This Broken World We Choose

Note: This fic is set about 30 years before the beginning of Naruto canon, about 6 years before the outbreak of the Third Great Ninja War. Most characters are original, but the setting is derived directly from the Fallen Leaves RPG on Insanejournal, and updated for its successor, ANBU Legacy. Great thanks to Dark for letting me borrow his characterization of Hatake Sakumo and his wife Sadayo, and to Dark and Nezuko for comments and support.


Chapter Three

Miyako sits alone in the darkness until it turns to dawn.

Her kitchen flushes pink, then gold, then steadily clear. A square of light creeps along the counters and up the wall to the cupboards. In her old second-hand coffee pot, the coffee boils blacker and thicker and finally burnt.

She stirs herself at last, dumps out the coffee, rinses the pot. Drinks water instead, cold and slightly metallic from the tap. Finds aspirin in a cupboard and eats two.

She should have locked the door.

Should have gone to Ryuu's place instead, stayed the night there warm in his arms. He'd offered and meant it; he wouldn't have kicked her out in the dark hours before dawn. Her father couldn't have come. She'd have left on her own terms, not—

Not slammed the door in Ryuu's face, unable to meet his eyes, furious and terrified and irredeemably sullied.

He would have killed her father. She almost wishes she'd let him.

She fills another glass of water and drinks it at the sink. Then she peels out of her shirt and takes a long shower, as hot as she can stand it, scrubbing until she is pink and sore. She washes her hair twice and tries not to remember his hands running through it.

Her bedroom still smells of him, sweat and sex lingering in the sheets. She strips the bed and piles it all in a basket to be washed. She has spare sheets somewhere but can't summon up the energy to find them. Instead she curls naked on the mattress, tangled hair drying slowly in the humid air, and stares blindly at the curve of her empty hand.

He was already leaving. Even if she hadn't closed the door on him, he wouldn't have stayed.

That afternoon she drops his things off at the Mission Desk and signs up for another mission.


Days and missions bleed into each other. She assassinates a wealthy merchant in Kawajima and steals an ancestral tablet in Moriyama and fights three Suna nin to a standstill in the forest somewhere in southeastern Fire Country. She works with old friends again, and half-strangers. Uchiha Jiro tries to feel her up outside Narai; she barely stops herself from stabbing him.

He tells her he'd heard she was one of the mission perks, and then she does stab him.

That earns her solo courier duty to Tea Country, punishment detail, without pay. It was barely a flesh wound, but she doesn't argue. What's the point?

She delivers the documents inside the three-day deadline and takes a room at an inn in Fujiki on the way back. It's an indulgence, and an expensive one, but there's no team captain to chide her for it. And there's a new kind of peace in sitting at the open window in the clean, quiet room overlooking the wisteria tree, listening to the maids scrubbing laundry in the courtyard below. She tips her head back against the window frame and closes her eyes, soaking the slow evening sunlight into her skin.

Pipesmoke, thin and sweet, from a room across the courtyard.

Her muscles tighten. It's sentimental, it's stupid, but just for a moment she remembers him sitting in the window of the inn in Junpei, the striped yukata open over his chest, the slender pipe long and graceful in his hand. Against the backs of her closed eyelids she can still see the way the short damp hair clung to the back of his neck, and the heavy muscles iron-hard over his shoulder blades as she eased the yukata collar down.

If he'd stayed...

She shuts the window, and spends forty minutes sharpening kunai before she can sleep.

It's half a day's run back to Konoha, in the hottest days of summer. She arrives in the early afternoon, and the mission office is quiet in the post-lunch lull. Shiota Hiyori lounges back in her chair with her feet on the desk, doing a crossword puzzle; Umino Natsume leafs through a file cabinet against the back wall, hitai'ate shoved back from his sweaty forehead, whistling tunelessly. The creaking fan overhead barely stirs the heavy air.

"Tousaki, mission ID 27A45-C," Miyako says, and drops a sealed scroll on the desk: mission complete, client's personal stamp acknowledging timely receipt, proof she made it in time for the bonus pay she won't get. She scrapes sweaty straggles of hair off the back of her neck and thinks longingly of a cold shower, an icy beer. Her apartment will be even hotter than the mission office, of course. She asks idly, "Anything in Snow Country in the offing?"

Natsume looks up from the file cabinet. "How soon can you leave?"

Miyako blinks. "Well—today, if I have to." She needs to wash her blues and restock her pack, but if she pays a little extra she can drop her uniforms off with the laundry-women and pick them up again by the time she's showered and eaten. Sleeping on the road may be cooler than her apartment, stuffy and airless after five days locked up. And Snow Country at the beginning of August will be delightful, with fresh breezes off the mountains and shaved-ice stands on every corner. She asks, "What's the mission?"

Hiyori groans, drops her feet to the floor, and rolls her chair over to collect a file from the box on the edge of his desk. "Four-man A-rank," she says, "but Intel says it could take up to six. There's three jounin already assigned. One special jounin—Hyuuga Hiroshi, the medic."

"Fire jutsu's always useful in Snow Country," Natsume adds, sliding his drawer closed and turning the key. "You should be able to keep up. Ever taken an A-rank?"

"Sure," Miyako says. She's taken two, and both of them nearly got her killed.

Three jounin could make a difference. She's never worked on a team with that many elite ninja before; usually jounin command a team of chuunin, or work solo or in exclusively jounin teams, like the Sannin. Will she keep up? Will they shunt her to a support role, like the medic—or will they overestimate her skills, thrust her into danger beyond her ability to cope?

Every mission above C-rank carries a risk of death. Miyako has never bothered to calculate the odds.

"Sure," she says again. "Sign me up."


They meet outside the gates at sunset. A few other teams are congregating there, trading heightened risk for cooler traveling. Miyako spots Hyuuga Hiroshi from twenty paces. There's a red-haired woman beside him, lean and lethal in mesh and black silk—one of the elite who trade anonymous blues for customized notoriety. She's probably in the Bingo Book. Her eyes are a startling, slit-pupiled green, and her only greeting is a slow, catlike blink.

Hiroshi seems a trifle disconcerted by her. Hyuuga aren't used to being outclassed. He says, "Tousaki," but there's a little more warmth in his voice than usual. He steps away from the red-haired jounin to join Miyako. "I didn't know you were back."

"Just a few hours ago," she says. "Fire Country is too damn hot."

His mouth twists in agreement. "I'd have volunteered, too." The white gaze doesn't perceptibly lift, but he nods over her shoulder, and adds, "There's the rest of the team."

She glances back. A strong-jawed, brown-haired man in jounin blues is coming toward the gate, limping a little on his right leg. Harsh lines carve grooves at his mouth and eyes, and a deep scar gouges a cross in his chin. She knows him by sight, though only distantly: Shimura Danzou, one of the jounin commanders, the Hokage's councillor. He must be nearly forty now. Old, for a jounin, which means he's one of the best.

Behind him, tall and black-haired and shadow-eyed, Ryuu falters from his steady stride.

He catches himself in the next instant. The muscle leaps in the side of his jaw, but he follows Shimura without hesitation. The scrape high on his cheekbone has healed; his hair is a little shorter, spiked with sweat. He has his sword and sandals and pack again. She can be glad for that, at least.

"Hyuuga," Shimura Danzou says, approaching. "Mizutani." He scrutinizes Miyako for a moment. "I just received notice of your assignment, Tousaki. Are you certain you're up for this?"

She can feel Ryuu's gaze like fire on her skin. She refuses to look at him. "Yes, sir."

"I set a quick pace," Shimura warns.

"I'll keep up," she says.

He grunts. "Fall in, then."

They run through the night. Shimura does set a savage pace, despite his limp, but Miyako's never fallen behind on a mission and she doesn't now. She paces herself against Mizutani, the red-haired jounin, while Hiroshi pants quietly behind them and Ryuu brings up the rear. The temptation burns in her, but she doesn't look back.

Sunrise comes early. Shimura calls a brief halt for ration bars and rest. They're heading almost due east, toward the coast; they'll take ship at Nosappu Point for the two-week cruise northeast to Snow Country. Miyako listens to the captain's plans with half an ear and wishes they could run instead. Two weeks ship-bound seemed a pleasant thought when she signed up for the mission: ocean breezes, lazy days, a chance to lounge on a rope-coil after her morning kata and read the trashy novel stowed in the bottom of her pack. Now she'll have to add avoiding Ryuu to that list.

He doesn't crouch around Shimura's map with the rest of them. He stands apart, shoulders braced against a tree trunk, a canteen dangling loosely between two fingers. He might be listening, but his eyes rest on Miyako.

Caught looking back at him, she refuses to glance away. His gaze falls first.

Shimura folds his map at last and grunts the order to move out. They run through the blaze of the day, out of forest and into rolling grassland, skirting towns and villages. Thirty kilometers an hour, a shinobi's staying speed, but after nearly twenty-four hours on the move even jounin have to sleep. Shimura orders a halt at twilight, two hundred kilometers from Nosappu Point. "Cold camp," he says tersely. "Dry rations. We'll move in six hours." His eye lands on Miyako. "Tousaki, first watch."

She's exhausted, trembling, forty hours without sleep or soldier pills. The jounin are all watching her. Mizutani's mouth curls; Shimura's dark eyes challenge. Hiroshi looks worried.

Ryuu says, "I'll take it."

The mocking curl drops from Mizutani's lips. Shimura's brows rise.

Miyako is suddenly, coldly, furious.

"No need, senpai," she says. "Even a chuunin can stand watch for two hours." She turns her back.

"You can have second and third," Shimura says lazily behind her. "Since you're so eager, Kondo."

Kondo. The family name she never knew. No reason to care for it now, of course. An unexpectedly vindictive team captain should be at the forefront of her thoughts. Shimura can make this mission hell, can break her career with a single report. He wouldn't even have to write the report; he's a jounin commander. A word in the Hokage's ear, a rumor passed down to the Mission Desk, will ensure she never gets a mission above C-rank again.

Shimura is her concern on this mission. Not Ryuu.

She leaves the campsite with a straight back and a steady step. The light is falling fast, stars springing out cold and high. Starlight here on the plains is brighter than in Konoha. She picks out a few patterns: the Cowherd, the Weaver Maid, separated across a milky river of stars. She doesn't know the rest.

Ryuu says behind her, very quietly, "I didn't know you'd be on this mission."

"Or you'd have refused the assignment?" She doesn't turn.

He pauses. "No."

"I didn't look for you," she says. It's important that he know that. She didn't and she wouldn't have. "I just asked for a Snow Country mission. They told me there'd be three jounin but they didn't say who."

He says, "I'm sorry."

She closes her eyes, just for a breath.

If he'd stayed…

"You have nothing to apologize for, senpai," she hears herself say. "Go rest. I'll wake you when it's your watch."

She doesn't hear him leave, but he's a jounin on a mission; of course she wouldn't. She trains her eyes on the darkness, and begins to walk the perimeter of their camp.


Four hours of sleep aren't enough. Miyako is stiff and slow when she rises in the cold pre-dawn darkness. Thoughts tumble slowly past each other, one after another: I need a soldier pill.

I can't ask.

But while admitting weakness to her team medic will bruise her pride and maybe damage her standing in her team captain's eyes, falling behind—or, worse yet, falling in a fight—because of sheer exhaustion would be far worse. She stops beside Hiroshi as he's rolling his blankets. "Are you carrying soldier pills?"

"Of course. Standard issue." He knots a cord tight and looks up. "Are you sexually active?"

"Not at the moment," she says dryly, after a beat. "Why?"

"There's a warning come out, with this new formulation." He pulls a relentlessly organized medkit out of his gear and extracts the sealed case of soldier pills. "Kunoichi complaints. Cramps, interference with birth control. Half a dozen kunoichi menstruated when they shouldn't have. Two got pregnant. We're not supposed to issue soldier pills to kunoichi within seventy-two hours of sexual activity."

"I hadn't heard that," Mizutani says, slinging her pack onto her back. It's the first time Miyako's heard her speak. "When was the warning given?"

"Last week. We've only had this formula about two months. They're working on a new version now." He shakes a dark green little pill out onto his palm and looks up at Miyako. "Are you in the safe zone, Tousaki?"

"I had six hours' turn-around between missions," she says, snagging the soldier pill out of his hand. "How busy do you think I could get?" She dry-swallows the pill before it can dissolve on her tongue. Surely she's only imagining that lump in her throat.

Two months. Which means the pill Daisuke gave her on that mission with Ryuu was from this same batch.

She hasn't had cramps or bleeding. The birth control she uses is the standard prescription for kunoichi, a monthly injection that turns off menstruation except for a week of regularly scheduled hell twice a year. It's possible the two women now staring at an uncertain, unwanted future were using something different, but unlikely.

Two pregnancies aren't much, but how many kunoichi have taken soldier pills in the last two months? How many of those have slept with a man during the danger period? That number can't be large either.

Mizutani shoves past her to claim her own soldier pill. Miyako steps aside. Her chakra coils are beginning to flare with the new burst of chemical energy, and her thoughts are already clearer, tumbling faster and faster. Eight hours to Nosappu Point. She can separate from the team there somehow, find a pharmacy in the city, buy a test—

And what then? What if the sudden fear churning in her gut is true?

It won't be. It can't be.

She chokes down bile at the back of her throat, and tells herself it's just nerves.


Eight hours' run to Nosappu Point turn into eleven when the oppressive heat breaks into rain, the dying edge of a late-summer storm lashing its way in from the coastline. Mud sucks at every footstep. Rain blinds them, curtains their view; navigating by landmark and compass, Shimura mistakes one mountain peak for another and leads them eighty kilometers out of their way. No one dares complain.

It's early afternoon when they reach the gates of the walled port city, but the rain greys the world to twilight. Shimura leads them away from the traffic-burdened road to a small sally-port nearly hidden by overgrown trees and crumbling brickwork. Miyako has no idea if their mission is too secret to risk exposure to the guards at the city gates, or if Shimura simply prefers the shadows, and she's too tired to care.

He leads them through mud-churned backstreets to a rough, smoky inn near the waterfront. It's barely more than a jumped-up tavern, with most of the ground floor given over to wooden benches and drunken sailors. A rickety stair leads up to a warren of rooms on the second floor.

"I'll see to the ship," Shimura says brusquely, passing Ryuu a couple of bills. "Get them fed." He limps back out into the rain.

Hiroshi whistles softly, ringing the water out of his hair. "And I thought he was hard on us. Man must be made of iron."

"There's a reason he's the jounin commander," Mizutani says, a trifle smugly.

Ryuu says only, "Clear the door." He herds them aside as another bunch of sailors stamp in, brawny and dripping, already shouting for drink.

They find a table, not too far from the smoky central fire, and order what food there is: rice and soup and simmered vegetables, grilled mackerel, warm sake. The sake is watered but the fish is fresh.

Miyako is ravenous, but every time she looks up from her bowl she sees Ryuu's face across the table, and her stomach turns over with sick dread. She barely finishes her rice, can't manage more than a mouthful or two of the fish. Hiroshi looks at her in concern. "Feeling feverish?"

"No. Just tired."

"You've done well," Mizutani says, unexpectedly. "I don't know many chuunin who could have kept up this pace." She crunches yellow takuan between her teeth.

Ryuu says, "She was on a team of mine last month. Mission to Junpei."

Miyako doesn't hear the rest.

Last month. Four weeks.

She'd lost track of the time, days sweated and bled away on missions, but suddenly it's surging through her veins, ticking away inside her belly. Four weeks already gone. How many to take a child to term? How many before she starts to show, and the mission office strikes her off the roster?

She can't do this.

She stands. "I'll be back," she says, and heads for the door. Hiroshi calls something after her. She pretends not to hear.

But when she opens the door, Shimura's there.

"Tousaki," he says, looking down at her. "Going somewhere?"

"Looking for a pharmacy." She can't think of a lie.

"Well, ask Hyuuga; what else did we bring him for?" He drops a heavy hand on her shoulder, turns her. The others are watching from the table. Hiroshi looks worried, Mizutani amused. Ryuu's face is perfectly blank.

Ask Hyuuga, she thinks, and almost laughs. Of course Hiroshi could see, if he looked with the Byakugan. A pregnant woman is a tidy firestorm of chakra, busy with creation. And a pregnant woman has no business on an A-rank mission, where one chance blow could cause her to miscarry one of Konoha's future soldiers.

If Hiroshi learns—if any of them learn—they'll send her back. Back to the Invalid List and a Mother's Stipend, to prenatal classes with Hatake Sadayo and Yuuhi Reiko and all the other women she knows who have fought for their happiness and finally seized it. Back to watching them smile up at their husbands, eyes alight with their shared secrets.

If Ryuu learns…

It might not be true. It can't be true.

"Upset stomach," she tells Hiroshi. "I don't think the fish agreed with me."


She never finds another chance to slip away from the team. The Aden Maru sails with the evening tide, with a cargo of silk and spice and shinobi. There are only two passengers' cabins, cramped and airless. Shimura takes one and tells Mizutani and Ryuu to play janken for the other.

The two jounin eye each other warily as Shimura's cabin door bangs shut behind him. Miyako has no desire to watch. She turns away, catching Hiroshi's eye. "Let's see what we can scrounge up in the hold."

Bales of oilcloth-wrapped silk make decent pallets, and the ship captain spares them one glass-enclosed lantern for light. Miyako lays out her bedroll in a sheltered little alcove and listens to the rustlings as Hiroshi composes himself for meditation and chakra exercises.

She has only a few minutes alone with him before the losing jounin comes. She has to make them count.

"The kunoichi whose birth control failed," she says, drowsy-voiced, as if the thought has just come back to bar her from the edge of sleep. "What happened to them?"

Hiroshi grunts. He's exhausted, too, and likely annoyed at the interruption, but he answers. "Back to light duty by now, I expect. If the researchers have released them. They're still trying to work out what causes the interference. Artificial chakra manipulation isn't an exact science." He sounds as if he disapproves.

Miyako tries to envision light duty. Teaching at the Academy, perhaps? Relegation to the Mission Desk, or the Quartermaster's office. Tasks that desperately need doing, but that any other set of hands could fill. You don't need a combat chuunin to repair flak vests.

"How did they find out?"

Hiroshi's blankets rustle. "Routine medical check, I heard." His breath puffs out. "Can you imagine, dropping off your blood vial for post-mission tests, and next morning there's a genin on your doorstep telling you to come back in…"

She squeezes her eyes shut. "Oh, yeah."

"One of my cousins has been trying to get pregnant for two years," Hiroshi says. "Maybe I'll tell her to try soldier pills." His voice is beginning to fuzz with sleep. "Just like the Akimichi, t'invent a new fertility drug while they were trying to do something else…"

Miyako presses a hand to her belly, beneath the blankets. Just like you, a voice jeers in the back of her mind. Try to catch a jounin's eye and end up catching his bastard instead.

The flutterings she feels are fear, she knows. Not quickening, not this early. Not even if it's true.

Maybe she'll catch a stray kunai in Snow Country, and none of it will matter anyway.


It might be morning when she wakes, or midnight. The hold is dark and stifling, and Miyako nearly trips over silk bales in her haste to scramble back up to the deck, where at least a breeze blows.

There's a fat crescent moon in the sky, hanging low over a silvered sea. The stars are weakening in the east, but dawn is still only a promise of light. One sailor sits at the helm, sleepy-eyed and huddled in a heavy jacket. Sails and ropes creak overhead, and salt stings her nose.

She picks her way over sleeping sailors and coiled rope to the prow, where the wind is freshest. There's a man sitting lookout here, too, but it's not until he stirs and shifts that she realizes his thick oil-cloth cloak is Konoha issue.

"What are you doing here?" she hisses. It comes out harsher than she meant, a demand, not a whisper.

Ryuu shakes back the hood of his cloak. It's beaded with salt-spray, and his hair is damp with it. "Mizutani took the cabin."

"I guessed that," she says tightly. "Couldn't sleep around the rest of us?"

His eyes lift to her, one piercing glance, and then fall away. "I don't sleep well around anyone else."

It might be true, she realizes. Twice she's fallen asleep in his arms, and woken to find him dressing or ready to leave. Even on the road he slept a little apart from the others: the distance of rank, she'd thought, but she's no longer sure.

"You could go below now," she offers. "There's plenty of space. Hyuuga doesn't snore."

This time his gaze barely rises to her breasts before it drops down to his white-knuckled hands. "What Hyuuga said. About the soldier pills. Did we— On the road to Junpei..."

She wasn't cold, a moment ago, but she has to wrap her arms around herself to hold back a shiver. "I don't know. I haven't been to the hospital in more than a month. Not since... before Junpei."

He manages, finally, to meet her eyes. "What will you do if it is?"

She stiffens. "I won't drag on your neck. No matter what you've heard—"

"I haven't heard," he interrupts. "Nothing worth listening to."

Her father's words ring in the silence between them. Enjoy her. Half the village already has.

Does that venom poison Ryuu's memories as it has hers? Soiling that hard, hot, breathless moment in the alley, tainting the gentle warmth in the inn at Junpei with a film of filth.

Her father's always had a gift for polluting whatever he touches.

Rebellion rises in her, wild and hot. Not this. I won't let him have this. He's taken too much from her already, and she's tired of running.

It might, after all, be safe to stop.

Here, with the man who warned her in Junpei, and then held her anyway. Who heard the worst of her father's accusations and still turned on the old man, not on Miyako. Who left when she told him to, and isn't leaving now.

There's a little space on the gunwale next to Ryuu, before the bulky row of belaying pins begins. He stiffens when she squeezes in, but he doesn't spring away. She's not altogether sure he's breathing. This close she can feel the chakra roiling beneath his skin, broken as rapids over rocks.

"If it's true," she says, and swallows. "If I am— If the soldier pill did interfere... I won't give up my career. Being a shinobi is all I've ever wanted. Not because it's serving Konoha, or because I like fighting, but—"

She pauses, searching for words. He waits, listening, his hands still knotted between his knees. His dark eyes drink her in.

He'd wait, she thinks, forever.

"There's a freedom. To volunteer for a mission, or turn down an assignment. To turn around on a few hours' notice and take another mission, or come back home and hole up as long as you need. If you need to run, you never have to stop. You can just keep running, and there's nothing — no one — dragging you back."

His clenched hands loosen and close again, muscle and tendon sliding sharply over bone. "You aren't afraid of losing yourself, if you run too far?"

"I made myself." She thumps a fist against her sternum. "Konoha built the fire, but I did the forging. Academy, genin oath, chuunin commission— I chose every step of the way. When to run, and when to stop and fight. And what to fight for."

"The village," he says. "That's easy." The corner of his mouth tilts crookedly, as if acknowledging a shared secret. "It's harder to fight for yourself."

"Yeah. Especially if— if you've mostly chosen to run." She hesitates.

And still, he listens.

She has to reach deep for the words, dredging them up past her ribcage. "I wish I'd fought, that night. I wish I'd let you stay."

Something in his face fractures.

His hands unlock, finding air and then her. One hand tangles in her hair, cradling the curve of her skull. The other curls around her waist and pulls her in. The scroll-pouches on his thickly padded vest dig into her breast, but his shoulder holds her forehead as if he were made for it.

His lips brush her hair. "I'll stay," he says, and makes it a promise. "As long as you want, I'll stay."

Miyako closes her eyes and grips his vest tight. His warmth seeps into her, and the thin sweet scent of his pipesmoke catches at her. For the first time in weeks, it feels like she can breathe.