Chapter 23: Suna Chunin Exams Arc: Six

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. But wish fulfillment is fine too.

The Triplets tumble into the room towards my hospital bed. "Hana." "Hana." "Hana." I run my hands through their fur, laughing wildly despite the ache in my side. Everyone's safe.

"You're alright. I prop myself up with my right arm and bury my face in Ni's fur. "You're fine."

He wuffs. "Hana better now." When I pull my face back, he covers it with dog slobber from over enthusiastic licking. I don't bother wiping my face. What would be the point? "Better now. Not dead." Ichi curls up on my right side. San flops over the foot of the bed. Ni very carefully curls up on the floor, favoring his right side especially the front paw.

He has a bald spot now, a shiny pink scar puckered over newly healed skin. I feel irrationally angry seeing the injury. She's already dead, but I want to kill her all over again just because I see this.

Ichi nudges my shoulder. "Your hands are clenching again, Hana."

I raise an eyebrow. "You are surprisingly calm about this."

He sets his head on his paws and looks away. "I knew you would survive. You're the oldest of us, after all."

I giggle. "What are we? Rei, Ichi, Ni, and San?"

San huffs from his place by my feet and turns a baleful dark eye towards me. "No. We are Hana, Ichi, Ni, and San."

"We are your first brothers." Ni yips from his place on the floor. "Your closest packmates."

My lips curl up into a smile. "Yes, we're a family aren't we?"

Ichi hums. "We want you to know."

I poke him in the ear. "I knew that already, Ichi."

"Pesky human. We wanted you to know. It'll never change. No matter what you do." He snuggles closer and promptly falls asleep. I drift off after him.

Toku and Muta trail into the room as the sun goes down outside the window, staining the glass pink and red with dusty purple streaks. They walk with their heads down, and feet scuffing and the stone floor, and I wonder why they're so hesitant to come talk to me.

"Hi." I whisper, and my voice cracks from disuse and dehydration.

Toku hands me a cup of water. "Hello Sleeping Beauty, you're finally awake." He grins, his lips pulling upwards into a crooked smile, but it doesn't touch his eyes. I shrug, because really what else am I supposed to say?

Muta takes his glasses off and slides them into his front chest pocket. "You haven't woken up for two days, Hana." Oh, well, that sounds quite horrific. I'm sorry guys, I'll be fine. "Hokage-sama has postponed discussing advancements until all the injured genin could get out of their hospital beds." Muta sighs and sits down in the chair beside my bed that Sensei had vacated hours ago. "It's only you and Nara Kasuga now."

Sensei didn't mention him when he was here, and he's clan and I'm not.

"Why, what happened to him?" I ask and Muta frowns without saying a single word.

It's Toku who responds. "He betrayed you and Muta by putting your unconscious body in a shadow bind and using you as a shield after everyone but he and Muta had been taken out." Toku slams a fist on my bedside table, his Byakugan automatically activating. "It was such a dirty trick!"

That, that actually left me speechless. As ninja from the same village it is automatically horrifying to hear that Nara had puppeteered my body to use against my teammate. I can't imagine what it felt like for Muta to have another Konoha nin use one of his teammates as a meat shield against him.

Muta visibly frowns, the buzzing of kikaichu filling the entire room in a heavy angry swarm. "I made sure to drain his chakra until it was life threatening. He deserved to feel some pain for that."

"Good." I say, surprising even myself with how viciously I'd responded. I am entirely unrepentant. I cannot be used like that ever again. Not ever. I have to be stronger than that. "I'm glad you did it." Suddenly a thought occurs to me, and I beam up at him. "So you must have won the brawl then. Oh, congratulations, Mu-kun!" If he'd been sitting closer I would have hugged him, but a pleased smile passes through his eyes, and Toku has relaxed slightly.

All is well in the world again.

After they leave, I climb out of my hospital bed, and by carefully holding onto Ichi, I make my way over to Nara Kasuga's room.

"This is a bad idea, Hana." Ichi growls. "He hurt you. We should hurt him."

I shoot him an unimpressed look. "He's still a shinobi of Konoha. Despite his lack of morals, we are not cut from the same cloth." I make this comment outside his door loud enough that he could certainly hear, and push it open so I could make my way into the room.

My side ached, but he certainly looked worse for wear, his face ash gray and exhausted, without a single other person in the room with him.

"What do you want?" He asks, and suddenly I know what the difference between him and Sensei that had so bothered me before. At his core, Sensei is an easy going, lazy individual who liked to drink tea. Nara Kasuga is just an irritable teenage boy that reminded me more of avenger Sasuke than anyone else.

"I want to know why you did that to Mu-kun." He seems confused, so I keep talking. "We're a close team, Nara-san." The honorific is spat in such a way that I make sure he knows that there is no honor in it. "And you made him watch me bleed in front of him."

"What, you think I wanted to match Aburame in a taijustu fight, bitch?" He scoffs at me.

From beside me, Ichi bares his teeth in a wordless growl.

I pat him on the head and chuckle mirthlessly. "For a Nara, you aren't very original, Nara-san." I grin at him, one that shows all of my teeth and is reminiscent of the way that Kaa-san liked to grin at enemies she'd use to pick her teeth. He doesn't look as confident anymore, when I lean down to whisper in his ear. "Remember what I do to objects that hurt the people I love. I. Rip. Out. Their. Throats."

As I think about it, I really am angry enough at him to cause him serious damage for putting Muta through the ringer, but not angry enough to tear his throat with my teeth. I had enough restraint to remember that he is still nominally an ally.

He's pale when I turn to leave and I make sure to smile at him when I float through his doorway. "I'll be seeing you soon, Nara-san."

"I have decided that there are three shinobi deserving of promotion this time around." The Sandaime puffs on his pipe as he surveys the six of us remaining. "All three of you demonstrated the qualities that a chunin must have, persistence, good judgement, and ability to work with your team. Aburame Muta."

Toku cheers with good natured humor, and slaps Muta on the back. "Knew you could do it, Mu-kun."

The Hokage clears his throat, and Toku falls silent with an abashed grin on his face. "Now, as I was saying, Akimichi Chikai, and Yamanaka Santa, you three demonstrated the qualities that a chunin must have in order to lead a team. From this day forward I pronounce you chunin of konoha." He hands each of the newly promoted chunin a standard green flak jacket, and smiles kindly at each of them. "May you wear the honor you've earned through these successive trials proudly.

"Why didn't Hana make it?" Toku asks.

The Hokage turns to him with a raised eyebrow. "Inuzuka Hana-chan demonstrated a great deal of potential, however, she made several key errors in judgement that could have caused significant damage were she to actually be leader of a team on a mission outside the village." I had thought perhaps...no, it doesn't matter now.

"Thank you for your guidance, Hokage-sama." I whisper, as I bow forwards a perfect a hundred and eighty degrees. "Your assessment matches my own of myself."

"You should have made chunin." Tokuma grouses as we sit around for team dinner that night. "You were strong enough. You made such great plans. You-" I place a finger over his mouth to shush him.

"I would have gotten everyone killed had I been in charge enough for you both to listen to me mindlessly. I don't belong as a chunin just yet." We all nearly died half a dozen times during these exams, and I didn't see any flaws in them when I made them.

I am not ready to hold the lives of subordinates in my hands.

"So what am I supposed to do now, Sensei?" Muta addresses Sensei who is sitting at the edge of our little huddle. "Do I still come for team training on team training days?"

Sensei sighs. "Not quite. Theoretically, you've become a free entity at this moment, although traditionally we'd still be working together, Hokage-sama wants to move you to tracking as soon as possible and push another person onto our team dynamic." Sensei glares balefully at a spot above our heads on the wall. "He wants to get as many students out of me as possible, and in his mind, this is a good way to do it." No, it can't be possible. Team Six is breaking up?

"Sensei?" I ask, my throat constricting at the thought that it might be Nara Kasuga who'd join our team next. He's lost both of his teammates to the promotion he didn't get despite holding out longer than them. "Who's going to be our other member?" Everyone looks mildly shell shocked at Sensei's announcement.

We'd never considered that we'd stop being a team, all three of us together. We'd thought it would last forever even though it's kind of silly to have assumed so.

"Is it going to be Nara?" Tokuma snarls. "No offense, Sensei, but if I had to work with him I'd rip his throat out myself."

"No, the Hokage has yet to determine who he wants to add, but I shall personally make sure that my dear clansman has a stern talking to, and isn't to come near any of you with a fifty foot pole." Sensei drawls, his arms crossed over his chest. "I will personally oversee his punishment with the Vicious Hag, by which at the end of, he will wish he'd never been born to have disgraced Konoha before an international audience."

I let out a shaking breath. "That's good, Sensei."

He looks around the room at us, at our still too young faces, but older minds, and calloused hands. "I'm proud of all three of you." He says finally, when the silence has gotten too expectant. "I'm proud of how much you've grown as a team since Day 1. I'm proud of how you are right now, and one day you three will be Konoha's best." At his kind words we break down, mobbing Sensei in a tangled pile of growing limbs and fur and dog and tears.

"Sensei..." We are ending an era, and it doesn't taste sweet at all.

The journey home is filled with sand and the burning desire to avoid Nara Kasuga. If I see him for too long, I'd have the overwhelming urge to throttle him slowly.

"Hey, kid?" I look up from my jogging to see that Asata-san has slowed his own pace to match mine. "Can I get a few words?"

"I don't think I'd be able to stop you, Sarutobi-san." My response is too sarcastic, too mean for someone who'd seemed to be a good friend of Sensei's, but I had a fairly good idea what Asata-san wants to talk about, and I'm not about to touch the problem that is Nara Kasuga with a ten foot pole.

"I wanted to apologize." He begins, and I really really need to end this before it devolves into a full blown conversation.

"There's really no need for that, Sarutobi-san." I pick up the pace just a little, despite the sand grinding between my feet and shoes. "You weren't the one that did something so tragically wrong."

"Oh, but I did, Inuzuka-chan." Asata-san keeps pace with me easily, and I feel as though no matter how hard I try to run away from the conversation, it just keeps on coming back to bite me. "I'm his sensei after all." He sighs. "I just want you to forgive him, he's had a rough time of it being on active duty, and his personality was never particularly lazy to begin with, and then he's got the huge chip on his shoulder about being less smart than everyone-"

"There's no need to tell me all about his sob story, Sarutobi-san." I look Asasta-san in the eye. "Otherwise I'd then have to tell you mine: Father permanently bullied because of his nation of origin, dead before my fifth birthday, killed my first person at age seven, not quite the same since, a singularly focused Inuzuka, my cousins didn't even visit me until I turned three..." I trail off. Actually, if I really wanted to, I could be one of those sob story kids too. "But really, there's more to my life than that, right?"

And honestly, there is far more to my life than just that. "So if you're going to ask if you could foist Nara-kun off on Sensei the answer's no." I look back over my shoulder at Asata-san who seemed to have stopped in the middle of the desert. "Sensei'll kill him in a week."

When we step through the gates of Konoha, the tension that everyone hadn't even been aware is present eases out of us. It's still early in the afternoon yet, and Sensei dismisses us to return to our homes.

"You want to come over for dinner later?" I ask as Toku, Muta and I walk down the street, our shoulders brushing.

"Maybe tomorrow?" Muta says, picking at his new flak jacket. "I don't know what Okaa-san and Otou-san want to do tonight."

"Yeah, I kind of want to eat with Koma-nii tonight so I can pick his brain for more ninjutsu training." Toku draps an arm over my shoulder and smiles. "I'm sure you want to spend time with your brother today too. So, tomorrow then?"

I nod, and we shake on it. It's only really then that I realise, I'm going home on my own two feet. We all survived.

"I'm home!" I call as I step through the door and set my sandals on the mat. The Triplets are dancing all around me, and race off towards rooms we haven't seen in well over a month. I set my pack down by the kitchen door, and pad through the house barefoot.

"NEE-CHAN!" A small brown and tan blur tackles me with intense force, clinging to my middle like a limpet. "Nee-chan was gone for so long." Kiba turns his big brown eyes up at me, and I see the tears sparking inside them. "Didn't like it." He mumbles as he hugs me as though attempting to stick himself to me like a piece of gum. My lips curl up in a smile. I'm going to stay home for a long, long time after this, Kiba-chan.

"Kiba-chan." I say, and hug him back just as fiercely. "Tell me about what you did while I was gone?"

He frowns. "I ran into the meanie again." He crosses his arms over his chest. "But this time I could definitely prove that Nee-chan was best." Oh, oh no, Kiba-chan what were you doing to Sasuke in my absence?

I sit down on the floor with him, and tickle him until he shrieks with laughter and lunges at me with a war cry on his lips. We roll around on the kitchen floor like puppies, unfortunately for my little brother, I'm wearing much more than he is, and mesh shirts did prevent small fingers from reaching their destinations.

Kaa-san and Kuromaru step through the kitchen door as we crash through a kitchen chair.

"Hana." We pause for a moment, Kaa-san's fierce glare a deterrent in our games. "Kiba." There's a long expectant pause as we wonder just what punishment Kaa-san would think up for breaking a chair. "Carry on."

Kuromaru pads down the hallway towards Kaa-san's room, and Kaa-san herself sits down in the doorway. Kiba and I look at each other.

And then we are at it again, but we do pay more attention to the location of the chairs.

A.N. Hana's home again, and there's change afoot.

Thanks so much to n1ghtdr34m3r, WhiteFang001, Snidekick, adi, and ArturolLJ50 for reviewing! (Oh, and I did fix the problem you mentioned regarding Earth Release: Earth Release. Didn't sleep enough while writing that part.)

And thank you to everyone who favorited and followed! I'm grateful to you all.

~Tavina.