[Naruto] The Return 3/5
Jan. 8th, 2007 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runespoorTitle: The Return
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In the middle of a war the usual thing is that people die. It's more unusual when they return alive after having been thought dead for three months. Hinata, after being a prisoner in Sound, does.
Notes: in this part: back to the original Ino-Shika-Chou.
Part I
Part II
III.
With their friend at the hospital, it wasn't surprising that Shikaku and Inoichi went there as often as they could, once or sometimes twice a day. When Shikaku confronted his inner Yoshino voice – the one that criticized him when Yoshino didn't, over things Yoshino would never have reproached him – he admitted that it was probably pushing it, as Chouza wasn't in any danger and just needed time, but the medic-nin wasn't born who'd try and keep teammates at bay when one of theirs was in the hospital.
It was another of those unwritten ninja rules.
Besides, Shikaku and Inoichi were experienced jounin and respectable, upstanding citizens – most of the time – so they knew not to nag the hospital employees.
Nowadays there were only a couple of full-fledged medic-nins attached to the Konoha hospital, and the Hokage for the visits she managed to cram in her overloaded timetable – the others had all been sent on the front. Tsunade had even dispatched her assistant; Shizune's skills, she said, would be more usefully employed in war zones. The genins fresh out of the academy were used as helpers and taught the basic life-saving gestures under the charges of a handful of their older counterparts, while veterans, too patched up and old for the Hokage to envisage them as potential weapons, ran most of the organizational work.
The hospital had changed, drastically, and Shikaku, who'd lived through and remembered the great wars, wasn't sure what to think of it. Logically speaking, it was a much-needed rationalization of the workings of the village for the time being, but it also made the average civilian more aware of what was going on.
Not that a reasonably intelligent civilian wouldn't notice it, of course; Shikaku had civilians in his family and the Nara clan wasn't even half as grounded in civilian society as the Yamanaka, so he knew that much.
But still, he couldn't help the idea that civilians were to be protected. They had no special skills, no control on their chakra, most of them wouldn't even be able to stand their own on a fight against kids at the academy – without even speaking of bloodline limits.
What they did was they allowed the village to work.
That was more than enough; it was up to the shinobi to keep their end of the bargain and protect the whole population. And if the ninjas couldn't – then the civilians were within their full rights if they chose to whisper against the ninjas.
Shikaku had witnessed it during the great wars; the contempt most ninjas had against civilians, who didn't know what it meant to fight and kill and die, and the distrust civilians responded with. What good was it to live in a Hidden Village, led by a shinobi and meant for shinobi, if the shinobi couldn't even do their jobs correctly?
Then, right after the end of the wars, when a new, shining, charismatic young Hokage had been chosen – the ninja who'd risen to fame because of the willpower he put in the peace treaties, a man who was the first shinobi from his family, someone the civilians had been ready to trust – the Kyuubi had attacked.
The village had been ravaged.
No war had ever entered the gates of Konoha – no war had ever been fought behind the safety of those walls.
It should have been the last straw – crushed every tiny bud of re-growing faith - and Konoha should have been destroyed and abandoned by its civilians. Shikaku couldn't help but think ensuring the unity of the village was one of the reasons Yondaime sacrificed himself. Yondaime was – or became – a symbol. The whole village uniting as one to defeat the monster. (It had taken Shikaku years to realize that Yondaime's legacy – the Kyuubi vessel – was also a symbol. One of hate.)
Civilian-ninja division in the village was a very real problem.
So Shikaku was always surprised when he went to the hospital and realized that the countless majority of doctors, nurses, and other employees were now civilians. Before the war had started, there had been a small proportion of civilians working there, but civilians usually went to their own civilian doctors, who worked in private cabinets or one of the civilian clinics, and didn't have anything to do with shinobi.
Yet since war broke out, though, civilian workers had begun to flock towards the ninja hospital, which really didn't heal only shinobi any longer.
Not only that, but Shikaku had noticed that an increasing number of civilians were studying at the ninja academy – and they weren't children, they were adults, who, if they'd started the academy at a normal age, would have graduated ten years or more before.
There were civilians out there who'd been born during the great wars, and who could remember Kyuubi's attack, and who'd resolved to become shinobi – civilians who'd never seemed attracted by the notion of fighting-and-killing-and-dying in real life and not merely in cheap thrilling novels, and who were now getting ready for the academy exam. Or who'd already passed it.
Adult civilians who had first-hand grounds not to trust ninjas to protect them, and who had decided to go and become ninjas.
It was a little overwhelming, Shikaku privately thought as he was greeted by one of the hospital receptionists, a red-haired woman in her twenties who'd previously been concentrating on her reading.
Next to him, Inoichi nodded towards the scroll. "Henge?"
"If only. No, walking up walls."
"Chakra control not easy, huh?" Inoichi sounded sympathetic. Shikaku thought it was damn hypocritical coming from him, but didn't comment. The red-head hadn't blushed so far.
The woman gave a dry laugh.
"You can say that again. You'd think that, logically, the more chakra you give the better you can adhere to the bloody wall."
She had the resentful tone of someone who'd been failing an exceptionally easy trick for a long time when she managed without breaking a sweat to complete far more complex moves.
If she'd started the academy as a child, she could have left the academy without ever worrying about walls and chakra control, and she might even have made it to chuunin, with the right luck. (Without luck, she'd have died during her first week out, because she'd have lost her balance as she painted a roof. That sort of freak accident had happened.)
Shikaku understood why the most basic chakra control exercises had been included in the things students had to be able to master in order to leave the academy, especially with the war.
It was the sort of things that were usually left to the jounin-sensei of the teams that had passed the last part of the test to become genins, and usually the jounin-sensei did teach those bits, over the following weeks or months, depending on the pace they wanted to set or the missions given to their teams. After all, it wasn't as if there was any urgency, unless you counted the eventuality of the chuunin exams.
But now… War didn't allow for time. Shikaku, who unlike Inoichi had never wanted to have a team of genins, now found himself acting as a sort of surrogate jounin-sensei for a good proportion of the genins who were staying in Konoha until they were ready to be sent on the war zones.
As one of the few senior jounins residing in the village, Shikaku was one of those who decided whether or not kids who'd graduated from the academy barely a handful of months or so ago could be trusted to fight and not have a mental break down – the way Hyuuga Hanabi had broken down, though Shikaku had to admit she'd had extenuating circumstances. Still, he was exceedingly glad he hadn't been the one to send the girl to war without making sure she had decent defenses against genjutsu – Byakugan or not. Hyuuga Hiashi had always put too much stock in his younger daughter, acting towards her as if she were five years older.
Inoichi laughed at something the woman had said. She flashed him a smirk that Shikaku could almost have called appealing if he'd been sure Yoshino wouldn't take it the wrong way if she were here, and Inoichi's lips twisted in a far-away smile.
When he was in that mood, waiting for Inoichi to be finished was hopeless. Chouza and Shikaku had used to roll their eyes a lot, but with the years they'd learned to simply take it in stride. With a wave of his hand, Shikaku indicated that he was continuing to Chouza's room, and nodded goodbye to the woman.
Inoichi caught up with him a few minutes later. By then, Chouza had already told him he'd be out in three days at the longest and they were making small talk, effortlessly avoiding all the necessary subjects – the kids, Yoshino's latest row with her husband, the kids' absence, Chouza's amusement at Shikaku's failed attempts to get Yoshino to forgive him for whatever he'd done, the kids' being late for report by five days.
Chouza just needed to look at Inoichi when his teammate entered the room, and chuckled.
"So, got a date? She pretty?"
"Don't encourage him," Shikaku warned as Inoichi took a chair, spinning it around so he could straddle it, arms hanging over the back. "We've decided long ago it's not good policy to date at work, and this," he gave an all-encompassing gesture of the finger, "is the hospital. Off-limits."
"Oh, she works at the hospital?" Chouza seemed interested. "Who is it? Do I know her?"
Shikaku snorted. "I doubt Inoichi knows her."
Chouza sent Shikaku a look that said plainly that Inoichi's promiscuity wasn't half as indiscriminate as Shikaku claimed, and that blatant sarcasm wouldn't deter Chouza from hearing the last installment of the great Inoichi Looking for True Love saga.
"Boys, boys." Inoichi raised in hands in a calming gesture. "First, I have no intention whatsoever of dating Kaede-san, who's young enough to be my daughter. Second, she wants to be done with the academy by next month anyway, so I will be helping her with her chakra control until then. Third – I know her, you're just the one who keeps mixing people up."
Shikaku wondered how much Inoichi honestly believed of what he said. He gave it two weeks; he informed Chouza of his estimate by discreetly raising two fingers of his right hand, as Inoichi was sitting on his left. Chouza's dispassionate look meant that he was on.
"She mentioned a boyfriend?" Shikaku casually inquired.
Inoichi looked startled.
"Er, no."
Chouza was stifling a laugh.
This, Shikaku reflected, was the exact reason he'd never wanted to be a jounin-sensei. It already felt way too much as if he was being the responsible figure of his teammate's life when it came to love and dating – and Shikaku was fully conscious of the irony of it, as Chouza had once declared him to be 'whipped' by his wife – and that had been for Inoichi's benefit. There had been no doubt in Shikaku's mind that Chouza had quietly reached his conclusion ages before.
Being mildly protective - making sure they at least somewhat recognized what they were getting into – was the sort of things you were supposed to do for your kids. …Well, it was true he'd never been able to do the same for Shikamaru.
And by the way, he probably should, though it'd come years too late and would only be met with Shikamaru's blankest look. The little twerp probably wouldn't take his advice seriously, and Shikaku had to admit it was only the accumulation of years upon years of little signs that made him register the obvious, in all its casual, unstated glory. The best he could hope to manage was embarrassing his son in front of his Sand girl, and – he'd have to carefully weigh the pros and cons.
Beside, he didn't doubt Shikamaru knew what he'd got into, or at least had a vague idea, or had come to realize it – because, as Shikaku once more told himself, it really was way too late, and he had never been that precocious, and how would he have been supposed to guess what was going on when his son's retelling of his match at the chuunin exams had been cursory at best (the kids had made the original Ino-Shika-Chou swear they wouldn't come and embarrass them)?
Admittedly, the girl's presence after his son's first mission as a chuunin should have tipped him off, but he'd been more focused on his son's depressed mood at the moment, and the boy had been as intent as ever on his 'girls are troublesome' way of life, and he'd even mentioned her in that context afterwards. …And that was a dead give-away.
On the other hand, Inoichi tended to get in over his head.
Shikaku had only ever met one man who'd been even more of an oblivious flirt than Inoichi, and of whom he'd been even less sure if the man did it on purpose, or if it was because he'd been raised that way, or if it was only a side-effect of his overpowering charisma, and that had been the Fourth Hokage.
They spent a few minutes more joking, until Chouza reminded them he was still at the hospital for a reason. Both of his teammates knew better than to argue – as an Akimichi who'd used military drugs since he was out of the academy, Chouza knew to take health recommendations very seriously. It was a bit of a paradox when one thought of his behavior when faced with actual danger, but Shikaku and Inoichi also knew better than to argue with that very specific brand of Chouza logic.
Upon leaving Chouza's room, the two men stopped for a moment in the corridor.
It was for once completely empty, a fact rare enough in those troubled times, and the silence of the place, only broken by the hisses of medical machines in the distance, considerably sobered them. Hospitals. Not places easily dealt with. That much stayed the same for ninjas and civilians. Having a friend at the hospital always shook you up, and it wasn't such a reassuring thought that Chouza had had it much worse and was in no kind of danger whatsoever. No matter the actual risk, nobody likes to have a friend there. Period.
They made a detour to leave the hospital, walking past the room in which they'd left the little Hyuuga girl one week ago – in which they knew she no longer was; they'd known it since the second day, when they'd seen an injured messenger laying in the bed, through the open door. They'd heard nothing about her since that night.
Shikaku thought of the message which must have reached her teammates and sensei since then, and wondered if such letters had been extended to also include the other members of the Rookie Nine which could be reached – which only left her cousin's team, which wasn't part of the Rookie Nine to begin with, though now, for everyone, they were. As for the two other teams – his son's was late and Shikaku had no idea whether the Hokage and the missing Team Seven were in any kind of contact.
He wondered about Hyuuga Neji's reaction, if he knew his cousin was alive, how badly he took being forbidden from returning to Konoha, if he was any less suicidal in his actions. Unbidden, he also wondered about the Hyuuga clan. They were probably in turmoil. Again. Still.
A week was a long time to spend in interrogation. Not that Shikaku had any experience. At any rate, it felt like a long time.
"It's probably a good sign there's been no word since then," he told Inoichi.
Yeah, it meant they had no proof yet that she'd betrayed them.
"Still, one week's a long time," Inoichi said in a neutral tone.
Unlike Shikaku, Inoichi had some knowledge of what sent on in interrogation rooms, before he'd specialized his possession jutsus to make them into fighting techniques and not spying ones.
When they were chuunins, he'd been caught a few times inside the body of someone else and been dragged to torture dungeons, and as there was a limit to how far the mind could – literally – snap in order to go back to his original body, and of course the purpose of the missions had been to avoid further wars in the first place, his teammates couldn't just charge in, carrying Inoichi's limp body. Inoichi had had to wait for them to sneak past the Mist-nins and rescue him, as there was only so much chakra control you could have on the body of an untrained civilian clerk.
On the worst mission – the one when he'd actually been supposed to impersonate a spy – he'd had to wait four days.
If Inoichi said a week was a long time, then it was.
Shikaku would have liked running into the Hokage, if at all possible, to have at least a guess of what to expect. It felt like there was nothing else they could do but wait, for the Hyuuga girl, for Chouza to be back on active duty, for their kids to come home.
It was more than a long time. It was forever.
Part IV
Author:
runespoor7Rating: PG-13
Summary: In the middle of a war the usual thing is that people die. It's more unusual when they return alive after having been thought dead for three months. Hinata, after being a prisoner in Sound, does.
Notes: in this part: back to the original Ino-Shika-Chou.
Part I
Part II
III.
With their friend at the hospital, it wasn't surprising that Shikaku and Inoichi went there as often as they could, once or sometimes twice a day. When Shikaku confronted his inner Yoshino voice – the one that criticized him when Yoshino didn't, over things Yoshino would never have reproached him – he admitted that it was probably pushing it, as Chouza wasn't in any danger and just needed time, but the medic-nin wasn't born who'd try and keep teammates at bay when one of theirs was in the hospital.
It was another of those unwritten ninja rules.
Besides, Shikaku and Inoichi were experienced jounin and respectable, upstanding citizens – most of the time – so they knew not to nag the hospital employees.
Nowadays there were only a couple of full-fledged medic-nins attached to the Konoha hospital, and the Hokage for the visits she managed to cram in her overloaded timetable – the others had all been sent on the front. Tsunade had even dispatched her assistant; Shizune's skills, she said, would be more usefully employed in war zones. The genins fresh out of the academy were used as helpers and taught the basic life-saving gestures under the charges of a handful of their older counterparts, while veterans, too patched up and old for the Hokage to envisage them as potential weapons, ran most of the organizational work.
The hospital had changed, drastically, and Shikaku, who'd lived through and remembered the great wars, wasn't sure what to think of it. Logically speaking, it was a much-needed rationalization of the workings of the village for the time being, but it also made the average civilian more aware of what was going on.
Not that a reasonably intelligent civilian wouldn't notice it, of course; Shikaku had civilians in his family and the Nara clan wasn't even half as grounded in civilian society as the Yamanaka, so he knew that much.
But still, he couldn't help the idea that civilians were to be protected. They had no special skills, no control on their chakra, most of them wouldn't even be able to stand their own on a fight against kids at the academy – without even speaking of bloodline limits.
What they did was they allowed the village to work.
That was more than enough; it was up to the shinobi to keep their end of the bargain and protect the whole population. And if the ninjas couldn't – then the civilians were within their full rights if they chose to whisper against the ninjas.
Shikaku had witnessed it during the great wars; the contempt most ninjas had against civilians, who didn't know what it meant to fight and kill and die, and the distrust civilians responded with. What good was it to live in a Hidden Village, led by a shinobi and meant for shinobi, if the shinobi couldn't even do their jobs correctly?
Then, right after the end of the wars, when a new, shining, charismatic young Hokage had been chosen – the ninja who'd risen to fame because of the willpower he put in the peace treaties, a man who was the first shinobi from his family, someone the civilians had been ready to trust – the Kyuubi had attacked.
The village had been ravaged.
No war had ever entered the gates of Konoha – no war had ever been fought behind the safety of those walls.
It should have been the last straw – crushed every tiny bud of re-growing faith - and Konoha should have been destroyed and abandoned by its civilians. Shikaku couldn't help but think ensuring the unity of the village was one of the reasons Yondaime sacrificed himself. Yondaime was – or became – a symbol. The whole village uniting as one to defeat the monster. (It had taken Shikaku years to realize that Yondaime's legacy – the Kyuubi vessel – was also a symbol. One of hate.)
Civilian-ninja division in the village was a very real problem.
So Shikaku was always surprised when he went to the hospital and realized that the countless majority of doctors, nurses, and other employees were now civilians. Before the war had started, there had been a small proportion of civilians working there, but civilians usually went to their own civilian doctors, who worked in private cabinets or one of the civilian clinics, and didn't have anything to do with shinobi.
Yet since war broke out, though, civilian workers had begun to flock towards the ninja hospital, which really didn't heal only shinobi any longer.
Not only that, but Shikaku had noticed that an increasing number of civilians were studying at the ninja academy – and they weren't children, they were adults, who, if they'd started the academy at a normal age, would have graduated ten years or more before.
There were civilians out there who'd been born during the great wars, and who could remember Kyuubi's attack, and who'd resolved to become shinobi – civilians who'd never seemed attracted by the notion of fighting-and-killing-and-dying in real life and not merely in cheap thrilling novels, and who were now getting ready for the academy exam. Or who'd already passed it.
Adult civilians who had first-hand grounds not to trust ninjas to protect them, and who had decided to go and become ninjas.
It was a little overwhelming, Shikaku privately thought as he was greeted by one of the hospital receptionists, a red-haired woman in her twenties who'd previously been concentrating on her reading.
Next to him, Inoichi nodded towards the scroll. "Henge?"
"If only. No, walking up walls."
"Chakra control not easy, huh?" Inoichi sounded sympathetic. Shikaku thought it was damn hypocritical coming from him, but didn't comment. The red-head hadn't blushed so far.
The woman gave a dry laugh.
"You can say that again. You'd think that, logically, the more chakra you give the better you can adhere to the bloody wall."
She had the resentful tone of someone who'd been failing an exceptionally easy trick for a long time when she managed without breaking a sweat to complete far more complex moves.
If she'd started the academy as a child, she could have left the academy without ever worrying about walls and chakra control, and she might even have made it to chuunin, with the right luck. (Without luck, she'd have died during her first week out, because she'd have lost her balance as she painted a roof. That sort of freak accident had happened.)
Shikaku understood why the most basic chakra control exercises had been included in the things students had to be able to master in order to leave the academy, especially with the war.
It was the sort of things that were usually left to the jounin-sensei of the teams that had passed the last part of the test to become genins, and usually the jounin-sensei did teach those bits, over the following weeks or months, depending on the pace they wanted to set or the missions given to their teams. After all, it wasn't as if there was any urgency, unless you counted the eventuality of the chuunin exams.
But now… War didn't allow for time. Shikaku, who unlike Inoichi had never wanted to have a team of genins, now found himself acting as a sort of surrogate jounin-sensei for a good proportion of the genins who were staying in Konoha until they were ready to be sent on the war zones.
As one of the few senior jounins residing in the village, Shikaku was one of those who decided whether or not kids who'd graduated from the academy barely a handful of months or so ago could be trusted to fight and not have a mental break down – the way Hyuuga Hanabi had broken down, though Shikaku had to admit she'd had extenuating circumstances. Still, he was exceedingly glad he hadn't been the one to send the girl to war without making sure she had decent defenses against genjutsu – Byakugan or not. Hyuuga Hiashi had always put too much stock in his younger daughter, acting towards her as if she were five years older.
Inoichi laughed at something the woman had said. She flashed him a smirk that Shikaku could almost have called appealing if he'd been sure Yoshino wouldn't take it the wrong way if she were here, and Inoichi's lips twisted in a far-away smile.
When he was in that mood, waiting for Inoichi to be finished was hopeless. Chouza and Shikaku had used to roll their eyes a lot, but with the years they'd learned to simply take it in stride. With a wave of his hand, Shikaku indicated that he was continuing to Chouza's room, and nodded goodbye to the woman.
Inoichi caught up with him a few minutes later. By then, Chouza had already told him he'd be out in three days at the longest and they were making small talk, effortlessly avoiding all the necessary subjects – the kids, Yoshino's latest row with her husband, the kids' absence, Chouza's amusement at Shikaku's failed attempts to get Yoshino to forgive him for whatever he'd done, the kids' being late for report by five days.
Chouza just needed to look at Inoichi when his teammate entered the room, and chuckled.
"So, got a date? She pretty?"
"Don't encourage him," Shikaku warned as Inoichi took a chair, spinning it around so he could straddle it, arms hanging over the back. "We've decided long ago it's not good policy to date at work, and this," he gave an all-encompassing gesture of the finger, "is the hospital. Off-limits."
"Oh, she works at the hospital?" Chouza seemed interested. "Who is it? Do I know her?"
Shikaku snorted. "I doubt Inoichi knows her."
Chouza sent Shikaku a look that said plainly that Inoichi's promiscuity wasn't half as indiscriminate as Shikaku claimed, and that blatant sarcasm wouldn't deter Chouza from hearing the last installment of the great Inoichi Looking for True Love saga.
"Boys, boys." Inoichi raised in hands in a calming gesture. "First, I have no intention whatsoever of dating Kaede-san, who's young enough to be my daughter. Second, she wants to be done with the academy by next month anyway, so I will be helping her with her chakra control until then. Third – I know her, you're just the one who keeps mixing people up."
Shikaku wondered how much Inoichi honestly believed of what he said. He gave it two weeks; he informed Chouza of his estimate by discreetly raising two fingers of his right hand, as Inoichi was sitting on his left. Chouza's dispassionate look meant that he was on.
"She mentioned a boyfriend?" Shikaku casually inquired.
Inoichi looked startled.
"Er, no."
Chouza was stifling a laugh.
This, Shikaku reflected, was the exact reason he'd never wanted to be a jounin-sensei. It already felt way too much as if he was being the responsible figure of his teammate's life when it came to love and dating – and Shikaku was fully conscious of the irony of it, as Chouza had once declared him to be 'whipped' by his wife – and that had been for Inoichi's benefit. There had been no doubt in Shikaku's mind that Chouza had quietly reached his conclusion ages before.
Being mildly protective - making sure they at least somewhat recognized what they were getting into – was the sort of things you were supposed to do for your kids. …Well, it was true he'd never been able to do the same for Shikamaru.
And by the way, he probably should, though it'd come years too late and would only be met with Shikamaru's blankest look. The little twerp probably wouldn't take his advice seriously, and Shikaku had to admit it was only the accumulation of years upon years of little signs that made him register the obvious, in all its casual, unstated glory. The best he could hope to manage was embarrassing his son in front of his Sand girl, and – he'd have to carefully weigh the pros and cons.
Beside, he didn't doubt Shikamaru knew what he'd got into, or at least had a vague idea, or had come to realize it – because, as Shikaku once more told himself, it really was way too late, and he had never been that precocious, and how would he have been supposed to guess what was going on when his son's retelling of his match at the chuunin exams had been cursory at best (the kids had made the original Ino-Shika-Chou swear they wouldn't come and embarrass them)?
Admittedly, the girl's presence after his son's first mission as a chuunin should have tipped him off, but he'd been more focused on his son's depressed mood at the moment, and the boy had been as intent as ever on his 'girls are troublesome' way of life, and he'd even mentioned her in that context afterwards. …And that was a dead give-away.
On the other hand, Inoichi tended to get in over his head.
Shikaku had only ever met one man who'd been even more of an oblivious flirt than Inoichi, and of whom he'd been even less sure if the man did it on purpose, or if it was because he'd been raised that way, or if it was only a side-effect of his overpowering charisma, and that had been the Fourth Hokage.
They spent a few minutes more joking, until Chouza reminded them he was still at the hospital for a reason. Both of his teammates knew better than to argue – as an Akimichi who'd used military drugs since he was out of the academy, Chouza knew to take health recommendations very seriously. It was a bit of a paradox when one thought of his behavior when faced with actual danger, but Shikaku and Inoichi also knew better than to argue with that very specific brand of Chouza logic.
Upon leaving Chouza's room, the two men stopped for a moment in the corridor.
It was for once completely empty, a fact rare enough in those troubled times, and the silence of the place, only broken by the hisses of medical machines in the distance, considerably sobered them. Hospitals. Not places easily dealt with. That much stayed the same for ninjas and civilians. Having a friend at the hospital always shook you up, and it wasn't such a reassuring thought that Chouza had had it much worse and was in no kind of danger whatsoever. No matter the actual risk, nobody likes to have a friend there. Period.
They made a detour to leave the hospital, walking past the room in which they'd left the little Hyuuga girl one week ago – in which they knew she no longer was; they'd known it since the second day, when they'd seen an injured messenger laying in the bed, through the open door. They'd heard nothing about her since that night.
Shikaku thought of the message which must have reached her teammates and sensei since then, and wondered if such letters had been extended to also include the other members of the Rookie Nine which could be reached – which only left her cousin's team, which wasn't part of the Rookie Nine to begin with, though now, for everyone, they were. As for the two other teams – his son's was late and Shikaku had no idea whether the Hokage and the missing Team Seven were in any kind of contact.
He wondered about Hyuuga Neji's reaction, if he knew his cousin was alive, how badly he took being forbidden from returning to Konoha, if he was any less suicidal in his actions. Unbidden, he also wondered about the Hyuuga clan. They were probably in turmoil. Again. Still.
A week was a long time to spend in interrogation. Not that Shikaku had any experience. At any rate, it felt like a long time.
"It's probably a good sign there's been no word since then," he told Inoichi.
Yeah, it meant they had no proof yet that she'd betrayed them.
"Still, one week's a long time," Inoichi said in a neutral tone.
Unlike Shikaku, Inoichi had some knowledge of what sent on in interrogation rooms, before he'd specialized his possession jutsus to make them into fighting techniques and not spying ones.
When they were chuunins, he'd been caught a few times inside the body of someone else and been dragged to torture dungeons, and as there was a limit to how far the mind could – literally – snap in order to go back to his original body, and of course the purpose of the missions had been to avoid further wars in the first place, his teammates couldn't just charge in, carrying Inoichi's limp body. Inoichi had had to wait for them to sneak past the Mist-nins and rescue him, as there was only so much chakra control you could have on the body of an untrained civilian clerk.
On the worst mission – the one when he'd actually been supposed to impersonate a spy – he'd had to wait four days.
If Inoichi said a week was a long time, then it was.
Shikaku would have liked running into the Hokage, if at all possible, to have at least a guess of what to expect. It felt like there was nothing else they could do but wait, for the Hyuuga girl, for Chouza to be back on active duty, for their kids to come home.
It was more than a long time. It was forever.
Part IV
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Date: 2007-01-08 10:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-09 04:25 pm (UTC)I'm really glad Konoha-in-the-war works out for you. I've been trying to give a feel of the world without info-dumping (too much) and I wasn't sure how well I'd managed. Most of the anecdotes are unplanned and Just Happen as the character is thinking and a stricter writer would probably scrap a lot of them, but, what can I say. I'm self-indulgent.
I've really rambled there, but it's out of relief that minor character PoV works here!