Tetsuki dreams of the cold. Not from ice or snow or harsh winds, but an empty kind of cold. A void. As if she were the only person in the world.
It doesn’t make any sense. The Land of Fire is aptly named, temperate even in the night, and before moving in to Ueno General Store she shared a room at Ryokushoku with seven other girls.
But dreams don’t always have to make sense.
It changes. Goes from cold to warm, like standing in a sunbeam, like casual affection and stalwart devotion and other things she’s never experienced before.
Getting adopted was a fairy tale that she has long put behind her, but she imagines maybe this is what it would feel like. Family.
Then her chest aches. No, it stings. No, it shrieks–much harsher and visceral–as if she’s been stabbed through the heart, not just punched in the sternum.
She wakes up, breathing heavily, to a worried Naruto Uzumaki.
“Are you,” he starts, uncertain and hesitant for it, “You were, um.”
At least she’s not crying.
Still, she has to swallow, clear her throat, before her voice can be coaxed out. In those quiet moments, she realizes it’s been longer than an hour and a half, the moon already halfway through its trek across the sky.
“Why didn’t you wake me up earlier? It should be my watch now, you need to recover, too,” Tetsuki wrinkles her nose at herself–she had no idea she was such a busybody.
“I’m fine!” Naruto Uzumaki protests, “And I figured you might need it more. And…”
Now that she looks at him more closely, he does look okay. Only his clothes show any sign of the fight, no bruise or scratch or minor swelling even.
“It’s my fault that you got hurt so much,” he nearly mumbles, chin tucking into the high collar of his hideous jacket, “You deserve more rest,” he finishes.
It’s a sweet thought, if very misguided. Basing resources on who deserves what or who’s at fault for that won’t cut it when they’re real shinobi. It’s harmless now, but there’s no need to encourage bad habits for out on the field.
And so she doesn’t address it.
“Are you a medic?” she asks, instead, because that’s far more pertinent. She knows he got hit a few times–she heard it in the smoke and saw the results while they were retreating–his wounds shouldn’t be at that stage yet. Not when her own are angrily pulsing with every heartbeat.
“No, I just… heal fast,” he mutters. Which is an odd thing to be so ashamed about–a soldier who can heal fast would be valuable–but who is she to judge? It’s disappointing that he can’t help her bruises and scrapes along, but they’re nothing she can’t work through.
“I’ve heard weirder,” Tetsuki shrugs, as a sort of peace offering, “Still, convenient healing or not, you should sleep. Tomorrow’s the last day and we need to get two more tokens.”
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