Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

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Let me tell you what I wish I'd known

When I was young and dreamed of glory:

You have no control:

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story

~ Hamilton; The Musical

.

.

Aoba and I stripped ourselves of anything ninja related – our headbands, our flak jackets, my clan symbol… and all our weapons. We sealed them away, so they were still at hand, but I felt supremely uncomfortable. I'd never been in such a perilous position with no weapons at all – heck, it had been months since I'd even left the house without my kunai pouch.

I even, reluctantly, undid my very identifiable braid and let my hair hang loose. It was immediately whipped about by the wind that barely existed, tangling up and flying into my face. Forget looks, any kunoichi that fought with loose hair had clearly mastered an arcane and mystical art.

Aoba threw his arm around my shoulder. "Don't sweat it, little sister," he said. "We're just two totally civilian travellers heading to the famous hot springs for a holiday."

I tried to relax my shoulders. "Absolutely civilian, nothing to see here," I agreed.

We doubled back, heading south until we hit the main highway from Land of Fire to Land of Hot Springs. It was pretty quiet, actually – a side effect of the border stalemate meant that we'd been funnelling anyone who didn't need to go this way away for months now. The lockdown would only increase that… and if it came to outright fighting? Well. Only those brave, stupid, or utterly without options would try and cross that.

We hashed out our cover as we went – nothing complicated, and we'd already had a stash of Intel Division fall-back excuses on tap, but it wouldn't be a good idea to contradict each other, and with increased ninja presence in the area it would be a good idea to have harmless reasons why we were poking our noses into things.

And despite our precautions, we didn't run into any signs of Cloud ninja on the way. I didn't even sense any. That didn't mean they weren't watching from a distance, but clearly this invasion was still in the 'secrecy' stage and not the 'outright occupancy' stage.

We arrived pretty late in the afternoon, close to sundown. The main tourist destination in the Land of Hot Springs was a town that had once been the Village Hidden in Hot Water – only now there were no ninja left. They'd sort of just… faded away and the village itself had been prosperous enough to survive without them. They were a buffer nation, though, directly between Land of Fire and Land of Lightning and things were probably about to get very rocky for them.

But on the road to the town, I paused.

"Something up?" Aoba asked, quietly. He turned, facing me so we were covering opposite directions.

I hesitated. "I'm not sure," I said, reluctantly. My chakra sense was reliable but it was hard to put into words things that didn't have direct cause. I just felt them. "I sense… it's nothing concrete. The chakra around the town is a little weird. That happens sometimes," I hurried on. "It could be a natural thing. Caused by the hot springs, maybe? It's kind of… heavy. Muggy."

"You sure you're not talking about the temperature?" He asked, jokingly.

I nodded, taking the question seriously. "They could be related – Land of Snow was." I shrugged. "It could be nothing. Sometimes it just happens like that. 'Weird chakra' has only been mission relevant for me once." I tried to lightning the mood, then had to reconsider. Land of Snow had turned out to be mission relevant at the end, with the generator. "Well, twice." And the monks at the Fire Temple- "Okay, three times."

"Okay," Aoba said. "Weird chakra things. Noted. We'll keep our eyes open."

"Yeah," I exhaled. "Let's do that."

And we were only just slightly north of Land of Fire, but the difference in temperature was astonishing. I was fanning myself with my hand as we wandered in to find a hotel and my clothes were sticking to me in totally unpleasant ways. Part of it was that I wasn't able to temperature regulate with chakra like I would have if I wasn't playing at being civilian, but it was just so damn humid.

"And you can grab towels for the house hot springs at the front desk any time!" the nice older lady running the place said to us. "They're lovely to unwind in at the end of a long day travelling."

"Sounds perfect," Aoba told her, and he nudged me with his elbow as we went down the hallways to our room. "We should totally investigate that. Who knows what kinds of secrets are hiding in the water."

I gave him a look that tried to be scandalised but was mostly just amused. "Are you implying we took a trip to the Land of Hot Springs for the purpose of visiting the hot springs?"

He grinned. "I'm just saying, we have to seize the opportunities that are presented to us."

We did anyway, after getting something to eat because everything was shut. For a tourist town, it was dead quiet.

"Relaxing," Aoba noted, sliding into the water. He was still wearing his sunglasses, the nerd.

It was, but I wasn't going to tell him that. "Boring," I sighed, leaning back against the rocks and watching the steam rising into the air. "You'd think there'd be a little bit of nightlife."

"What a wild party animal you are," he deadpanned. "Oh wait, where was it you wanted to go? The library?"

I yawned and flicked water at him, half-heartedly. "Shuddup."

The hot springs rocks were clearly sized for people who were taller than me, because I kept sliding down them into the water. The third time I ended up with water up my nose and being laughed at for it, I was done.

"Alright, I'm out," I declared, hauling myself out of the water and padding back to the changing rooms. The hotel host was in there, changing soaps and cleaning up, and I gave her a sleepy smile as I went past.

I got changed and started to use the towel to dry out my hair and stood-

And immediately the world went white around me, bright, too bright, fuzzing around the edges, and I was too too hot and my blood was pounding beneath my skin –

Attack?

My chakra surged, even as my knees buckled and I hit the ground with a clatter, knocking against one of the bathroom stands.

But there was nothing. My chakra was fine. It pulsed through my body chasing away the strange moment of weakness. I even tried to discretely check for poison, but came up negative.

"Are you alright dear?" the host asked me, clearly concerned. She hurried over, hands reaching for me.

I gave her a weak smile. "Just stood up too fast," I said awkwardly.

She nodded in understanding. "It's the heat," she said, and guided me to a stool. "You just sit there, I'll get you a glass of water!"

She hurried away.

"Shikako?" Aoba called, warily from outside. I had no doubt he was prepared to spring into action. "What happened?"

"I'm fine, niisan!" I called back, hoping the reference to our cover would convince him I was telling the truth and not lying under duress. Now what to say… 'I tripped' would probably just put the alarm meter right up. "I was practicing some new dance moves!"

"Brothers worry, don't they?" The host said, handing me the promised glass of water. "Now, you drink that right up! It's so humid you don't really notice it, but people get dehydrated very fast around here!"

Was that really what it was? I was so used to my ninja body being a finely tuned weapon, bursting with so much chakra that things like 'standing up too fast' and 'not enough water' didn't really affect it at all. Not in such minuscule amounts, anyway.

"Ah, so embarrassing," I said, playing it up, just a fraction. It was embarrassing, but my natural reaction would have been to pretend it had never happened. "Thank you, Oba-san."

There was a distant ringing noise, like the striking of a bell.

"What's that?" I asked, even though I could have guessed.

"The monks!" She replied, brightly. "They do some kind of prayer service that ends with ringing the city bells. It used to be quite terrible – they'd ring them at midnight! Can you imagine? But people kept complaining so they got earlier and earlier and now they ring them at dusk. And at dawn in the morning."

"Ah, my brother is going to go see them tomorrow!" I said. "It sounds really boring."

She laughed. "Maybe if you're young. You'll see them anyway, if you're in town. They march through the streets a couple of times a day. For prayers, they say, but it's mostly to collect donations."

"Ah," I said, finishing my glass of water and swinging my feet. I wondered if there was an easy way out of this conversation now.

"Is your brother the spiritual type?" she asked, curiously.

"Oh, no," I said, easily sliding into the cover we'd worked out. "He's a book writer! We're looking for ghost stories!"

"Ghosts!" she feigned shock. "How scary!"

I nodded, eagerly, trying to portray nothing but a harmless teenager. "We were in Bird Country before! Did you know, the prince died because his advisor betrayed him and then his ghost came back to seek vengeance!" I paused. "Or that's what they said."

It wasn't like many people knew the real story anyway. It sounded good, and that was the point.

"Well, I don't know anything like that," she said, clearly thinking about it. "Yugakure has been so peaceful for a long time! Maybe Old Yama will – he used to work with the ninja, when they lived here. If there's anything that sounds like ghost stories, it's ninja!"

I beamed at her. Perfect. "Just what I wanted to hear! Thanks, Oba-san!"

.

.

The next morning, the sound of bells woke me.

"Ugh," I muttered, dragging myself upright and nearly tripping on the tangled bedcovers. "Make it stop."

Aoba groaned and threw his forearm over his eyes, not even trying to get up. "I haven't slept this badly," he rasped, "since… I don't even know. A long time."

I staggered to the bathroom and tried to drown my face in the sink. The cold water worked briefly to wake me up, but it only made me aware of how unpleasant I was actually feeling. My nightclothes were sticky with sweat. My hair was frizzy. I'd somehow managed to pull a muscle right between my shoulders.

"Ow," I said, pitifully, completely unable to reach it and make it feel better.

The first two problems I took care of, with a quick, cold shower and securing my hair in a braid. The pulled muscle, unfortunately, didn't go so quickly. I traded off the bathroom and started trying to stretch, hoping to loosen it enough to not be painful.

"What are you doing?" Aoba asked, bemused, once he was done getting ready. He stretched too, and I heard his shoulders click.

"Ow," I repeated, just as pitiful the second time. "I pulled a muscle. Right on my spine."

"I'm not a medic nin," he said, "but I'm pretty sure the spine isn't made of muscle." But he stepped behind me and started pressing down, hands deft and sure. There was chakra in his hands and it started to sink into my back, easing it up.

"That's better, thanks," I said, sighing.

He snorted. "At this rate, we won't have to worry about Cloud ninja. This place'll kill us."

"Changed your mind about it being the perfect vacation spot, huh?"

We split up, Aoba going towards the temple to see if the monks had kept any records of the ninja here and I went towards the library to see if they had any old newspapers on record – or any records of the ninja from the village at all. I was pretty sure Hidan had been from around here, and I was pretty sure that that would have involved murders, so I was hoping there was some kind of trail.

I saw the monks that I'd been warned about, a group of them moving through the streets and chanting. They even had music to accompany their chanting, some tapping staves to the ground, others carrying small drums. But most interesting to me was the path of chakra that travelled along, stamping the same purpose into the earth day by day until it left a mark behind. I could have followed their circuit around the village with my eyes closed.

Still. That wasn't why I was here. Chakra based mysteries could wait until after I had information.

At the library, the librarian showed me to the microfiche and newspaper stashes and even suggested a few years to check out in response to my 'ghost stories' prompt.

There was even a cat sleeping on a nearby chair that I went to pat.

"Aw," I said, hand freezing in the air. I looked for the librarian.

She misunderstood my look. "He's very friendly; you can pat him."

"No, um," I said awkwardly. Poor kitty. There was definitely no movement of his sides as he breathed. As in, he was definitely not breathing. "I don't think he's very well?"

"Oh, Chibi," she sighed and came closer to lay a hand on his head. "You missed Mimi that bad, huh?"

She scooped him up and took him away and I scuttled back to the microfiche and tried to look very, very busy.

.

.

I met up with Aoba for dinner. We picked up something to eat at a food cart and found ourselves a very quiet spot to catch up.

"Does this symbol mean anything to you?" he asked, wiping his hands and pulling out a square of paper with a hastily drawn triangle-in-a-circle on it.

"Yeah," I said, then repeated it again, more sure. "Yeah. That's the cult symbol."

He tucked the paper back away again. "I thought so. I found a few places marked with it – I'm going to go and check them out."

"Okay," I said. "I'm going to try and talk to the people that the lady at the hotel mentioned. Maybe some of them will remember the ninja that used to live here."

"I'll meet up with you back at the hotel," he agreed. "Maybe we can investigate the hot springs again, eh?"

We split up. The temperature was getting a little more comfortable now that the sun was going down, but it was still so damned oppressive. And I was a person that was far more comfortable with heat than cold at that.

I passed a monk sitting with a donation bowl and threw a few coins in, the same as the other passers-by were doing. Out of curiosity, my feet fell onto the path that the monks had walked around the town. It looped, a full circle, centred perfectly around the Temple.

There was something… there was something strange about it. It didn't feel like the monks at the Fire Temple, I mused as I walked.

Obviously, I didn't expect them to feel the exact same. They were different people in different places following different spiritual paths…

And yet.

Maybe it was just that this one made me feel uneasy?

The chakra of the Fire Temple had been patient. The kind of patience that came from an unhurried life, where every day brought more of the same. Constant. Ceaseless.

This was. Something else.

Patience, still, but a more watchful kind, maybe? The feeling of waiting for something. Of anticipation.

I finished the circle and branched off inwards, choosing one of the two paths that intersected with the rim of the circle in a 'v', another street through the town that they had filled with fading echoes of their will.

I could hear the chanting of the monks, starting to rise now as they began evening prayers.

I stopped.

I was walking in a straight line.

The circle had had three points where this path had crossed it, each a 'v' leading in two directions. If I overlaid those two facts in my head-

A circle with a triangle inside. The symbol of Jashin.

Oh goddammit. They'd been hiding in plain sight. The monks were the cultists.

There's a hell of a lot of them, I thought, a little uneasily. But they could hardly all be as dangerous as Hidan. Most likely very few of them had any power at all. And they had no reason to know we were here, or that we were ninja.

Apart from us nosing around potentially looking for a cult of Jashin.

I would just… wait for Aoba to come back and we would make a new plan. Simple. No problem.

From my left, just into the woods outside the town, there was a burst of screaming birds and rustling feathers as a hundred crows tried to take off. Fire sparked and smoked filled the air.

"Shit," I said, clearly and distinctly. "Great timing, Aoba."

I spun, ready to leap off and get involved in whatever fight was going on –

And the world went out from underneath me.

My legs buckled and my palms hit the concrete with an awkward smack as I failed to compensate for the unexpected weakness. The world seemed bright and fuzzy and I couldn't get enough air.

I watched as, across the street, two children playing catch both faltered and swayed and went down. Their ball bounced away, rolling past me and down the road.

"Oh," I breathed, and forced myself up onto hands and knees. It took so much effort – to think, then to act, like every decision was suddenly an insurmountable task, a Sisyphean calculation before I could move – even though my pure and visceral reaction told me what I wanted to do.

"You fuckers."