A/N: Not a very exciting chapter, I hope you'll forgive me; I, for one, rather like it anyway. :D Maybe the fact that it's slightly longer than usual will make up for it. :P

-/-

"Let's have a party," said Eiji abruptly, holding herself together admirably well. Better than me; I was shaking like the forest in a gods-sent storm. I knew better than to think she didn't care because she didn't show it; the shortness in her voice, the tightness in her shoulders—they were enough of a break from never displaying distress that I knew she might snap. (Or she wanted to.) Any other time, it would have warmed me, how much she really cared. Reason and pain and a prophetic loneliness meant right now that it just coiled a chain around my heart.

"I'll bring the chocolate," I offered, smiling mirthlessly. I could skim off Mom's stash; I'd paid for it, after all.

"Hun, we may need more chocolaty goodness than you can get from your mother's half-quality stack." She clasped her hands in front of her lips, thumbnail between her teeth. "I'll ask my parents."

I shrugged. Eiji's parents were reasonable, so we wouldn't get a wild abandon out of this. Wouldn't get forgetting in the form of loud music and all-night caffeine drips; or of sugar splurging beneath the diamond-spattered sky of Konoha, or even with the bottle of sake we could probably get ahold of if we tried.

For a fleeting moment, such a party sounded—perfect. Such a party would keep Konoha wrapped in sound and light inside my heart when I left.

But I realized I didn't want to forget like that, not even just with my best friend in all the world. If I was going to lock away the ten years I'd spent longing for the place I was being forced to now, I wanted to remember.

All I really wanted to forget was the pain.

-/-

We didn't invite Raiyo. This was just us, just two best friends who didn't want to say goodbye.

I thought of him with a touch of guilt and wondered if distance meant it would hurt less when he died.

Eiji insisted I didn't come 'til late. I argued halfheartedly; I had to leave rather early, and I needed all the time to say goodbye that I could get.

But she crossed her arms and stared at me and told me to be late. So I trudged through the streets of Konoha at 11:11 and wished for the desert.

Not for Gaara.

Her parents were asleep, she said, and her parents slept like rocks buried in the sand, so it didn't matter that they'd ok'd this. She'd pulled the top layer of her hair back, so a thin tail swept over a raggedy black cascade; and she'd removed the midnight blue 'arm socks' she normally wore, so her sleeves were pure fishnet.

Her room had changed since I was last here (a few days ago, before the Chūnin Exams had attacked). All her furniture had been moved to one wall, giving almost a squished feeling to that side of the room, with her bed (large) next to her dresser (small) next to her desk (covered in scattered scrolls and a forest of bamboo). That left a blank wall across from the furniture, and she had covered it with a pattern of elaborate masks, far more organized than the rest of her room.

But they weren't ANBU masks. ANBU masks were porcelain and simple. These—these creations were wood and feathers and bits of glitter that looked like forest streams. They were arranged in a row of connected diamonds, each right point the left point of the next; flowing in an order that looked like a rainbow of complex shading, starting at red—green ran to teal to blue-green to royal blue to midnight. From Eiji's open window, a summer breeze made a brief foray, and the feathers rippled, shuddered, like they were going to fly away, one great plumed dragon.

At the final point, all the way to the left, there was an ANBU mask, as incongruous as a cuckoo in a blue jay's nest. Bone-white, blank—the initiate's, the unordained.

I frowned. "You're not—"

Eiji looked at me, then laughed mirthlessly. "Gods no. With hardly a C-mission beneath my belt, how the hell would I make ANBU?"

She trailed her fingers over dark blue feathers, letting them land on black ones that so perfectly matched her black hair and complemented her elaborate red hood (that she almost never wore), the same scarlet as my own preferred outfit.

"I just like the way they look." She lifted the blank mask off its hook, leaving the dragon without a head, and placed it over her face, turning towards me.

"Look. I'm smiling, but you can't tell."

-/-

Eiji still lived with both her parents, which meant she didn't survive on her shinobi stipend like me. (As you might imagine, nobody gets paid a hell of a lot for D-Rank missions.) Because of this, she lived in a real house, with more than two and a half claustrophobia-inducing rooms—a fact I never begrudged her, partly because it meant I could invade her home if—when—I needed to get the hell away from the mound of pillows inhabiting my house.

Her back door opened onto a little alley, dank and grey and safe, like a storm shelter in the rain. That's where we sat, under the roofs and the trees and—if we looked real close—the glitter-smile of the stars.

Eiji had set a portable stereo on the sullen black asphalt; we sprawled beside it, heedless of charcoal-dust stains on dark clothing. Endless footprints marked this alleyway—shinobi spies or lonely drunks or broken lovers or leaving friends. Somewhere deep inside us, we wanted those footprints to rub off on us. They would last forever and we wouldn't and we wanted to.

The music beat in time with our hearts just loud enough to drown out the half-hearted buzzing of the street lamps and the shouting two houses down and someone else's party around the block. It mourned for us so we didn't have to listen to the leaves rustling or the memories whispering or our own dull depressing dreams. (Stay alive, just live and have a few friends and die old with no need to see your name or your friends' on the Hero's Memorial Stone.)

But we were shinobi and we heard all those things anyway.

"Some goodbye," said Eiji musingly. "Some wild party we're having here."

"Don't want a party, Eij," I said wearily, leaning back on the concrete-cold step and peering through the shadow-leaf haze to the sky. "I don't want to celebrate going away."

"You should say," she murmured, " 'going home.' "

"Maybe I should," I agreed. "But damn it, Eiji, I'm afraid I'll never make it home, not in the company of that… demon."

"Demon." She smiled slightly, nail in her teeth. "That's harsh."

"Did you see his eyes?" I moaned, throwing my arm back against my forehead and leaving it there.

"They were gorgeous," she teased. "I haven't seen them since you mangled them."

"Don't remind me." I gritted my teeth and closed my own eyes. "That's what got me into this mess in the first place."

"Hun, you were just trying to win."

"I know." I sighed. "But I guess that's a punishable offense."

-/-

Asphalt dirt and concrete streaked the red cloth of our clothing and made us look like we'd rolled in blood spilled on the ground. It had to be passing two a.m.; we'd played the same thrumming CD until it had faded into the starry alley background and we barely knew it was there.

Just talking. Sometimes, just quiet.

"Eiji," I said suddenly, another symptom of my departure hitting me in the heart. "You won, didn't you? Your match? And—"

"And drugged-out and half-blind, Raiyo did, too," she interrupted absently. "Kid got lucky."

I swallowed the hand reaching to clench around my lungs. It latched onto my heart. "I won't get to see you guys go on."

"Don't worry, 'Nako. I'll send you a letter telling you what happened."

I snorted. "That damn Baki'll probably intercept it. I probably wouldn't even get it after he read it."

"Alright, then." She smiled. "I'll send you messages in your dreams."

I half-laughed. (I couldn't tell if she was joking.) "Wanna tell me how you plan to do that?"

"It's a secret."

"Mm." I opened my eyes and raised an eyebrow. "I never remember my dreams."

"You'll remember this one."

"You sound so sure."

"In a war between Konoha and Suna, 'Nako, who would you support?"

Her voice was surprisingly plaintive; I sat up and looked at her, long and hard. "I don't know," I said. "I really, really don't know."

And she didn't call me on the lie. Maybe because it really wasn't.

-/-

"Oh, hell, Eij, I gotta leave in an hour," I slurred, exhausted, staring up at the faintly glowing sky. She giggled, drunk on nothing more than sleep deprivation and sugar.

"Better go home and pack," she sniggered, knowing as well as I did that there wasn't a damn thing to pack.

Crumpled wrappers to various and sundry chocolate bars littered the pavement like curled up spiders and dead butterflies. Shivering as the chill of the asphalt soaked through my skin—it may have been summer, but nights still cooled off when they hit the deadest darkest hour—I thought vaguely of cleaning them up, but it just seemed like too damn much effort.

"Why d'you gotta leave at—eh—" She peered up at the sky, trying to determine what time it was. "—So damn early anyway?"

I shrugged sullenly. "Gaara never sleeps, I guess. Dunno how the hell he manages that, just what Baki told me. Since he doesn't sleep, we don't have to wait for him to wake up to leave. Guess they don't give a damn about consideration for anyone else."

"What if you don't show up?"

I cast her a startled look and grinned, caught by the sparkle in her eye. "I'd probably get a tongue-lashing from Lord Baki."

"Yeah, but what's he gonna do? Leave without you?"

"Hahaha, I wish. Maybe they would."

"Care to test it?"

"What, in the interests of sleep?"

"Psh, sleep."

Bitterness ran through my voice like blood laced with sickness. "What the hell else are we gonna do with a couple extra hours, Eij? Take even longer to say goodbye?"

She was unperturbed. "See a movie, catch a show, do something fun."

"Movie theater's not open." I closed my eyes, swallowed. We were both desperate. Right now, I wasn't sure who was more. "I've got to go." Moving slowly, as if leads weighted down all my limbs, I rose to my feet and gathered together all our candy wrappers and broken dreams. "Are you—are you gonna come see me off, or are you gonna be sensible and sleep?"

She lay where she was, watching me, head on her arms, hair spread heedlessly over the pavement. "I'll tell you a secret. I don't actually know how to say goodbye."

-/-

Half an hour to go and I still hadn't said goodbye to Mom. Damn. I had a brief affair with the thought of not even telling her, but it flitted away, reproaching me as it went. She might not notice if I was gone—but then again, she might, and it might drive her—I dunno. I dunno what it would do.

I headed for Eiji's front door, trudging most unwillingly. She grabbed my arm and turned me around.

"Not yet, hun, I've got something."

She led me back to her room. I followed quietly. Thinking. There was something I was missing—

"Eij." I swore effusively in my head, damning that I hadn't realized it sooner. Never was a quick thinker. "They're going to have to assign you a new squad member."

"Not if I make chūnin." She smiled winningly, stepping through her door. "And you can bet on it, girl, I'm gonna make chūnin."

I wanted to say, But what if you don't. Because more than likely, they'd put another guy on her team. And it would be my fault.

"You damn well better, Eij."

Grinning, she moved towards her mask-adorned wall and gazed at it for a few minutes, thumb thoughtfully between her teeth, as usual. Finally, she reached out, hand steady as stone, and lifted one off its arrow-straight hook.

Turning around, she held it out to me.

Yellow-gold feathers, almost the color of the desert and tipped with delicate sky blue, stuck out from one side like half a butterfly. Down the other side of the ellipse ran a swirl of gold glitter, almost in the shape of an ANBU tattoo.

"Eij—"

"I'll get a new one to fill the hole." She smiled tightly, and I thought she might be lying. "We'll be our own kind of ANBU."

-/-

The demon raged inside him, still wild with fury. It roared, it screamed around inside his head, and he only half tried to contain it. He was as angry, as agonized, eyes burning with the last remnants of needle-sharp sand. Betrayed.

Gold-diamond stars rose in pits of ebony, but even the demon couldn't use mangled eyes, although it tore the bandages from its host's face with warped and twisted hands. Shredded cloth, stained with the last lingering blood of unhealed wounds, drifted to the ground like tainted snow, the contrast to his untamed wrath.

No medic would come to replace the bandages. No medic would dare.

His own family wouldn't come near.

-/-

"I'm going on a really, really long mission, Mom," I muttered, slinging a pack with two changes of clothing (one identical to the one I was already wearing) and a set of pajamas over my back. I had hooked Eiji's mask to the belt of my sand-pouch with a little length of string, and it weighed there like guilt.

She crooned and simpered, telling me how proud she was that I was being trusted with a lengthy—and therefore important—mission. I guess she didn't comprehend just how long I meant. "I don't know when I'll be back."

Then I walked out. I think I hoped someone would keep her alive. I wasn't sure.

Raiyo was standing there, surprising me. I swallowed and met his eyes—eye. Maybe he was an idiot, but he was a teammate, and that meant he was family. Aruno-sensei popped out from behind a building halfway to the gates, chattering and bubbling. I tried to ignore him. I couldn't decide if he was family or not. (I didn't want him to be. I didn't need a family.)

Eiji didn't show. I stopped at the gates of Konoha, gazing up at them, unwilling to look ahead, where Gaara stood, half-hunched over with madness or pain, I didn't know, side-by-side with Baki, his keeper. His other squadmates were nowhere to be found; I guess they got to stay behind and finish the Exams. Lucky.

I pivoted, hugged Raiyo impulsively, suffered one from Aruno-sensei. "Make chūnin," I whispered to my half-blind brother, closing my eyes and feeling my stomach twist into knots. He probably wouldn't. He'd probably die.

Then I spun and strode toward my new family, the ones like to kill me at a moment's notice, head held as high as I could manage, Konoha headband tied firmly in place.

I looked back, and saw Eiji leaning against a building, some distance away from the rest of our—her—squad. She wasn't crying.

But then, neither was I.