Sunlight filtered through brown and white banded feathers, highlighting each barb in the primaries. He watched as the figure laced his fingers together, pressing them skyward, and spread his wings in a languid stretch. Uncertain steps carried him forward and the grass crunched softly under his feet.

The figure whirled. "You came!"

The bright grin aimed in his direction tore at his heart. It had been so long since he'd seen it. "I came to take you home." He clarified.

"That again?" The smile faltered.

He understood the reluctance. Home meant a large family. It meant a perfect older sibling and a coddled younger one, and every spare moment spent doing the chores the parents had no time for, the youngest wasn't old enough to help with and the oldest had enough seniority to delegate.

This world was freedom personified. The wide sweeping wings bought as a modification were evidence of that. "I don't…want to go home. Look at this place!"

"This place is killing you." He insisted. "Please…."

"No." With three steps, he leapt to the top of the short wall that surrounded the rooftop garden.

The wings opened wide, and his eyes were drawn to the slight trembling along the leading edges. "Wait!"

A strong downbeat stirred clouds of dust. He launched upwards, muscular wings driving him skyward. On the third sweep, one wing moved, but the other did not. It sagged, useless, at his side, and he hung suspended for a heartbeat before plummeting.

"Obito!" His scream echoed off the close walls as he bolted upright in bed. He wrapped his arms tightly around his torso, trying to hold in the pain that had not dulled after 6 years.

OOOOOOO

A green light clicked on the lock next to the door seconds after he heard Tusnade's voice. He paused for a moment once he pulled the door shut, waiting for the telltale vibration of the locking mechanism. Tsunade's office was soundproof as long as the door was properly shut.

She took every precaution to ensure VRA Industries' true mission never escaped these walls.

A carefully stacked pile of folders obscured the closest corner of her desk. Iruka took the chair she gestured to, noticing his name on the tab of the topmost folder. "Good afternoon, Tsunade-sama."

"Afternoon." Silence hung in the air between them while she scrutinized him. Then she returned his smile. "You don't look too bad."

"I got a little out of breath coming up the stairs." Iruka admitted.

She pulled his folder into the clear space in front of her and opened it. Papers rustled as she flipped from one page to the next. "You delivered four messages on your last trip?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"One save."

Iruka was glad she hadn't formed it as a question; he wasn't sure he could trust his voice. His hands clenched involuntarily on his pants. "Tsunade-sama…."

"If you're feeling okay," She cut him off. "I have new assignments."

"I can't do this."

Her eyes snapped up, and all warmth was gone. "Excuse me?" The tone fell somewhere between threatening and disbelieving.

"I can't…. If…" He paused, gathering his thoughts. "If I fail, they'll be killed. The last three times I've gone in, I've saved less than half of the people I was assigned to, and it's fewer every single time! What was it this time, one in four? I'm responsible. I'm not good enough to save these people." Once he started verbalizing all of his thoughts, he was almost unable to stop. He bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood and only then managed to forestall the flood of words.

"And what, exactly, do you think will happen if you quit?" Tsunade rose to her feet and planted her hands on the desk with enough force to make the legs creak in complaint. "Hm? Do you think they're going to leave on their own?.None of the people who have been in that long ever leave without outside help." Iruka opened his mouth, but she cut across him. "You've had 26 messages in the last six months. You've saved 9 people. Only 17 have died. Do you know how many would have died if you'd quit six months ago?"

He didn't respond; he didn't need to.

She answered for him anyway. "26."

He felt like he'd been slapped, and apparently he looked like it as well, because Tsunade sat back down, sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose. "Iruka, the only way that you can fail these people is if you don't try. There are other messengers who only save one person, every other time they're in the game, but every person they save is a victory. Please." She met his gaze, and he could see the bone-deep exhaustion hidden behind those eyes. "Please, don't give up. All you gain by quitting is the responsibility for all of their deaths, instead of some."

No one had ever accused the boss of VRA Industries of mincing words. Iruka choked and managed a response. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?"

"Life's a bitch." She agreed.

The folder with his name still rested open under her hand. The top page was an assignment form with a long list of names filling the right column. "I can be back in the game tomorrow morning."

"I'm glad to hear it." She smiled softly at him. "You'll have the information when you get there. We've got…." She dragged a finger down the text, counting silently. "18 targets."

"18?" The number caught him off guard. He'd never been assigned that many in a single trip. "Why are there so many?"

Tsunade shook her head. "Perhaps LM2 had a rise in sales 9 months ago." Nine months was approximately the maximum amount of consecutive time a person could survive in the berth before dying. "It's also possible that more people are recognizing the danger and requesting our services. I don't know. But they are the people we've been asked to save."

"And all we can do is try." Iruka finished for her. He stood, and the chair scraped back on the hardwood floor. "Have a good night, Tsunade-sama."

"You too." She depressed a button in the center console of her desk, and the LEDs on the door's keypad flashed to green.

The door swung open silently at his touch, but he paused on the threshold. "Tsunade-sama?"

The stack of file folders had disappeared from the desk, safely secured in the floor safe below it. Tsunade straightened.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, and don't obsess about it. We all need a kick in the ass sometimes."

He left chuckling.

OOOOOOOO

Soft lights strung around bare branches twinkled through the fine patina of snow. A hum of conversation filled the air as couples strode from store to store along the cobbled walking street. Unlike most games, there was no necessity to buy anything in LM2 – the world around you developed based on your desires. Want a television? Just picture it on the wall and 'taadaa.' Players loved the game because there was no need for money or to put any effort into the game to create the life you wanted. But shopping areas like this still existed in the game to both maintain the illusion of real life and to provide a social forum for players to interact.

One woman shrugged on an elegant wool coat to guard against the evening chill and linked her arm with her husband's, brushing by a huddled figure without a second glance.

A hand snaked out from the rags and made a desperate grab for the woman's arm, but her fingers closed on air, just missing the trailing edge of the woman's sleeve. Her lips parted with a quiver. "Please…" She whispered.

The woman continued her animated conversation with the man beside her.

"Hello?" The figure cried, taking several steps after the woman, before giving up and holding her hands out to the husband. "Hello! Someone, please…." She clutched at the frayed edges of her jacket, turning from one smiling couple to the next. "Can anyone hear me? Please!" The word ended in a broken sob.

Not a single person paid her the slightest bit of attention, and she collapsed to the ground.

Kakashi perched on the rainspout, one leg swinging idly over the open space. He studied the woman below and felt no surprise when one shopper walked directly through her. LM2 was a utopia – beggars just simply didn't exist in this world – so he'd harbored little doubt when he first saw her that she was a ghost.

Well, there was nothing any of them could do for her now, and his mark had just re-emerged from one of the boutiques. Kakashi rose to his feet, intent on finishing the job he'd been sent in for.

The haunted eyes widened a fraction before snapping up to focus on him. She leapt to her feet and took an unconscious step forward. She must have spotted the accompanying step he took backwards, because a look caught somewhere between triumph and joy flew across her face.

He vaulted the small lip that ran the length of the roof and covered the short distance to the stairs in a few long strides.

"You can see me, can't you?" She blocked the doorway. Ghosts weren't confined by the physics of the game – he'd seen them appear and disappear, cover miles of distance in a few short seconds, levitate, and even walk through people and walls.

Kakashi let his eyes focus on the darkness beyond her.

"No, you're not going to fool me." She shook her head. "If you couldn't see me, you'd just keep walking through me. If you couldn't see me, you wouldn't have run when I saw you. And besides," She tapped her temple with an index finger. "My mod tells me that you were watching me."

Ah, that would explain it. As an assassin, Kakashi made a living out of not being noticed. Like everyone else in this godforsaken game, she should not have been able to see him. But that fact only begged the question: how did her mod allow her to see him? "Your mod?"

Her lips hitched into a faulty smile. "You can see me."

"As you so eloquently pointed out before." Kakashi agreed. "How did your mod let you see me?"

"It terrifies me." As his cocked eyebrow, she elaborated. "Being unnoticed like this. It would be terribly sad to go through life without anyone ever noticing you. My mod lets me know when people are looking at me. Do you know how many people watch me on any given day? Thousands. All of those people paying attention to me was…fantastic! But lately, no one looks at me. I mean, if no one looks at me, how do I know that I even exist anymore?"

Kakashi opened his mouth to point out that she didn't, in fact, exist anymore, but she continued right over his words.

"And then there was you. I felt the spark again." Her hand strayed to her temple, and sunk her teeth slightly into her lip. "Someone was watching me again. I'm still here. I'm still worthwhile! And it didn't go away. You were staring at me. So I must…."

"You're dead."

"Be…. Dead?" She stumbled. "Don't be silly. You can see me."

"I can see you because I see this world for what it is. I recognize that people have died here, and that, if their body passes on while they are still plugged in, their minds are trapped here. At least for a little while."

"What do you mean?" She shrank away from him.

"A mind without a body can't survive for very long. A week, maybe a little more." Kakashi let his gaze trail away from her, following the path of his target as the man strolled lazily along the sidewalk.

She grabbed his arm in a vise-like grip. "You're saying that I'm going to die? What can I do?"

"No." Kakashi pulled himself free. "I'm saying that you're already dead. There's nothing you can do. If you'll excuse me, I have to go and save someone from suffering your fate." He stepped through her, ignoring the strange feeling as the computers adjusted to the two streams of data occupying the same space.

"You're going to keep them from dying?" She called out after him.

"I'm going to kill their mind before their body dies. They're going to die either way, but my way means that they won't become a ghost, like you."

Though he tried to shake her, ghosts were notorious for being able to move through the matrix of data that formed the game. She followed him through the entire mission, and he watched her fade away only a couple of minutes after his mark stopped breathing.

OOOOOOOOO

The steep concrete steps up to the house were much more modest than those that graced most of the houses Iruka was sent to. He trotted up them and pressed a thumb to the doorbell, listening to the double chime echo inside. No response. If the man was on the list for the messengers, he'd likely be too far-gone to venture outside of his home, so he should be there. He rapped a fist on the door. "Kimura-san?"

A brief sound followed right on the heels of his voice, and he pressed an ear to the door, listening for a moment before calling out again. "Excuse me, Kimura-san. Are you home?" Still no response, though he was sure he'd heard something. He cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass pane beside the door. "Shit!"

The door creaked when he slammed his shoulder against it, but refused to budge. A few commands to the device on his wrist, and the gravity surrounding his body increased dramatically. With the excess weight, and therefore momentum, the door shattered on impact, and the wood floor just inside the door splintered under his foot. He toggled the gravity back to normal. "Kimura-san!"

The man sprawled across the floor, mouth opening and closing as tremors wracked his body. The whites of his eyes had taken on a decidedly yellow hue. Jaundice. His nervous system was failing; his liver had already failed. His body was shutting down, unable to cope with the lack of sustenance.

The waxed floor provided no traction for his shoes, which he hadn't bothered to remove, and he half ran, half slid to the man's side. "Kimura-san, h-hang in there." The words were useless, but they spilled from his mouth anyway. It just seemed wrong not to say anything.

There was food everywhere, covering the hall tables and even the chairs. Kimura still grasped a platter in his hand, and Iruka knelt carefully to avoid putting his knees in any of the dubious food.

"I'm so hungry." Kimura sobbed. "I keep eating, but it never goes away." A hand with the strength of a man facing his own mortality clutched at the front of Iruka's shirt. "Help me! Please!"

"I….I'm sorry." Iruka covered the man's hand with his own, but made no attempt to pull it away. "I can't…. If I'd gotten here sooner, then maybe…." His voice failed him, and all he could do was hold Kimura's hand as he faded away.

Iruka staggered out of the building, falling heavily on the stairway railing before his knees gave out entirely, and he sat down hard on the bottom stair, with his legs kicked out in front of him. He laced his fingers together over his eyes and swallowed convulsively.

There hadn't even been a chance to try and save that man. He'd tried, but there had been so many messages.

And he hadn't gotten there in time.

There were just so many….

OOOOOOOO

The berth's lid swung open with a soft hiss, and Iruka tumbled over the edge, catching himself on the table next to the berth, and paused for a minute in order to get his feet underneath him. The TV remote was only a few inches from his fingers, and he grabbed it. The TV let out a soft chirp as it turned on to the news. He'd found that this was the fastest, easiest way to find out the current date and time.

Ads.

He snorted. Even on the news channel, they had to make money somehow. He turned up the volume and headed for the kitchen.

A deep-voiced man began a voiceover. "What would you do, if you could do it all over again? How would you live? What would you become, if you had no limits?"

An ad for LM2? The last ad for the game that he'd seen must have been five years ago. The game was so popular that they'd simply never needed an advertising campaign. Unable to truly sprint with the weakness in his legs, Iruka staggered back into his living room just in time to see the final image of the ad.

The words 'Re-Live' were stamped out across the screen in a shiny embossed font with a band of light arching through letters and a rising sun above the 'L'. Under the words was the slogan: 'Tomorrow is a new day.' The credits for the design company and the release date popped up next. Re-Live was not built by the Kasou Corporation.

Someone was ripping off LM2.

Some company had apparently grown balls in the last few years. LM2 and Kasou had a monopoly on psych games. No one else had dared touch that market until now. Iruka wondered how long it would be before the shit hit the fan.

Perhaps at some point, he would worry about the impact of another psych game on the assassins and messengers, but right now, he had another problem.

OOOOOOOOOO

The bright sun reflected off the white walls and roof. Iruka leaned back against the wall just under a metal ventilation grate. The sound of the air exchange masked any of his sounds, and the heat pouring out of it would do a fairly good job of hiding his body signature. The beasts were unlikely to spot him, even exposed on the roof like this. All he could do now was wait.

The coded message he'd posted on the boards last night would draw any messengers to this location. They couldn't meet in any of the typical social locations of LM2 without being observed. The messengers hid in plain sight – LM2 had them recorded in all of their databases – but, if they gathered en masse, the admins were likely to put two and two together.

"Sensei!"

The voice brought Iruka to his feet, and he grinned as he held out his arms, pulling the brightly clothed youth into a tight hug. "Kit! How are you?"

"Awesome! I saved five people last week!"

He smiled softly. "That's great, Kit." Tsunade recruited messengers from all walks of life. Some – like Iruka – came from her own company. Others just sort of fell into her hands. Kit was one of later. Iruka didn't know all the details as the messengers shared as little information with each other as was possible - hence the nicknames.

He'd gathered that Kit was an orphan, and that he'd taken on jobs here and there to make ends meet. Tsunade had encountered him on the street one day and offered him a job as a messenger. She'd been skeptical as to whether it would work out, but too soft hearted to pass him by. She'd dumped him in Iruka's care to learn the ropes. Most messengers trained with a trial-by-fire method, so it just showed how little she had trusted Kit.

His methods were coarse and unexpected and nothing that Iruka would have ever even thought to try – half the time Kit simply beat the truth into them – but he was one of the most successful messengers out of the entire group.

"Sensei?"

"Hm?"

"Are we the only ones here?" Kit peered around the roof as if he was expecting other messengers to simply melt out of the woodwork.

"So far."

He squatted down beside Iruka with a bored look on his face. "Why'd you call the meeting?"

Iruka leaned forward. "How many messages did you get last time?"

"Fifteen." Kit's eyes widened with sudden realization. "That's a lot more than usual, huh?"

"Yeah, same for me. Tsunade-sama said she didn't know why, but…. I don't know. It seemed more like she didn't want to tell me." Iruka stretched upwards. "I just wanted to know if it was widespread. If it is, maybe we can rearrange the assignments and make it easier to get to everyone."

Kit settled next to him and chewed on the side of his thumb. Besides the universal shoulder bag, he certainly didn't have the look of a messenger – a young teenager with a shock of blonde hair, blue eyes, whisker-like marks on his cheeks, and a fondness for orange clothing that bordered on obsession. Iruka had expected the boy to get tossed out on his face by the first person he delivered a message to.

And he had on several occasions. His general reaction to that treatment was to kick the door in and demand the message recipient's attention.

Given his predilection for violence, Iruka had little doubt that Kit would have also made an excellent assassin if it weren't for one, small problem.

"HEY! Where are you guys?" Kit's patience wore thin, and he vaulted to his feet and shouted, both in volume and in data. Stealth had never been his strong point.

Iruka clapped his hands over his ears, but that did little to block out the flux of data Kit had sent into the system. The beasts certainly knew where they were now. No one ever spammed the game like that, and they would absolutely come and investigate. "Kit!"

He turned, clearly oblivious to the danger he'd put them in. "What?"

They probably only had half a minute to spare – not enough time to run to safety. Iruka dug his fingers into the metal grate and wrenched it free. "Kit, come here." He helped boost the boy up into the duct. "Stay put and stay quiet. Don't come out until they're gone."

"Wait, what? You're coming in too, right? Sensei!" He jerked back as Iruka slammed the grate back in place.

"Stay put." The ruse wouldn't work all that well if the beasts actually scoured the area. He had to give them something else to focus on.

"Sensei!"

OOOOOOOO

Three blocks away, Kakashi almost lost his perch on the peak of a roof when the shout hit him. What the hell?

None of the normal players would have done something like that, which meant that it was one of his comrades. The direction of the origin was obvious, and he knew full well he wouldn't be the only one following it.

As he reached the location, he spotted a familiar figure racing across the roofs. He also spotted a moving shadow rapidly closing the distance between itself and it's prey. The shout tore from his throat of it's own accord. "Messenger!"

OOOOOOOOO

Iruka heard someone call out, but was far too preoccupied with the unmistakable sound of death closing in behind him. He yanked his sleeve up and drove his gravity down, trying to get as much speed as possible.

The moment of distraction led to a false step, and he rolled over his left ankle, staggering sideways and taking several short steps to get his feet back under him. He dove left and zagged back right, with the beast on his heels.

Something hit him hard from the side – not heavy enough to be a beast, but hard enough to knock him to the ground and send them tumbling across the roof. The beast's claws whistled through the air above him.

As the mad roll came to a stop, Iruka bunched his legs underneath him, preparing to run, but an arm around his waist yanked him back to the ground. Black cloth was tossed over his shoulders and tugged around his chest. The other hand clapped over his mouth.

"Don't move." A voice hissed in his ear.

Assassin? Iruka remembered that voice and whispered back when the hand had loosened and dropped to his shoulder. "It'll see us."

"The cloth blocks body heat." Kakashi murmured. "It'll see something, but it won't look human. So don't move." He crouched around Iruka, one leg thrown over Iruka's to use the fabric of his pants to break up their thermal output.

The beast padded around the corner of the wall, eyes wide to soak in the thermal signature. It growled deep in its throat and swung its head back and forth to search for them.

Despite his best efforts to remain still, Iruka shrank back against Kakashi's chest. If it weren't for the iron grip on his waist and shoulder, he surely would have bolted. After several agonizing minutes, the beast let out a huff of surrender and retreated.

Kakashi slowly released him, pulled back his shirt and re-tied it.

Iruka lunged forward out of his grip.

"What the hell was that?" They snapped at each other.

"What?" Kakashi shot back.

"Excuse me?" Iruka retorted at the same time. "You tossed me across the entire roof!"

"I was saving your life! If I'd realized that you only weighed ten pounds I wouldn't have hit you so hard, but I still saved your life." He growled. "And at least I wasn't the idiot doing the shouting!"

The argument slipped completely out of his mind, and he scrambled to his feet. "Kit!"

Thank god for small miracles. He'd stayed put behind the metal mesh, exactly as he'd been told. The minute he spotted Iruka, he kicked the mesh out and leapt down. "Sensei, you're okay!"

He cuffed Kit across the back of his head.

"Ow!" Kit dropped to a crouch, clutching his head between his arms.

"You idiot! You could have been killed! What were you thinking?" Iruka planted both hands on his hips and glared down at him for a minute before caving and dropping his hand to the crown of Kit's head. "I'm glad you're okay."

Kit's eyes lit up, and he was back to his feet instantly.

OOOOOOOOO

The messenger was fast. Kakashi dug his feet in for an extra burst of speed. Iruka probably still had his gravity turned down. He leapt to the higher level of the roof and spotted Iruka scolding a golden-haired youth. Kakashi caught the tail end of what Iruka was saying. The kid? He'd been the idiot? So, the messenger acted as a decoy. Kakashi shook his head in disbelief. He could have been killed.

The boy recovered almost instantaneously from the scolding and suddenly focused his attention on Kakashi. "Who are you?"

Iruka whirled and let out a breath of relief. "Assassin. It's okay, Kit. He's on our team."

"And who are you?"

He eyed Kakashi. "Kit. I'm a messenger too."

His gaze went from Iruka to Kit and back. "I thought we weren't supposed to meet, in-game or otherwise. At least, not intentionally."

"There's something strange going on." Iruka scratched at the scar that sliced across his nose. "We're getting an exorbitant amount of messages. I wanted to see if it was universal to the messengers."

"Is it?"

"It is for the two of us, but we haven't seen any other messengers." He shifted his weight between his feet.

"That's why I yelled for them!"

"That's nothing to brag about, kid."

"It's Kit!"

"Enough!" The waspish tone shut both of them. "Look, the beasts will probably be back to investigate again. We probably should make ourselves scarce."

Kit sent one last glare Kakashi's direction. "Okay, Sensei." He yanked the door to the stairs open and disappeared inside. The nearest port was only a block away, and he'd be there shortly.

"What about the other messengers?" The question was a fair one. Kakashi didn't know the exact numbers, but VRA had somewhere around forty or fifty messengers on staff. The fact that not a single one had turned up to this meeting was more than a little worrisome.

"I'll ask the boss." Iruka shrugged and headed for the door. "Maybe she'll tell me what's going on."

Kakashi caught Iruka's arm, holding him back. "You risked your life to save him."

Iruka cut off any further words with a smile. "Hey, it's my job for a reason." He turned to catch up with Kit, only to turn back. "And besides, you did the same."

True, but I'm not the one running around unarmed.

OOOOOOOOOO

Holy hell... I am soooooo sorry this took so long. Real life decided to explode in my face over the last couple of months, and I had zero free time.

So, a new chapter! I'm having a huge amount of fun with this particular story. It is all going somewhere (I have plans, mwhahahaha).

Love it, hate it, vastly confused? Let me know! Believe it or not, comments tend to guilt me into writing faster - and yes, this is writing faster *headdesk* Damn life, always interfering...