On my very last night at Fuyu's house, I finally found the right door.
It was in the twilight state of consciousness on the very edge between meditation and lucid dreaming, my pulse low and my awareness directed entirely inward. It was to fall asleep but catch yourself right on the edge, and to follow the corridor that formed around you until you found the door in it that led to somewhere just slightly more real than the rest of the things in your head.
I'd found pointers in the Uchiha library, and also in my own past life memories. By no means had I filtered through all of them; I'd barely dipped a fingertip into that vast and terrible pool. But I'd gotten better at searching for things by concept, by association, and the first thing I'd looked for was more on the Akasha. And as it turned out- both Uchiha scholars and people I'd been in past lives agreed- it wasn't so much about your visualization technique or your focus as it was about settling into the exact right state of altered consciousness.
I'd been overthinking it, as usual.
But then I'd got it.
The doorknob I grasped in my dream was as real as any I'd ever turned, and when I passed through the door I could not mistake what I had found.
The room stretched out in every direction around me, even behind me where the door had been. An endless vault overhead, midnight dark and lit by the crystalline glow of a billion stars. Every single one of them reflected in the glass-smooth water below, a perfect mirror if not for the ripples, radiating sluggishly out from my feet. I was the only disturbance in the whole vault, the only distortion in the lake.
It was cold, and the smell of salt was crisp on the air. It was the kind of quiet that you got in caves, deep underground. My breath formed little puffs of fog. I watched the stars in the reflection of the lake, and then, slowly, I looked up.
They were not the stars as we know them in the physical world, there were too many and too clustered, too close. They danced, and as I watched I could see the slow rotation around the pole, directly overhead.
Each star above me was an entire universe, every point of light a different world with a different past and future to mine. The entire timeline of every reality that had ever been and ever would be.
The Cosmic Record. The Akasha. The shared consciousness, the very purest manifestation of the mental plane. I'd read about it. I'd heard it described, seen echoes of it through the memories of my past selves.
I still hadn't been prepared for it to be so beautiful.
A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise.
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns
I cannot know how long I stood there mesmerized. In the waking world I'd plotted and planned, mapped out what I would do, where to go once I'd found this first step. But now I was here, and all I could do was look. Didn't even try to control it, pull in a record, take a peek at another timeline. I stood there in the dark and the cold and the light of the stars, until I fell asleep in real life and drifted out of the hall of records, into proper REM sleep.
I woke up on my futon in Aunt Kuro's spare room, which was not where I'd been when I'd started meditating. There was a cat on my chest, breadloafed with front paws tucked in neatly. From the pale quality of the light that reached past the curtains, it was not long after dawn. I didn't remember the dream I'd had, but I remembered the vault of stars with such vivid clarity that I could not doubt I'd really done it.
It had only taken me two weeks. As I was going through it had felt like an eternity, but objectively, it had only taken me two weeks. That was phenomenal.
The feeling in my chest wasn't elation, or satisfaction, or even relief, though. Today was my last day staying at the Uchiha compound, tonight I would be staying at Natsuki's house in the Yamanaka estates. Today was also my appointment to be Mindwalked.
I had no idea how much of what I'd experienced could be viewed by Yamanaka technique.
With that thought, I knew I would not be going back to sleep this morning.
I'd managed to talk to Fuyu and Natsuki about my change in physicians and the new and imminent danger I was in. Their ideas and advice remained more or less the same; I had to go back to work, preferably in the Hokage tower. To do that, I had to pass the psych eval.
I knew what kinds of things would disqualify someone normally. I had no idea if any of this would. Natsuki was aware that I'd been spending some time dissociating in public, which was not, in fact, a symptom that could get you barred from desk work. However, if Natsuki could see the content of my flashbacks-
I'd been some wild shit in past lives. The one where I'd been a talking horse, the one where I'd been some kind of rainbow slime monster. The ones (plural! more than one!) where I'd been a fucking dragon. The ones where I'd been a civilian serial murderer, strangely normal in comparison. How weird was too weird? How weird was weird enough for HQ to say no thanks, you are compromised?
How much past life content would need to be in my head for Natsuki to decide there wasn't enough me still in here? Of course, it was all me, all the way down- I was a consistent creature in some ways.
I put the cat aside, went about getting up and getting dressed and thought about whether or not I was about to be fired for things I'd done in a past life.
Futilely, I wished I'd been able to get ahold of Aki, but for the past week he'd been well and truly missing. Out of the village, maybe. Seemed nuts, to take outside missions during reconstruction, but well, that was where the money came from. Reconstruction cost money.
(But how fast could the village be rebuilt if we put all of our jonin-tier ninjutsu to work doing it? How quickly could a thousand ninja build a thousand homes? What if- and here's what'll get me disappeared someday- what if we could use our superpowers to help ourselves first, the Daimyo second or not at all?
If ninja society was capable of focusing it's abilities on anything but violence, we'd be on the fucking moon by now)
I wanted to talk to my sensei, but he simply wasn't here. Neither of my teammates had caught him either. I had a lot to tell him. By the time I saw him again I was sure to have even more to tell.
I emerged fully dressed into the kitchen and was stunned to find that the coffee-maker hadn't even come on yet. It was on a timer, set so that a full pot would be ready and waiting immediately when Aunt Kuro had to get out of bed.
"Holy shit," I said, to the black and white bobtail cat sitting on the table washing between her back toes. "I'm the first one up." I hadn't managed that the whole time I'd been here; consistently missing Fuyu and Kuro in the mornings and often also at night.
"You've been walking ancient roads," said the cat on the table, between chewing at the webbing between her toe beans. "You're not the only one on them at that time of night, you know. I'd be careful."
I blinked at her, my hand on the cabinet door, halfway to getting down tea things.
"Thank you?" I said. "That's terrifying."
"Dying makes you better at spacetime jutsu," said the cat. "It's a well-known fact."
"...It is not," I said. "And I'm not doing spacetime jutsu, I'm not doing jutsu at all, I'm just, I'm meditating. You know, like monks."
"Your Akashic Record is personal and unique to you," said the cat. "But the Vault of Stars is Real."
"Which one are you again?" I asked, frowning. "What's your name?"
The cat hopped down from the table and stalked away into the hall. I busied myself with making tea while the automatic timer switched the coffee machine on. It occurred to me that I might yet be still dreaming. When Fuyu got up I'd ask him. He had the sharingan, he'd be able to tell.
Fuyu was not a morning person, not like Natsuki was, but he was still alert enough that he only performed a double take, and didn't startle, to find me seated at the table steaming my sinuses over my cup of tea.
"Am I still dreaming?" I asked him, and I fear I must have looked genuinely worried. He shook himself, crossed the room to me and pinched my cheeks into a smile.
"Eeeeeeeh," I whined in protest.
"Nope," said Fuyu, and in the moment before his smile closed them his eyes were red. He let my face go unceremoniously. "Unfortunately, we're both awake. What's wrong? Bad dreams? Nerves?"
"Yes," I said. "...The second one," I amended. "I mean. I love Natsuki, I trust him with my life, I've even had him in my head before-"
"But that was for fun," said Fuyu, nodding. For fun, and for training. All of my teammates had used their bloodlines against me and each other, to find out what it felt like and learn to fight it. But ultimately, we didn't expect to actually encounter native Konoha bloodlimits hostile to us. There weren't real consequences, there wasn't real pressure.
"This is like- it feels like going in for my medic exams," I said, nodding. "Except if I don't pass, I'm going to be disappeared and human experimented on."
Fuyu grimaced, and poured himself a cup of coffee. "We have contingency plans," he said, trying to reassure me even though I'd just made him worried, bless him. "...Haruka, we have so many contingency plans. You're a headcase, sure, but it's the kind of headcasery that makes you a good ninja. If this doesn't work out something else will."
"God laughs while men make plans," I intoned. Fuyu cocked an eyebrow at me.
"I thought you were an atheist," he said.
"It's an aphorism," I said. "The unfeeling and chaotic universe laughs while men make plans just isn't pithy."
That got him to laugh, a sudden bark that had Aunt Kuro giving him the stink eye as she finally slunk out of her room for breakfast.
Aunt Kuro worked in the T&I building, when she wasn't off being terrifying in an ANBU mask or in deep cover somewhere. Conveniently, the T&I building was where my appointment this morning would be. The look she gave me when I asked for a ride there made me wonder, with brief terror, if I really was going to die at fourteen after all.
But it was just pragmatic, and the Uchiha as a whole understood pragmatism. So I hugged Fuyu good-bye, waved to the cats, picked up my biggest, ugliest carpetbag, filled up with all the clothes from the bugout bags I'd collected, and held out my hand to Aunt Kuro. She threw me over her shoulder like a sack of grain, and a moment later we were out front of T&I.
I immediately wanted to throw up, and it had nothing at all to do with our mode of travel.
Aunt Kuro delivered a light slap to the back of my shoulder, sending me stumbling into the double doors.
"Aren't you friends with half of T&I anyway?" asked Aunt Kuro, watching the slapstick routine that was me trying to catch my balance with her usual lazy smirk.
"That's why it's upsetting," I said, waving back at the receptionist from across the room. She'd already recognized me. "Everyone's been so nice, and if I turn out to be compromised they'll have to black bag me anyway."
"You're so cheerful," Aunt Kuro told me, with an amused little snort. "Are you angling for a job in Risk Assessment?"
"Why, do you think they'd take me?" I asked, perking up a little.
"Go sign in for your appointment," said Kuro, flicking a hand at me. "I don't have time to stand around with you doing schtick."
"Nobody ever does," I pouted, but stepped up to the reception desk anyway. Kuro swiped her ID and slipped further into the building through the staff door, and I wondered how long it would be before I saw her again.
Behind the desk was one Fuuma Izumi, a member of a clan vaguely related to the Uchiha, not that you'd know it by looking at her. She waved me up with a bright smile, her nail polish the same brilliant sky blue as her long silky hair. Her eyes were the very same color, and framed by her hime-cut brought to mind the malaphor of the curtains matching the windows.
"Hey kiddo," she chirped, sliding a clipboard under the glass partition to me. "Good to see you again! How's Fuyu-chan doing these days?"
She looked young, not much older than myself, but she was definitely of Aunt Kuro's generation, a contemporary of hers in T&I. She seemed to enjoy reminding everyone around her of this.
"Doesn't Aunt Kuro tell you about things like that?" I asked instead of answering, scratching my name down on the sign-in sheet. It was one of the ones like we'd use at the hospital, where each line was a sticker you peeled off after the patient signed in. Confidentiality, that's nice. A courtesy I had not expected.
Izumi laughed merrily, sliding the sign-in sheet out from under my pen as soon as it lifted. "Of course she does, but it's a different set of information, isn't it? Coming from his aunt, as opposed to his friends."
I half-shrugged, submitting to the logic. "He's overworked. So's everybody with a job right now. Hoping to get cleared so I, too, can go back to being chronically overworked."
"I like the positivity," said Izumi, turning in her spinny chair to sort through paperwork. "You're trying to get cleared for deskwork, right? Thought about going into T&I? You're pretty good with infosec."
"Thanks," I said, grinning briefly. "I'm hoping to get something in Hokage Tower. They do need infosec up there, too."
"But it makes my job easier when it leaks," said Izumi, with an impish little smile.
"You don't work here because it's easy, do you?" I asked, and she slid my visitor badge towards me under the glass. She giggled.
"No," she said, sounding a little regretful. "Have a sit, Haruka-chan, Natsuki-chan will come get you in a minute."
I gave her a two-fingered salute, and marched myself to the row of uncomfortable steel chairs along the wall by the far door. See, Aunt Kuro. She had time to stand around with me and do schtick. Schtick that doubled as information-gathering, but well. That was the hazard you ran, talking to people around here.
I was only sitting there for about six minutes, but it felt like an hour. Long enough to spin myself, wind down, and then start spinning in the other direction. I felt myself reaching for that feeling of space, of unreality, that cold starlit hall- not to visit, but just thinking about the Cosmic Record. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so at peace, as I had in that ancient vault.
…Actually, I could. It had been on that gray sandy shoreline, on the tenth of October, when I was dead.
(You'll rest when you're dead, the man next to me chuckles. It is an old joke between us.
No, not even then, my answer, an older joke still)
Natsuki popped out of the door to the backrooms with a sunny grin and a bounce of his golden ponytail. I was spaced out enough that I didn't even startle, just blinked up at him.
"You're up," he chirped, hooking a thumb over his shoulder and holding the door open for me.
"Finally," I said, scrambling to my feet. "The time dilators in here are working overtime today. I've been waiting about a year."
"Oh good, I'll let the decorator know it's working," said Natsuki, leaning back to let me pass. The door closed behind us with a very final clunk, shutting out all natural light and leaving us under sickly, humming fluorescents.
"How do I get that job?" I asked over my shoulder as Natsuki ushered me along.
"You don't, she loves it. You'd never get it out from under her," said Natsuki with a tisk. "Hang a right up here. We're not going very far. There aren't even manacles on the table we're using."
"Tremendous," I said, feeling myself break out in an all-over prickle sweat. Natsuki was good at his job. Goddammit.
We took a few more turns, before arriving at a nondescript office door. T&I building was intentionally labrynthine and claustrophobic, the better to disorient detainees. It was a master class in hostile architecture, one of those places that it didn't matter that you knew it was deliberate. Techniques that worked no matter how awake you were to them.
True to Natsuki's word, there were no manacles on the table here. It was just an interview room, internal windows with the blinds drawn, the same cold lighting and flat metal surfaces as everywhere else in the building. He pulled out a chair for me, and when I sat down, dragged the other chair from the opposite side of the table, to sit directly next to me.
"This is going to be just like when we did it for fun, as genin," he opened with. "Except instead of asking you to hide something so I can practice going and looking for it, I'm asking you to try bringing the relevant events to the front of your mind. Just- think about the night of the tenth. Not that you have to? But it'll make it take less time. And try to relax."
"Think about the night you died," I said, nodding, "But try to relax." To his credit, Natsuki cringed, his smile going toothy and brittle.
"You know what I mean," he said. "Don't tense up. Don't think about pink elephants."
"I am thinking about pink elephants," I told him, but his hand was already on my forehead, and then I was falling.
It wasn't like the last time. It wasn't like the last time at all. I'd only perceived a sort of pressure, and a gray field behind my eyes, only noticing that the train of my thoughts was being directed because I knew to look for it. If the technique hadn't called for physical contact, I might not have even know I was being mind read. There was no visualization whatsoever.
This time, there was visualization.
I found myself suddenly standing in an indefinite gray plane, nothing in front of me. I turned around and there was Natsuki, his hands on his hips, frowning at a long wall lined with doors. He looked just as surprised to see me there as I was to be there.
"This is new," he said, indicating the doors. "None of this architecture was here last time, it was just kind of soup. Most people's heads are just soup, you know?"
"I've been doing a lot of purposeful meditating lately," I said. "Internal organization. Think that's it?"
"You're not supposed to be here, either," Natsuki went on. "Hardly anybody can project an avatar like that in a mindwalk, and oop-" he looked down at his hands, curious. "You're doing it for me, too. I'm just a presence usually. Like a smoke?"
"Meditation," I said, my hand on my chin. "Meditation boot camp. That's all that's changed. And that I've died, that's changed too." I looked over at the wall of doors sharpish, and knew immediately, in the way it is in dreams, that the one closest to us was the one containing the events of October 10.
"I couldn't say which it is more," said Natsuki, shaking his head a little. "I don't think I've ever been in someone's head who's died before. This is it, then? Oh, I'm not supposed to have you help me. Don't help me, you'll skew the results."
"I'll stay out here while you go in," I offered, as I wasn't particularly interested in reliving the night I died in detail.
"I think that's almost worse," said Natsuki, turning the handle and opening the door. "Who knows what you could be doing behind my back in your own head?"
"You're teasing me," I said, frowning. "This is my house, and you're teasing me." I followed him in, anyway.
Behind the door was a quiet night at the hospital. I didn't particularly recognize it, there were lots of nights at the hospital like that, with me sitting at the nurse's station frowning at charts while the dull hours passed me. I hated being bored on shift, but saying such a thing aloud was to curse yourself with an interesting shift.
Natsuki and I saw the memory of me sigh, and look up at the ceiling, an ink splotch on her chin from charting. There were no sirens yet. The night was still ordinary.
And then the whole world flinched, and it wasn't anymore.
I saw myself stand up from the station as the alarms began to sound, the village-wide evacuation sirens seeming to come from every direction at once. The lights flickered, and I started to run for the ER. They'd need me at triage, whatever was happening.
I never got there. The world flinched again- I felt it in my ghost this time, and so did Natsuki, from the way he splayed a hand over his chest. We watched as the pulse of demon chakra washed over the hospital, screams, babies crying, the memory of myself stopped short in the hallway. I saw myself struggling to take a breath and never managing it. I coughed a modest amount of blood and pitched forward like my strings had been cut, and that was it. The hospital went dark, and then fell to pieces, leaving my dream-self and Natsuki's floating in a gray foggy soup.
"That's more like it," said Natsuki, a hand on his chin. "...But this is where any tampering would have been done, I think, while you were out. Nothing before, anyway, you really did just seize up from the chakra miasma."
"I know," I said, staring at him from across the soup. He gave a sheepish little grin.
"Again, not supposed to have a peanut gallery for this," he said. "...Oh! I know what to do."
And then he was in front of me, a hand on my forehead, and I was falling, again.
This time it wasn't a third person replay, viewing the incident like a ghost in my own past. This was me, back in my skin on the day of the tenth, thinking the things I'd thought and feeling the things I'd felt.
I hadn't realized that I'd stored the feeling of dying, of my lungs collapsing on me, the burning sear of being unable to breathe until I was unable to do anything at all. But it was right there in living color for me again, a pain and panic that had stolen all reason, all thoughts from my head but it hurts and I can't breathe.
The dark in between was much the same, and then the sand between my boots came into focus, the sound of waves breaking gently in my ears. I was on that gray shoreline again, and when I looked up, the girl with cat ears was there.
She looked just the same as she had, but I paid closer attention this time, taking in details. Spider lilies on her kimono and, too, in a crown on her hair, resting below her triangle ears. Her sleeves and the bottom of her kimono were dark and heavy, like she'd been waist-deep in the surf just a moment ago. The bandage on the end of her tail was ratty and inexpertly tied, and when she turned to me there was a faint jingle, though I couldn't see any bells.
She shook her head slightly, her eyebrows furrowing. She lifted a finger to her lips, and I blinked, and I was back in the soup with Natsuki.
"Still just nothing," Natsuki was saying, looking at me consternated. "If you were just unconscious, there should have been something-"
"You didn't see the beach?" I asked, and I could feel my pulse kick up. "There was a shore on a cloudy day, and the shinigami was there."
Natsuki stared at me.
"...When?" he said. "You died in the memory and then we were…here…"
I put my hands on my cheeks, clutching my face as I tried to think. What had the cat said to me this morning?
"Your Akashic Record is unique and personal to you," I recited. "You can't see other people's. It's your record of all your past lives. Natsuki, I died. My physical brain wasn't recording anything. It's not here. I'm accessing it through the Akasha."
"...But I can't, because your Akashic Record is unique and personal to you," said Natsuki, hushed.
I felt a momentary wild rush of elation, because this meant no one could pull my past life memories out of my head and use them against me. And it wasn't the greatest proof that I'd died for real, untampered with, but it was a kind of proof.
"Okay," said Natsuki, nodding once. "Okay. I'm going to look at the other end, when you woke up in the morgue. And then I'm going to do a sweep for tampering, and we'll be done."
"Must you?" I asked. "That part was almost worse than dying was." But a door had floated up beneath us, and I reached for the knob of it anyway.
"You dying was pretty bad!" said Natsuki, with false cheer. As I dove through the door, he came up behind me and put a hand to my forehead, and the memory played from the first person once again. Very low on the list of things I'd wanted to review intimately, waking up in that morgue.
I hadn't realized how long I'd spent on the floor there, just going through it. Shivering and bloodstained and pelted by new and terrible past life memories. The one in the morgue, with the necromancer and the dead girl on the table-
I was fairly sure Natsuki couldn't see that, like he couldn't see the beach and the shinigami. We stayed with the memory up through where I'd stumbled out and straight into Fuyu's eyes, though now, seeing it again, I could pay close enough attention to watch his sixth and final tomoe form in his eyes in real time.
"Shit," I said, when we pulled back into the soup. "...I didn't realize. I really did mature his sharingan." Right there on the spot. It hadn't been me dying that had done it- it had been the shock of seeing me come back.
"You are incredibly lucky he didn't light you on fire immediately," said Natsuki, his ponytail wrapped around his off hand, as he did when he was stressed.
"He's too good to me, really," I said, shaking my head. We'd talked about zombie plans. Kill it with fire was the very first option. "Satisfied?"
Natsuki looked at me, his lips thin and his expression intense. "What was that bit that made you freak out? Were you remembering being dead? I couldn't see it, but in a weird way, like, it's not a genjutsu keeping me out of your head or anything- you literally can't when I'm in here? So I'm assuming it was you directly accessing your Akasha for something…"
"Yes," I said, slowly. "That's… what's been making me dissociate, since I came back. The past life memories. I'm getting a handle on it, but it's… taking work." It was easier to talk about, now that I knew he wouldn't be personally poking into any of it, wouldn't be seeing the bullshit I'd been seeing.
Natsuki bit his lip.
"You weren't kidding about that," he said. I sighed with my whole body.
"I can't even really blame you for not believing me," I said. "It's my own fault for being the way I am."
"I didn't mean it like that," said Natsuki, feebly, because how else could he have meant it? "...Let's talk about this in meatspace. I'm going to finish making sure you aren't, like, traditionally compromised."
"Do I have to be here for this? Can I leave?" I asked. Natsuki looked at me strangely.
"I am not keeping you here," he said, slowly. "You don't have to stay, if you can figure out how to leave."
I made a face of some kind, that made Natsuki spasm with the effort of not smiling. I made a shoo motion with my fingers, and rolled around to turn my back to him. I closed my eyes (they aren't my eyes, I'm in my own head, my eyes are already closed) and tried to center myself, reaching for the cold crystal clarity I had found in the Hall of Records.
Whether this was a good or a bad thing, achieving the state required to access the Hall erased all sense I had of time passing. It could have been an hour or a minute or a day, but I found myself standing on that mirror pool under the stars once again, ripples forming around my feet. Trying to find patterns in the stars filled up all of my attention, watching universes spin and split and planets turn. It was waiting for me, all of time and space, and I could take all the time I wanted to get there because it was all happening at the same time.
It took me a while, in this state, to realize that I was being watched. I wasn't looking down, you see, but when at last I did mine were not the only set of ripples breaking the surface of the glass lake. I turned to face the source, expecting to see Natsuki- and wasn't that terribly unfair, that I'd worked so hard to find the halls and here he was just from having followed me through in my head? But it wasn't Natsuki.
There was a creature, stood there in the water, greater than twice my size, four dainty clawed legs and two fluffy, feathered wings held up in half-tuck to keep them out of the damp. A head like a python at the end of a long neck, furred and crested with feathers, a long tail curled up at the end. A pink forked tongue flicked out, ruby-red eyes widened in surprise at the sight of me.
It sat up on it's haunches, front feet placed between hind paws like a cat, the feathers on its neck pricking up like ears. It was wearing a smart little buttoned vest, and a pair of fingerless gloves and matching spats.
I lifted a hand and waved. The creature- the dragon? was this what dragons looked like?- lifted a paw and waved back, a trilling, resonant sound welling from it's throat.
There were a lot of things I could have done, at this juncture. I did none of them, opting instead to trip over nothing, lose the trance state that allowed me access to the Halls, and wake up with a start.
I opened my eyes to Natsuki's hand still on my forehead, a look of intense concentration on his face. Fuck. I felt like I'd been gone hours, and he wasn't even done yet.
I put my fingers to my pulse point and started counting, concentrating on reining it in. About five minutes passed, long enough for me to begin to fidget, before Natsuki blinked, and came back to himself. He unstuck his hand from my forehead, and pulled back with a deep breath. Looked at me a long moment, and then leaned in again to put his arms around my shoulders and his face in the crook of my neck.
I huffed, and returned the hug. I guess he'd earned it.
"Did I pass?" I asked, after a minute. Natsuki laughed.
"You're all you, all the way down," he said. "No tampering. Still no explanation, but yeah, you pass. I guess you really did meet the shinigami."
"I know," I said. And a few things besides. The goddamned cat had warned me, but I hadn't expected to find someone else in the Halls that fast. I gritted my teeth against the realization that it would be about a month before I was supposed to rotate back to staying with Fuyu and Aunt Kuro, and excuses to visit the Uchiha might be thin on the ground before then. I wanted nothing more than to pin down that cat summons and ask if they knew.
Knew I'd see dragons on my second trip to the Halls.
Natsuki was still holding on to me, and I had no reason not to let him. Finally he moved, but before he disentangled entirely he had one more thing to say.
"Fuyu was right," he said. "Mindwalk is for enemies, not teammates. I'm filing a complaint."
"Don't put your career in jeopardy for me," I said, without much feeling.
"Let me worry about me," he said, shaking his head a little. And then the moment had passed, and he was smirking. "So, I saw something interesting while I was in there. The night of the wake?"
I groaned, standing up to get away from him.
"Did you really get caught in bed with Hatake Kakashi? By Jiraiya no Sannin?" Natsuki pressed, unrepentant.
"That was entrapment. It's all sensei's fault," I said, but of course that would only egg Natsuki on.
I only protested a little, before I gave in to gossiping. If I didn't fold now, it would only get worse from here- I was going home with Natsuki, after all. And I didn't mind, truly. Explaining myself to Natsuki wasn't the same as explaining myself to everyone else. He wasn't asking to judge me, he was simply ribbing me mercilessly, as is his right.
I hung around T&I the rest of the day in the break room. When Natsuki got off shift, we left together, arm in arm.
Been a minute! sorry not sorry. gonna be all ocs all the time for a while here, but in fairness, I *did* warn you. feels like I'm almost done with the setup! after I get to a certain point I feel like it'll speed up again. I'm writing ahead and out of order, so some stuff is getting written way ahead of posting... and of course, the glue in between is what slows me down. Ain't that always the way!