March 11, 6 AK

I stare at the dead bandit before me, my head slightly cocked and kunai still held in a firm grip by the hand now hanging loosely by my side. He's sort of handsome, in a rugged, dirty sort of way, I suppose; blue eyes and tanned skin and all. The wind in the trees is quiet, just a slight ruffling of the fresh spring leaves, new growth tinted almost teal by the bright Fire Country sun, and the smell of blood is faintly overshadowing the rather pleasant odor of recent rain that I had been enjoying for the last few days of travel. My eyes slide loosely over the camp, now still where before it had been a riot of activity, briefly catching on a cluster of small yellow flowers poking out from between a few bits of granite, now marked with a concealing splatter of muddy red.

Was that it?

The short knife in my hand has only a slight smearing of red over the matte black metal, and it taps against my thigh gently, leaving a small stain on the dark grey fabric of my pants as it continues in its absentminded oscillation. I expected, I don't know, maybe a little fear from looking at a dead body. 'Oh, that could be you, look out!', but the whisper of terror is strangely absent. Perhaps I am too used to it to hear.

The bandit has stopped oozing while I ruminated, still staring in the general direction of my feet. There is a lot of blood in the human body but once your heart stops it doesn't flow as freely. The pool spreading from the gaping wound in his neck isn't growing anymore, already transitioning from verdant crimson to a dull and crusty brick-brown.

Everyone talked about first kills being big life changing events but… I wasn't really feeling it. Was I in shock?

My free hand pushes inside my collar to press a pair of fingers against my pulse point. Pulling it back and extending the palm flat, fingers extended, confirms my findings. No trembling. Steady pulse. No symptoms of shock. Though I do seem to be having a little trouble looking away from his face, and my thoughts are slipping through my mind a trifle freely...

My lips purse in a small frown, my eyebrows pinching under my forehead protector.

"Hiroki."

I turn smoothly on my heel to look at Kakashi, face twitching slightly as I abort the habitual smile response. Don't smile after killing someone, weirdo.

"Yes, sensei?"

The Hatake looks me over slowly, his eye drifting for only a moment to the kunai held at my side, a flicker of something vaguely unhappy clouding his placidity for a moment before he reestablished eye contact.

"Are you alright?"

I consider the question carefully, teeth pulling gently on my lower lip.

"I… think so? I dunno. I sort of expected something a little more…"

I trail off, gaze tracking over the handful of other bandits scattered around the camp in various states of disassembly.

"It's just, inside, we're all just… It was so easy. Just a little push and… no more person. Just spoiling meat."

And it was easy. Really easy. The Sharingan, even with only two tomoe in each eye, makes tracking movement effortless. So long as the enemy isn't significantly faster than me I am practically invulnerable; I can simply permit the natural flow of events to bring the enemy to my blade.

"It's alright. You did the right thing."

My gazes snaps back to the Jounin and I blink, nonplussed, as he steers my train of thought to completely foreign tracks.

"I was following orders."

Kakashi-sensei normally displays very little affect, but there is still a subtle difference between a guarded expression of assessment and one of blank incomprehension.

"What?"

My head tilts a bit to the other side as I consider my words, eyes tracking the arcing lines of splattered crimson across the meagre possessions of the outlaws as my attention wanders slightly.

"You said I did the right thing. I was following orders. Orders cannot be right or wrong, they just are. I serve Konoha; following orders is what I do. Saying I did something right or wrong would be like saying the sun was right or wrong. It can't be right or wrong, in fact those adjectives can't even be logically applied. It would be like saying what I did was purple, or what I did was banana flavored. I suppose you could say it was the right thing in a… what do you call it… analogy? No; metaphorical. In a metaphorical way. Like, it was very efficiently done and being efficient is logically better than being inefficient so it was the 'right' thing to do."

I bend down and finally wipe my kunai off on the ragged clothes of the bandit, face still drawn down slightly into a frown. I glance back up at Kakashi curiously.

"But I get the sense that isn't what you meant."

Kakashi is looking at me with a vestige of worry and more than a little exasperated concern.

"I was going to say something about how these were bad men who would have hurt other people if we didn't stop them, but now… Hiroki, you know there are such things as orders which are morally wrong, right?"

Okay, I really don't get where this is going anymore.

"Yes…?"

"Okay. So, if an order is morally wrong, that makes the order wrong."

I shake my head in negation.

"Only if you use morals as a defining factor. But we're ninja. We are the textbook definition of amoral. Literally: devoid of moral consideration. There is virtually nothing we won't do for pay; it is the entire reason we go on missions."

I wave vaguely in the direction of the nearby corpses, the kunai glinting briefly in the anemic sun shining through the thin haze of smoke over the camp before I tuck it away in the pouch hanging on my hip. It'll need a fresh coat of paint, I guess.

"Sometimes the mission comes with an objective that is morally praiseworthy, like killing bandits. Sometimes it's strangling orphans. But I'm a ninja. I don't care. I care about my team, and the village. They're safe, so the world is correct. And I get paid."

My teacher rubs his forehead in small circles, the backs of his armoured gloves reflecting the blue of the clear sky, his expression unhappy but no longer alarmed.

"We don't take missions just for pay Hiroki."

"Yes we do...? There is more than one kind of pay sensei. I get paid by fulfilling my duty to the village, by keeping my team safe, by lots of things."

I can see that my answer is not quite satisfying to the Jounin, but I can't quite figure out why. My breathing remains deep and even and my eyes stay wide and open as they track from point to point.

"Hiroki, what would you do if you were given an order to kill your teammates. Would you follow it?"

I am still feeling oddly distracted from the current situation, my thoughts not digging in as far as I would like in the stream of consciousness. It takes me a moment to arrange the ideas in a coherent order.

"No? My first loyalty is to Konoha. The Hokage is Konoha, but Konoha is not the Hokage. If the Hokage issued orders which were contrary to Konoha, then he is no longer part of Konoha. So we would replace the not-Konoha Hokage with a Konoha Hokage. A Konoha Hokage would not order the death of the Konoha members of my team. ...Unless they were traitors, I guess, in which case killing my team would be the Konoha thing to do. I think... I would act in the best interests of Konoha. Doing so will always be... correct."

"Hiroki, you're doing it again."

I blink at a pallid and clammy faced Wasabi before glancing down at the spot where blood has begun seeping out of the back of my hand, immediately stilling my scratching fingers. I catch the thrown roll of bandages with a muttered thanks and bind up the minute abrasions.

Kakashi stares at me for a long moment before sighing and turning towards where Nikkei is faintly retching next to a pile of sick as her ninken noses at her comfortingly, my squadmate's gaze fixed on her own freshly made corpse.

"Well at least you aren't loud."

. . .

Mother knew about the mission. I can tell the moment I walk in the front door and smell frying chicken. It shouldn't come as a surprise; the village is actually pretty good about that sort of thing, on balance. Missions which are likely to come with some psychological aftershocks are something we can take time with, for now, during peacetime.

There is something to be said for the more frenetic methods of desensitization, for throwing the pre-teens freshly admitted to the ninja force into the thick of it, for giving them no chance to fester or ruminate about the death. It's the method I would have prefered, to be perfectly honest. I don't like having time to myself to think about… uncomfortable topics. At any rate, if the ninja in question has a support system already in place the mission office almost always sends a note to give the parents or extended family or what-have-you a heads up to be extra supportive. It wouldn't do to let the investment the village has made by training us go to waste with a psychological breakdown after our first proper mission.

I was expecting it, though. Honestly 'investigate' a bandit camp? As if a ninja ever just looked at bandits.

The fried chicken is a rare treat, not something mother makes often, for the smell has a tendency to seep into nearly everything; the bed linens will all need to be changed tomorrow and the house aired out to get rid of the greasy odor. She only puts forth the extra effort for special occasions.

Well, I don't mind anyway since I have the next two days on leave. Helping with the chores will be a chance to be with mom for a bit longer.

"Hiroki? Is that you?"

"Hey mom."

Yuki pokes her head out of the kitchen, her lovely hair pulled back into a messy bun to keep it from trailing in the food. She wipes her hands off on a kitchen towel and swats a bit at the flour on her apron before pulling me into a tight hug.

"How's my little ninja?"

I can't help the fondly exasperated smile at her words. I'm still pretty tiny; she gets a free pass for now. The thought pushes my mind to thinking of the future, and the realization that I'll probably never be old enough to tease her back about calling me little while she's alive. I gasp silently and pull her into an even tighter hug, holding back the tears which threaten to slip my control.

Mother has always been almost psychic about my mood, much to my confoundment, and to her my distress is transparent. She starts rubbing soothing circles into my back and rocking me slightly back and forth.

"Hey, hey, it's okay sweetie. I know it's scary having to hurt someone. It's okay Hiroki. "

I pull in a shaking breath, thankful for her misattribution of my distress to my recent mission rather than thoughts of my own mortality, and hers.

"I know mom. I know. I'm okay. It's just- It was so easy. It was so small. And we're all just, fragile things, like glass walking around, and one sharp tap is all it takes and- I'd never see you again."

"Oh sweetie, I'll always be here for you. Even if something happened, I'll always be here for you. Even if you can't see me I'm still watching over you, and I always will be."

I force a smile, keeping the glimmer of tears at bay, but I know the horrible truth and I mouth it silently into her hair as she picks me up and carries me into the kitchen.

No, you won't.

. . .

A/N: First level sharingan gives photographic memory. Second level heightens perception and reflexes for limited predictive powers. Third level allows virtual precognition via hyper-accurate body language reading. Skilled users can cast genjutsu via eye-contact. There are no straight roads to power. If something seems awful, don't think about it!