"It's quite an odd one. I think I could patch it up but, usually, a single scar does not require an entire Mystical Palm session to treat." The medical ninja at the Konohagakure hospital explained while examining the cut on Mana's cheek.
"It would be incredible if you did that. I know it might not fit the definition of necessary treatment so I'm willing to pay to get it off." Mana sighed in relief. Every day since she's returned she's received weird stares and whenever she spoke to someone or interacted with one of the many fans that stopped her on the streets to greet her or to ask when the next show was, their attention and the topic of the brief conversation would inevitably steer towards the scar on Mana's cheek.
"Oh, don't worry, I'll pen it down as required corrective measures. Wouldn't want to leave Konoha without its entertainment, would we? When's the next show?" the medical ninja winked.
"The last mission was rough, still kind of getting things together. Just… Don't feel in the right mindset for stage magic, honestly." Mana admitted. The medical ninjutsu specialist worked his magic on Mana's left cheek. His ninjutsu was powerful, Mana could almost feel strings of her flesh and her skin curling out, extending and tying to one another, then melding. Then again, perhaps this supposed skill of the jutsu merely came from the fact that the ninja was focused entirely on a single wound.
"It sounds like you may have emotional problems. I'd like to sign you up for something. Given how I just offered you a small favor with the extension of the medical insurance to cover this treatment, maybe you could do me this one?" the medical ninja wondered. "It's sort of like a support group for ninja. The people working out on the field see all sorts of scary stuff out there. You seem like you've seen your fair share and… You're not quite a prodigy the likes of which was unseen by the village before but you've ascended the ranks to where things get quite dark very fast."
"Sounds a lot like by emotional you meant psychological," Mana said. She did not feel all too opposed to the idea, honestly. Maybe if she did feel particularly thorny about the issue, she'd have carried a tad more spite in those last words.
"We tend to not use the p-word. It's gotten a nasty reputation and it's a trigger word, most of the time amongst people that could really use the p kind of help." The medical ninja shrugged. "Could you maybe do this for me? I'll sign you up, all you've got to do to get even is just to come to a single session, if you like it or if you feel it's useful for you – come and vent whenever you want."
The healer then stood up and concluded his session. Mana looked surprised by how easily he had finished treating her cut. Just like that not an inch of it remained on the magician's face. She no longer looked like an underage veteran, truthfully, that tiny cut truly had grown a bit out of control there at some point and just flat out refused to close up.
"That's impressive. My boyfriend tried it out, he's a medical ninja, he couldn't close it up." Mana examined the missing cut. She's been getting so accustomed to it that her own image in the mirror was beginning to feel like something was missing. The wound may have been a remnant of a grievous last resort attempt at Mana's life but it was beginning to feel like a corrective stroke on the total painting to give it some pizazz.
"Oh? Who's the lucky guy? I'd be glad to exchange experiences with him, treating every person is different, I'm sure the talk might be useful for both of us." The medical ninja wondered.
"Kouta Juugo, though he used to have a fake last name of Hirano, he had huge father issues…" Mana halted for a moment. "I guess he still has some of that but they're kind of reversed at the moment."
"Oh. Yeah, he's one of the kids in Konoha High I've had the chance to read an occasional lecture to." The middle-aged medical ninja recalled. "An incredibly talented kid. I feel like his attention is all over the place though. Sadly, no offense, but I believe his is the quite common case of not living up to his full potential."
"He's always been split between saving lives or taking them away." Mana nodded with a feeling of somberness taking over her.
"Perhaps that's what's been holding him back. A flawless killer or a legendary medical ninja can be neither of those things if they're trying to be both." The medical ninja said. "I can only say one thing, ever since he's graduated from Konoha High, the boy had not put in a single hour in the Hospital. I am not too sure if he is so split after all…"
"I'll try and talk to him." Mana agreed with the man who had just treated her scar. Like so many things that had come into her life by kicking down the door, it just felt like her responsibility. Kouta's medical ninjutsu had been slipping the last couple of weeks that the magician had been around him.
Perhaps it was luck, maybe Mana just knew her boyfriend's faults this well but she skipped out on checking his home. The magician headed straight for the Eighth Training Grounds. She had not made it into the very essence of the place before the feeling of the quaking ground made the magician spread her legs out and do her best to maintain balance. The rotating pair of spiraling, blue jets splitting the clouds and flying high up, together with the immense chakra pressure emanating from the signals the magician would have picked up from any range made Mana certain that this was the full view of the two Juugo sparring.
Kouta's chakra had taken a massive dip, something like that could have come from either the boy putting up chakra augmentations of astounding size to withstand one of his father's world-ending impacts, or he may have been knocked out from his Cursed Seal state as the chakra of both of those two felt about as repulsive as rotting garbage of a bunch of molten in acid corpses when the mulch was mixed in with the eroded goop of their personal belongings as well.
Mana weaved a pair of hand seals, forming the puny gust of her Rebellious Twist Jutsu that caught and kept Kouta afloat. Missing the deafening sound of his son crashing through a bunch of artificial rocky formations and leaving an epic fissure in the ground, Kusagoro descended as well.
"I'd like to talk to Kouta," Mana asked the man, fully expecting him to dismiss her and tell her to stuff it and wait until their training was over.
"Go ahead, maybe talking to you will fix his distraction problem. It's like his mind is somewhere else the whole time, honestly…" the Juugo growled while looking at his son from up high. To someone so desiring his father's approval, this scowl of disappointment and frustration must have felt more painful than the punch that blew him out of the sky.
"What's the matter?" Kouta looked at Mana with the same kind of cheerful smile that he wore. One that would not have provided the objective observer with the basis to assume that the youth has just been punched in the face with enough power to crack the world in half.
"I've come to a decision. One that will be painful for both of us but one that's got to be made." Mana started. She was surprised by how easy starting to talk was. Usually, the beginning part was the difficult chunk of any situation. Not here, in fact, from where Mana stood the whole thing seemed not quite easy but something that Mana could go through without flinching once.
"Hey, your cut is gone. Did the medical ninja manage to remove it?" Kouta noticed, interrupting the magician. He was looking out for her, thinking that doing what she's about to do would be too difficult on someone as gentle as Mana but… He may not have truly known her…
"Yes. They also told me that you were misusing your talent and that if you hadn't been, you'd have been able to treat it." Mana sighed. Accepting the diversion even though she fully intended to arrive at the same inevitable conclusion.
"I could have told you that…" Kouta pouted, he did not look proud of the fact but he still had enough emotional health to accept it without fighting it too hard. "Nobody's perfect at everything they do."
"Though you could be perfect at something. It's just that you cannot decide which thing it is. You never could." Mana said. By then the two have walked farther away to where nobody could have heard them, the rough and mountainous artificial wasteland of the Eighth Training Grounds were beginning to shift for the more forested and green, more natural sceneries.
"I'm very glad to have gone on that last mission with you. It had opened my eyes on more things than I can ignore. You're split between two things you want but for entirely different reasons: the man you want to be and the man you want people you love to see you as. When you failed at your role as a medical ninja it made you hurt worse than I've ever seen you hurting before. Though I don't think it's because you felt incompetent or incomplete, it's because you thought that I would have taken you as a failure." Mana recalled the time when Mizoma the Phantom Lantern turned off Kouta's Cursed Seal or when Kouta failed to keep the captured tribesman alive.
"You did though, didn't you?" Kouta looked down and kicked at a stone he should not have reasonably been picking fights with. He did not appear to augment his body, or did so on a very subtle level, resulting in a dull thud and neither of the two colliding surfaces giving way. "If I had kept that boy alive, we'd have found out the intelligence sooner and would have never run into the Kumogakure ninja. The same bunch that hurt you, offended all of us on multiple occasions and then killed all those people. You keep blaming yourself for this sort of thing but, truth be told, it's on everybody on some level. Still… When I look back at my failures back then, I sort of understand how you feel when you're hurting really bad and blaming yourself all the time."
"You shouldn't. Nobody should. Not unless they take that responsibility up on themselves and that's my point – you're suffering because of trying to live up to what you think I want to see, not because you yourself took up those burdens on your own. Well… I'm done seeing you suffer. During our last mission, I've seen both the bad and the right ways of letting go and…" Mana stopped. Not because it hurt too much, it hurt a decent deal but she was simply short of an adequate way of expressing herself.
"What are you saying?" Kouta stopped and stepped out in front of Mana.
"You can't live looking both ways all the time. You can't make the choice so I'm making it for you. It's going to hurt now but I'm sure you'll live up to the man you're always meant to be this way. I'm breaking up with you." Mana placed her hands inside the pockets of her blazer and looked away, it was at times like these that she enjoyed the fact that she wore an excessive top hat that, when viewed from diagonally above, obscured her emerald eyes.
Kouta looked down, still trying to comprehend what he's been told, then he looked away. It wasn't the first time that the two had broken up but somehow this felt like something more than just a pecking quarrel of two hatchling lovebirds. This felt serious. Considering that one of the times the breakup did not feel as serious as now was when Mana betrayed Kouta's trust and almost had him beaten up severely, things really rose up to their proper perspective.
"So this is the good way to let-go?" Kouta muttered.
"It's not the best. But it's not quite like the way in which the Hozuki let go of their pasts. I'll admit it's not giving up so that your children could live but… It's my way of letting go. It hurts. Just as much as it might for you but… It won't when I see you no longer having to worry about what I'm thinking about you. When you put all your apples into becoming the man you want to be. Even if that's to become a killer, even if it's to become a man like your father, I'll be fine with it either way because we're now separate people." Mana barely kept herself from breaking down.
Kouta tried replying with something coherent but he could merely grunt before he could put his following thoughts into words. Taking it as a sign of the youth's surrender and acceptance of the break-up, Mana turned around and started moving the other way. The plan for the day was to put as much distance between herself and the Eighth Training Grounds or Kouta's home as possible. Hell, she did not have any immediate need to go to the Konohagakure Hospital too so she may as well have avoided that place like the plague too until the need to confront the torn inner wound would become inevitable.
Mana had hoped to see hatred or anger aimed at her in Kouta's eyes. After all, what she's done was sudden and it just ripped out half of the Juugo's identity so nonchalantly as only one's true nemesis would have. If Kouta hated her deep down, it would help him get through it easier.
"You want me to hate you, don't you?" Kouta's voice reached Mana's ears, shocking the magician by how accurately he had read her mind. Then again, the two had been spending so much time before Mana's constant disappearances and lone training sessions and crazy missions began taking precedence over everything else dear to her.
"Do or don't…" Mana shrugged. She could not turn around or else she'd have risked exposing her tears. That would have been unacceptable. She'd have shown how much it hurt, how much this decision was already weighing on Mana and how much torment it would cause in the days, weeks and years to come.
"It would be something from your own personal handbook. Have something to point fingers to and blame everything on. Form something specific and have your pain take a shape. Hell, when I say it like that, it almost sounds therapeutic." Kouta growled. Something about his voice started feeling off, his chakra began leaking with malevolence. This was something that the magician was not expecting, for the break-up to affect him so much that he'd lose control. If the Cursed Seal was accessed through anger and great, personal stress, something that could have been called up, given sufficient experience and training, it did nothing to rule out the Cursed Seal breaking upon natural, unpredictable moments of infuriating inner pain.
Mana could not see Kouta move at all. His expanded fist stopped just inches away from the magician's face, throwing her hat flying backward and off her head from the backlash of the wild swing, stopped only at the final moments by Kusagoro's firm grip. The arms of the Juugo patriarch wrapped around the colossal punching limb from his shoulder to wrist.
"I'll take it from here." Kusagoro turned at Mana with a strict face. "I guess that now you want to be anywhere but here so take the chance and scram."
Mana flipped a glass over, letting the brown liquid cool her lightly swollen from repeated cold drinks throat and then went right down. Chest, stomach and then bubbling softly while pressing through whatever bits of food rested inside her gut. The curse of being a sensor was that there were few surprises possible, to ever be surprised by a friend entering the building, one would have had to work their best at suppressing their own abilities and that was not something Mana liked very much to do.
"Mana! There you are!" a familiar voice of a Yamanaka heiress reached the magician's ears. The young woman sighed and then turned around on her rolling chair to face Kiyomi and Meiko who have entered the building together, in full gear and ready to kick someone's ass. Given their passion for pointing out Mana's poorer life decisions – likely the magician herself.
"I suppose asking how you found me would be silly." Mana looked around, observing a circle of space that the civilians and ninja around the junk food joint she sat in provided her with. One that nobody asked for but one that persisted to follow the magician wherever she went. An entertainment star, a starlet kunoichi who not only met the expectations of the Chuunin Exams main event but surpassed them as well. Whoever wanted to approach such a person on their bad day?
"This better not be cola you're drinking!" Meiko pushed Kiyomi aside with a hint of rudeness while the blacksmith bumped at the Yamanaka with her shoulder upon passing her. The redhead walked up to Mana, sat down near the magician and tried to take and check on the glass still in Mana's hand but she failed to do so before Mana finished it, letting the glass slip out with a light brush against the blacksmith's reaching hand.
"I ain't even sorry. I'll eat every greasy burger and drink every soft drink in this place." Mana sighed.
"I'd lift you and drag you away to keep you from regretting this tomorrow but… Meiko…" Kiyomi turned to the blacksmith who just grabbed Mana by her collar and lifted her off the chair and moved the magician away to where she could have been safely deposited.
The blacksmith picked up a burger that had just been brought to the magician and sniffed on it. "As I thought… The cheese ain't even the luxurious kind, it's just ordinary, junk food cheese."
After the initial observation, the redhead checked up under the bun, what she saw there shocked the powerhouse of Team Hokage to her core. "The meat… It's just some ordinary meat! It's just a goddamn patty, Kiyomi! The food isn't even classy, it isn't even classy!"
"And she's eating a dozen times more than it's normal for her…" Kiyomi scratched her chin in confusion.
"I'm a big girl, I can make my own life decisions already…" Mana pouted just before Meiko picked the magician up and rushed to the door, intending to follow Kiyomi who was already halfway done leaving the burger joint. Meiko jumped up and rushed back to the chair to pick up the blazer and the hat that would have been left behind and then ran back after the blonde.
"When I heard those people talking about Konoha's Sorceress being "down to Earth" and "eating at Lightning Burger" I knew it would be bad but… This is worse than I thought." Kiyomi assessed the situation.
"Put me down!" Mana insisted. "Can't I just drown my break-up grief in grease with some peace?"
"Break-up? That's even worse than being worse than I thought. This calls for…" Kiyomi looked down with a grim expression.
"No way… I'm not even doing that, I'm in my armor and ready for training, I can't…" Meiko complained.
"Yes. Under no other circumstances would I say otherwise but… It is time for… An intervention!" Kiyomi looked up with her fiery, baby blue eyes drowning in determination.