Published: 1/20/2019

Warning: references to torture and rape.


For some reason the next day my appointment with Hayato-sensei was cancelled, so that morning I was unexpectedly free. Masaki and Koharu were not at any of their usual haunts, so I wandered in boredom until I found a sunny patch of grass in the courtyard. Then I suddenly found myself training. Obviously there were no kunai or wires here, but it only took chakra and some old-fashioned sweat to start recreating Akihiko's old handstand pushup regimen. Despite all my misgivings, I guess I really was a ninja child in the end.

About ten minutes in, I stopped what I was doing and stared down at the ground in contemplation. By the time we had left for Death Valley Akihiko had been doing far more challenging exercises than handstand pushups. I wondered what he was up to now. What sort of training did Special Forces apprentices do? He was probably taking part in all sorts of combat drills that I couldn't even dream of. He had always been on a different level. Sometimes it still boggled my mind that Susumu had tried to recruit me alongside him.

"What are you doing?" Kakashi asked me. "You hit 120 seconds a while ago."

I dropped my chin and stared blankly at him. He was dressed as he always was in blacks and navy blues, but today his bandages were gone. He had begun to tilt his hitai-ate over his eye.

I looked back at the ground, thought about how my shirt was loose and how my midriff was exposed, and about how my hair had not been combed in two days running. Then I quickly dropped out of my handstand.

"Nothing," I muttered, putting a hand on the back of my neck and looking away. "I was just wondering. About what it would be like to be a Special Forces apprentice, I mean."

"For ANBU? Why would you wonder about that?"

"I was just thinking about my old teammate and what things would be like if we hadn't split," I said. "But—never mind. Why are—what are you doing here?"

Kakashi stared at me like I'd grown another head. I shifted nervously, realizing that that admission had been a mistake. I had promised Susumu that I wouldn't talk to anyone about it, after all. I doubted he would know if I did say anything, of course, but somehow betraying the confidence of an ANBU captain seemed unwise regardless. I hoped Kakashi would have the good sense not to ask anything else.

"...I came for my follow-up today," my teammate eventually—mercifully—replied. "I guessed you probably hadn't heard, so I thought I might as well tell you about Sensei while I was here."

My eyebrows rose. "Minato-nii?"

I had thought it a little strange he hadn't stopped by—we had promised to talk when we returned to the village, and he always visited House kids when they were in the hospital—but I had figured he was busy with the whole matter of his nomination.

Kakashi eyed me with an inscrutable look. That was something of an improvement from his regular behavior; he usually glared if I referred to Minato by any other address but "taichou" or "sensei." In fact, this entire encounter had been strangely mild. But I suppose he had reason to be subdued even without considering our venue.

"He's been dispatched to the western front again. Rumor has it that Iwa is mustering a thousand shinobi in response to our sabotage operation. Since Suna is tied down with the Kumo guerilla squads led by A the Unruly, and since the Sannin are holding the eastern front, they say the Yellow Flash is Konoha's only hope of repelling the invasion."

I was mute as I processed this information. Of course. In the story of Naruto, what had history remembered best about the Yellow Flash? Not his debut campaign at Tatsumi River, or his nomination test, or even his role in the Battle of Kannabi Pass. It had been his defeat of a thousand Rock ninja.

"I see."

Kakashi raised an eyebrow at me. I looked away.

"He's going to be Hokage," I said. "Of course he would have to go. He's the village's strongest ninja."

Kakashi was quiet at that. We spent a long minute standing awkwardly together in the courtyard. The wind began to blow, and now that I was no longer exercising, my sweat was beginning to cool my skin. I shivered.

"I—" Kakashi said.

"What?"

"Never mind."

There was a longer and even more awkward silence. I began rubbing my arms uncomfortably.

"I also wanted to talk to you," Kakashi admitted at a length. "Are you free?"

I gave him a startled look.

"Um, yeah. My session was cancelled this morning, and the daily check-in's not for hours."

Another silence. Kakashi stared at me.

"...It's cold, so I guess, um…" I stared back. "I guess we'll head back to my room. There's a—uh. I have a sweater there."

We were so uncomfortable it was vaguely comedic. I sat down atop my bed, pulling the sleeves of my sweater on, and Kakashi seated himself in the wooden chair next to the window. Morning light washed over his figure and made the tips of his silver hair so bright that they looked white.

It was a strange transformation. Usually he was so harsh, so severe, and so brutal in both wit and form that I could never think of him as anything but a hard and deadly jounin. But something about him had softened that morning, and as he sat in that chair and looked at me with his dark, downturned eye, he was different. He was still nothing like the Kakashi the Earth girl knew—his back was so straight and his air was so solemn—but he was not quite the Kakashi I knew, either.

I wondered if this was the Kakashi Rin looked at when she fancied him. I hadn't understood how anyone could fancy Kakashi the jounin, but this Kakashi—if it was this Kakashi, that seemed more tenable.

"I'm sorry," he said.

I blinked and was taken out of the quiet dazzle. "Pardon me?"

"I'm sorry," Kakashi repeated. "For everything. For the way I've been behaving towards you. It's unacceptable."

"I…" I gawked. Then I realized I was gawking and hid my gaping jaw behind a hand. But words still failed me. "I—but you…?"

Kakashi's straight back slumped, and he gave me a look that could only be described as miserable. I pulled myself together.

"It's not your fault," I raced to reassure him. "You don't have to—I mean—this whole thing has been awful for everyone. I—I understand."

"That's no excuse," he protested, looking intent on finding some way to chastise himself. "I'm a jounin and your senior. Someone of my position picking fights with a younger kunoichi who was forced into the team by transfer… and now you're in the western wing—you can't justify my actions. Not with this." (1)

Kakashi had always been so unwavering and self-assured in everything he did that I found myself at a loss. It never even occurred to me that I might ever receive an apology from him. Not only because of his personality, though—I never imagined getting one because I didn't think I deserved one. Not in the final analysis, anyway.

I found myself sinking back against my pillows with that thought. Kakashi noticed the darkening of my gaze and seemed to hold his breath. What could I say?

"I have not been good to my team, either," I uttered after a long moment, vaguely and without meeting his gaze. "I've… failed them in too many ways. I think—I think I would be the worst kind of hypocrite if I held any of these past months against you." I looked up then. "...Kakashi-san, I want to apologize to you, too, but I have a secret I can't tell you. That… probably makes the whole apology meaningless, but I want to say it anyway."

I bit my lip, looked out of the corner of my eye toward the window, and thought about Obito and his orange goggles. Then I looked back at Kakashi: Kakashi whose left eye was gone, whose shoulders were heavy, and whose gaze tired and sad. In a breathless moment I regretted my silence fiercely. I regretted it maybe more than I had regretted anything in my life. I regretted my cowardice because there had been a way to prevent all of that suffering.

No, there was still a way.

"I'm sorry," I forced out heavily, and then held my breath to prevent the escape of any unseemly sob-like noises. Determinedly, I did not cry. No tears—not even water. No passivity. This ridiculous charade had to end.

Kakashi, in an odd turnaround, seemed quite mystified by the intensity of this sudden reverse-apology. For a moment, he regarded me in silent bewilderment. But then he sat back in his chair, too, and spoke after a moment.

"Just Kakashi," he said.

I blinked.

"...Pardon?"

"Just Kakashi. Don't add -san." He crossed his arms. "You didn't use -san for Rin either. So Kakashi is fine."

In that moment, the clouds shifted and the light filtering through the branches of the courtyard trees fell over me, too. Mid-morning sunshine lit up the whole of the room. As one, we both paused and looked up as dust motes swirled in the air, speckling my glowing white bedsheets with faint pinpricks of shadow.

"Kakashi," I said after a moment.

"Suzu," he replied.


I flipped my journal upside down and then opened it from the back. The process of writing down the story of Naruto was not an easy one. It was so many memories of a reality so removed. There had been plots she hadn't followed, story arcs she'd skipped and only read about, and things she just plain hadn't remembered. It was a project of several days, and was so consuming that it took three consecutive cancellations of therapy for me to even realize that something was amiss in the western ward.

But something was wrong. On the morning I'd squeezed out the very last of what the Earth girl knew about the end of the story—I would go back and assemble profiles for characters later—I tilted my head, frowned, and asked as a nurse came in with breakfast, "Is Hayato-sensei sick?"

The nurse, who was one of the ones Koharu had classified as "safe," tilted her head back at me. "It's a little complicated," she said vaguely. "But if you need him, I can let him know. You're doing all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I was just wondering. It's been a while since I saw him."

"He's still around. He told me to let you know he's still available if you asked after him. When I mentioned that you've been writing furiously all week, he said he figured you had started to remember some of the stuff you'd dissociated, so please don't hold back if you want help working through something. Do you want me to take your journal to him?"

She probably meant to be reassuring, but this offer had a completely opposite effect. I plastered the diary against my chest in horror.

"Or not." She held up a placating hand. "I won't, then. Oh, don't look at me like that. We know journals are private. None of us will go snooping without your permission."

I did know, and I figured I could take her at her word, but I still found myself hiding mine under my shirt when I left my room after eating that morning. It had been a proper age since I'd spoken to Koharu and Masaki, so I decided to search for them while I rested from my great marathon of writing. But once again they were absent from all their usual places: not in the courtyard, nor the common room, nor the end-hall bay window seat. Bemused, I eventually began walking up and down the wing until I came across one of their rooms.

I found that Koharu's was empty, at which point I began to feel faintly incredulous, but my questions were answered when I peeked into another room down the hall and caught sight of her perched on a chair.

"Koharu," I called, sticking my head through the doorway. Koharu, who was chewing on a piece of melon bread, turned and looked at me.

"Oh, Suzu. Hello..."

She did not seem opposed to my presence, so I stepped inside. Then I caught sight of Masaki sitting on the bed. His face was sullen and his left wrist was handcuffed to a bar on the headboard. I stared, and he glared.

"...Is this why I haven't seen you guys all week?" I asked eventually.

"Yeah," Koharu confirmed. She looked just a smidge more unkempt than normal; like me, her hair also appeared to have gone a few days without care. "Masaki got in trouble. He's cuffed until they decide he's not going to assault a doctor again."

I immediately connected dots. I looked back at Masaki.

"Did you maybe," I asked slowly, "hit Hayato-sensei?"

Masaki was silent as he looked away. I turned to Koharu, whose face was all the confirmation I needed.

"They said Hayato-sensei has a cracked rib, so he's home on call for the rest of the week," she told me.

"It was his own fault," Masaki spat. "He knew Koharu was in there. He should have called you out instead of bringing that man in."

This struck me as strangely patronizing, as if Koharu were some sort helpless maiden who needed a white knight to screen every inch of her life. But Koharu was silent as she continued to eat her bread.

"I don't think that was a good excuse to hit him," I replied doubtfully.

"Yeah, well, they didn't either." Masaki's scowl deepened. "But in the end he's just another damn adult. I thought he was okay because he's a doctor and because Koharu likes him, but he's just the same as Sensei and they all were."

I had only ever heard Masaki refer to his sensei once before, so I did not know what exactly kind of woman she had been. I had thought that his comment about nadeshiko flowers had been made because he missed her too much, but I could see clearly now I had been mistaken. He did not hate the flowers because they made him sad; he hated them because he hated her.

Koharu stood abruptly. "Masaki, I want to go for a walk."

Masaki's face shifted from angry to dejected in the space of a half-second.

"Yeah, okay. Sorry," said Masaki. He glanced at me guiltily.

"...Koharu, can I come with you?" I asked, wondering if I had read that look quite right. Why would he need me to go with her? Was he worried? Considering that he was the one who had assaulted a doctor, it seemed to me that his concern was a little misplaced. Koharu was evidently far better adjusted than he.

"Sure," she said. She was already halfway to the door. "Let's go."

Koharu's face was contorted with unhappiness as we walked down the hall. Something really wasn't going right between her and Masaki. But it was clear that I didn't have enough information to parse out the contents of their nonverbal interactions. I had such little context about the two of them. Who was their sensei? What did she do and why did Masaki hate her? Why was he sorry that Koharu wanted to take a walk?

"Koharu, what's going on?" I finally dared to ask. Until now I hadn't had the courage to pry into their circumstances, but something about talking to Kakashi and writing down the story of Naruto seemed to have settled my gut. I suppose I must have been scared that asking them to divulge their bad pasts would lead to me divulging my own. But somehow deciding to face my memories wasn't as frightening now that I had faced the Earth girl's. I felt like I could do it now.

Koharu stopped and gave me a look. Then she glanced up and down the hall, found it empty, and wedged herself onto a nearby windowsill. It seemed to be a trait we shared.

"He's doing it again," she told me.

"Doing what?"

"I don't know what to call it. That thing. You know, when he was talking about Hayato-sensei bringing a man to the common room."

"You mean how he said 'he should have known better'?" I asked, surprised. So she hadn't been as blank as she had appeared.

"Yeah," she nodded. "Masaki, he—I don't know. I mean—I guess—well, when we first came here, I was a lot worse than I am now. I still freeze up, but before I really started working with Hayato-sensei, just seeing a man could send me screaming from the room depending on the day. It would be really bad. Not just getting up and running away, but really crazy ugly crying… you know?"

She looked at me uncomfortably. I found myself climbing into my own windowsill opposite her, and I cracked a wry smile.

"I know exactly what you mean."

Koharu stared hard at me. And then, slowly, she cracked a smile of her own. A little light seemed to leak into her eyes.

"I don't know what to say to him," she confessed a moment later. "Because—because Masaki was the only one who was there for me when everything was going wrong. When our sensei… betrayed Konoha."

So their instructor had been a traitor. That would explain a great many things. I put my arm across my knee and asked quietly, "What happened?"

Koharu turned her chin away, but she looked at me from the corners of her eyes. "Well, it's kind of a long story. But the short of it was that we were sent to deliver emergency supplies to the western front and our squad got captured. And—well, she was a jounin, you know? They must have thought—they knew she had information. So they tried to interrogate her. But of course she wouldn't speak, right? So… they decided to torture us instead."

I found myself mirroring her pose as I turned my own face away.

"That's awful," I whispered.

Koharu wrung her hands a bit, pursed her lips, and blinked several times. Then she said, "Yeah. It was the worst."

We both were silent for a long while as we stared out into our respective memories. Then she continued, "They decided to go one at a time with us, but Sensei didn't talk, and Isamu died after a week. I—I have journeyman status as an iryou-nin, so they were going use Masaki next, but their superior was worried that he'd die too quickly, too. So they figured they needed to figure out some sort of non-lethal torture. So, um, basically, they—you know—they tied Sensei down and made her watch while they all… you know. Took turns."

I put a hand over my face. I had suspected, but it was still terrible to hear.

"I'm sorry, Koharu."

Koharu was chewing on her lip when I lifted my fingers. Her hands were clenched and white-knuckled on the windowsill, but she was staring searchingly into my face.

"It happened to you, too, didn't it?" she asked. "You and your team? Didn't they use you on your sensei, too?"

My heart broke a little at the hope in her voice. It was—I didn't know what it was. But it was too sad.

"They did, but… not like that," I shook my head. "They mostly just—broke my ribs, stepped on them, choked me, stuff like that. They weren't worried about killing me or not."

"Oh." The light in Koharu's eye seemed to dim. I wasn't sure how that made me feel. On the one hand, I wished terribly in that moment that I could have been the girl she had needed. On the other, I couldn't imagine what would have become of me if Hatsuta, Tokiya, and all the ninja from the bunker had raped me in shifts over the course of five days. The result would have been too horrible. I couldn't conceptualize it.

We fell into another silence. Enough time passed that a nurse actually came by, but he seemed to sense that were struggling hard to sort something out together, so he passed through unobtrusively.

"After all of that, Sensei talked," Koharu told me after a while. "...She did more than talk. I think they broke her, because she did anything they told her to. Anything."

I didn't like the sound of that, and I didn't know if I could handle knowing more. But Koharu didn't elaborate. She picked up a piece of her tangled hair and began curling it around her finger.

"Word of a turncoat jounin must have reached the village. ANBU came for her. I think their mission was actually to eliminate the whole squad, but they didn't in the end."

I was not surprised to hear that, either, but I was glad it hadn't happened. There was a limit to how twisted a given life ought to be.

"Why didn't they?" I asked her.

"Because Masaki had already killed her," Koharu admitted. "He'd stolen one of her knives and had been waiting all week for a chance to stab her. We—we were going a little crazy when they found us. Digging at the walls with our hands, swearing at her body, screaming at her about Isamu. I guess they felt pity. They escaped with us and brought us here instead."

And this was where they had remained. I let out a shaky breath and ran my fingers through my bangs.

"Masaki's hated every adult he's met since," she told me quietly. "We were both bad when we first came in, but I… I was really nuts. I wish I had been less hysterical about everything. Everyone was focusing only on me because I was so loud. Even Masaki was. He's still so focused. So focused that even though so much time has passed, he hasn't even started trying to deal with his own stuff." Koharu put her forehead on her knees. "I don't know what to say to him, Suzu. I wouldn't have survived without him. He's like my brother. He carried me through when I was falling apart. But even though Hayato-sensei's been helping me and I'm so much better, it's like—it's almost like… like I'm becoming an excuse. His excuse."

His excuse not to deal with things. I understood in a moment. So long as he focused on helping Koharu, watching her and protecting her, he wouldn't have time to process his own trauma. So long as he was Koharu's perfect guardian, he would be able to hold himself together. If Koharu looked at him for strength, he would feel like he was strong again. Maybe he thought the mask would become real if he lived in it long enough. Maybe he thought he could skip looking all of that stuff in the eye… just like I had tried to skip looking at Naruto.

Late morning had passed into afternoon, and now afternoon was beginning to turn red at the edges. Night would approach soon. I looked over my shoulder at the brown grass outside.

"What will you do?" I eventually queried.

"I… I think I'll wait," said Koharu. "Hayato-sensei said… said that Masaki would need time. That trauma presents and resolves differently for every person. Maybe it'll take him longer, but eventually he'll get better, too, don't you think? Just… just like I've been getting better."

I didn't know what I thought of the sound of that brittle, desperate hope, so I tried not to express any emotion as I looked at her. Koharu's face slanted into sorrow.

We both put our heads down again, feeling suddenly flat and exhausted, and sat together in our windowsills until curfew was called.


A/N: Someone asked me why such things as rape must be included in HSS, and at first I wasn't sure how to answer. But when I tried to imagine writing a different Koharu, a Koharu who hadn't survived that experience, and somehow the story seemed to deflate. It wasn't full anymore. It didn't speak the way I wanted it to speak anymore.

After thinking on it a little, I think HSS is written like this because that's how the world is. Behind the fantasy veneer of ninja and chakra and jutsu, the story always came back to people in the end, and that's the sort of thing people are capable of. People rape girls like that. It's fiction, but it's still truth.

To be honest, this story's long hiatuses happened in the times I was really struggling hard to parse out all the things I've begun to learn about humanity. Somewhere along the way Suzu's story became a place where I could start to process it. You could say that she and I are experiencing and learning things together. We're meeting people together, experiencing hardship together, and we're glimpsing the abyss together, too.

Honestly, because of that, I have no idea where the meta story of HSS will end. I know where the plot will stop and what will happen to all of the characters, but I don't know what kind of person Suzu will be at the end of that, or what kind of conclusions she will have come to.

But I do want to know. I'll keep writing until we get there.

Thanks for reading, friends!

Cheers,

Eiruiel


Notes:

1. "Someone of my position…"

Sometimes my characters speak in Japanese in my head, which can be really unhelpful. It's especially bad when they use noun-modifying clauses. The resulting word-dump is just a massive run-on sentence, and Kakashi was really bad about it here. I think I more or less got what he was trying to say, but the grammar just feels… bad. Sorry.