"Remembering you...The fireflies of this marsh seem like sparks,
that rise from my body's longing."
-Izumi Shikibu
Shino's feet landed softly on the bamboo forest floor, his sound embrace safely locking the mysterious kunoichi he'd caught in his arms.
The ghost-haired girl having lost consciousness during their fall, before she could ever finish her final attack against him.
Her delicate breathing barely noticeable now against his flak jacket.
The Wolf's Bane toxin seducing her into its sleepiest stages, as it lured her closer to a sweet raptured death.
Her only hope of redemption now.
"Whoever she is, she doesn't have much longer," Shino observed, gazing into her unmasked face between the silvery waves of her blood-stained hair. Her pale face gradually losing more color, cold and damp as the numbing fog swirling around them.
And realizing suddenly that he was holding this beautiful dying woman in his arms by all but a perfect accident, Shino's stomach scurried like a thousand cockroaches running for cover.
She was a girl...and she was in his arms...Jumping grasshoppers! There was a girl in his arms!
It was by instinct that Shino threw himself in the way to break her fall, as could be expected of any Aburame man for a lady in distress, despite this bloodthirsty Yuki-Onna mysteriously hellbent on assassinating him.
And what was he to do with her now that the earwig was in the other shoe?
Because what started out as a nice leisurely walk with Kiba through the forest had turned into an unexpectedly cut-throat moral dilemma he never asked for.
How was he to go back to his original mission finding Hinata a wedding gift when this bag of angry bees had literally just fell right into his hands?
Kiba couldn't be that far off, and Shino had been sidetracked long enough for his teammate to notice he'd gone missing.
No way he could trust Kiba's outstanding "suavities" upon meeting the Beekeeper alone. But then again, he couldn't just leave a girl passed out and alone in the middle of the bamboo forest either.
And he still had questions.
Like why she'd been trying to take him out in the first place?
Shino couldn't find a ninja headband with any clues about where she came from. Nor any signs about which clan she belonged to, or any hidden intel that might reveal her motives.
Was she a missing-nin then? A specialized corps ninja? A shinobi for hire?
If she were any of those, she'd have a price. And if she had a price, it would be much too high for accepting the job of killing someone like him.
Because after all, he was only an intel ninja. A side character in his own story. The unsung hero of the battlefield.
Which meant he wasn't a Jinchuriki, or a Kage, or any other high-profile combat ninja that might make anyone interested in dropping a bounty on him.
So, if those were the basic economics of contract killing, then what order was she given against him to make her believe he was such a prime target, that she took the risk of sabotaging herself in battle, in order to increase her chances of taking him out?
A tantalizing question he would live in thereafter.
Because as her life faded away in his arms, the Aburame was forced to accept that the true victory of their match was with his rival in never satisfying him with any answers.
After fighting him like this, she'd never recover.
Because without knowing the exact formula that went into the making of her poison, it'd be a wild flea hunt for Shino to match the correct antidote in time.
Still...despite knowing that she was a lost cause...Shino couldn't make himself walk away from her.
No matter who she is, dying alone without anyone beside you is truly a tragic fate,' the lone-wolf-spider of a ninja decided.
So he stayed.
Knowing the reason behind their battle may forever remain a mystery to him.
But no mystery was ever so staggering as Shino's own instincts.
This unknowable rival wasn't like the others he'd fought before.
He sensed something different about her.
Because even if his better judgement told him that it was impossible to know a girl before he'd ever met her, Shino knew that he knew her.
He didn't have a logical reason why, but her vulnerable body wrapped up against his hardened chest triggered something irrational, primal, and jealously protective in him.
Come to think of it...the last time he'd felt this conflicted over not being able to save someone, she had left him bound and gagged in a hot sticky cocoon of beeswax.
But that was a very long time ago.
Many years, in fact, since a restless Shino laid in bed pretending to be asleep.
Breathing in the lingering scent of honey on his pillow, which he still wasn't quite able to wash out of his hair, as he listened to Shibi come in from his hunt.
His father quietly opening the shoji sliding door to check on Shino, careful not to disturb his "sleeping" son with the dark knowing of what he'd been ordered to do that night.
"Is it over, dad?" Torune had asked their father. "Did you track down...them?"
Shibi sighed heavily, sliding the door of Shino's room closed again.
"Since the day Hansukebachi first challenged me to take his revenge," Shibi muttered quietly. "I knew that until one of us killed the other, this fight would never be over."
"So, Hansuke has escaped," Torune guessed his father's meaning. "Will he come after Shino again? If he tries it, I will be ready for him."
"No," Shibi said. "This is between me and the bee clan. I refuse to allow my sons to get involved with this feud. Your duty is to the village and the Hokage. My only expectation is that you and Shino both get stronger to fulfill that duty."
"He's my brother," Torune objected.
"He's a shinobi," Shibi reminded him. "And the shinobi world will not treat him differently. So, you must not either."
"What should I do then?" Torune asked him.
"The ninja I fought tonight wasn't Hansukebachi," Shibi told him. "The reason I know is because, when I last fought Hansuke, I used my insects to deflect his bee bombs against him. Because his face is scarred beyond recognition now, he has become master of the beeswax cloning technique. But I see now the man I fought was not my old enemy in disguise...Which confirms Hansuke is not the last shinobi of his clan, as we had hoped. We need to gather intel on the others in hiding, like the two ninja I killed tonight...And the girl with them...She couldn't have been older than Shino."
"Did you kill her too, dad?" Torune murmured.
As if, like Shino, he too was afraid to know the answer.
But the answer never came, as Shibi dropped a heavy hand on Torune's shoulder.
"Never speak of this again to anyone," he mumbled gravely to his eldest son. "Especially Shino."
And then Shibi walked away, leaving his sons to contemplate the silence that followed his damning answer.
True to his promise, Shibi never again spoke about what happened that night, leaving Shino to believe, for many years to come, that the girl he'd given the name "Firefly" was dead.
Shino dropped to his knees.
Urgently but gently unhooking the kunoichi's arm from around his neck, the Aburame laid the rogue ninja down in front of him on a soft bed of grass.
Defying the stoic rational side of him that told him it was too late to save her now.
His outer gray duster jacket falling over his powerfully-built thighs as he crouched down next to her, and unrolled the medical supply scroll from his inner vest.
His hands steady and competent as he raced against time, setting aside a jar of blood increasing pills, the Hyūga Clan's Secret Ointment, and his own formulated antidotes for Wolf's Bane. Then he reached for his bug jar collection, and popped open an emergency supply of his kikaichū beetles.
With his basic defense kit for poison ready, Shino unsheathed the kunai wrapped by a bandage around his thigh.
'Although it's impossible that you could be the same girl who hid me in her beeswax cocoon, I made a bond with her,' Shino decided. 'So, even if she is dead now, what she did to save me that night still means something to me. And because of my friendship with her, I will not leave you to die like this.'
Shino used the tip of his kunai to make small pricks of blood under her skin, on the 7 detoxification points of her body.
The Great Rushing point at the feet. The Three Yin Crossing at her inner ankle. The Union Valley between her thumb and index finger. The Inner Gate at her wrist. The Upper Sea at her...
Shino froze.
The tip of his kunai hovering just over the opening along the neckline of her kimono shirt.
His steady hand now faintly trembling.
Momentarily caught off guard by the busty roundness of her almost-naked breasts, hidden by tightly wrapped bandages underneath her netted, mesh kusari gusoku armor.
Bashfully, Shino drew his attention back to his work. A master of fortitude, long practiced in domineering his secret, unrealized fantasies back into suppression, as he hyper-focused on his kunai tip instead.
The round softness of her cleavage grazing his gentle hands as he left a light prick at the Upper Sea against her heart.
Since the moment he met her in this bamboo forest, he knew things would get messy.
Because he wasn't a medical ninja, after all.
He was working on the fly (no matter how tormenting the pun), and his method to draw out the poison from her body wouldn't be as clean-cut as a trained medical ninja.
So be it.
Nothing else mattered to Shino in that moment but to stabilize her condition.
He didn't have time to think about the consequences.
Like how this might complicate things for them later, or how the accidental memory of her like this would secretly wreck him every time he gazed into her moonlight face.
He'd deal with apologizing to her some other time.
If she ever lived, that is.
Shino's only goal was to beat time, releasing the kikaichū in his bug jar to drain the poison from the 7 points he'd made on her body. His insects tracing the faint throbbing of her veins to slow the toxins before they fatally damaged her heart.
Giving Shino time to treat her with the blood increasing pills, diluting the Wolf's Bane, and replacing the blood loss where her kunai had slit her palm.
Carefully rubbing the Healing Ointment into the wound, Shino tightly wrapped her hand with white bandage and tied it off to stop any more bleeding.
And then all he could do was wait, keeping his insects at work diluting the poison as much as he could.
It was a daunting task, bleeding his own chakra as he fought a damn-near-impossible battle to hold her back from the edge of death.
His heart breaking every time he had to replace another insect, its wings quivering in its final moments as the unforgiving poison choked out its life.
Making Shino question again the demand he was putting on his insects by challenging her deadly fate that he wasn't sure he was strong enough to oppose.
Without a medical-nin, trying to draw out the poison by himself with his own insects could only do so much to keep her alive.
Would he really go so far as to drain every insect inside of his body to save her?
Shino knew he was only prolonging the inevitable.
But her haunting resemblance to Firefly reminded him too much of the girl he knew from the past.
In the end, he was never able to save his bee friend.
And now he'd be haunted evermore by not knowing enough advanced medical ninjutsu to save this shinobi too.
But regardless of the odds, Shino took the chance.
And then, as if he already didn't have enough on his hands, he felt it.
A diligent humming vibration in the air around him.
Subtle, at first.
Like the sound of a soft breeze through the bamboo leaves.
But the trees above him weren't moving.
The forest had fallen eerily silent, except for the humming gradually closing in on all sides of him.
His insects alerting him that another threat approached him from the mist.
Until the soft humming steadily turned into violent blood-lusting buzzing.
The war song of 1000 warrior bees surrounding him on all sides.
