Firefly Without A Light

chapter one

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1
The first day

Choujin Village smelled distinctly of fish. Thanks to all the rain, its dirt roads had congealed into mud. Brown, sticky mud. It stained her travelling clothes and slooped into her shoes, getting in between her toes.

Ugh.

"This is the place, huh?" Tenten looked around.

Everywhere she turned, she saw activity. People moving to and fro. Taking care of daily business. The rains came, made everything muddy, but life went on. Oddly enough, it wasn't noisy.

"Are you sure, Neji?" She smirked. "It's pretty easy to get turned around in these forests, after all…"

Neji stood behind her, for once. He made no verbal reply, but she didn't have to turn to feel the glare. The take that back before I make you rays bored into the back of her neck.

He didn't even need to say that he was sure.

Beside her, Gai-sensei strode forward. "I'm looking for the headman!" He called, oozing manly confidence in the way the mud fled from his shoes and the birds overhead began to caw.

People stopped, turned to look at them. Team Gai was obvious, noticeably different with their hitai-ate and smooth movement and the aura of battle-readiness that surrounded them all. Even mud-stained, they visibly clashed with the villagers. They didn't have to try. They just did.

Tenten, however, in the bright red travelling cheongsam she wore over her shirt and pants, and with her yellow travelling shawl, stood out even more. Obviously a gypsy, obviously proud.

Nobody said anything, but the murmurs were there. The smaller villages, which had to run off gypsies from stealing the horses or livestock or belongings, always had murmurs like that. She'd known they would murmur, but the prospect of having clothes halfway dry and a quarter of the way clean had been too good to pass up.

The villagers seemed more interested in making a show of not staring at her than in answering Gai's question. They looked and they shuffled their feet and they looked away, only to look at her some more out of the corners of their eyes. And then they'd look again, furtively, at all three of them. More shuffling of feet. More looking at her through their peripheral vision.

It was rather like one of those childish games her siblings played. The game where Jiang would hold his finger scant millimetres from the Senjen's arm and stay that way, close enough that Senjen hated it. But, of course, far enough away that he could honestly claim, in that typical and irritating singsong, "I'm not touching you!"

Gai-sensei put his hands on his hips and made a couple of half turns. Trying to figure out where they were looking, probably. It would be obvious to him soon enough. It already was for her.

She heard clothing rustle— obviously Neji's. Lee's clothing didn't make rustling sounds. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Neji cross his arms over his chest.

After a few more minutes of blatant not-staring and scuffing feet amidst the oozing of mud and the cawing of birds, their jounin sensei lost his patience. "We're looking for the headman! Please tell me where we can find him!"

It was only when he pointed out a specific person from the general crowd that they got an answer. The man he chose shifted his weight and trembled and tried not to look anywhere special.

With a little subtle bullying and repeated exhortations, the man Gai had chosen pointed them in the direction of the largest building in the village.

The village headman, it turned out, was a greyed old man with a cane she could have bludgeoned a man with. Then again, there wasn't a lot she couldn't bludgeon people with.

"You're the ninjas from Konoha?" The old man rasped, using his hands to fuss and natter at a woman who shifted a mug of something hot that she'd placed in front of him. I see it, his hands said as he slapped hers away, I saw it ten minutes ago.

"We are," said Gai-sensei. Once again, he oozed manliness and solemnity and that was just so not him. Well, the solemnity wasn't him. The oozing manliness, unfortunately, was.

Instead, she slid her eyes in their sockets so she could look at Neji.

After a moment, he shifted his gaze, making eye-contact through his peripheral vision.

"A gypsy, a blind boy, and—" the headman paused. He didn't seem to have any harsh words for Lee.

Was it the nature of Lee's utter sweetness and adorability, or was it because Lee was so abnormal that there weren't any words?

The woman choked back a sob. "You were supposed to find our children."

"Neji is far from blind," Gai said, voice quiet but very serious, deep and dark and very excuse me, but did you just insult my students, whom I love most in this world?

There were moments where Tenten truly honestly did love Maito Gai. This particular moment was one of many.

"What does it matter that Tenten is a gypsy?" Lee crossed his arms, and Gai-sensei laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

"The gypsies may have taken our children."

Neji looked straight at the woman. She could tell from the periphery of her vision that his body had tensed. He disapproved of this woman's notion. Disapproved enough to glare.

Tenten herself scoffed. Visibly and audibly. She knew she shouldn't, but that was plain ridiculous. She got enough of ridiculous from Gai and Lee. She didn't need it from the headman of a fishing village and his trophy wife.

"And why would they do that? Gypsy caravans have their own problems. They don't normally need gazhe children. They won't even eat with gazhe, why would they kidnap children?"

"They steal everything else. Why not the children?"

She gritted her teeth and looked away. Logical, in its own, twisted way. Wrong, but they believed it, and they wouldn't stop.

"Whatever the case," Gai-sensei said, looking at the headman and making eye-contact, "we will investigate. We will find your children. Even if they were," a pause. He didn't want to say it. "Taken by gypsies."

The headman nodded. "That is, after all, what I paid you for."

Lee stiffened, and Gai's brows furrowed. Both of them hated it when people reminded them that they did this for money. Most missions, they could happily take for free.

Neji tensed even more. Turning her head slightly, she noticed that both his hands had clenched into fists.

"This is my granddaughter, Chanto Mai. She has places prepared for you. One of the missing children is hers."

And with that, he waved them away.

They followed Mai out.

2

When she stepped into Chanto Mai's home, she had no idea what she'd expected. Whatever she'd thought she would find, she found the opposite. Clean, with lots of shiny wood and things that didn't look quite right. Mostly children's drawings of chimimoryou— well, she thought they were evil river spirits; they were coming out of blue wavy things and had fangs— or adults who were presumably their parents, sometimes of fishing boats.

"Misao draws the river-spirits," Mai told her. "Hotaru drew the ones of us." A soft sigh. Mai looked down. "Hotaru was always a bit more— grounded than her sister."

Neji, still tense, bowed slightly. He was infallibly polite in nearly every situation, yes, even when he wanted to knock people's teeth out. So he stayed fairly quiet and kept his barely-tonal voice in the 'I think he's trying to be pleasant' range when he said, "I am sorry, but we have been travelling four days."

Somewhat Less Polite Translation: get with the program and show us where we can bathe and sleep.

Mai seemed to see them for the first time. Her eyes widened when she realised that they were going to track mud into her house. A single arm lifted, one finger pointing the way they'd come. "The mud room is right next to the foyer. The baths are right next to it."

Tenten bowed deeply. "Thank you. I'll help clean up—"

"—that won't be necessary." Chanto's voice went sharp. "Just. Go. Please."

So she went, wishing that Mai wouldn't just block her out automatically. After all, she was here to help, right?

In a way, though, it was understandable. The members of Team Gai were strangers. She was a gypsy, part of a group, even if not directly affiliated with it, that Mai thought might have kidnapped her daughters (or was it daughter? Had both of the girls disappeared? She didn't know, and she disliked not knowing).

"Ladies first," Gai-sensei said, standing by the door to the mudroom. Lee nodded his agreement, and even Neji seemed to approve.

Tired, muddy, and chilled to the bone, Tenten didn't argue.

There was a girl in her room. She had a cheerful smile and eyes as blue as Yamanaka Ino's, and was standing by Tenten's bed with a piece of parchment in one hand and Tenten's bed-covers in the other.

Tenten blinked.

"Are you Hotaru?" She asked.

"Nyuh," said the girl. "Hotaru's with the chimi-chimi-chimimimoyou. 'm Misao."

Hotaru is with the chimimoryou. Such an odd way of saying that Hotaru had disappeared.

"The chimi-chimi—" a frustrated noise— "you know what— are bad people." The girl's face became solemn, in an expression that was probably uncharacteristic. Children weren't supposed to be solemn; her younger brothers had all been exuberant. "They took my Aoshi."

"Is Aoshi one of the children who," she paused, "went away?" She bent down, placing her hands on her knees. She could feel the heat in her palms through her yukata and wondered if maybe the water had been too hot.

Misao shook her head. "Nyuh."

"Then who is he?"

Those eyes were big and blue and getting slightly moist, and Tenten mentally kicked herself. A tanned, stick-thin arm shot straight up in the air, her tiny, trembling hand forcing the parchment toward Tenten.

Tenten accepted and unrolled it. The contents were shocking. A river (well, a child's attempt at drawing a river: wavy blue lines), with a tiny "girl" with long black hair standing on the bank. Dark blue people with fangs were dragging away a much taller "boy" with equally dark hair.

"That was a long time ago," Misao, informed her. "I bet Hotaru went to get him back!"

Get him back? But if Misao's drawing was a figurative explanation of real life, then wouldn't he have drowned?

Or were the chimimoryou like an imaginary friend— well, enemy?

"I… see," she managed. "Uhm—"

And it was at that moment that the door slid open. "Misao, is that you in here?"

Mai walked in, and then blinked. Her face hardened. "Misao! What are you doing in here? What are you doing with my daughter?"

Tenten held out the drawing. "She was showing me this."

Chanto's eyes glinted in the candlelight. Tenten saw something dangerous and unsteady in her. The woman's long, pale fingers snatched the parchment from her.

There were a few moments of silence while the woman's mind digested the meaning of the picture.

When Mai looked up, that glimmer in her eyes had changed. The protectiveness of her daughter had gone, replaced by a sorrowful but resigned expression.

"Misao, sweetie, why don't you go sleep in Hotaru's room? She's—" Chanto choked a bit before continuing. "She's not using it right now, and I know how you like to listen to the river."

Misao's face brightened and the reedy bundle of stick-arms and stick-legs darted out of the room. Her long black hair, braided tight into a thin, hard cord, smacked against a low table as she bounced away.

The older woman closed the shoji door behind her daughter and turned until she faced Tenten directly. Chanto's hair was a dark brown; only a little lighter than Tenten's own shade of nearly-red-black, and coiled into a braid that only barely reached her elbows. One hand stroked up and down along the braid. A nervous gesture, probably.

"We have a neighbour," Chanto began, very quietly, "who has— had— a son. Aoshi watched over Hotaru and Misao for us. They were both very attached to him. A year ago, he went missing. That was when Misao's obsession with the river spirits started."

She heaved a sigh and looked in the direction her daughter had run. The woman's sombre-coloured yukata seemed to drape heavily on her body. Muscle tension created the impression of slightly hunched shoulders.

This was perhaps one of the saddest women near her age she'd ever seen. It put her in mind of that day six years earlier, when she had returned home from the Academy to find her father sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the grains of the wood as though they would tell him the meaning of life. There had been a weight in the air, a sudden bitter taste on the back of her tongue.

—Your mother's feet got too light again.

—Which of us did she take?

How she had hoped that Jia had just left. It was horrible, but she'd hoped her mother had just put some clothes in a travelling pack and left without taking any of them. They had no way of knowing when they would see her again, and it wasn't fair, and she had no right to just take one of them off to gods-knew-where.

"Six years ago," Tenten murmured, reaching out a hand, "my mother disappeared. She took my younger sister with her. We haven't seen either of them since."

Mai reached out in return. Their hands touched, gripped each other, fingers interlacing.

The civilian began to cry. Tenten watched, slightly uncomfortable. She wasn't very good with people crying unless they were children.

She didn't move while the other woman cried. Her father hadn't cried, but she remembered crying for hours. She'd been ten at the time, just two years from graduating, and her father had kept her and her younger brothers home from the Academy for several days.

She didn't bother dispensing worthless advice. This woman didn't want to hear that it would get easier to function without her daughter around. She didn't want to hear that the pain would eventually stop being so pronounced. She wanted to hear that Team Gai would bring her child home, and that wasn't something Tenten could promise.

So she let Chanto cry, and she said nothing at all, and every word of it was true.

firefly could you shine your light?
now i know your ways
cos theyre just like mine
now im justified
as i fall in line
and its hard to try
when youre

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-- breaking benjamin: "firefly"

firefly without a light, tbc 16 september 2006