So here's the next one already! No fighting this time, because I think we all need a break from the tournament.
Instead, team-fluff and Temari.
48 hours until the final match starts.
Hisana isn't sure what to think about the fact that she'll be facing Hanada of all people. Despite the girl's rather impressive performance against Haru and her overall … solo success in the tournament, the entire thing feels a little weird to her. It should be someone more impressive. Someone from Suna, older, intimidating, a genius. Someone she can rightfully fear. Hanada just feels sort of anticlimactic. Then again, some sort of confrontation has been brewing between them for some time now – started by Hanada's embarrassing obsession with Sora and not at all helped by Hisana's penchant for needling her with unmitigated disregard. Dear god, Kakashi-shishou has been rubbing off on her.
This time nobody is spending the night in the hospital. She's grateful for this small mercy, because after today she feels that team 11 may have some things to talk about. Even though she'd dearly love not to. Haru has been throwing her covert looks for the whole walk back, still occasionally coughing, and the reappearance of Sora's cheer is somewhat eerie. Kohaku-sensei, in typical fashion, doesn't pick up on her unease. In fact he seems confused why she would visit the boys in their room when she could be taking a nap.
"You will need your strength," he advises earnestly, "I will endeavor to prepare you for Hanada-san as well as I can."
"Yes, well," she hedges, "I'll go to sleep soon. But first I really need to make sure we're all ok."
Kohaku-sensei's brows furrow and for a long moment he appears to think this over. "Why would you not be ok? You all performed well today."
Hisana stares at him. Oh dear. "I want to make sure Haru isn't too disappointed and Sora isn't angry with me."
Judging by Sensei's blank face this clears up exactly nothing, but he nods anyway. Hisana slides out of the room, exasperated and a little fond. Good to know that Sensei wouldn't know how to hold anything against her if the occasion ever arises.
When Hisana knocks at the boys' door she can hear hectic rustling on the other side. "J-just a moment."
Haru opens the door, hair in a messy braid and eyes sleepy.
"Are those … chickens on your pyjamas?"
He turns a little red, but his expression is pointedly haughty. "S-so?"
"Oh nothing," she demurs in amusement. "Love the color; baby blue's your thing."
Her answer coaxes a smile out of him, so things can't be too grim on this end. He lets her inside the dark room. The only light is coming from the bathroom where Sora is making a lot of noise. "Girl incoming," she calls lightly.
"You sure?" comes a grunt back. Asshole. In retaliation she throws herself on his bed without taking her shoes off. With every passing minute she feels a little more comfortable. Nothing horrible has happened yet. She turns her attention away from the bathroom light and towards the teammate that is currently nodding off on the other bed. There's a book in his hands and it's been continuously inching closer to his face; by now Haru's nose is almost touching the pages.
"You ok?" she asks quietly. Haru is quiet for a long moment, until he turns sleepy eyes to her.
"You worry too much about the wrong things," he finally settles on. "My pride is bruised. I will be fine. I think … maybe I'm not ready for promotion anyway."
She turns towards him properly, confused.
"Who says you won't be promoted? You won the first match and you were good in the second."
He shrugs serenely. "I was ok. It'll be nice if it works out. But if it doesn't – well, I won't be too disappointed is what I'm saying. I'm no good with telling people what to do. And chuunin are team leaders, right?"
That's true enough. But Hisana does think he'd be good if he tried. Haru has a good head on his shoulders; the problem is that he simply isn't aggressive enough. His stony face is probably the only reason people don't walk all over him.
"You'll be fine," she tells him. "Even if you're not promoted. There's always next time. Plenty of people aren't chuunin yet."
He makes a merry little noise."I just remembered, Hanada's team will still need a third member, right?"
The breathy laugh that escapes Hisana is a strange cross between horror and hilarity. "Don't say that."
A towel comes flying out of the bathroom and hits her square in the head.
"If team 2 does the exams with him, he'll be fine," Sora insists. Much to Hisana's disappointment his pyjamas seem to be plain and boring, if a little holey.
"How do you know them?" she wonders, not for the first time. He's commented favorably on Hanada's team before. The names seemed completely unfamiliar to her, but then again Hisana isn't known for her face or name memory.
"They all live in my neighborhood," he admits, shoving Hisana's dirty shoes off his bed and brushing off the sand she tracked in. "They're good guys, just a bit … naïve maybe. Mami has them wrapped around her finger and she keeps ditching them."He scratches is head. "Idiots."
When he notices Hisana's lingering look, Sora scoffs. "What? Don't try to coddle me. I lost, but I think I did good." He kicks at her leg. "Let's put it on the kekkei genkai. No way I can defeat something like that."
Hisana winces and strategically decides not to tell him that her genjutsu was mostly ordinary. His assessment is true enough to be left uncorrected after all.
"We should still work a bit on our genjutsu," Haru mumbles unexpectedly, before his eyes slide shut again.
Sora kicks her out after that.
It's not quite late yet and the Suna weather gives her real trouble going to sleep. Hisana has no idea how the boys can simply block out the heat and pass out like that. It's cooler inside than outside, but it's still not the sort of cold she is used to sleeping in. She misses her own bed and Sasuke's snoring. Well, no, Sasuke doesn't actually snore. He is, however, a loud breather. It helps her fall asleep knowing there's someone else in the room. Kohaku-sensei sleeps either never or so silently and motionlessly that it's unnatural. She can't quite tell yet the difference between his different forms of stillness. One day, she contemplates, I'm going to find him and he's dead. And I won't notice.
She opens the door to find the room in darkness. What now then? Stumble around in the dark and wake him, or use her Sharingan and risk waking him with the chakra flare? Hisana closes the door and decides to go out.
It's still hot, but with six o'clock come and gone the worst is already over. The streets are still empty though, except for a few foreign ninja who stuck around for the final matches. She recognizes a Kusa kunoichi with a wicked looking bagua saber as one of the ninja buried under the rubble with her during second task. For one irrational heartbeat she considers saying hello but then thinks better of it. The girl looks ill-tempered, cheeks red from the heat.
In the past weeks Hisana has come to know Suna fairly well. The boys love exploring the streets, no matter how often they get lost in the process. The residents are not entirely friendly, but very honest and straight forward, so she feels reasonably at ease alone. But she doesn't want to eat or train and so she's at a loss of where to go. There are no teahouses in Suna, mostly because tea isn't really something you drink in this heat. Killing time is a luxury that is mostly indulged by higher ranking shinobi who are old enough to visit bars at night.
"You lost?" a familiar voice quips up behind her. Temari's chakra signature is a blazing beacon in the empty streets. It's a show of confidence rather than sloppiness. 'I am here, what are you going to do about it?'
Hisana really doesn't want to talk to her. Any further contact with the girl could end in disaster – Gaara being her most urgent fear. She's pretty sure the Kazekage has kept his youngest son safely locked away as long as foreigners are in the city. But she can't be sure for how long Gaara is going to put up with it. Finding his siblings might be high on his list then, especially when Temari has done something interesting, such as participating in the Exams.
The Kazekage himself worries her too. She has no way of knowing how long he will still live, when exactly Orochimaru will kill and replace him. A coup isn't planned in a matter of weeks; he must have been deceiving them for longer than that to form a treaty with Oto that would fool the elder council.
"Temari-chan, right?" she beams at the girl. "What a coincidence!"
Hisana hopes her voice isn't as wobbly as it feels. Saying hi to that Kusa girl looks pretty appealing right about now.
"Oh, so now you're friendly," the blond returns waspishly. "Someone told you who I am?"
Hisana's smile drops instantly. "Don't get cocky. I thought I'd be a little nice now that Haru handed your ass to you. What do you want?"
For some strange reason her rudeness seems to mollify the girl. She shakes a bit of fresh air into her loose day robes before swaggering towards her.
"I just thought I'd say hello. You know, basic courtesy. Also, you're going to be in the final match. I want to know why."
The girl leads her through a number of shadowed back alleys. The heat collects here and makes the air taste stale and thick. Every now and again they pass civilians carrying crates with non-perishables and bottles of alcohol.
"What is this?" she asks the younger girl, who is obviously no older than twelve and really shouldn't be here either. "The shadowy underbelly of Suna? Should I be worried?"
Temari snorts inelegantly. "Don't be stupid. I'm showing you where my people spend the day. It looked like you were bored anyway, so don't complain."
They duck into a little hole in the wall. The stairs lead underground and hot wind is blowing out of it and into the alley. Hisana squints her eyes against the sting of the air. The inside still
smells somewhat musty and the only light comes from a number of enormous candles, but it's a lot cooler; someone has put a fan behind a block of ice that is slowly melting into the clayey floor. Nobody seems to care.
"Do you drink?" Temari asks her, throwing her shawl from her face. "I know Konoha is pretty stuffy, but here you're a proper adult when you graduate. A little alcohol I can get my hands on."
"No thanks," Hisana decides after weighing her longing for a beer against the appearance of her not quite fourteen-year-old body. "And we're not stuffy, we just care about our children, thank you very much."
Some of the adults are eying her carefully. Hisana has no doubt that most of them are ninja; her Konoha hitai-ate and attire stand out like a sore thumb. Temari ushers her to a sturdy looking table at the back of the room before darting away to the bar. For a few nervous minutes Hisana is alone under the locals; one man even turns around to point blank stare at her. When Temari comes back she's carrying two glasses with thick pink liquid. She kicks the man in the shin until he turns back around and plops down next to Hisana.
"Here, that shouldn't offend your delicate sensibilities too much."
She leers at Hisana; in the half-light she looks like a shark: All teeth, and far too much aggression pent up in that little body. "I thought your whole clan was dead. What the hell does an Uchiha do here?"
Hisana very nearly chokes on her sweet drink. "Your mother teach you no tact? – Oh wait…," she shoots back pointedly. Temari's face twists into something angry and then pained.
"Touché," she concedes unhappily. "Let me rephrase that: I'm surprised to see an Uchiha in Suna. I'm even more surprised they let you leave their little golden cage."
This time Hisana outright snorts at her. "You think I'm some sort of fancy songbird?" For a moment she entertains thoughts of her curmudgeonly cousin singing for anyone. "Forget it," she tells the blonde. "I'm a ninja – I'm only useful as long as I do my job. I want to do my job. And what are you doing in the Exams? You're what – twelve?"
"So?" the girl protests in annoyance, just like Hisana knew she would. Temari is only a year younger than her teammates, but she seems awfully young. Were her boys that young only last year? She thinks of Kohaku-sensei's training and wonders, not for the first time, if the stress of it hasn't actually aged them prematurely. If it did, she's more than grateful for the effect it had on Sora and Haru. Being so used to their youthful faces it frequently escapes Hisana that they're by all accounts hormone driven 13 year-old teenage boys. And yes, she's occasionally caught either or both of them staring down her shirt, but neither of them has dared to make any comment yet so the entire thing is still humorous to her. She knows Inomaru – the only other cheeky teenage boy she knows – would have said something stupid already instead of politely averting his gaze when caught.
She observes the barely restrained emotion on Temair's face, unable to match it to anything she's ever seen on the faces of her friends. The spoiled, sheltered daughter of the Kazekage? Maybe. The man must love his children in some ways or he wouldn't have so many of them. His first born is sure to be something special to him. The heavy guards that accompanied his only daughter during the Exam suggested as much. "And I'm only … preparing," Temari admits. "I have younger brothers and we're supposed to take the actual Exams some other time. I'm the babysitter."
The last is said with no small amount of resentment.
"Brothers," Hisana commiserates lightly. "Such pests."
Temari shoots her a haunted look. "You have no idea. Kankurou is trying so hard to act like an adult it's embarrassing. And Gaara is …" Her voice trembles at her youngest brother's name. "Gaara is different."
"But you love him anyway," Hisana ventures.
Temari looks at her incredulously, but after a few seconds of contemplation her eyes go sad. "He's my little brother," she finally settles on, rolling the words around in her mouth as if they taste strange. "Gaara is my little brother."
Hisana nods before taking a chance. "So, am I going to meet them or what? Where are they?"
Temari shoots her a calculating look from under her eyelashes, swishing around the dregs of her juice in the glass. "Oh, you know … around."