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31_days2006-10-11 09:47 pm
yesthatnagia.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2006-10-11 09:47 pm
[11 October] [Naruto] Quick Fix
[t]itle: Quick Fix
[r]ating: Rated T for Teen
[w]ordcount: 2,471
[d]ay: October 11. take one and call me in the morning
[f]andom: Naruto
[p]airing: Team Gai OT3, or perhaps Team Gai gen.
[s]ummary: She knows they're all fragmented, but that doesn't stop it from hurting when they have to piece each other together again with bandages and painkillers and words that shouldn't have any meaning anymore but somehow do. And she knows with equal certainty that nobody understands Team Gai the way Team Gai does.
[n]otes: Angst warning, NOT a happy fic.
i
At first, Tenten never relied on her teammates outside of combat. They were friends, they were good friends, but neither one of them really knew how to comfort people.
Their first C Mission-- the one in which they each made their first kills, the one with the faces that would stand out in her memory even when the faces of people she killed as ANBU blurred together-- changed that. There was just something about turning to your teammate to see him staring at the blood on his hands, on his white bandages, with a kind of fascination that you knew would snap and turn awful. She can't help but want to help him, want to hug him and hold him.
Neji's quiet murmurings (nonsensical, they had been completely nonsensical, she knew that now but they'd made sense at the time, they had made sense and she had understood completely) had made her want to cry. The look on Lee's face, that awful sort of fascination, the kind where it was totally obvious that he didn't understand, that he wasn't entirely sure what was happening, had made her breath catch in her throat.
And Gai-sensei had been so grim and quiet. He had firmly taken Lee by his bloody hands and grabbed Neji by the shoulder, had tilted his chin at her to draw her in. And they had stayed like that, warm, together, murmuring and shivering and caught in the worst place for just-now-thirteen year olds to be: somewhere between awful, bloodthirsty joy and the realization that they were murderers now. Those feelings and the adrenaline left them all weak and shaky and nauseated.
It had been easier to cry in their arms, after that. It had been easier to explain why she never spoke of her mother, why she had spent two weeks sleeping on Gai's couch. She hadn't been as hesitant to hug Lee or rub Neji's back, or to storm into Gai-sensei's house and take over his kitchen.
That was where she stood now. Outside her sensei's door (and he would always be her sensei, even when he was old and grey and she had students of her own, she was sure of it). The key to his apartment felt warm in her hand; she'd been holding it for several minutes.
After another second of deliberation, she unlocked his door. It swung inward only a few inches. She smiled at his caution-- he'd put up his lock-chain.
That wasn't enough to keep out a ninja. Two senbon found their way to her hands, and she carefully worked them through the gap between the door and the frame. After a few moments of careful maneuvering, the latch on the chain dropped from its place and the door opened.
She found him sleeping on his couch with a mug of coffee right next to his face. The sight made her smile.
He woke up the instant she moved closer to him.
"It's all right, Gai-sensei. Just me." She picked up the coffee mug, noted that it had long gone cold, and smiled at him.
She set the coffee mug down on the table in front of his couch. A little coffee sloshed over the side of the mug, but it landed on a six-month-old magazine. "
He grinned at her, forced his eyes to water. "You have no idea how much it touches me that you still think of me as your sensei. I'm on Indefinite Reserve now, you know." Not even Gai-sensei could keep the bitterness completely out of his next words, but because he was Gai, he managed to pare it down to just a whiff. "I'm not a real ninja anymore, Tenten."
"I'll always think of you as my sensei." She knew what that meant and she wasn't going to cry.
He'd hate if if she cried. Gai-sensei hated tears of sorrow. The copious crying of his melodramatic moments had always, always come from joy.
Joy in a life that was doomed to be fleeting was what he had taught her. It was the thing he took pride in teaching them all.
So she gave him joy. She smiled at him, touched his shoulder, and kissed his forehead. "You were a 'real' ninja a long time before I was, Gai-sensei. Nobody ever showed me how to be a 'real' ninja but you. I could never stop thinking of you as my sensei."
Gai's smile at that was brilliant. He sat up, rubbed the top of his head. He looked sleepy and mussed, almost like a half-roused child. She kissed his cheek and sat down beside him, one arm slipping onto his shoulder.
She tried very hard not to cry. But the tricks she'd used when they'd first started noticing, when all the hope had started to bleed away, had long stopped working. Thinking of the happy times-- the times she would never have again-- only made her want to cry more.
So she closed her eyes and forced her smile, and made herself focus on how she enjoyed sitting beside him.
"Why, Oleander, if I were just a few years younger, I might wonder what you were trying to do to me." He chuckled at his joke.
The low, throaty sound made her smile widen, and she began to grin when he draped his own arm over her. Somehow, the half-hug turned into a full hug. And then Gai-sensei stretched his legs out along the couch, and she curled up beside him.
She could hear his heartbeat. Lub-dub, lub-dub. A comforting sound. He wasn't dead yet. She could still do this. She could still hug him and touch him and talk to him. She could, if she were cruel or stupid, ask his advice, and he would answer.
But she said nothing, because that she could still sit with him and just be-- that was a miracle. That she still had this much at all was a Springtime Miracle of Youth, and of course she had to get her Springtime Miracle of Youth in Gai-sensei's old age.
Gai breathed in deeply, then let it out. She counted every breath, and privately thanked whatever gods or spirits or ancestors there were.
They stayed like that, in the dark, totally silent, for hours.
It was almost enough.
ii
"Hush," Tenten told Lee. The salve burned, she knew, and any sort of burning was one of Lee's most hated pains.
He squirmed and wriggled and writhed. It broke her heart to see, and she rubbed his back through the bandages.
"It'll go away soon." Lie.
"If you can just keep using it, it'll hurt less." Lie.
"I promise, just another week and you'll never have to use it again." Lie! Lielielielielielielielie she was a lying liar.
Several paces away, Neji dropped small white tablets into a glass of water and stirred the mixture with a spoon. He watched the two of them with slightly narrowed white eyes. The thin, hard line of his lips combined with the straight, stiff set of his shoulders told her that he was in pain.
"Neji, please use only a little," Lee gasped. "Using too much at once could--"
"--cause drowsiness, overuse causes subconscious reliance, then dependency, then addiction, and 10 overdoses out of 10 are fatal." He eyed the liquid, and Tenten wanted to cry.
But she couldn't cry. She had to fix them, first. She had to glue all the brain and heart pieces back together. She had to bind up the wounds and set the bones and give them something to help them sleep.
Then she could cry.
"No sleep aids," Neji said. "Too much to do to sleep. No soldier pills, no caffeine pills, nothing else."
Nothing but this, he was trying to say, and that was a lie, they were lying to themselves. The salves and the bandages and the pills and the potions-- they weren't healing them. They weren't making them better.
They were all broken and shattered into little tiny pieces, be it physically or mentally or emotionally, and whatever glue she'd used to fix them as a Chuunin had long, long ago stopped working.
Sometimes pieces of them fell off even if they hadn't been touched. Sometimes they screamed and broke more and nothing had been hit or hurt. Sometimes they woke with muscle cramps and old broken bones hurting again and they hadn't even been training.
Sometimes Lee forgot and tried to run until he threw up, but the kind of shape he was in now (despite the need for the salve), he would have had to run for a week or more. Straight. Sometimes Neji forgot not to tell people about the tumors he saw in their bodies, or that he wasn't allowed to let slip the fact that he was permanently in a Stage One Byakugan, and could see through clothing and thin walls and doors. Sometimes she wasn't sure which knife went where. Was this tanto a kitchen knife, or did she sheath and carry it? Was that meteor hammer decorative, with a hollow core and few layers of steel, or could she use it as a weapon?
"No sleep aids," she said. "Don't drink all of that yourself, I need some. And it might help with Lee's--"
"--it will not help, but it is best to split that glass three ways. We must never use too much."
Later that night, when it was obvious that their opponents wouldn't be coming after them just yet, they huddled together. She sat in the middle, with Neji on her left and Lee ostensibly to her right. He was practically in her lap, actually, with his arms wrapped around her waist. She methodically stroked his back in a slow, even rhythm. Beside her, Neji closed his eyes and tried to block out a world that, she knew, had long ago pitted his defenses: a world not even unconsciousness could completely dispell.
Neji's breaths came even and slow, synchronised so that his exhalations coincided with the instant her hand brushed against Lee's lower back. The timing was perfect. So perfect that she knew it was fake.
"They won't find us," she murmured to them both.
Saying it didn't make it true, but Lee replied with a sleepy mumble, one of those sounds people made when they were half awake and had long lost the ability to speak coherently. His tone, close to inaudible and heavy with sleep as it was, made it quite clear that he believed her. Not even Neji's typical grunt sounded as cynical as she thought it should have.
After Lee fell asleep from the combination exhaustion and her massage, Neji leaned closer to her. His mouth brushed her ear and his every breath tickled her skin. When he spoke, his voice came out somewhere between 'husky' and 'breathy' and she shivered a little not only at the sound but at the way his lips moved against her earlobe.
"I'm building up a dependency."
Tenten realised what that meant and found herself thinking of Lee's constant pain and Gai-sensei's transfer to 'Indefinite Reserve' status, and fought hard not to put her head in her hands and sob. Instead, she fisted a hand in Lee's smooth hair and pulled Neji toward her with her other hand. Neji let her, and when she kissed him, he kissed back.
It was almost enough.
iii
The sunlight that streamed down was bright and cheerful and it hurt her eyes, but Tenten pretended it didn't. Lee smiled his old grin, the one with teeth so bright she could hear it, and she laughed aloud. Beside her, Neji started to smirk, but soon stopped.
She set the flowers down and fiddled with them for a minute, eyes focused on the white, crisp, beautiful big blooms. Her smile felt strange; there was an odd pressure in and around her eyes. Even through the grin and the laugh, her eyes had already begun to water. The stiff mask she tried so hard to put on her face was slipping, slipping, slipping away.
She didn't regret that.
"Thank you," she told the Cenotaph. She had to force the words out through a thick, knotted lump in her throat, and the weight of holding back sobs and tears made her windpipe burn.
Not even three minutes, and she was already choking up. How Lee could stand there and smile and give a thumb's up, she didn't know. She would always, always admire him for that.
Tenten tried to pull herself together. She did. She even managed to stop choking for about two minutes. But the realisation that Gai-sensei was gone, gone, that there would be no more embarrassments or posturing on top of Ninkame or silly speeches undid her. No-one would ever call her "oleander" ever again, nobody would hem and haw over her aim the way he had, or try and find challenging trajectory problems, or try and come up with challenging trajectory problems when finding them in books failed.
There would never be anybody quite like Gai-sensei ever again. He was gone.
Gai was gone, and both her boys were going, and they were all broken, all of them, even her. And that frightened her to her core. She wasn't afraid of having to pick up the pieces because she'd done it since she was twelve, and she didn't resent the fact that nobody would ever doctor her the way she doctored her boys. She didn't really doctor her boys, anyway; it was more like playing doctor, reciting the "take one of these and call me in the morning" sketch, she faked and she faked and she did nothing.
What she feared and resented was the knowledge that someday, her remaining boys would break clean in half, and no bandges or potions or pills would fix them again. She couldn't remember how she'd held them together when they were Chuunin, and even if she could, that wouldn't be able to help them anymore. And when that horrible awful day came, and she couldn't fix her boys no matter what she did-- what would she do then?
What would she do without her bleeding and broken boys? Who could she murder with, and then kiss with bloody lips, if not Neji? Who would she soothe and massage and hug, if not Lee?
When they were gone, she would have no-one left to fix but herself, and she wasn't sure she wanted to be fixed.
iv
"BERNIE CAPAX: But I did okay, didn't I? I mean I got, what fifteen thousand years. That's pretty good isn't it? I lived a pretty long time.
DEATH: You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less. You got a lifetime."
--Neil Gaiman, Sandman
[r]ating: Rated T for Teen
[w]ordcount: 2,471
[d]ay: October 11. take one and call me in the morning
[f]andom: Naruto
[p]airing: Team Gai OT3, or perhaps Team Gai gen.
[s]ummary: She knows they're all fragmented, but that doesn't stop it from hurting when they have to piece each other together again with bandages and painkillers and words that shouldn't have any meaning anymore but somehow do. And she knows with equal certainty that nobody understands Team Gai the way Team Gai does.
[n]otes: Angst warning, NOT a happy fic.
i
At first, Tenten never relied on her teammates outside of combat. They were friends, they were good friends, but neither one of them really knew how to comfort people.
Their first C Mission-- the one in which they each made their first kills, the one with the faces that would stand out in her memory even when the faces of people she killed as ANBU blurred together-- changed that. There was just something about turning to your teammate to see him staring at the blood on his hands, on his white bandages, with a kind of fascination that you knew would snap and turn awful. She can't help but want to help him, want to hug him and hold him.
Neji's quiet murmurings (nonsensical, they had been completely nonsensical, she knew that now but they'd made sense at the time, they had made sense and she had understood completely) had made her want to cry. The look on Lee's face, that awful sort of fascination, the kind where it was totally obvious that he didn't understand, that he wasn't entirely sure what was happening, had made her breath catch in her throat.
And Gai-sensei had been so grim and quiet. He had firmly taken Lee by his bloody hands and grabbed Neji by the shoulder, had tilted his chin at her to draw her in. And they had stayed like that, warm, together, murmuring and shivering and caught in the worst place for just-now-thirteen year olds to be: somewhere between awful, bloodthirsty joy and the realization that they were murderers now. Those feelings and the adrenaline left them all weak and shaky and nauseated.
It had been easier to cry in their arms, after that. It had been easier to explain why she never spoke of her mother, why she had spent two weeks sleeping on Gai's couch. She hadn't been as hesitant to hug Lee or rub Neji's back, or to storm into Gai-sensei's house and take over his kitchen.
That was where she stood now. Outside her sensei's door (and he would always be her sensei, even when he was old and grey and she had students of her own, she was sure of it). The key to his apartment felt warm in her hand; she'd been holding it for several minutes.
After another second of deliberation, she unlocked his door. It swung inward only a few inches. She smiled at his caution-- he'd put up his lock-chain.
That wasn't enough to keep out a ninja. Two senbon found their way to her hands, and she carefully worked them through the gap between the door and the frame. After a few moments of careful maneuvering, the latch on the chain dropped from its place and the door opened.
She found him sleeping on his couch with a mug of coffee right next to his face. The sight made her smile.
He woke up the instant she moved closer to him.
"It's all right, Gai-sensei. Just me." She picked up the coffee mug, noted that it had long gone cold, and smiled at him.
She set the coffee mug down on the table in front of his couch. A little coffee sloshed over the side of the mug, but it landed on a six-month-old magazine. "
He grinned at her, forced his eyes to water. "You have no idea how much it touches me that you still think of me as your sensei. I'm on Indefinite Reserve now, you know." Not even Gai-sensei could keep the bitterness completely out of his next words, but because he was Gai, he managed to pare it down to just a whiff. "I'm not a real ninja anymore, Tenten."
"I'll always think of you as my sensei." She knew what that meant and she wasn't going to cry.
He'd hate if if she cried. Gai-sensei hated tears of sorrow. The copious crying of his melodramatic moments had always, always come from joy.
Joy in a life that was doomed to be fleeting was what he had taught her. It was the thing he took pride in teaching them all.
So she gave him joy. She smiled at him, touched his shoulder, and kissed his forehead. "You were a 'real' ninja a long time before I was, Gai-sensei. Nobody ever showed me how to be a 'real' ninja but you. I could never stop thinking of you as my sensei."
Gai's smile at that was brilliant. He sat up, rubbed the top of his head. He looked sleepy and mussed, almost like a half-roused child. She kissed his cheek and sat down beside him, one arm slipping onto his shoulder.
She tried very hard not to cry. But the tricks she'd used when they'd first started noticing, when all the hope had started to bleed away, had long stopped working. Thinking of the happy times-- the times she would never have again-- only made her want to cry more.
So she closed her eyes and forced her smile, and made herself focus on how she enjoyed sitting beside him.
"Why, Oleander, if I were just a few years younger, I might wonder what you were trying to do to me." He chuckled at his joke.
The low, throaty sound made her smile widen, and she began to grin when he draped his own arm over her. Somehow, the half-hug turned into a full hug. And then Gai-sensei stretched his legs out along the couch, and she curled up beside him.
She could hear his heartbeat. Lub-dub, lub-dub. A comforting sound. He wasn't dead yet. She could still do this. She could still hug him and touch him and talk to him. She could, if she were cruel or stupid, ask his advice, and he would answer.
But she said nothing, because that she could still sit with him and just be-- that was a miracle. That she still had this much at all was a Springtime Miracle of Youth, and of course she had to get her Springtime Miracle of Youth in Gai-sensei's old age.
Gai breathed in deeply, then let it out. She counted every breath, and privately thanked whatever gods or spirits or ancestors there were.
They stayed like that, in the dark, totally silent, for hours.
It was almost enough.
ii
"Hush," Tenten told Lee. The salve burned, she knew, and any sort of burning was one of Lee's most hated pains.
He squirmed and wriggled and writhed. It broke her heart to see, and she rubbed his back through the bandages.
"It'll go away soon." Lie.
"If you can just keep using it, it'll hurt less." Lie.
"I promise, just another week and you'll never have to use it again." Lie! Lielielielielielielielie she was a lying liar.
Several paces away, Neji dropped small white tablets into a glass of water and stirred the mixture with a spoon. He watched the two of them with slightly narrowed white eyes. The thin, hard line of his lips combined with the straight, stiff set of his shoulders told her that he was in pain.
"Neji, please use only a little," Lee gasped. "Using too much at once could--"
"--cause drowsiness, overuse causes subconscious reliance, then dependency, then addiction, and 10 overdoses out of 10 are fatal." He eyed the liquid, and Tenten wanted to cry.
But she couldn't cry. She had to fix them, first. She had to glue all the brain and heart pieces back together. She had to bind up the wounds and set the bones and give them something to help them sleep.
Then she could cry.
"No sleep aids," Neji said. "Too much to do to sleep. No soldier pills, no caffeine pills, nothing else."
Nothing but this, he was trying to say, and that was a lie, they were lying to themselves. The salves and the bandages and the pills and the potions-- they weren't healing them. They weren't making them better.
They were all broken and shattered into little tiny pieces, be it physically or mentally or emotionally, and whatever glue she'd used to fix them as a Chuunin had long, long ago stopped working.
Sometimes pieces of them fell off even if they hadn't been touched. Sometimes they screamed and broke more and nothing had been hit or hurt. Sometimes they woke with muscle cramps and old broken bones hurting again and they hadn't even been training.
Sometimes Lee forgot and tried to run until he threw up, but the kind of shape he was in now (despite the need for the salve), he would have had to run for a week or more. Straight. Sometimes Neji forgot not to tell people about the tumors he saw in their bodies, or that he wasn't allowed to let slip the fact that he was permanently in a Stage One Byakugan, and could see through clothing and thin walls and doors. Sometimes she wasn't sure which knife went where. Was this tanto a kitchen knife, or did she sheath and carry it? Was that meteor hammer decorative, with a hollow core and few layers of steel, or could she use it as a weapon?
"No sleep aids," she said. "Don't drink all of that yourself, I need some. And it might help with Lee's--"
"--it will not help, but it is best to split that glass three ways. We must never use too much."
Later that night, when it was obvious that their opponents wouldn't be coming after them just yet, they huddled together. She sat in the middle, with Neji on her left and Lee ostensibly to her right. He was practically in her lap, actually, with his arms wrapped around her waist. She methodically stroked his back in a slow, even rhythm. Beside her, Neji closed his eyes and tried to block out a world that, she knew, had long ago pitted his defenses: a world not even unconsciousness could completely dispell.
Neji's breaths came even and slow, synchronised so that his exhalations coincided with the instant her hand brushed against Lee's lower back. The timing was perfect. So perfect that she knew it was fake.
"They won't find us," she murmured to them both.
Saying it didn't make it true, but Lee replied with a sleepy mumble, one of those sounds people made when they were half awake and had long lost the ability to speak coherently. His tone, close to inaudible and heavy with sleep as it was, made it quite clear that he believed her. Not even Neji's typical grunt sounded as cynical as she thought it should have.
After Lee fell asleep from the combination exhaustion and her massage, Neji leaned closer to her. His mouth brushed her ear and his every breath tickled her skin. When he spoke, his voice came out somewhere between 'husky' and 'breathy' and she shivered a little not only at the sound but at the way his lips moved against her earlobe.
"I'm building up a dependency."
Tenten realised what that meant and found herself thinking of Lee's constant pain and Gai-sensei's transfer to 'Indefinite Reserve' status, and fought hard not to put her head in her hands and sob. Instead, she fisted a hand in Lee's smooth hair and pulled Neji toward her with her other hand. Neji let her, and when she kissed him, he kissed back.
It was almost enough.
iii
The sunlight that streamed down was bright and cheerful and it hurt her eyes, but Tenten pretended it didn't. Lee smiled his old grin, the one with teeth so bright she could hear it, and she laughed aloud. Beside her, Neji started to smirk, but soon stopped.
She set the flowers down and fiddled with them for a minute, eyes focused on the white, crisp, beautiful big blooms. Her smile felt strange; there was an odd pressure in and around her eyes. Even through the grin and the laugh, her eyes had already begun to water. The stiff mask she tried so hard to put on her face was slipping, slipping, slipping away.
She didn't regret that.
"Thank you," she told the Cenotaph. She had to force the words out through a thick, knotted lump in her throat, and the weight of holding back sobs and tears made her windpipe burn.
Not even three minutes, and she was already choking up. How Lee could stand there and smile and give a thumb's up, she didn't know. She would always, always admire him for that.
Tenten tried to pull herself together. She did. She even managed to stop choking for about two minutes. But the realisation that Gai-sensei was gone, gone, that there would be no more embarrassments or posturing on top of Ninkame or silly speeches undid her. No-one would ever call her "oleander" ever again, nobody would hem and haw over her aim the way he had, or try and find challenging trajectory problems, or try and come up with challenging trajectory problems when finding them in books failed.
There would never be anybody quite like Gai-sensei ever again. He was gone.
Gai was gone, and both her boys were going, and they were all broken, all of them, even her. And that frightened her to her core. She wasn't afraid of having to pick up the pieces because she'd done it since she was twelve, and she didn't resent the fact that nobody would ever doctor her the way she doctored her boys. She didn't really doctor her boys, anyway; it was more like playing doctor, reciting the "take one of these and call me in the morning" sketch, she faked and she faked and she did nothing.
What she feared and resented was the knowledge that someday, her remaining boys would break clean in half, and no bandges or potions or pills would fix them again. She couldn't remember how she'd held them together when they were Chuunin, and even if she could, that wouldn't be able to help them anymore. And when that horrible awful day came, and she couldn't fix her boys no matter what she did-- what would she do then?
What would she do without her bleeding and broken boys? Who could she murder with, and then kiss with bloody lips, if not Neji? Who would she soothe and massage and hug, if not Lee?
When they were gone, she would have no-one left to fix but herself, and she wasn't sure she wanted to be fixed.
iv
"BERNIE CAPAX: But I did okay, didn't I? I mean I got, what fifteen thousand years. That's pretty good isn't it? I lived a pretty long time.
DEATH: You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less. You got a lifetime."
--Neil Gaiman, Sandman