Chương 25: Light - 2

Ino woke up to knocking. Not her alarm. Not her mother. Someone was hitting the front door— thud, thud, thud —fast and sharp, like they needed to be let in right now. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and grabbed the first thing off her chair. The knocking didn't stop. She opened her bedroom door a crack. Three people in the living room, talking in low voices. One of them was her father. She didn't know the other two. But she heard Shin's name. The sleepiness left her all at once.

She'd visited him at the hospital today. He'd been lying in that bed looking wrong—not sleeping, something worse than sleeping—and she'd stood there with the other classmates and not known what to say, and then she'd left, and the image had followed her home. The door hinges made a noise. All three adults turned.

"Ino." Her father's voice was gentle.

"Did we wake you?" She looked between them. The woman she didn't recognize. The man she didn't recognize. Her father's expression—careful in a way that meant he was choosing his words.

"What happened to Shin?" she said. The woman's eyes sharpened slightly.

"You know him?"

"Tsume." The man spoke—barely. Just her name, nothing else.

"Ino and Shin are classmates," her father said.

"Same year." Ino looked at her father.

"What happened to him? Is it bad?" No one answered. She'd seen this kind of silence before. It was the kind adults used when they'd decided on a version of the truth they were willing to share, and hadn't settled on it yet." Dad."

"Ino." Her mother appeared from the hallway behind her, crouching down to her level. Her voice was the soft one she used when she meant not now.

"It's late. You have school tomorrow. Come back to bed."

"I'm not going back to bed." She didn't move.

"Shin's in the hospital and you're—why are you here? Dad isn't a doctor." The three adults exchanged a look.

"It's nothing serious." The man with the dark glasses spoke without expression.

"He developed a fever. It became complicated. Your father's skill set may be of use."" Liar." The word came out before she'd decided to say it. She felt her mother's hand on her shoulder and ignored it.

"If it was just a fever, you wouldn't need my father. Why does he have a genjutsu on him?" Silence. Something moved in the woman's expression. It wasn't surprise. It was something more like— assessment.

"... I agree to that arrangement," the woman said under her breath. She was looking at Ino in a way that made the back of Ino's neck prickle.

"What?" The man in dark glasses turned his head.

"Did I say that out loud?" The woman looked genuinely startled for a moment. Then she cleared her throat and turned away.

"Never mind. Yamanaka—we need to move."

"I know that," her father said through slightly gritted teeth. He turned and came toward Ino with a look on his face that she recognized as his please help me out here face. He crouched down in front of her, hands on her shoulders.

"Ino. Listen to me." His voice was low.

"Shin is going to be okay. I'm going to go help take care of it right now, personally. Can you trust me on this?" She looked at him.

"... You'll tell me what actually happened?"

"When it's over and everyone's okay." He met her eyes.

"I promise."

"..." She didn't move for a long moment. Then she stepped back. The three of them left. Her mother tried to say something reassuring. Ino nodded along and didn't hear a word of it, and eventually made it back to her room, and stood there in the dark. Why would Shin be under genjutsu. The question didn't have a comfortable answer. She turned it over, put it down, picked it up again. Why would anyone do that to him. She lay down on her bed but she didn't close her eyes for a long time. Shin came to slowly.

The ceiling was white. The smell was antiseptic and something else beneath it—flowers, the waxy-sweet kind they kept in hospital lobbies. He lay still for a moment, cataloguing the information, and then turned his head. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. White sheets. Bed rails. A table crowded with fruit and wrapped parcels and arrangements of cut flowers. A window, half-open to the night sky.

A figure sitting on the windowsill with their back to the room.

"Shisui." Shisui didn't turn. He was looking out at the dark, one arm resting across his knee, posture easy in the unhurried way of someone who had been sitting there for a while. Hana was asleep against the edge of the mattress, breathing slow and even.

"... Where am I?" Shin said.

"Hospital." Shisui's voice came out quieter than usual. Heavier.

"You've been out for about a day." Shin pushed himself up. The movement cost him something—a dull pull through his head and behind his eyes—but it passed. He sat there and tried to sort through what he remembered. Fugaku. The long conversation. The walk home. The feeling of being very, very tired. And then nothing. A long dream he couldn't quite hold on to.

"I don't remember most of it," he said.

"He said a lot of things. I came home and lay down, and then—" He stopped.

"I think I dreamed."

"You did." Shisui was quiet for a moment.

"For a day and a night." Shin looked at him. The line of Shisui's shoulders. The way his right hand was resting on the window frame. Something dark on his fingers. Shin's eyes focused. He sat up straighter. The red was still fresh. He got out of bed.

"You just woke up," Shisui said.

"You shouldn't be walking around." Shin didn't answer. He crossed the room—carefully, because the floor tilted slightly under him—and came to stand beside the window. He reached out and touched Shisui's hand. The warmth under his fingers was real. So was the wet." Thud." A drop fell. It landed on the back of Shisui's hand, and Shin tracked it back up to its source. Shisui's right eye was closed. A thin line of red traced down from beneath his lid, following the angle of his cheekbone—one clean, dark streak.

Shin reached for his face without thinking. Shisui caught his hand. He pressed it down gently, not forcefully, and held it there.

"Overuse," he said.

"The eye can only take so much at once. It'll clear up." Shin looked at him.

"... Is something about to happen to the Uchiha," he said. It wasn't quite a question. Shisui didn't answer.

"Is it aimed at you." Still nothing.

"Are you going to be okay." The silence stretched. Then—" Pfft." Shisui turned his head, and there was that expression—the one that arrived ahead of whatever he was actually thinking, the easy half-laugh that meant he was buying himself time.

"What are you doing, cursing me?" He let go of Shin's hand.

"I come all this way to check on my student and he starts telling me how I'm going to die."

"That's not what I said."

"It's what you were getting at." His left eye curved.

"I'm the one with the Body Flicker, remember? I've gotten out of worse situations than this. Have a little faith in your teacher."

"..."

"You haven't even learned everything I have to teach you yet. I'm too useful to disappear."

"... That's not really how it works."

"It's exactly how it works." Shin looked at him for a long moment. Shisui looked back with that one open eye, and the lightness in it was real—but there was something underneath it that wasn't light at all. Shin said nothing. Shisui reached over and pushed the hair back from Shin's face—gently, palm-forward, the kind of motion that started somewhere between gesture and reflex. He ran his fingers through once, from the crown down to the ends. Shin let him. He'd stopped bothering to object.

"Three days," Shisui said quietly.

"What?"

"Three days from now. I'll teach you the last technique in the Uchiha shuriken style." His hand stilled in Shin's hair for a moment.

"So don't go back to sleep and miss it."

"..." Shin didn't answer. He looked up and found that Shisui's hand was gone—and then Shisui himself was going, his outline blurring at the edges the way certain things did in the early hours of the morning. The darkness outside the window seemed to rise and meet him. Between one breath and the next, he was gone......." Mmph." Hana made a small, confused sound against the mattress. She pushed herself upright and dragged a hand across her eyes.

For one suspended moment she was still half in sleep, stretching— Then she was awake." Shin." She was on her feet before the word finished, spinning toward the empty bed— He was at the window. Standing there in the dark, looking out, alive and upright and clearly conscious.

"Shin—" Her voice broke on the second syllable. She crossed the room in three unsteady steps and crouched in front of him, hands on his shoulders, making sure he was solid.

"You—you're—""I'm okay," he said.

"Hana. I'm okay." She pulled him in. He let her. His head came to rest against her shoulder and she wrapped both arms around him and she did not let go, not for a long moment, and her arms kept tightening like she was checking something she already knew." Thank god," she kept saying, barely above a whisper." Thank god, thank god —" He brought his arms up and held on. He didn't have words. He wasn't sure he needed them. The door opened.

"Hana?" Tsume stood in the doorway. Shibi was half a step behind her. And one more face—a man Shin didn't know, a Yamanaka by the look of his coloring, wearing the rumpled look of someone pulled from sleep. Tsume saw them. She moved forward, and Shibi's hand came up and caught her arm. She stopped. And then she seemed to notice— really notice—the way Hana's shoulders were shaking against Shin's back, and the way Shin's arms were wrapped around her, holding on with quiet certainty. She stood still.

"... Shin." On the roof of a building across from the hospital, a figure stood in the dark. The window light was small from here. But shinobi eyes saw clearly in darkness.... That technique? The figure touched the side of their own eye, uncertain. Why... The forest was dark and still. Itachi moved through it without a sound, following something small and instinctive that had pulled him out here—he hadn't even been sure why, until he'd found the figure by the rocks.

"Shisui." He closed the distance quickly and got an arm under him before he could fall.

"You're—" He pulled him to the nearest boulder and sat him down, and looked at his face, and at the dried blood on his right eye." Shisui. What happened to your eye." Shisui waved him off. The motion was a little unsteady.

"The plan is on hold," he said. His voice had gone thin.

"What happened?" Itachi pressed.

"Who did you—""I underestimated Fugaku." Silence." The second Mangekyō, I didn't think there was a second one," Shisui said, a quiet note of exhaustion in his voice.

"I thought I was the only one. I had reasons to think so." His right eye was still closed. The left one looked out at the dark trees.

"I was wrong." Itachi sat beside him without speaking.

"With his eye power—" Shisui stopped. Tried again.

"Kotoamatsukami might not work on him. Not with my eye at half strength. I can't afford to be wrong about something like that. If he resists it—" He didn't finish.

"So we wait," Itachi said.

"We wait." Shisui leaned his head back against the rock. He looked very tired.

"There's still another option," Shisui added after a moment.

"I haven't used it yet. I'm keeping it as a last resort. If everything else falls apart—we go there." Itachi was quiet. Then: "And Danzo?"

"Danzo I'll handle."

"How—""He was my teacher once." Shisui said it simply, like that explained something.

"I know how he thinks. I'll find a way to manage him." The wind moved through the trees. Somewhere above them, a flock of birds burst upward from the canopy, dark shapes scattering against the stars.

"Shisui."

"Yeah?"

"Be careful with Danzo." A pause. Shisui's eye moved to the sky, tracking the birds until they disappeared.

"I know," he said.