A world with you in it - 3
So it looks like Ino will be playing the romcom sidekick 8D
i don't even know
III.
The darkest hours of night had already gone by when ANBU Crane stepped into the small Intelligence Division’s locker room to change out of her gear and into regular clothes, more than ready to go home and sleep the following day away. It was a stroke of luck that the room was empty, as most of her coworkers usually clocked out around this time too, and she decided to take full advantage of the extra bench space to lay down and breathe freely for the first time in three hours.
After talking to Tiger, she had gone straight to the office of the Leaf’s resident seal experts to deliver the two-way scroll containing his package. She had never had much reason to go there before, but the one time she had visited the place during the orientation session on her first day at ANBU had left her with the distinct impression that anyone who dedicated themselves to the study of seals operated on some sort of parallel universe where up was down, right was wrong and everyone was one stroke short of a kanji. Her visit this time did nothing to contradict the notion.
The minute that she had opened the door, a giant ball of flame had erupted from the middle of the room to the sound of slightly hysterical laughter and raucous applause. Her reflexes were fast enough that she jumped back into the hallway on time to avoid getting singed, but the wrecked ceiling and doorway had not been so fortunate and spoke of a real danger averted. Her heart thumped against her ribcage and her ears refused to stop replaying the white roar the flame had made on a loop. She did a quick breathing exercise to get her pulse under control, then went in for round two.
Modulating her tone to her best impression of Captain Ibiki’s pissed off voice, she dropped Tiger’s package on the nearest desk and informed the so-called experts that she expected them to have results within the next six hours or else.
Really, if ever she had wondered why, out of everyone in the Intelligence Division, it was the sealing department that had gotten a room of them own to play in, now she was quite certain that it was solely for the protection of every other ninja who worked there. To think that the ninjas working on the field thought that they had the most dangerous part of the job...
After that, being able to sit down in the peace and quiet of the locker room, eyes closed and savoring the first waves of drowsiness after a long day’s work, was bliss. She wished she could make the feeling last forever, but, sadly, there was no rest for the ANBU. It was not long until she heard a set of approaching footsteps.
The door opened, revealing a younger girl, with long blond hair tied up in a ponytail and the bluest of eyes.
“Hello, Ino,” she welcomed the newcomer, reluctantly sitting up to make room for her friend. “Are you coming in or heading out?”
“Hey, Rin! Oh! Sorry... I mean Crane.” After the cheerful greeting, the next part of her answer was rather redundant. No one who had finished working a shift could sound so energized, unless, of course, they were someone like Sakura Haruno or Naruto Uzumaki. “Just coming in, actually.”
Rin was very fond of the Yamanaka girl. She had known her for years now, having apprenticed under her late father, Inoichi, after graduating from the Academy. He was one of the wisest men she knew, but also one of the kindest, often inviting the team over for dinner at his home, with his wife and daughter. He had died during the last war and the pain of losing him was still fresh in Rin’s mind, as she was sure it was in Ino’s. He had helped Rin to not just become an excellent ninja, but a better person. In many ways, he had been like a father to her and was the reason why Rin, who had been trained as a medical ninja, had found her calling working in Intelligence. Because of this, she could not help but think of Ino in a sisterly fashion.
“So, did anything interesting happen during your shift?” Ino asked, incorrigible gossip that she was. “And by ‘interesting’ I mean Uchiha.”
“Ino!” Rin gasped, scandalized. She had confided in the Yamanaka just the one time and here she was regretting it all over again. “Stop that! It’s nothing like that and, besides, I’m not even supposed to know what clan he’s from!”
“Oh, it is exactly like that and you know it. You don’t fool me! I don’t know why you don’t just ask him out when he’s in the village and be done with it. It’s not like you don’t know when he will be around or anything.”
Rin felt all the calm that her short rest had afforded her slipping through her fingers. If anyone came in and heard the things coming out of Ino’s mouth, she would be in big trouble and standing before an inquiry committee trying to explain why she had abused her position to learn personal information about a fellow ANBU before she could say “Ino’s fault”.
Unfortunately for her, Ino was not done yet.
“It would be good for you, you know? You spend too much time on your own. It’s depressing! When was the last time you went out with anyone? And I don’t just mean on a date, either. When was the last time you went out with friends?”
To her endless embarrassment, Rin made the mistake of actually taking the question seriously and giving it some thought. She took so long to come up with an answer that she ended up giving Ino all the ammunition she needed to prove her point.
“You see?” the younger girl said. “So, the next time you talk with your boyfriend, ask him out! His codename is Tiger, for crying out loud! What more incentive do you need?”
Between the crazed pranks of the sealing team and Ino’s well-meaning but uncalled for pushing, Rin found herself wondering about her life-choices, particularly those that had led her to work in ANBU and to call Ino a friend. “This place... I see... I’m in hell,” she murmured to herself.
The sudden drumbeat of feet hitting the ground outside put an end to the girls’ conversation. No one ran inside the ANBU headquarters unless something very serious was going on and, by the sound of it, whoever it was, was coming their way.
Ino and she had both gotten up to check what the disturbance was about when the locker room door opened with a bang, revealing Aoba Yamashiro.
“Rin! Thank the heavens you’re still here! You’re needed in the Communication Room, there’s a medical emergency!”
Rin stopped only long enough to grab her back pouch off the bench, before darting off at double the speed Aoba had came. She could hear his and Ino’s footsteps following her all the way, but the sole thing on her mind was of how she had to put her exhaustion aside. Rifling through her supplies yielded a pair of food pills which she gulped down dry en route to whatever trouble awaited her.
Bursting through the Communication Room doors, Rin quickly spotted where it was she needed to go.
“What’s wrong?” she asked Ibiki Morino, captain of the Division. The fact that he was there was indication enough that something had indeed gone very wrong with one of the field teams.
Tiger? the thought flitted past her mind before she dismissed it as impossible. She had spoken to him tonight already and he had not been in any danger.
“Nohara, glad you made it,” Captain Ibiki greeted Rin. She usually found him a little hard to talk to, a little rough around the edges, but times like these made her grateful for his pragmatism. “One of our ninjas was severely wounded and there’s no one with medical expertise on his team to help. The situation is still hot with ongoing fighting, but you have to get there and patch him up.”
“Understood, sir,” she replied without hesitation, pushing her short brown hair behind her ears and settling down in front of the chakra transmission communication device that was already calibrated for her.
This was it, the reason why she had joined the Intelligence Division when she could have so easily gone on to have a brilliant career as a surgeon in the Leaf Hospital, away from the dangers of ANBU missions.
Her sensei Inoichi had seen the potential in her and nurtured it, going so far as to use his position as head of the Yamanaka clan and ANBU Captain to bend the rules for her. Throughout the Third Ninja World War, he had witnessed her skills and how she always managed to find a way to patch up her teammates’ wounds when proper medical supplies were nowhere to be seen. They could all admit that she was no Tsunade, but her ability to keep her cool, think creatively and work efficiently under duress were far above the ordinary and had saved plenty of lives.
Loathe to see skills like hers go to waste in a Hospital that was already full of perfectly competent doctors, Inoichi had taught her the secret Mind Body Switch technique of the Yamanaka - under oath that she would not pass on the knowledge to anyone else - and created a new position in the Black Ops just for her, that of long-distance medical assistant. What the title meant was that, whenever one of their ninjas was critically wounded without having anyone nearby who could provide medical assistance, Rin would transfer her conscience into one of their teammates and administer treatment in situ herself.
The dangers were high. Often the conflicts were not entirely resolved by the time Rin got there and so she was effectively jumping into a dangerous situation having no prior knowledge of her surroundings, putting not only her life at risk but that of whoever’s body she occupied.
Statistics showed that there had been a decrease in the numbers of ninjas killed in action since Inoichi had implemented the long-distance medical assistant system, but many ANBU operatives were still weary of putting their lives in the hands of some medic girl they had never met before and therefore refused to contact headquarters to call for help to deal with injuries that were treatable. Inoichi and Ibiki had done the math once, after careful analysis of the mission reports with recorded casualties: a third of those deaths could have been avoided if the team captains had decided to request assistance from headquarters.
Rin understood the concerns of the ANBU working on the field, of course, but still wished that these warrior types could admit to needing help every once in a while.
As soon as the headset of the transmission device was in place, Rin performed the Mind Body Switch technique. It pulled her conscience across the wiring connecting her to the machine behind her and then ejected her in the direction she had to go. There was a long distance to travel, so the technique took a couple of seconds to take hold, but the moment she opened her eyes again, Rin was no longer in the Leaf.
She was glad to see that the Leaf team had been careful to hide both their injured teammate and the one who would be serving as medic in some kind of abandoned room. The chamber was grand, with two rows of pillars flanking a central corridor, connecting a single door at one end to a large statue of a Buddha on the other. Besides that statue, the room was bare, adorned only with carvings in the limestone walls that were frighteningly intricate. Rin recognized some depictions of major Bosatsus, but she could only guess what the rest of the pictures meant since she did not even know what country she was in.
“Whirlpool,” her host was kind enough to supply.
Her location was the least of her concerns, however, as before her lay her patient, bleeding to death, and from behind her came the sounds of a heated ongoing battle. Standard teams were composed of four members, so she assumed that there were two more Leaf ninjas outside.
Shutting out all distractions, she formed the handseals for the Mystical Palm technique and got to work healing her fellow ANBU.
His condition was severe, but Rin was nothing if not persistent. Little by little, she was able to stem the blood flow and keep her patient from slipping any further away. He was not quite stable yet, but at least the immediate danger had been dealt with. She was assessing the multitude of cuts on the man’s body, trying to decide which should be tended first, when her host once again interfered with her thoughts.
“Behind us!” he yelled.
His warning kept her from getting skewered by a barrage of incoming kunai. Rin had been focusing too hard on what was in front of her to keep track of the progression of the battle the rest of the Leaf team had been fighting. She only just managed to evade the attack by jumping behind a stone pillar off to the side. Looking back at the space she had just occupied, however, she could see that her patient had not been so lucky. A kunai was sticking out of his exposed throat, a sure kill shot.
She had failed.
“I’m sorry,” she told her host.
“You did the best you could, miss,” he said, tension on his voice. “I think you should go now and leave the fighting to me.”
Rin would if she could. She had no delusions that, whoever she was talking to, he was more skilled than her when it came to doing battle.
“If I break my technique now, that will reveal your position to whoever threw those kunai,” she explained. “We need to know what’s out there first, so you’re not caught off guard.”
All ninjas understood the value of information, so her host did not even consider arguing. “There’s a mirror in the left breast pocket.”
Rin found it quickly and angled it out from behind the pillar to look at the reflected view of her attackers. The image revealed two men wearing the standard Leaf ANBU uniform and Rin heaved a sigh of relief that the threat had been dealt with. She was about to come out of hiding, when a shudder of alarm from her host froze her in place.
“What is it?” she asked, trusting his greater experience on the field.
“There were no bodies on the floor.”
Rin realized what the problem was, of course. She was not so inexperienced that she could not tell, just as he had, that a kunai strike like the one she had evaded could not have come from too far away, which left the unpleasant question of where their attackers’ bodies were if their teammates had taken them out.
“No... You think your team turned on you?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but why aren’t they coming any closer?”
Rin had no answer to that, so instead she pulled out the mirror one more time and took another look. The two had made no move to come closer, only standing there looking at the body of their fallen teammate. The uniforms were an adequate fit, which lowered the odds that they were someone else impersonating the Leaf ninjas.
As she looked, however, a third figure that was definitely not from the Leaf detached itself from the shadows off to one side and came to stand between the two ANBU. He looked like he had come out of one of those horror films Rin hated. Dark robed, pale skinned and with long unkempt hair covering half of his face, he had a strange symbol tattooed on his forehead and extending down the bridge of his nose. She could only see half of it, but it reminded her of an elephant’s head. Again, she felt a frisson of some emotion from her host and, considering that he was probably better informed than her, she asked him if he knew anything about the man.
“He works for Taro Shigeki.” Rin recognized the name from Tiger and Dog’s mission orders. It was the name of their mark. “That guy was leading the group of Mist ninjas who attacked us. He came out of nowhere before and hit Fox before we could even notice he was there. It makes no sense for Boar and Monkey not to react to his presence now. We should assume that they’ve been compromised and are assisting the enemy for some reason.”
Rin felt dizzy at the implications of her host’s words. There was someone out there, who could take two loyal Leaf ninjas and turn their allegiances around like that, from one moment to the next? That was crazy. How were they supposed to fight something like that?
“Are you saying that your teammates are the ones who attacked us just now?” Rin asked.
“It could only have been them. There’s no one else there,” he said. His tone this time was softer, probably sensing Rin’s fear. “You should go now, miss. You need to report back to the Leaf about what this guy can do and I have to do what I can to help my two remaining teammates. It doesn’t look like that guy is aiming to kill, so I should be fine.”
It was not the first time Rin had been in a situation like this, where every decision felt like the wrong one. As a medical ninja, hard decisions were a part of her job description, however, that did not mean that they ever became easier to make. Were she to leave now, she would give away her host’s position. Were she to stay, she risked getting them both killed and leaving the Leaf ignorant of this strange man’s dangerous skill.
“All right,” she conceded. “I’ll break the technique and go back to the village. Please... be careful.”
“Thank you for all your help,” he said by means of goodbye.
Whatever happened to him next, Rin did not know. She broke the Mind Body Switch technique and felt her conscience whip across the land a second time, all the way to her body back at the Intelligence Division headquarters. As the chakra transmission communication device began to shut down, Rin pulled off the headset, careful not to get any hairs caught in the many wires that connected to the battery stacks behind her.
She sent a prayer to her fellow ninjas in Whirlpool, all the while knowing it was likely in vain.