Firefly Without a Light
prologue
the last day
Wind blew through the grass, producing a rattling sound. Almost like a dry, hollow whisper. The creek on whose banks the grass grew had swelled from all the rain— bloated, almost, like a tick that had gotten exactly its fill of blood.
Bloated was a good word for it. The water had stormed right up past what were probably its usual banks without even a by your leave. Soaking the grass's ankles hadn't satisfied it: it had moved straight on, reaching out weepy tendrils of muddy liquid toward the forest path where she stood.
Fireflies drifted in the air above the stream. They danced in the twilight, moving hither and thither. The scene would have been almost peaceful, had Tenten not been mud-stained and wet and half-sick of the creek's burbles sounding like a river's roar in her left ear.
A few yards away (not a scant number, but certainly no more than twenty), she could see a very large dark spot against the hillside. The creek lay between the path and the dark spot, wide and loud and reflecting fireflies. Completely oblivious to Team Gai's state, oblivious to and wildly uncaring about Choujin village's very great sorrow, it burbled and made mud bubbles and carried a child's shoe away from the opposite shore.
A child's shoe, stained and torn and drifting, drifting, drifting away. A cave in the hillside, part and parcel of the banks of a creek that flooded frequently in the rainy season. This wasn't going to end well, was it?
For once in her life, Tenten wished she hadn't been the first to see it. Irony was a horrible thing, sometimes. Didn't she usually wish to just once be the first in her team to do something?
But now her brain put it together before Neji did. And she hated the conclusion. The inevitable, immutable, completely horrible conclusion.
Desperately, eyes tearing up, trying hard to pretend that this wasn't happening, she shook her head.
"No." Her voice didn't sound right in her ears. "No, no, no."
"Tenten?" Lee's voice was soft, for once. "Tenten, is something the matter?"
She gave a choked cross between a gasp and a sob. It gurgled its way out of her throat, practically clawing its way out of her mouth. She turned a little to look at him.
His eyes had widened, lips had gone into a thin, determined line. He had a crease on the bridge of his nose the size of a ditch from how hard he'd furrowed his brows.
He was genuinely concerned for her.
She turned back to the creek that childishly tried to be a river. She strained her eyes, putting her perfect vision to use in a way she never had before.
A torn, dirty scrap of red floated by. Small, but straining her eyes, she could tell it was a shirt. For a village like this, that kind of dye would be expensive.
"I found them, Lee," she said. Her voice came out ragged and harsh, watery. "I found them."
firefly without a light, tbc 21 august 2006