Disclaimer: Naruto is not mine.

Kumo awoke to pain. She hurt everywhere. Her body was one dull ache, except for a jagged line of pain across her left side. She felt a low moan escape her lips, and three figures appeared in her field of vision. The girl with the dark blue hair and the funny eyes was looking at her intently. "Her chakra network is still stable." She reported.

The girl with the pink hair addressed her patient. "No medic has tried to heal you, considering your reaction previously. Can you tell me about what happened? Has it happened before?"

Kumo tried to speak, but her throat was dry and raw and she started coughing instead. Shino helped her sit up while the girl with pink hair held a cup of water to her lips. "I can normally end an episode of mine by expelling all of my chakra at once as flames coming from my mouth and transforming, but I couldn't hurt Shino. He's the only one left who acknowledged I exist. I had to hold it in. Had to try to stay human." She croaked. To think that she endured that pain in order not to injure me. Shino thought. "I think you could heal me, my chakra's stable now." Kumo continued, unaware of Shino's thoughts.

Pink girl held out a green hand and the throbbing in Kumo's side eased. "You tore your side up pretty good on a rock during your episode. Is this how you got your scars?"

Kumo shook her head. "Less than a quarter. Most are from the council…" her voice trailed off and her eyelids slid closed.

"The council?" Sakura whispered.

"She told me that she was tortured as punishment if her father failed or to show what would happen if he disobeyed. Presumably it is a council that was using her. What council, I do not know." Shino replied.

Sakura finished her healing and asked the boy "Will you stay with her? Tsunade wants a report."

Shino nodded.

When Kumo woke again, only Shino was still in the room. His glasses were on his face again, and she couldn't tell where he was looking. "You're wearing your glasses again."

Shino turned toward her, and removed his shades. "Are you happy now?"

She just looked at his eyes intently without saying anything. Shino found this disconcerting, but hid it well.

After studying his eyes for a minute and thinking, Kumo closed her eyes tightly. Shino carefully watched as fur sprouted on her face and faded, her nose lengthened and shrank, whiskers appeared and disappeared. Her features settled back to human, but she opened her eyes and Shino could see that one was now brown and one was grey, just like his, though hers weren't quite human.

"Why did you change your eyes to match mine?"

She shrugged. "You seem self-conscious about your eyes, so I thought I might understand if mine looked like yours, but I forgot how hard a partial transformation is." While she was talking, her grey eye flickered back to its usual hazel before she forced it to return to grey. "And it's even harder to keep two different partial transformations going at the same time, one for each eye."

"Should you be doing that while still in the hospital?"

"It won't hurt. Transformations never do. Being able to cast normal jutsu can, but never transformations."

"Do you know why that is?"

Kumo shrugged. "I think it might be because my chakra network has to stay put to cast normal jutsu, but transformation rearranges my network as my body changes, so it doesn't matter if it wasn't behaving or not."

"Hmm."

"Can't you say anything a little more interesting than hmm?"

"What would you like me to say?"

"Well I do have one more question that's been bugging me." Shino just raised an eyebrow and waited for her to ask it. "Why do you have a girl's name?"

"Shino is normally a girl's name, but the doctor was confused as to which of the babies in the hospital was my parent's, and told them that I was a female. Once they named me, they couldn't change it when the doctor realized he was mixed up and that I was a boy. Now, since I have shown you my eyes and told you how I got my name, it would only be fair for you to tell me your true name."

"Kumo is as true of a name as I have. I was born as an experiment. For the first years of my life I was called experiment 3951, and my father simply referred to me as Kodomo*. Kumo was the name I chose for myself."

"Kumo." Shino repeated, using her name for the first time. "Did the experiment cause your unstable chakra network and transformations?"

She shrugged. "They didn't really tell me much, they just injected me with drugs, and hooked me up to machines."

"Who is 'they?'"

"The researchers in Iwagakure."

"Were the researchers in league with the council?"

"Yeah. Neither cared about me. To one I was research, to the other a weapon against my father."

"Who is your father? Will you tell me more now?"

"He's dead. I couldn't stop him from taking my father. I didn't wake up until 3 days later. There would have been no point in going after them at that point. He would have died that day, even if I could have found him."

The figure 3 days was haunting Shino. He knew it meant something important, but he couldn't remember what it meant. "Why would he have died on the third day?"

Kumo stared at the sheets on the hospital, sorrow in her eyes as she whispered in a broken voice. "Three days is all they need."

It was driving Shino crazy. So close, but so far. "3 days is all they need for what?"

Her voice was barely audible as tears tracked down her cheeks from her once-again hazel eyes, but Shino's question was finally answered. "For the extraction."

Extraction! Was her father a jinchuriki? Shino reached out to put a hand comfortingly on the girl's shoulder, feeling he should comfort her after forcing her to relieve the trauma. His being a jinchuriki would explain him being thought of as a weapon.

"3 days. Then the host dies."

The Akatsuki took her father. The man who she couldn't stop, the one that knocked her out for 3 days and took her father must have been one of them. Though he didn't let it show, Shino's heart twisted as he watched her curled up in a ball on the bed, sobbing in anguish. I'm a shinobi. I should be able to put my feelings aside. But somehow she destroys my control.

A/n: Kodomo means child in Japanese, and Kumo means spider.