I DO NOT OWN DREAMING OF SUNSHINE OR NARUTO

I am merely making use of their characters, settings, and themes to tell a different story.

If anyone would like to use my own work as a base/inspiration for a fic, you are more than welcome to do so, just credit me in the beginning and maybe send me the link so that I can read it too, I'm always looking for more DOS recursive.

Well, I think that covers all of my bases, so with that out of the way, on to the fic!

Chapter 13: Flight of the ANBU pt.1

Gazelle knew they were going to be in deep shit when they finally got back and delivered their report to the Hokage, but with the turn things had taken at the end, Gazelle was just happy to be returning at all.

It all started roughly three days after their arrival at the town. They had all begun to sleep a bit longer on their off rotations but didn't think much of it at the time - looking back now, he's almost sure that whatever it was that was going on in that town wasn't just messing with their energy and chakra, it was messing with their heads too.

They wasted no time starting their recon and surveillance, already establishing shifts and setting up traps to defend the campsite. He'd thought things were fine -sure, he'd felt a little tired, but fatigue was expected on these types of missions, and their recon efforts were proving incredibly fruitful, which made him hesitate and eventually decide against leaving. He wanted to collect as much information as possible on this cult they had been sent to investigate, and to do that he needed to stay as long as possible. At the time it'd seemed like a perfectly logical choice, but it wouldn't be long before he regretted it.

On the morning of their seventh day there, Gazelle went to wake the other three agents so that they could carry out their shifts. Since there were six of them, Gazelle had done the logical thing assigning three to each shift. It was an ideal set up for this kind of mission, since it allowed for a pair of people to go and perform recon while the third remained behind and stood watch over their sleeping comrades. This day had been Gazelles turn on watch duty - it was an incredibly dull but important all the same. Like every other watch rotation that had occurred during this mission, absolutely nothing of interest occurred. Nothing of interest occurred, but Gazelle still found himself exhausted - far more than he should be even with the length of the mission. A suspicion had begun to grow in him, something that was unfortunately confirmed when of the three agents sleeping, only two rose.

"Rabbit, sleep rotation has ended, you're on recon." He said a little louder.

Except, she didn't react…at all.

One of the worst parts of being inducted into ANBU ranks is the initiation training used to weed out those who have what it takes from those who don't. It's a grueling experience, but an extremely necessary one that teaches ANBU recruits many essential skills - one of them being the ability to operate with little to no sleep for long periods of time. That part of the training usually spans a two week period. Gazelle knows Rabbit, has run multiple missions with the kunoichi - she's been in ANBU for going on two years now, and her reflexes show it.

Disjointed pieces of a larger puzzle he hadn't even realized was in front of him suddenly began to fall into place.

' If any of your team begins to feel abnormally tired or lethargic you are to abort the mission and retreat immediately… '

' ...abnormally tired or lethargic…'

'...tired or lethargic…'

'...abort the mission…'

'...retreat immediately…'

'...abort…mission…'

'...retreat…'

ABORT.

RETREAT.

The words rang through his head. He'd had a headache for days by that point, the same string of sounds repeating over and over again in the back of his head but always lacking any decipherable meaning…

Now though, now they rang clear.

They'd all been feeling tired lately, despite spending more than eight of every twenty four hours sleeping. He hadn't thought anything of it, just chalked it up to mission fatigue, but…

'Rabbit is physically the smallest member of the team, we've all been getting progressively more tired, I haven't been thinking straight for days…'

Completely violating protocol, Gazelle took off Rabbit's mask so that he could have a clear view of her face. He already knew that she was still breathing - that much was clear from the rise and fall of her chest - but he didn't know a damn thing about medical chakra beyond what was necessary to perform patch jobs on flesh wounds that would hold up until he could get himself or a comrade to a qualified medic. He could do a diagnostic jutsu - it wasn't hard if you knew mystic palm - but it would be utterly useless given he had no idea how to interpret the information. There wasn't much he could do, but what he could do would at least give them a better idea of whether Rabbit still had enough going on upstairs to be worth the risk carrying her deadweight would pose to the rest of the team. Gazelle wasn't one to abandon a comrade, but he also wasn't one to endanger the rest of the team for something that was already beyond help.

Taking his medical kit out from the storage seal, he quickly located the pen light he kept in there and set to work. Straddling her torso Gazelle leaned over her face and pulled back each of her eyelids, turning on the pen light he carefully observed her pupillary response, and was relieved to find it normal. Some of the weight that had been on his chest lifted at that, glad that things didn't appear to be as bad as he had first feared. The next thing he checked was her pain response, which was also normal. The second test had mostly become a redundancy as soon as she'd shown a normal pupillary response, but more information was always good, and even if she'd failed the second test, he still wouldn't have left her behind.

Realizing that in his rush to determine the presence of Rabbit's mental facilities he had yet to give Boar and Lion their marching orders, he quickly issued them as he began repacking his supplies and disassembling the camp.

"We have to go. Now. Locate Squirrel and Lizard and inform them that we are aborting the mission and returning to Konoha effective immediately."

Both men were gone as soon as he finished speaking.

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