Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

The next day felt like it never came. Not because Hinata fell asleep basking in a moment she would have been happy to exist in forever, which she had, but because the sun was no match for Ame's storming weather. There was no brightness to wake to, no warmth and no break from the pounding of rain on rooftop and windows. Clouds ruled the land by blotting out the sky the sun and any indication of time, seeming to never shift or budge to let sunlight through. Dense and dark and imposing, the clouds over Amegakure were nothing to joke about, especially when they consistently wept over the country without ever relenting.

When Naruto and Hinata had finally risen and moved on to seek answers anywhere they could find them throughout Ame, the rain had been steady without any additional wind. By the time Hinata had moved to observe her fifth target in two hours, the rain was coming in sideways and the temperature had dropped from cold to freezing. With a body most accustomed to the heat of Konoha, she felt herself chilling straight to the bone. Teeth unconsciously chattering, Byakugan activated and a hand pressed to the wall of the tower she currently knelt in, Hinata watched the workings of two of the mere ten people she had managed to see within her visual scope. Understandable, given the district of Amegakure that she and Naruto were currently in, but this was the place that Naruto had specified having his encounter with the dead. Or, undead. Whichever worked, Hinata thought hastily, as her targets began to move.

She had been tracking them for a while now, having already swooped by them quickly and stealthily enough to place audio clips upon their clothing. They were elderly, both moving slowly with limps in their walks, one man and one woman. She pressed two fingers to her earpiece and listened closely, waiting for their idle banter and complaints about the wind to conclude and hoping for some solid evidence of misdemeanor.

There were frequent mentions of Pain and his control of the weather, which apparently had consisted of somehow keeping the wind away but maintaining the constant stream of rain for his own personal reconnaissance. Hinata had no idea how the weather was still so ferociously relentless now that he was gone, but she didn't much care to find out, either. After a few more minutes of listening in to her targets, they fell into a companionable silence and just walked together, hands in their pockets and shoulders bumping every now and again. Hinata groaned under her breath, turning to rest her back against the tower wall. Another failed route, another dead end. These people didn't know a thing about the dead coming back to life, or someone who has the ability to vanish into thin air. And waiting around doing this traditional tracking was getting her nowhere; it was time to switch things up a bit.

With renewed determination, she dropped down from her high perch and landed silently down the road from them, her feet becoming immersed in puddles no matter where she stepped. She took her earpiece out and pulled her hood up, cramming her hands in her pockets and adopting a casual, carefree gait she'd seen her targets using. She approached them quietly, making her footsteps clearly heard, and watched as the man and woman turned to examine her. She knew from having followed targets that whole day that seeing a stranger in Ame was usually dangerous and cause for fleeing, so she tried to make herself appear as harmless as possible.

When she was a few feet away, she looked up and presented a surprised expression, as if she hadn't known that they were there. Wary, the two strangers ushered closer together, uncaring of the rain pounding down upon all of them, tinkling off of the many metallic structures standing and hanging around them. For a place that was predominantly wet, there sure were a lot of features made from materials known to rust, as well as being incredibly noisy. Each raindrop was a symphony of notes falling against different metals of differing densities; it was enough to distract anyone.

"H-hello there," Hinata greeted, her voice gentle but strong enough to be heard over the thrashing elements. Her targets only nodded at her, still wary, still unsure.

"My name's Hinata. Ah, I'm pretty unfamiliar with Ame, but I was wondering if you might be able to help me?"

"Depends," The man spoke up, ushering the woman a little further behind his shoulder. Hinata had known from seeing them in her Byagukan but seeing them up close was yet another reminder of the plight of those living in the lowest districts of Amegakure. Their skin hung heavily over their bones and stretched tight enough to tear, their teeth rotted or missing. The man had a grey beard with some black dusted in that he was constantly touching, while his other hand meticulously tapped against his leg. The woman was shivering in a bundle of ragged clothing and had a bandana wrapped around her graying hair underneath her cloak. She held her hands in front of her and constantly wrung them together, bringing to attention the knuckles knotted with arthritis.

"What do you want? We don't have any money."

"I just wondered if you could give me some information."

"What kind of information? And what's in it for us?" The man's voice was soft and low, hard to hear over the rain. A coughing fit came over him and nearly tore him apart, the woman reaching up to put a hand on his shoulder and balance him out as he heaved. Hinata felt her insides clutch with pain, diverting from her original intention of simply getting information in order to help this man as best as she could.

"Would you mind, sir, I'm a medic—I can help you. Before anything else, would you allow me to help you?" The man looked like he trusted her about as far as he could throw her, but after a few silent instances, very hesitantly he nodded his head. Still, he subtly pushed the woman behind him, incredibly protective of her, and took a single step towards Hinata. His eyes gleamed with wariness, resigned but cautious. She moved slowly, with her hands held out in front of her so that he could see there were no tricks. When the flame of verdant chakra burst around her hands, undaunted by the cascading waves of rain coming down from the angry sky, the man gasped and for the first time showed fear.

"This is healing chakra, sir. I am a medic. Does your chest hurt you? It sounds like it's a little hard for you to breathe," Hinata began, slipping easily into medic-mode. The man, flabbergasted but intrigued, nodded his head on both accounts. He reached up and scratched a sideburn, looking nervous.

"Been havin' trouble breathing since the last war came and went. Lots of explosions, lots of smoke. Chest aches all the time, don't know why, never stopped me before." Nodding, Hinata moved her hands gently to touch base upon his frame.

"I'm going to survey your internal damage before I do any healing, okay?"

"Ah, sure." At a loss for words and quite nervous about being touched by a stranger, the man looked anywhere but at Hinata. He even went so far as to glance over his shoulder at the woman with him, who was peering over his shoulder at Hinata's work.

"Hm, I see. Have you ever been to the hospital for heart problems, sir?"

"No."

"Have you had a serious fall or loss of consciousness recently?"

"No." Before Hinata could continue, her brow furrowed in concentration, the woman smacked the man right on the back, jarring him. He raised his hands and grunted, casting her a dirty look.

"Okay, okay. Nosy old broad. I had a fall about a month ago, got real light-headed and felt a lot of pain in my chest and shoulder. I was out for a few minutes, just a few. Woke up feeling like hell but I couldn't just stay down, not on these streets, not in this country. Lucky enough I didn't get robbed for all I'm worth, which isn't much, but it's all I got."

Concerned, Hinata delved her chakra into the man's chest with more understanding, checking his heart, noting the weakness there.

"Myocardial Infarction," she whispered under her breath, checking the valves and the tissue. Just as expected from the man's given symptoms, there was a small part of his heart muscle that had been damaged and appeared to be dead. The fall had been caused by a stroke, a lack of blood flow to the heart. The difficulty breathing was another matter, though not necessarily unrelated. From the looks of the man, he seemed to be well into his seventies, possibly early eighties. His lungs and airway were coated in a thick mucus that was the cause for his raucous coughing spells. Beyond his past heart attack, the man was currently suffering from Chronic Bronchitis and from Hinata's estimate, he had been for quite a while. As she opened her mouth to inform him of her diagnosis, her hands flared with healing chakra and she set to work on lessening his pain, doing what she could for him with such devastating damage to his heart and lungs.

"Your fall was caused by a Myocardial Infarction, or heart attack. You're currently suffering from Chronic Bronchitis, which is why you're coughing up mucus. You really need to go to a hospital. It's good that you seem to walk a lot, that should help, but this cold air is only making it worse."

"Can't afford a hospital, and besides, not like we got top-notch care here. They'd just send me right back where I came from, so why would I bother."

"There is a hospital here? Could you tell me where it's located?" After the man explained where the hospital was located, he sarcastically asked if his examination had been worth anything at all or if they'd just been wasting time. Hinata was already shaking her head, thoughts forming in her head at rapid speeds, preparing to scan the woman. The man turned, then, and gestured his companion forward, whispering something about it being safe. Hinata smiled at her, meeting her in the middle to gently grasp her gnarled hands. The moment she laid eyes on those damaged fingers, Hinata's heart dropped. The woman was old and had clearly had arthritis for so long that her fingers couldn't even unbend; they were permanently mashed together against her palms, almost completely fisted. The gleam in her kind honey eyes was enough to show Hinata that she'd expected this, had expected the hurt in Hinata's eyes when she realized there wasn't much of anything to reverse this process.

"Kei's had arthritis for ages now, girl. Not much left to do there."

"No, not much, but still something." Hinata's chakra flared to life, coating each finger with a soothing warmth. The woman, Kei, watched in wonder as she regained just the very slightest ability of movement, her eyes going wide and her lips trembling. The man watched too, easily just as captivated.

"This is all that I can do for you, Kei-san. But I know many exercises that help this condition. They'll bring you some comfort and relief, at least, and at the very most you might regain very minimal function. That's highly unlikely, but it's not completely unreachable. Don't lose hope." After showing both Kei and her companion the hand exercises she'd been taught and had researched on her own to help with joint stiffness and specifically arthritis-based patients, she found herself stalling to leave the elderly couple.

"Sir, do you know if you are allergic to anything?"

"Not that I know of, kid."

"Alright. Is this where you live? Can I find you here again?" she posed it hesitantly, not wanting to offend them, overstep her boundaries, or make them feel trapped. She felt a certain fondness for them, could imagine them as her own elders. She watched as Kei slipped her hand through the man's once more, snuggling into his warmth. The rain continued to pour, the sky churning like poison.

"…You can." He was hesitant again, returning to his distrustful, protective self. Hinata didn't take it to heart, not when he lived in constant fear and struggle just to survive.

"Before I head out, I was just wondering if there's been anything especially strange happening around here." The man had his tapping hand held over his mouth, staring at Hinata with unsure, hooded eyes. The woman nudged him from behind, nodding her head. That seemed to seal the deal for the man, though he continued to act suspicious and tight-lipped.

"Anything strange, you said?"

"Anything at all."

"There's a lot of strange things in this world, kid. Strange that you can work your whole life then be raided by brutes and lose everything you ever owned. None of you upper-class heathens even know what it's like down here in the slums. Barely enough food for a child. Only thing in abundance is shelter, and that's because the whole damn district has been deserted." The man shook his head, hand dropping to his side once again to resume its tapping. His lips were trembling from the coughing spell, his face beet red. The woman let her forehead fall gently against the back of his shoulder, a gesture of comfort that seemed to settle the man down. Hinata had a moment to wonder about the relationship between the two of them, and whether or not the woman's silence was her choice or the result of someone else's cruelty.

"Sir?"

"Strange, strange. Nothing really jogs the memory as out of the ordinary. Nothing but rain and piss and—" The woman suddenly tensed, lifting her forehead from his back and tugging on his sleeve. When he turned to her, she began to make hand gestures Hinata recognized as a rough form of sign language, her gnarled fingers trying to outline complete words and sentences as best as she could manage. The man was nodding, though, so it seemed he understood what she was telling him.

"Oh yeah, yeah! Forgot all about that, but not Kei here." He smiled fondly at the woman, securing one of her hands under his arm and holding it there so as to keep it warm.

"Has a memory like a steel trap, this one does. Reminded me that the other night, we were wandering down a few kilometers north of here and we saw a few shady looking folks, nothing too out of the ordinary about them. They were eatin' at one of the motels' diners, sipping tea or something. We walked by and they didn't even spare a look at us. But we got a look at them, and let me tell you something child, those men were up to something. Black cloaks swallowing them up, just a bad vibe all around as we walked by."

"They were just eating here? Is that what made them unusual?"

"Motels are the main source of food in these districts, so that's not what concerned me."

"Then please, what did concern you?" Hinata didn't know if the man knew something important or not, didn't know if she was onto something or just drawing blanks, but this was more than she'd gotten yet and she'd be damned if she didn't follow it to the end.

"What concerned me and what was odd about them was there was one that was just, he was loving the rain. No one in Ame loves the rain. No one. This guy, he was lookin' away from his group, staring up at the rain comin' down, opening his mouth to taste it. It…it was his teeth! Mouth like a beast, that one, sharp and lethal. Kei and I still wonder if we were hallucinating those teeth. Strange folks when you really look at them, one was even wearin' a mask."

"One of the men had sharp teeth? Was he very pale, with white hair? Small build?" Excitement coursed through Hinata's bloodstream as she realized she had finally gotten something useful. This was something huge, in fact, something worth reporting back to Lady Tsunade. Finally, she was on the right track. The man was looking at her like she'd lost her mind, but he answered her all the same.

"Yeah, sharp teeth, white hair, small build, pale skin. It's so cold here everyone's always pale, though."

"And the men he was with, what did they look like? Can you describe them for me?"

"Could only really see the one who was wearing the mask. It was a strange design, not to mention no one here wears masks. Orange, and swirled. Covered his whole face up. The other guy, we couldn't get a good look at him. He was in the shadows."

"Thank you, thank you for this information." Hinata's voice was earnest, sincere. She had it all catalogued away in her mind, ready to meet back up with Naruto after a short errand at the hospital. She bowed to the elderly couple, thanking them once again. The man flushed, his pale skin taking to the color with ease. Kei moved forward and pressed one mangled hand very gently over Hinata's heart, leaving it there for a moment before pulling back and taking her place beside the man once more. Touched and spontaneously close to tears, Hinata leapt up onto an overhanging cable and headed towards the hospital, her feet moving with renewed purpose.

When she arrived at the hospital, she thought she'd gotten the wrong place. The front desk was empty and there was no sound indicating that life existed in this building, but Hinata's Byakugan did not lie. She had seen people in gurneys a few floors up, not many, but enough to warrant this building to be differentiated from the rest of the deserted towers. Hinata had a strange feeling coursing through her, wondering why she felt so tense. It might have been the complete lack of personnel to greet her, the absence of people running around busily trying to save lives as she was so used to in Konoha. Or it could very well have been the strangeness of finding and entering a hospital without a ground floor. High up in the sky, the lowest level of the hospital was taller still than many of the towers within Ame. Every patient would have to be transported up several floors through a rickety elevator in order to get to the emergency room, and even higher to reach the operating rooms and ICU.

Hinata had never underestimated a place's plight as much as she had in Ame. It was no wonder the population was dwindling, no wonder people never wanted to travel here, let alone pass through the place. The care was rough and untrustworthy, the streets dangerous, and every patron's outlook was dismal.

It only took her a few moments of exploring before Hinata decided that given the circumstances, it was okay to be a little amoral. She was a shinobi, anyhow, there were always rules she would have to break. Stealing medical supplies for a good cause in a place where those in need were left needing, for instance, did not stand out as something Hinata would regret later in life. So she searched through the hospital, walking down deserted hallways and coming across only a few people actively working, though none of them questioned her beyond their cursory glances. She estimated that her healthy gait and presence was enough to register as not needing any assistance and therefore she was left to her own devices. It took her a matter of minutes before she found a storage room, plundered and thrashed from what she guessed to have been thieves.

She managed to gather as many materials as she could find in the destroyed remains of the room. Gauze, bandages, some materials for makeshift splints, one hospital blanket, and a few other basic medical necessities for people who couldn't carry much with them. She didn't want them to stand out and be robbed, but she wanted them as comfortable as she could help them to be, and prepared for the future. She also devised a small first aid kit for them to share, tucking it into a tin container and stashing it in her pouch. And finally, she wrapped her last items in gauze and tucked them into a small sack before securing it at her hips. Finished with her scavenging, Hinata took one last look at the room torn asunder by some unnamed peoples' desperate needs and moved back towards the way she'd entered.

This time, however, there was a woman at the front desk, leaning down to push a box into place and turning with surprise to see Hinata coming from behind her. Flushing, Hinata greeted her and paused by her desk when the woman asked if she needed assistance. With hands full of items clearly not her own, Hinata wondered if the woman just did not care about theft anymore. If it happened so often that all she had left to offer was any help she had to give. She wanted to ask the woman what had happened here, why there was no one around, why there was no sign of life in this district or this country. She wanted to know what had happened here that left the population so desperate and in pain, but she knew that one. She knew the civil war that had torn this country apart, left them battered and broken. It wasn't like their infrastructure had been blown away like Konoha's had been, no, it was worse. It was the people. Massacred. Slaughtered. Families lost and broken, never to be restored in the material world. Amegakure had not survived its war; was the complete opposite to Konoha in that respect. Where Konoha had picked up where the war had left off and worked on rebuilding and rebirth of the population, Ame had dwindled; had become stagnant.

What more could Hinata expect? The war Pain had rained down upon Konoha had come to fruition with complete loss of structure and life. But, Hinata thought gravely, Naruto had gotten through to Pain, had convinced him to return the lives he was able to in order to start a new path, a better path. He had started with six, just six paths of pain, because all he had known was pain. But Naruto had shown him the seventh, the path of hope that led to revival and forgiveness. And Konoha had prospered.

But who had been there for Ame in its time of need? Who had been there to talk down the criminal mastermind behind the destruction of this village's people? Children. Three young, ambitious children led by master Jiraiya himself. And yet everyone knew how that tale had turned out. And so Ame had suffered.

So instead of asking any of these questions, Hinata surprised herself with what came from her lips.

"What…do you need?" The woman didn't openly react, didn't even seem to believe Hinata was still standing there. The way her eyes looked right through the kunoichi, it was as though she believed deep down that any correspondence after an initial greeting was either unheard of or a fabrication. As if no one before had stayed long enough to pose other questions, to offer aid to the one person who seemed to offer aid to all.

"I'm sorry?" Her voice was tasteless, colorless. There was no inflection to propose any sort of presence in the conversation at all. She was a drone, moving about behind her desk, pulling syringes and other medical items that Hinata had never seen behind a welcoming desk before, though she knew this hospital set a precedent all its own.

"Is there anything you need here? I can help. I want to help." This was so not a part of her mission parameters and she was sure that if this panned out, she'd be getting a biting punishment rant from Lady Tsunade, but having walked past rooms of empty wire frames where beds and the ill should have been, with mold on the walls and a deafening silence in every hall, Hinata understood that she had to do this. She could not leave this place and do nothing for it.

At last the lady looked at her, really looked at her. Hinata wondered what those tired brown eyes were seeing, wondered if there was even a hint of something in her appearance that would promise aid.

"You want to help." She said, her voice still untouched by emotion. But there was a look in her eyes, a flickering memory of towers rising into the sky each day, each one taller than the next, strong and sturdy and shining like beacons in the day, like guardian giants in the night. Mountain shadows to look up to and to be lifted through, to stand atop and see the entirety of the country, watching the rain fall and hit them and not soak through them. Shelter from the elements, places to raise families and learn in and work in. Metallic angels lifting their arms up into the sky, running fingers of cable and iron through the clouds, icing at the tips.

Hinata looked at this exhausted woman and saw hope staring back.

Hope for rebirth as she had seen when she was a child, when one war had rocked her world but left it right side up. Different from now, when she was old enough to have two wars under her belt, to have seen her world be rocked twice, first to stabilize, then to turn over into the unknown. She was still in the unknown, drowning in this constant rain, constant fear. This woman, these people, they didn't know how to get out.

Hinata was no fool. She knew that Konoha was no savior, no saving grace; that if she came running back with tears on her cheeks and hands fisted into statements that no one would listen to the plight of Amegakure. No one would move to aid this village of brokenness. Even Hinata had known about the war prior to coming on this mission, had known that the place had been decimated. But she had never been there, had never experienced it, had it rubbed into her face firsthand.

And now she was a part of the unknown, a small insignificant part of the broken aftermath. And she was no savior. Her home village was no savior. These people in Ame, they didn't want to be saved by a village that did not come to their aid in the time of a civil war that had destroyed them. The spread of the Third Shinobi World War had reached Amegakure and tormented its people, its families. It's children. All that the shinobi world had ever offered to Amegakure was death and brokenness.

Hanzō. Civil war. The Third Shinobi World War. Pain.

Amegakure wanted nothing to do with any of the villages or their shinobi politics. They just wanted to be born again, to be able to live and have the chance for a future. They wanted lives of freedom without the possibility of a shinobi dictator, or outside forces coming in and slaughtering their families, using their children as warriors in battle. They wanted their own agency.

They wanted a chance.

"What village are you from?" the woman asked. It was a simple question, yet had it come from anyone else Hinata would've understood it meant that the asker was drawing boundaries.

"Konohagakure, ma'am."

"Nice weather this time of year. Well," and there was a flicker of life in her, a sunshine smile that rose and set within a few seconds after it occupied her frozen lips. "I suppose it's always nice weather there."

"Yes, it is. Ma'am, I'm sorry to intrude upon your business, but is there anything that I can do for you?"

"You seem like a nice young lady," the woman turned, reached under her desk and brought up a jar filled with teeth. Upon closer inspection, the teeth were rotted and some were still attached to long extending roots. Hinata's mind registered the man with Kei and their missing teeth and her heart gave a punch in her chest.

"Like someone who truly does want to help. You're hesitating to ask, which shows me that you understand the politics of someone like you offering to assist someone like me, here, in this place. I accept that. And I'll tell you right now, I am not the kind of person to reject the offer of help when it is extended to me, no matter where it's being extended from. You've seen the place, clearly," and she nodded at the goods in Hinata's arms, making her flush. But then that smile rose up again, her plump lips curling back to reveal her teeth. None were missing, none were rotted. Her skin, so deep in pigment, was beautiful and unmarred by blemishes, yet she had scars. Pink, stretched out marks on her neck and shoulders, her hands and her forehead.

"Don't worry, sweetheart. You can have those goods, I don't mind. I'm not going to ask why someone from Konohagakure needs a hospital blanket and some gauze, or why she's getting them from here. I will gladly accept any help you wish to offer, child. The world needs more people willing to put their pride aside and accept the kindness of others. I'd like for you to remember that, too, while you complete the mission you're on, and when you're off on others."

Slowly, Hinata nodded her head, bowing before taking a few steps to the door. When she reached the doorframe, one foot already being soaked by the incoming rain, she turned back to the woman and said, "I will remember." Then, with the last image of the woman's hopeful smile in her mind's eye, Hinata turned away from the dilapidated hospital and looked out into the rain where a single beam of sunlight had broken through the cloud cover, streaming down unbroken upon the metal surface of a small tower.

Hinata hurried back to the street upon which Kei and her companion were, hopefully, still walking. It didn't take her long to find them, descending from the nearest tower to land a few paces away from them, her new items jostling. She raised her hand in quick greeting and gestured for them to follow her over to a small tower with an overhang. It wasn't much of a source for cover from the rain, especially not with the wind thrashing about, but it was better than nothing. She removed the items from under her cloak and began to place them against the corner, setting everything down carefully and turning to see the wide-eyed, suspicious gazes of her newfound companions.

"I've brought you medical supplies." She moved through each small container, showing them each item and explaining what each one was for. Though it was difficult to register the time of the day from the utter darkness around them, which had rose with them out of sleep and would surely fall ever long into their next dreams, Hinata had to gauge the time from experience. She'd wager that it was already evening, given that she'd been out tracking and stalking all day long and had even detoured for this side mission. So, with that in mind, she pulled the hospital blankets out and handed them over to the couple, explaining that they were the best she could find within the hospital. They stared down at the blankets with awe, as if they weren't tiny sheets of cloth that the wind would tear right through, but rather as something opulent, something akin to jewels. The man kneaded the material between his fingers just once, almost as if to remember the feeling, then turned and wrapped it around Kei's shoulders. He took her own from her hands and did the same, doubly padding her to help reduce her shivering.

Hinata felt the sting of tears in her eyes at the blatant act of love and leaned over with her hair falling to cover her face as she untied the small knapsack at her side. She handed it to the man without words and watched as his fingers jostled the items around before pulling the first from the case. He didn't move for just a moment, simply stared at the item and then the copies still hidden within the sack. Moments passed before he finally looked up at Hinata. He looked a little shaken, but continued to try to hide his emotions in the face of someone he deemed a stranger.

"Have you ever used an inhaler before, sir?" He was already lifting the tiny aid to his lips, pressing just once to administer the healing agent. The resounding sigh he released afterwards was still muffled by mucus but his expression shown a relief he hadn't felt in years.

"Yes, I have. Used to have a prescription for the cheap one at the store, but couldn't afford it when the war came through." Kei moved to nuzzle into his side, her form bulky from the blankets over her shoulders. Still, the man moved so that she could slip her gnarled fingers around his arm, tucked intimately into his side. Hinata nodded at the man, then smiled at Kei as the couple moved towards the small grouping of medical supplies.

"I know I don't have to tell you, but please keep the goods hidden well. Most likely inside this building would be best. I don't want them to bring you more strife."

"Yes, yes, you're right. Of course. We'll do that." The man responded, nodding his head and turning back to her. He extended his hand, slowly but with a certainty to the gesture, as if he was putting himself out on the line but he knew what he was doing.

"I'm Jun." His mouth was a straight line but his eyes were glistening and Hinata felt her heart pound in recognition. Here was a thanks he couldn't put into words, somehow distinguishing that she was no stranger to them anymore now that she knew their names. In a nation of thieves and victims, this man had offered personal information to her in thankful return for a measly few medical items she'd managed to steal from the local hospital. Even though it was a tiny amount of goods, something that a patient in Konoha would have thrice of in general care, this couple viewed it as though it were precious jewels. Hinata felt truly, truly humbled.

"I'm Hyūga Hinata." She reached out and grasped his hand, felt the gentle squeeze before he brought his hand back and placed it atop Kei's on his arm. "It's very nice to meet you." Her smile felt hot like sun rays on her skin, wide and sincerely happy and striking enough to remind her where she was and what she was doing. She was on a mission. She had garnered valuable information and needed to regroup with Naruto, see if he had managed anything further, and then return to her home village to report. She could not stay here any longer. She felt a curious sadness at this, then a sense of wonderment at how she'd become so attached to these people in such a short amount of time. She began to back away from the couple, whom stood huddled together under the overhang, intimately tied together as they watched her step back into the downpour. The rain soaked through her cloak and clothing in an instant, reaching down to chill her bones once more.

She looked into Kei's strong, honeyed gaze for a long moment before turning to the steely ice pick stare of Jun. She dipped into a bow, her own special form of gratitude and slowly lifted back to standing position.

"We will see each other again." She promised, smiling.

Then, before the couple could say anything more, Hinata lifted herself up into the clouds to challenge the rain where it was coldest, ran so quickly over rooftops the wind couldn't keep up with her, and promised herself that no matter which elements of her world thrashed her, she would never give up.

That was her ninja way.

A/N: Please take care of yourselves : )