I sat with my chin on my knees in a bright clean hospital room, trying to reach a meditative state and absolutely failing. My expression was at least probably blank, a low enough bar for shinobi. I was the closest bed to the window, handy for staring broodily out of, so I did.
The Yondaime Hokage, Namikaze Minato, Konoha's very own golden boy, eaten by the shinigami in exchange for the power to trap the Nine-Tails once again. Eaten by something, anyway, with no body to investigate or burn or bury. The S-Class secret that was his wife, the Nine-Tails jinchuuriki, dead too as an inevitable consequence of the Kyuubi's release- so perhaps it had not been too painful a choice to make. And it was all very unfair, because if an extradimensional cat-mahou wanted to bring someone back to life that day, why couldn't it have been one of them.
Or literally. Just about anyone else. I was not a strategic addition to the village. I was. Not anybody, really. Himitsu Haruka, chuunin medic, could have been so much more if she wasn't so sick, isn't it a shame…
And here I was, sent back, no less sick than before, and the Yondaime and many, many others were dead and cold. What the fuck.
Clearly, I hadn't been thinking, when I gave the bakeneko the go-ahead to shove me back into my own personal meatsuit. I should have stayed in the void, let myself be shuffled along to wherever was next. Or come back to haunt Konoha as a ghost, perhaps. Told the cat to fuck off and drag someone else back, someone who mattered.
Which was a fallacy, I was well aware. Causality was much more complex than that. Something something butterfly's wings something something chaos theory. But it was one thing to know this and another thing to understand it, particularly from where I was sitting. Hence, the attempt at meditating.
Again, "attempt". I was not getting anywhere. The state of my mind was not conducive to generating the necessary serenity- I could barely hit indifference. Scraps of foreign memory kept pelting me before I even got close. At least now I had a theory forming on what they were. The part where these visions held emotional content on top of everything else had led me to consider that I might be seeing highlights reels of my own past lives.
The sense of deja vu that settled on me in that hospital bed was nothing too unusual, I worked in the hospital, of course it would be familiar. Not so the sense that I had died here once. No, not just the once...collapsing in the corridor like a pensioner. Died in a bed in a long white room like this, coughing my insides out. Died in a great hall of beds, tall paned windows over me and not a familiar soul for days. Died in a straw-stuffed cot in a humid thatched attic, surrounded by implements of medieval medicine...
A person is not supposed to remember previous lives. The turn of the wheel is meant to be a mystery. There is space in the human soul for the scope of eternity, but not in the human brain. Small wonder I was having difficulties concentrating.
A tiny shift in atmosphere brought me back to the present, looking up sharply at the curtain that divided me from my roommate. This would ordinarily have been a single, private room- it was still private, but there were two of us in here. He'd been here when I was brought in, unconscious then and unconscious persistently since. And now, unless I missed my guess, he was awake, and only pretending not to be.
With a sigh, I slid my legs over the side of the bed, grateful for the fluffy socks Fuyu had brought me. Grateful for the clean hospital pyjamas, too, even though it was still too fucking cold for me, with only the one cardigan. I liked wearing a haori and at least one sweater, maybe two.
Yes, I know the Land of Fire is temperate bordering on tropical, even in October. Too fucking cold.
I wasn't being IV'd at the moment, so I was free to shuffle over to the rack of clipboards by the whiteboard on the wall. Someone would doubtless come by eventually to perform phlebotomy and hook me up to a gallon of whatever I'm still deficient in, but judging by how busy the hospital sounded in just the corridor outside it might be a while. I took one of the labcoats off the pegs by the whiteboard and pulled it on, before I took the other clipboard off the wall. I knew what mine said already.
Hm. Such a lot of [REDACTED]. It's like they don't trust me, or something.
If anything, it was HQ's own fault that I'd gotten so good at reading through a line of black marker.
My roommate, it seemed, was Hatake Kakashi, if the shock of gray hair peeking out above the sheets wasn't a clue. Sharingan Kakashi, or that goddamn eye thief, as he was affectionately known around the Uchiha district. A controversial figure, for someone no older than myself. If he'd not been Namikaze Minato's student he might have had the eye stolen back by this point, such was his popularity.
...Oh. He'd been Namikaze Minato's student. His last living student, famously. Now the last living member of his whole team.
It was like someone kept dropping bricks on me. Surely, at some point, they would have to run out of bricks.
...Hatake Kakashi was probably hoping the bricks would run out soon, too.
His chart said he was largely unharmed except for the chronic exacerbated chakra exhaustion, for which the only treatment plan was a week or so bed rest. We'd be lucky if he stayed put after he could get up under his own power, but such was the nature of shinobi.
I shuffled over to his bedside, to take a peek at the instrumentation he was attached to and make notations on the chart, where the nurse should have done about twenty minutes ago. Negligent, tisk tisk- but the hospital was very busy, and we were ostensibly stable. Anyway, that's what I was for, picking up the slack, even ill and wearing someone else's labcoat.
He was awake and pretending not to be, even as I was pretending not to know he was awake, and pretending I was supposed to be here. The sheet pulled up over his nose to hide his face, and I knew he'd have a surgical mask underneath that, even with his usual mask missing. His headband was gone just like mine was- Fuyu had said he'd change it over to a new bandanna, if the blood wouldn't come out of my old one.
The bad-ideas gremlin on my shoulder whispered to me that I ought to try pulling his mask down, just for funsies. Better ninja than I had tried, to catch a glimpse of Hatake's face. Now was not the time, and I would surely fail, but the temptation was there. I could ignore temptation, and bide my time.
"The reason you're not in a completely private room is the same as the reason you didn't get the window seat," I said aloud, still making notes in his chart. "The hospital is crowded at the moment, but you're also a flight risk. Less work for on-duty staff if you have to climb over me to go out the window." More work for me, but then, the staff knew me, and knew I never minded. You never really stopped being a medic, on or off duty.
His breathing stayed even, and I remained unacknowledged, but I did see his eyelids flicker. Good enough.
"Try to go back to sleep," I went on. "Everything will be just as fucked when you wake up, so do try not to worry about it."
That got me a reaction, a single baleful dark eye peeking up at me through long, pretty eyelashes.
"Who are you," he said, quiet and very muffled. I smiled minimally, lifting a forefinger to my lips.
"Himitsu Haruka," I said. "Chuunin medic, theoretically off-duty. Shhh." A spark of recognition, but only very little.
We didn't really know each other; except perhaps peripherally, by sight and reputation, names on paperwork. He'd already been gone when I entered the academy, graduated and promoted and thrown face-first into an apprenticeship. Our genin teams had only the briefest of interactions. Our teams had been in a chuunin exam together, the one they'd passed and we hadn't. It had been a bit fun, actually, even though we hadn't passed that time- I hadn't seen much of him, an aloof and cold lad, going through the exam as a formality to legitimize his field promotion. Maybe Hatake's teammates had told him about the shenanigans we'd got up to backstage (another story for the next time I'm drunk perhaps). Fuyu, straight-laced and rule-abiding when not under my immediate influence, had not really known Uchiha Obito. I had known Rin, from around the hospital.
Her death had been a particularly heavy brick. I'd found the nickname Hatake had gotten out of it to be needlessly cruel.
The village could be like that, sometimes.
"...Team Shenanigans," he said, still muffled and still very unamused. Ah. So he did recognize me. My smile got wider, and a touch sparky.
"Technically, that isn't my team's informal call sign," I said. "But yes. Shenanigans." I made my expression soften- ninja medics weren't really about bedside manner, so a little bit went a long way. "...If you need anything, I'll be in the next bed over. Might be faster than calling the nurse."
His open eye slid over, briefly, to the water bottle still sealed shut on the rolling bedside table. I reached for it without being asked, and cracked it open. A moment of hunting turned up bendy straws stored in the usual place in the cart, and I dropped one in the open bottle. I made sure the bedside table was scooted close enough that it would take minimal effort to reach it, and then I left him alone, dropping off the labcoat and chart on my way to my side of the curtain.
Even bored and unbalanced as I was, I couldn't bring myself to pick on him too much. Only a little, just enough to get him to growl at me, instead of that coma patient impression. He wouldn't benefit from much more than a gentle annoyance, at this point, unless I missed my guess. I rarely missed my guess, when it came to people.
I found myself oddly exhausted, back in bed on my side of the curtain, my ears ringing almost too loud to make out the quiet shuffle of Hatake making use of the water bottle. Even little things were taking a toll, with my entire reservoir of chakra dedicated to operating my respiratory system. Still, I made myself sit up, and pulled my hair out of it's low ponytail, to put a low braid in it. My hair was a little curly and perpetually brittle, the color and rough texture of straw. If I slept on it without doing something with it, I woke up looking homeless. With all the layers I liked to wear, the combined effect was awfully bag lady.
Which was nice, sometimes, for undercover. But as much as it suited me it wasn't what I wanted to be.
I spent about twenty minutes drifting, staring up at the ceiling panels, before I rolled over and pulled the blankets up.
"G'night, Hatake," I mumbled, even though it was still afternoon, and light out.
No one was more surprised than me, when I got an indistinct mumble back.
The first visitor I had was my mother. She came alone.
My mother, Himitsu Moriko, was civilian all the way down, but that did not keep her from being one of the strongest women and yamato nadeshiko I knew. I had great respect and admiration for her. Such was our relationship that I'd rather be salted and eaten than tell her so.
She had married my father before his medical retirement, and was completely ambivalent when he was taken off-duty. She disapproved of all kinds of things that went on in Konoha, and sometimes she even said so out loud. Civilian, when speaking about my mother, did not equate to feeble.
When she came to my room alone, a tiny woman in solemn traditional kimono, grays and violets that brought out her blue eyes, the first wisps of gray in her sable hair at the temples and crown, I felt my stomach drop. She met my look, and her mouth thinned.
"Your father-" she said, saving me from having to ask. She swallowed to steady her voice. "Iwashi was called up. Everyone was, retired or not. He didn't- he didn't make it very far. Lung hemorrhage."
Just like me. I felt cold all over. I had no control whatsoever over my face, but whatever I looked like, it made my mother wrap me up in her arms, close and a bit too hard. I buried my face in her shoulder, my eyes burning. Her kimono was real silk. It would stain if I cried.
"I'm sorry," I rasped out. "I should've- I couldn't-"
She shushed me, because apologizing didn't make any sense, if you didn't know what I knew. If you didn't know that I'd been stupid enough to take a second chance for myself, forgotten about literally everyone else who might deserve it more.
The longer I went the more I was resolved to never fucking tell another soul.
I stayed in my mother's arms, and we made meaningless noises at each other for a while, all part of the process.
"The house is… it's not much left," she told me, a hand petting my braid. "It was in one of the districts that monster destroyed. It hasn't been cleared to do anything but look. Still unsafe."
Neat. Now I'm homeless, too. Something to worry about more thoroughly when I was out of the hospital.
"...You're staying at the civilian shelter?" I asked, very hoarse. She shook her head, the corner of her mouth turning down.
"I've been offered a place at the Kurama estate," she said. "They've said they'll inter your father in the family plot, as well." My lips peeled back.
"A bit tardy for an attack of conscience on their part," I said, delicately as I could. "They'll admit we're family now that he's died a hero? Of course."
"Shh," said my mother, in a tone that let me know she agreed with me. "They're being very generous. Of course, your grandfather has extended the invitation to you, as well. Once you're out of the hospital."
"That I can stay at the compound, or that they'll host my funeral?" I asked, airily.
"Yes," said Moriko, just as dry. "I will tender your refusal, then."
"No, no," I said. "Don't. I'll tell grandfather in person."
She sighed, smoothing my hair back from my face. "It probably won't kill you to see a pot and leave it unstirred, Haruka."
"Why take the risk?" I snorted. I had a thought. "...If there are any of dad's paintings left…"
"They're not getting any of them," she finished, all steel. "Not a single one. If none of the ones at the house survived, there's still the storage unit. It's nowhere near the damaged parts of town."
"You know what they say," I said, softly, looking away and out the window. "...They'll be worth more, now."
She smiled, bittersweet. "That money isn't just for taking care of me, you know," she said. "...Any of them that you want…"
"...Thanks," I said, choked up again. "I'll… when we know what's survived. If I can. There are a few I'd like to keep." I looked back up at her, watery-eyed. "If grandfather wants any, he can pay through the nose like everyone else."
Her smile was still sad and the chuckle that got out of her very dry, but at least it was there.
We talked until the nurse came in to shoo her out. I didn't feel any better for talking to her, but then, I also didn't feel any worse. Part of me wondered if that was because there wasn't anywhere farther down to go.
...I think I'd almost known already, actually. If the Nine-Tails had caused me a fatal attack just by manifesting, me with my small handful of years being ill, then my father, carrying the disease since he'd been a young man…
At least I could extrapolate that it had been quick. Mine was, anyway.
… Dad would have laughed, at the whole fucking fiasco. Once he was done being furious. He had a temper he'd passed on to me, and there was always someone to blame, in a fuckup this big. I kept trying to direct mine at someone other than myself. It might take a while.
My father had an irreverent sense of humor, which he'd tried to pass on to me, with mixed success thanks to my mother's interference- sorry, temperance. Not that I contained much of that particular virtue either. But he would have appreciated the deep layer-cake of irony I'd woken up to, would have had a joke to crack to make me feel better about it.
I missed him the way I imagined I might miss an arm or a leg. Bereft. Something vital removed.
He'd been sick my whole life, but his death was still a sucker-punch.
A soft noise from the ceiling caught my attention and dragged it off of my own misery, my head snapping up. I locked eye with one Hatake Kakashi, halfway through lowering himself back down from the space above the ceiling panels, still in his hospital pyjamas and surgical mask and eyepatch. We were both frozen for a long moment, watching each other's brains tick over, and then I threw back my blankets and slid across the room to his side of the curtain. Haste made him ungraceful in his renewed scramble to get out of the ceiling - halfway through he registered what I was doing, changed his mind, and tried to climb back up.
I got up on his hospital bed, planting my feet to make up for the way it rolled, and grabbed him by the scruff. Hard enough to make him whuff like the wind startled out of him, jarring him enough to let me haul him out of the ceiling and overbalance, sending us crashing down onto the bed. It wasn't meant for this level of abuse; the side-rails collapsed down when we landed, and the bed itself skidded into the wall.
I had him in a headlock, one leg around his chest for good measure, much good it may do me. But if the amount the room was spinning for me was any indication, neither of us were going anywhere for a minute. I had no breath, and it was in no hurry coming back. Hatake made no effort to move, either.
"Sage's saggy balls," I said, as soon as I could. "The room won't stop spinning. Is the ceiling more comfortable, then?"
A single baleful dark eye met mine. Languorously, he started the process of untangling from me.
"You were having a private conversation," he mumbled, not looking at me for it. Lazily I reached out and pinched his cheek.
"You are on bed rest," I said. "These are privacy curtains. We cannot see each other past them. If you're that uncomfortable eavesdropping, there are earplugs in the bedside cabinet." I hooked the appropriate drawer open with my fluffy-socked foot, to illustrate.
He listed away from me, and I let him pull his face out of my grip to faceplant into the pillow. He said something indistinct into it, that sounded like "just let me go home."
"Why can't they, you mean?" I said, reaching for the chart at the foot of his bed. I flipped through it perfunctorily. "...Numbers still too low. They'll let you go tomorrow or the day after, maybe. Hoping I'm out by then, too." I chewed a cuticle, thinking. I'd have to figure out where I was going, when I got out of here. After I told grandfather where he could stick it, as I certainly wouldn't be staying at the Kurama compound after that.
I propped myself up at the foot of his bed, as Hatake oozed into the pillow at the head of it. Pulled the second pillow out from behind it and handed it to me, so I could make myself comfortable.
"...didn't have to throw me around," he said, more distinctly now, and very sullen.
I fluttered my eyelashes, to the benefit of no one, since he wasn't looking at me. "...I do apologize," I said, a hand resting on my breastbone demurely. "It may have been something of an overreaction."
That got a longsuffering, exaggerated sigh, instead of the snort I was hoping for, but at least he was playing ball a little.
"I can promise it won't happen again, as long as you stay out of the ceiling," I went on, looking up at the still-askew panel. Be a while before either of us got up there to fix it! The next orderly to come in would be subjected to some slightly comedic visual storytelling, particularly if I hadn't made it back to my own bed by then.
"...think you'll have any more visitors?" asked Hatake, flat as a board.
"Most likely," I said, thinking of my sensei and my genin team.
"...then no deal," he said, and I laughed. I couldn't help it. My laugh was an ugly sound, hoarse and wet and invariably ending in coughing. It sounded bad enough that it got him to actually look at me, skeptical and almost concerned.
"Don't make that face," I rasped, my hand sliding to press the part of my ribs that burned. "It's fine, I just do that. Little hobby of mine."
"Choking on your own spit?" he suggested. That got me to giggle, low and stuttering.
"Ahhh, laughing hurts," I sighed, regretful but smiling. "Don't you dare stop telling jokes to spare me, though." I had teammates to threaten that, occasionally.
"...I wasn't being funny," he said, flat again.
"Then by all means, continue not being funny," I told him. He gave me the sort of suspicious look I loved to engender in other people, and I continued to smile.
A moment before the door opened I felt him tense, and employed the leglock I'd left loose between us to keep him from bolting up the ceiling again. The doctor who bustled in with a wheelchair was fortunately one of my very favorites, and familiar enough with me to take in the scene and just sigh.
"Suzume-senpai," I effused, and felt Hatake tense further at the sheer insincerity of it, like he ought to. "My day gets brighter and brighter."
"Was your own bed just not comfortable?" asked Dr Kawara, raising both eyebrows behind their large round spectacles. An unimposing thing, short enough to tuck neatly under my chin when I was capable of standing, with soft, short brown hair and intimidatingly perfect chakra control. My smile got wider.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said, earning a very tiny sigh from Hatake. "Are you here to take me back to the funny farm? Or are you here for him?"
Dr Kawara sighed, and rolled the wheelchair up next to me. "I'm here for you, unfortunately," they grumbled. "Get in, Haruka, we're going to run some tests."
I saluted jauntily, and began the process of extricating myself and sliding into the wheelchair seat. Suzume-senpai very conscientiously made sure my feet were up on the slats, before backing me up towards the door. I waved cheekily back at Hatake as I was wheeled away. He did not look at me, nor wave back. I expected as much, and was not at all put out.
[[I had this weird idea where I thought since I've written this ahead I could update every week no problem! but it turns out I just have no concept of time, god bless]]