Hello everyone- here is a small, slightly explanatory filler chapter!
Enjoy!
Flashback
"…"
Michiko is silent as an attacking nin looms over her, his hands are hanging limp and his eyes are bulging as he stares at her.
Prior to this, he was steadily knocking her down, blow after blow. Regrettably, Michiko thinks she is staring into the eyes of death when she hits the ground.
The sensation of being ground up, like spices in a bowl, overtakes her. She can smell wet earth, blood and grass. A painful daton jutsu crushes the bone of her left arm.
Too weak to scream, she lets out a weak groan that is sick with pain. Haggardly she forms the hand-seals for Futon: Beast Tearing Palm with her uninjured hand in a final effort to cut him before he can finish her.
However, he dodges the weak jutsu quickly. Now, shocked from the pain of her arm, Michiko is immobilized.
Blinking tears in what she thinks are her final moments, she waits for a death that never comes.
'Drip…drip…drip…drip'
The man groans, spluttering like a fish as he spews blood from his mouth.
Michiko thinks someone has saved her, "…Kakashi?" She calls weakly while her vision is bleary and unreliable from the blood-loss.
She breathes deeply, trying to focus on the sensation of oxygen in her lungs. Her chest hurts from a broken rib. A gently warmth fills her body and, just as she wonders if she has wet herself the pain begins to ebb away from her abdomen.
Its absence revitalises her. When her vision focuses again, she sees a sight so absurd that she her physical shock surmounts into a mental shock from disbelief.
Her un-crushed arm that she raised defensively as the man came down on her, has a growth, an abnormality. When she moves her arm, she sees the skin below her elbow is broken. Her own blood is dripping from it. Only after noticing it does she feel the intense burn that ripped flesh summons. In comparison, her limp hand feels numb.
Through this ruptured skin, is stark white, dry bone. For a second, she thinks she has broken her arm in two- but she realises soon that this bone is separate from her arm, and yet, a part of her.
The extension tore free through her skin and impaled her attacker straight through the heart.
She can see its tip protruding behind him. Realizing his weight, her arm drops to the side and she stares at it as the bone retracts, back into her arm. A neat hole, about three inches wide, lets her peer at the scenery through her enemy's corpse.
"MICHIKO!"
She can't tell whose voice it is.
The rubble is removed from her arm, and someone is hoisting up her body into their lap.
"Michiko?"
'Shisui.' She thinks slowly, "D…Did you s…see that?"
Shisui doesn't hear her though- he is busy watching her arm heal itself. The absurdity of the bone, both ends reaching towards one another as if they were soft strands of thread or ink, leave him queasy and stunned.
As the bone threads its broken ends together and reform, the skin follows soon after until only slightly risen, thick lines remain.
Shisui knows she has no medic-training.
Losing consciousness, Michiko wakes a few hours later in the infirmary.
While she has been passed out, the cogs turn, determining several fates in one revolution:
Kakashi knows that Shisui should not have been out near the Anbu mission.
Danzo hears of Shisui's presence and becomes suspicious of his true intentions.
Shisui approaches Hiruzen for a second time since he was assigned to keep tabs on Team Ro.
Hiruzen learns of his niece's kekkei genkai, which has troubling implications; for her, their family and the village.