300 reviews! More than that by now!
I'm so sorry, but I currently have no facts to give you. The only thing I could come up with is a small list of songs that I listened to while writing the last chapter. You'll find them at the end of this chapter.
Oh dear god, I wrote almost 1,000 words and then deleted it again – three times. This was so hard and I don't even know why.
But here you go, the aftermath:
For a few long moments she just kneels there, staring at the dead man, feeling absolutely nothing. Then she goes to pick up the still sleeping Yuki.
There is no question about leaving Hoga's body. There's not. She can't possibly phantom leaving it here with her murderer. It is hard to look at Hoga's face; guilt is already gnawing at her, but she owes it to the girl. Her teammate. The one she was supposed to protect.
She was also pretty convinced you'd be back for them.
There's no agony on her features, or surprise or fear, or anything at all that Hisana would have expected from someone who knew they were going to die. Instead there's a vicious sort of triumph that reads, 'I beat you. You killed me, but I still beat you.'
The girl's body hoisted over her shoulder, warm blood running down her back, and Yuki pressed against her chest, she slowly makes her way back to the rock. The rest of the genin and the Hyuuga woman are already waiting for her.
Hisana wordlessly hands Yuki over to her and spreads out Hoga's body on the floor. Only then the others seem to realize that the girl is dead.
Shizuha, still supported by Shiki, makes a noise that Hisana has never heard before and buries her face against the Nara's arm. Somewhere further off she can hear someone vomiting.
While the others fuss over the body, someone pulls her back by the shoulders. Blood is wiped off her brow, her hair is put into some semblance of order.
"You failed," the Hyuuga woman says, straightening Hisana's clothes and examining her face.
The Byakugan are activated, a faintly irritated red around the edges.
"You failed your team. He was in your cell – you spent two days with him and you did not realize his deception. You left your teammate alone with him, and you let Hoga-san die because of it."
Fingers press into her temples and her forehead. There's a dull pain, and then a pressure behind her eyes vanishes that she hadn't even noticed.
"I let you have the kill," the jounin says firmly, "because it was your privilege and your duty. I hope this will be a lesson to you."
"Onee-sama," Kohaku-sensei's voice drifts over from behind her. "That's quite enough. I don't appreciate you getting involved with my team."
"For the time being this is also my team," the woman rebukes him. "And I will correct the misbehavior you seem to allow so freely."
She releases Hisana's face to stare at her brother. For a moment they just stand there, heads tilted like two giant birds seizing each other up for a fight.
"Airi."
Kurenai's voice cuts through the tension like a knife.
"This is neither the time nor the place for this. Keep your family affairs at home."
Hyuuga Airi bows her head minutely and turns away.
"We caught the remaining jounin two miles out – the mission is completed as soon as we turn over the children to the town," Kurenai tells them. Several jounin appear in swirls of leaves, scooping up children and vanishing. Kurenai takes up Hoga's body, cradling it to her chest with a regretful expression.
"Regrouping at camp in twenty minutes," she instructs, "don't be late."
Then she, too, vanishes. There's a moment of heavy silence.
"You did well bringing the body back," Kohaku-sensei tells her.
He doesn't say Her parents will be grateful, like they do in the movies sometimes. They both know her parents won't care.
"You're not going to scold me?" she asks, almost hoping he will.
"No. There is no use in repeating what my sister said. She is correct, you made a mistake."
He watches her intently, looking for a reaction maybe. She gives none.
"If it comforts you, you will not be the only one to be reprimanded. All of you should have known better."
The including Hoga herself is implied, though Kohaku-sensei is too polite to say it.
"What Onee-sama fails to understand," he adds, "is that the blame for such things can rarely be laid at a single person's feet. Now, I understand there is something you need to show me."
He presses the same spots Airi did just moments prior. It's easy to drumm up the will to activate the Sharingan. It's not a particularly nice Kekkei Genkai, she thinks. It feels a little like hatred, but also like justice and righteous anger.
"It has been a while since I have seen a Sharingan," Sensei comments. "Well done."
It doesn't seem like a victory.
She doesn't have enough control over it yet to deactivate it, so he re-seals her tenketsu for the time being. They make their way back to camp in silence. Every once in a while Shizuha, who's legs are both broken, is shuffled onto someone else's back, but no words are exchanged at all. Six children were carried off by the jounin – six of originally ten. That made four dead children and one of their own, because of one measly little chuunin who managed to sneak through their defenses right under their noses. Not even the missing jounin. A chuunin.
The way back home is torture.
Nobody sleeps a wink, the jounin dealing with the grieving parents, the genin rounding up the bodies. All of their chuunin are entirely out of commission. Vulnerable as they are they can't stick around any longer, so they take off without rest.
It's almost four days of sleeping only in hour increments and carrying injured people on their backs. For three very uncomfortable hours Hisana has Anko clinging to her neck, giving her the most awful pep talk in the history of ever.
"I did much worse your age than let some comrades die. You're gonna do much worse until you're my age. You have no idea how many people die all the time."
Coming home is not as comforting as she hoped. It's in the middle of the night; Sasuke is already asleep. She's dirty, tired, moody – and quite frankly, she smells a little funky. For a moment she simply stands in the genkan, backpack sitting on her feet, unsure of what to do. Eat, shower, sleep? Shower, eat, sleep? Sleep, fuck the rest?
Any of those things sounds so incredibly normal; she doesn't know if she can do them. She doesn't know how to do them anymore. People are dead and she's going to eat a sandwich now.
A little confused and trying to do everything at once, she simply takes off her dirty clothes and leaves them there. In underwear she pats into the kitchen, fixes herself some food, and then sinks down on the cold tile to eat. It's dark in there, but comforting. For a moment she doesn't have to look at herself and wonder what sort of person she is to let her teammate die and to feel so little about ending a life herself.
In the bathroom she has to turn the light on. A little unwillingly she looks into the mirror; the image makes her stomach churn unpleasantly. She looks gaunt and pale. There's still some blood crusted into her forehead, and small, circular bruises have formed all over her face. Kohaku-sensei must have sealed and unsealed her tenketsu more than a dozen times in the past few days, until she gained enough control over the Sharingan to turn them off herself.
They flare to life with the tiniest burst of chakra.
Like this she recognizes herself even less. Her Sharingan are a dark, rusty red, one singular tomoe spinning lazily in each eye. They look foreign and strange on her. She yawns, eyes watering and squeezing shut. The next time she looks into the mirror, her eyes are their usual black. For a few more moments she examines her smartening, bruised jaw and the way her cheek split open under someone's fist. She looks terrible; Sasuke is in for a fright.
After a disappointing lukewarm shower she crawls into bed. It's not as satisfying as she remembers. It's still the same almost-but-not-quite-cheap cotton sheet, the same heavy comforter, the same somewhat beat up pillow. She can't sleep in it. The last time she slept in this bed feels so incredibly long ago.
Quietly, as not to wake her cousin, she takes a spare blanket from their wardrobe and goes to sleep on the couch.
The next morning she wakes up to Sasuke sitting by her feet. He's looking at her in bemusement, eyes flicking back and forth between her split cheek and the bruised tenketsu she knows to be right in the middle of her forehead.
"Is there any particular reason," he starts somewhat put out, "why you didn't find it necessary to wake me up when you came home? Or why you're sleeping on the couch?"
She stares at him.
"Did we get married while I was away?"
"I don't know – is that the only way you're going to keep me updated on your major life decisions?"
"Like sleeping on the couch?"
"Like dying."
He raises an expectant eyebrow and she snorts. When did he grow up so quickly? And who the hell gave him permission?
She flashes her Sharingan at him in hopes to distract him. He fidgets.
"I know you're trying to change the topic," Sasuke says at length, "but … let me see."
He shuffles closer to inspect her eyes. Watching him like this is strange; she can predict his movements so easily. Every minute change in his face, every aborted muscle twitch. She knows he's had the irrational urge to touch her eyes, and that irks him. The little twitch in his hand and the tension around his mouth tell her so. She knows that he's jealous. Curious too. And also uneasy. Hisana thinks about showing off a little, already forming the words he's going to speak with her lips, but decides against voicing them. It'll scare him; and a scared Sasuke is an angry Sasuke.
"How did it happen? How did you …?"
"Someone died," she says after some consideration. "A teammate. Not … - a teammate teammate, but someone I was supposed to look out for. I messed it up."
And this is my punishment, she thinks. The memory of Hoga's body and her murderer forever burned into my brain.
Sasuke's face displays a confused mixture of awe, giddiness, and pity. Pity, mostly for her, not for Hoga. It should probably worry her, but right now she doesn't have the capacity to. Maybe later, when she doesn't feel like death warmed over.
"You saw it?" he asks a little breathless. "What did you do?"
"I killed him."
The wonder on his face she could have read without the Sharingan. She lets them fade, unwilling to deal with her cousin's creepiness on such an intimate level. Hisana already knows he's not quite right, she doesn't need to see it too.
"What was it like?"
"I didn't like it."
And that's no lie. She didn't hate it either, but she most definitely didn't like it. Her tone effectively ends that venue of conversation.
"Does that have anything to do with why you're sleeping on the couch?"
It was of course optimistic and not a little naïve to think that her cousin wouldn't wheedle the reason for her camp out right out of her. Her answer provokes a strange mixture of quiet disbelief and patient sympathy onto his face that worries and warms her in equal parts. 'You are silly,' it says, 'but I will indulge you.'
She hopes that his callousness in regards to human lives really does stem from his upbringing, not from his personality itself. She'd see soon enough probably; for now she allows herself to smile at his suggestion that they simply go buy new sheets today.
The heavy feeling stays. She can lock it away somewhere deep inside for a while; team 7 makes things better. But their presence is like a band aid over an infected cut – the pressure takes off the edge, but it can't drive out the sickness that keeps incubating inside. As soon as they say their good-byes she can feel the guilt gnawing at her again.
For a few days she seeks out Shizuha.
They both saw things they can't forget.
They both feel guilty.
But instead of spending each other comfort, they make each other sick.
"Of course," Shiki says, "you need to work through your problems, not dwell on them."
She looks haggard and tired; between Hisana and Shizuha she barely has time to get over her own crippling self-doubts.
"I led my team into a trap," she admits, voice vibrating with suppressed self-loathing, "this could have ended very differently for us. What if Choumei hadn't gotten away? And if I'd seen this coming, maybe Hoga-san would still be alive too."
Even Hisana's teammates have their own weights to shoulder.
"I did nothing," Sora tells her, wide-eyed and ashamed. "You broke the seal, and you freed the others. I didn't do a damn thing to protect my team. That guy beat the crap out of you – what was I doing while that happened?"
But you were trying, she thinks. If you only knew how much older I am than you, maybe you wouldn't ask so much of yourself.
But while she feels for him, she can't take this burden from him.
"You'll take care of him, won't you?" she begs Haru. "Please. I can't – …"
Haru pats her head awkwardly.
"It's fine. You two already – … it's the least I can do."
She functions. They all do. Maybe it's one of those regrettable side effects of being a ninja; one day you just break a little, and nobody can fix you up entirely anymore. And every day the crack gets a little wider – until someday someone comes to put you down like a dog, because you've slowly crossed over onto the wrong side of 'dangerous' without noticing.
No, she functions flawlessly in the field. Their teamwork has only gotten better, they are efficient and driven, D- and C-rank missions are completed by the dozens a week. It's elsewhere the cracks are showing.
Hisana's not really interested in anything anymore. Even small failures discourage her. Minor, trivial things make her unreasonably angry.
"I did not think we would have to talk about this," Kohaku-sensei remarks the next time she nearly bursts into tears during training. "You took your first kill remarkably well, after all. It appears I was mistaken."
He steers her away from her worried looking teammates, sits her down and pushes a cup of tea into her hands. She's not sure where it came from – she never is. It's just one of these things about Sensei; as long as he's around, tea is always in reach. She stares down at it, somewhat helplessly.
"I am relieved I was mistaken," he suddenly says, effortlessly picking up the conversation where he left off. "It may sound odd, but I am immensely relived. There's only one kind of ninja that makes their first kill without taking mental damage: born killers. I do not believe that that is what you are."
"It isn't … that," she grits out, rubbing at her chest, right over where her heart squeezes painfully. "I don't regret killing that man."
"That is not what I was referring to either. The official reports will classify him as such, but that man was not the first life you were responsible of ending."
There's a moment of silence. It hurts to hear it again, but it's the truth. She's strangely glad even that Kohaku-sensei is not one to sugar-coat things; it makes it easier to believe him about other things as well. He watches her carefully.
"You do realize, intellectually, that you are not solely responsible for Hoga Chisato's death? That the entire mission was very nearly a failure because our intelligence was faulty? That, even if you had been there, there is no guarantee that you would not have simply been killed alongside her?"
She nods.
"Good. Then I want to introduce you to someone."
You guys are crazy. Suddenly I have 300 reviews and I really agonized over what to give you as an extra.
Then I thought of giving you this. Some of these songs will definitely feature big time during the later chapters - sometime I'll make you a list about what song corresponds to which scene.
Right now I'll give you this one:
Hoga's Death: Shimomura Yoko - Destati
Others that haven't come up yet:
Shimomura Yoko
Primal Eyes
Dive into the Heart -Destati Version-
Kajiura Yuki
Puella in Somnio
Credens Justiam (Mami's Theme)
Nux Walpurgis
Sis puella magica
Magia -Orchestral Version-
Terror adhaerens
Symposium Magarum (Octavia von Seckendorff's Theme)
Brian Crain
At the Ivy Gate
I love dramatic, classical style music (especially by Kajiura Yuki). Of course they are far too grand to fit this story, but if they put me in the mood to write some tragic, angsty violence, then hey!
I'm curious if you'll be able to put the right songs to the right scenes without my help.