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“ Something’s wrong .”
“ What ?”
“ Look at her, she actually does look like a Princess.”
While most people would rightfully freak out at two other voices speaking inside their heads, Kagome doesn’t even think twice before responding, “ Shut up, Inori. ”
Far across the other end of the ballroom, Inori’s lips twitch, suppressing his smile. Disguised as a guard, he’s the only one of them who can openly carry his weapon, something that Kagome is so sore about — her fingers long for a kunai. They are stationed far apart: Kagome seated on a dais at the front of the hall and Inori near the back door, keeping a watchful eye on the guests, yet she hears his words clearly in her head as if he were standing right next to her. “I’m just saying, you might wanna consider actually dressing up for the summer festival next month.”
Kagome decidedly refuses to look at him and draws the light shawl around her shoulders. The sparkling silk of her scarf and gloves does little to cover her from the cold prickling her skin. According to the locals here, this is one of the warmest days in the Land of Snow, but even Konoha’s winter don’t often run this cold, and Kagome can only hope that the goosebumps on her skin don’t give her away as an imposter.
It’s their first time in the Land of Snow. After spending the better part of two weeks on foot and boat to get there, Kagome had been surprised at how lively and beautiful the country at the edge of the world map could be. For the summer solstice, the people gather in the grand hall of the Palace to attend a ball hosted by the royal family to revel in the warm weather and longer hours of precious daylight. After the tragic death of their King a year ago, the Princess is making a rare appearance in public hosting the ball ahead of her upcoming coronation.
Or so, that’s what the public knows.
In truth, the Princess is nowhere near the main hall. Instead, Kagome is sitting in her seat on the raised dais dressed in her clothes, wearing her tiara, doing her best to smile and wave like she might.
When sending the mission request to Konoha, the Princess had laid out the specifics as follows: (1) She had been tipped off that there would be an attempt made on her life sometime before the coronation and (2) She wanted a decoy that could pass off as her. Ordinarily, a deep cover decoy of this prominence would necessitate only jounin-level shinobi for this mission, but the intersection between teams that were qualified to take on an A-rank of this complexity and girls who could pass as being a seventeen-year-old Princess was a set of one, and so Team Nineteen, comprising three chuunin and their jounin supervisor, was dispatched instead.
So far, they have already thwarted two would-be assassins — one that tried stabbing her in her bedroom and another that had served her poison in her tea. The first time, she reacted on instinct and the fight had ended with the man dead with her blade through his chest, and the second had chosen to drink the poison before she could even begin interrogating them. That unfortunately meant that Kagome is stuck performing the part of the Princess of Snow until they weed out the person behind the assassination attempts.
Still, how does the Princess do this?
Smiling and waving sounds like a cushy job, but Kagome’s fingers itch to hit something. She wonders if the Princess’s second clause about a decoy was really just an excuse to escape these dull conversations because if she has to listen to someone talk about the weather one more time—
“ It can’t be that bad, can it? ” Inori asks in her mind. “ You get to sleep in her nice bed, wear her nice clothes, maybe have a dance with a mysterious handsome Lord.”
“The next time we have a client request to play a princess, you can do it ,” she tells him. “ You probably won’t even need to use the transformation jutsu. ”
She can almost sense Inori flipping his blond ponytail without even looking at him. “ And what exactly is that supposed to mean .”
From the corner of the room, the third member of their squad adjusts his glasses, sunlight glinting off the rims. Just like her, he’s dressed to the nines. “ You know, considering that we are waiting for an assassin to show up, maybe dancing with a stranger isn’t actually something you should be looking forward to.”
“ Good point,” Inori concedes. “ Kagome? Don’t dance with creepy guys.”
“ No dancing with you then.”
“Princess.”
She snaps back to attention. “Uncle,” she addresses.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be attending.” Regent Doto has been taking care of most internal affairs since his brother’s demise in preparation for the Princess to take over when she comes of age. A hulking figure of a man, even before he climbs up the steps to the dais, he is already at eye level with her, dressed in their family colours in white and light blue formal robes, his goatee freshly trimmed and his dark hair slicked back.
“Yes, well, busy week,” she replies, standing up to greet him with a curtsy as he climbs up to the dais, “planning two events back to back and all.”
He extends his arm towards her as an invitation. “May I have the honour of your first dance, your Highness?”
“Of course.” She places her hand in his and lets him lead her down to join the main hall.
The hall is vast enough to hold a couple hundred people, much larger than the venues that her team usually stakes out. Between the large, marble tiles, full-length windows with intricate paintings into the glass, and the crystal chandeliers hanging overhead reflecting white light into multicoloured rays, Kagome wonders if the Land of Snow really is as poor as the reports suggest, or if it is precisely because of this opulent palace in the mountains that the land suffers. Even so, the people part to give way to them with polite nods and smiles.
As the live quartet begins their new song, she mirrors the steps by following his lead, counting the beats of the song to try to keep up. Other people begin joining the floor in pairs, dancing to the waltz that the musicians are playing.
Mostly because she is too busy concentrating on not tripping over the long hem of her skirt, it takes her a moment to realise that Doto is speaking to her: “—coronation plans are going well?”
“Yes, everything is moving along as planned,” she answers smoothly as she turns, stepping to the rhythm with the feigned grace of a noble who does this all the time.
He spins her in time with the music. “Nervous at all?”
“A little,” she admits.
His eyes bore into hers, seeming to pierce through the disguise of her transformation jutsu.
“I am certain you’ll make your father proud.”
“His are some large shoes to fill. But I’m thankful that I will have your continued support, Uncle. You’ve been such a great help to me throughout all of this.”
The corners of his lips turn upward into a smile, but the light doesn’t reach his eyes. “The pleasure is all mine.”
The conversation shifts towards the usual small talk that she finds utterly boring. When the song ends, the Regent excuses himself with a slight bow and dips out of the way as a young noble asks for the pleasure of her next dance.
“ Is it just me or… ” she begins, taking the man’s hand and sweeping across the floor.
“ That guy is definitely suspicious.”
“ No kidding.” The lighthearted tone in Inori’s voice has evaporated. “ Look, he’s leaving early. ”
She spots the Regent slinking out of the hall from the corner of her eye. “Inori. ”
“ Way ahead of you .” Inori tilts his head towards the side of the ballroom. “ Back me up?”
“ What about Kagome?”
“ I can take care of myself.” She raises her chin. “ Go .”
She catches a glimpse of her teammate looking at her from across the room with an odd look in his eyes, before turning to go.
The final song ends to the sound of more polite clapping from the villagers and a curtsy from Kagome. Refusing a third dance from another interested party, she lifts the hem of her skirt to climb back up the dais.
That’s when she notices.
Wait, she thinks, but she finds that she is all alone in her mind as the world around her explodes.
Kagome is sitting at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Nara River. Birds chase each other through the trees, sunlight filtering through the branches and spotting the ground in uneven patches under their vast canopy. She closes her eyes, feeling the light breeze in her face, listening to the trickling of the gentle stream.
She’s at it again.
The voice bounces around in the hollow of her mind, sounding far, far away.
Snap her out of it, then.
A stinging pain on her cheek brings her out of the vision. She blinks rapidly as her eyes adjust to the darkness. “Rude,” she spits. “I was having fun with that.”
“Answer the question,” the man in front of her demands.
Part of Konoha Academy’s curriculum includes a final written exam which asks the question: “What should you do when you are captured in hostile territory?”
A few years ago, Kagome scored full marks on this question and came second overall in her class. But she can’t remember a word of the model answer that she gave, now that she is strung up in chains.
Somebody rigged the hall with bombs. Pandemonium broke out across the hall, with explosions blowing up entire columns and drowning out screams. One of them ignited right beside her, narrowly missing her foot but sending her crashing into a pillar. Disoriented by the blast, her reaction was sluggish enough for a man to come up behind her and press a chlorofoam-soaked cloth to her nose and mouth.
Which is how she woke up here: hanging from the ceiling, suspended with iron manacles around her wrists in a dark, dingy dungeon.
In the windowless room, it’s impossible to tell how much time has passed, but gauging from how restless her captors have been getting, a few hours must have passed since they kidnapped the wrong girl.
“How are you doing that?” one of them asks.
Their initial attempt to get her to reveal the location of the true Princess is so pathetic that she shrugs it off within seconds. It’s laughable, really — they think a genjutsu of that calibre will work on anyone on her team, who routinely breaks into people’s minds for a living?
She can’t see their faces with such low light, but she imagines his bewildered expression and it makes her want to smile. “You gotta be more specific.”
“Taking control of the genjutsu. I’ve never seen someone do that.”
“See more then.”
Her snark is rewarded quickly with another tight slap. Her cheek burns.
“Wow,” she responds. “Hitting a girl. No chivalry in this world anymore.”
“Why, you—!”
“Enough.” Another man steps in — the leader of their unit, she presumes. “We’ve wasted enough time. He won’t be happy if we tell him there’s been no progress. Use it on her.”
They hook her cuffs up to a metallic disc sparking with electricity. A moment later, a shock of pain shoots down her spine, and she can’t stop the gasp that escapes from her lips.
Emboldened by getting their first reaction out of her, their leader steps forward. She can smell his bad breath with how close he is. “How ‘bout you tell us where the Princess is, and we can end it here?”
She laughs, a little breathless. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“Thought you’d say that.”
On the subsequent shock, several volts higher, she grits her teeth to stop the scream bubbling in her throat. Each time, they repeat the question, and each time she refuses to respond, they threaten to raise the voltage. She closes her eyes, letting her mind drift away from her body.
Hopefully, the other members of her squad are getting away safely. They left the ballroom, the epicentre of the blast, before the bombs went off, so they most likely had not suffered the same fate. With any luck, she just needs to hold out a little more to waste these guys’ time, and her team would have gotten the Princess to safety. The plan was that if any of them had gotten unwillingly separated from the group, that they would meet at midnight at their specified rendezvous point — a boat secured off the harbour disguised as a regular fishing boat, poised and stocked for them to make a speedy escape with the Princess if there was a need to whisk her away from the Land of Snow.
With any luck, they’ve made their way down the mountain by now.
A clang as the door of the cell bursts open catches her attention again. The slanting rays of a setting sun outline a tall, familiar figure as Regent Doto strides in, and the men who have been questioning her scramble to bow to him in panicked, jerky movements. He is half dressed in his formal blue robes, sans the clasped cape around his shoulders but in the same buttoned up suit with their family regalia.
“Sir!” The leader of the men salutes him.
I guess our instincts were right after all , she thinks wryly. Typical.
Doto turns to the leader, towering over him. “Anything, Captain?”
Skittish, the captain takes a step back. “She won’t be able to hold out much longer. We’ll get the location soon enough.”
“In other words, you made no progress.” In the amber light of the sun, Kagome can make out the frown lines on his forehead. “How difficult can breaking one girl be?”
The captain’s eyes flick towards her and then back to Doto. “She’s a tough one, sir.”
Doto grunts, clearly irritated. He turns to her and grabs her chin, yanking her face towards him. “You don’t look like much,” he addresses her, his voice a deep rumble in his throat.
That’s kind of the point , she thinks to herself.
“The Princess is smarter than I thought,” he muses, turning her face from side to side, “getting a kunoichi to be her body double. Though I have to say, I am surprised that they managed to find one so young. How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen?”
Actually, Kagome is turning fifteen this year, but he doesn’t need to know that she’s actually younger than the real Princess.
Undeterred by her silence, Doto continues, “I don’t particularly enjoy hurting little girls, so why don’t we make a deal? You give us the location, and I’ll pay you double of whatever she is.”
At this, Kagome has to scoff. “You’re trying to assassinate your own niece.”
“Now, for the record I never said that I wanted to,” he says, “but I have to do what must be done.” Doto lets go of her chin roughly. “The Princess is like her Father. Dreaming of impossibilities. Always about channelling our resources into building a tunnel through the mountain. No, I think I have a better idea on how to use the treasure he left behind.”
This guy loves dramatic monologuing, she can almost hear Inori saying. “And what would that be?”
He spreads his arms. “Building a military strong enough to rival the Five Great Nations.”
Kagome raises her eyebrow. “You would court war with the Hidden Villages?”
Arrogance drips from his voice. “I captured you, haven’t I?”
Have you?
“You don’t know the first thing about shinobi,” she tells him. “And I’m not helping someone who bombs their own people.”
Doto’s lips curl in a sneer. “You know, I really did want to avoid this nastiness.” He turns, his robes sweeping after him. “Raise the voltage again.”
The captain’s eyes widen. “But sir, any higher and we run the risk of—“
“I don’t care if you kill her as long as she gives up the Princess before she dies.”
As he turns to go, she calls to him, “So much for not liking hurting little girls.”
The sun has now set, and in the flickering lighting of the torch outside the cell, she sees his lips curl into a grotesque smile. “I think I can make an exception.”
The Regent strides out, his two guards hurrying after him like mice.
Kagome’s vision blurs and her body jerks involuntarily as the next jolt of electricity courses through her body. She’s starting to lose feeling in her fingers. The chances of her escaping tonight will go down drastically if she doesn’t make a move now.
“I’m not sure how much more she can take,” someone in the room mutters, sounding distant to the ringing in her ears. “At this rate, she’ll die before giving us anything.”
“He’s going to kill us if we don’t get the location out of her.”
Calm down, she tells herself and closes her eyes. Just breathe.
The sun has set over the horizon now. From her glimpse of the outside corridor, she could see familiar stone walls. She must be somewhere in the Palace. One, two, three guards are in the cell with her, two more at the entrance.
Yes, she can work with this. She takes a deep breath and begins moulding chakra in her body.
“Again.”
The next time the electric shock runs through her body, she leans into the pain radiating in her body and lets her scream ring throughout the cell, then goes limp in the chains, her head lolling to one side.
“Is she—?”
“Get her down, now!”
The metal chain connecting her to the ceiling clinks as they lower the suspension, the excess of the chain pooling at her feet. It’s a relief to find the ground beneath her again. Two cold fingers press into the side of her neck.
“Goddammit, call the medic!”
“Yes, sir!”
The door creaks open.
In a flash, Kagome’s eyes fly open. The man standing in front of her is completely unguarded when she wraps her elbow around his neck in a headlock and snaps it. Standing near the door, the captain stares, too stunned to move, as the man’s body crumples to the ground.
“What the—”
One of his underlings lunges at her; it’s the wrong move. Now that her feet are on the ground, she only has to sidestep to avoid it, and as he comes back for another swing at her, she tangles the chain around his neck and pulls hard. His choked gasp finally prompts the captain to draw a blade. She loosens the chain. The body drops to the floor with a terrible thud.
“But you had no pulse,” he says, baffled.
Silencing their heartbeat is one of the first things her sensei taught them when they went on their first undercover mission together. The three of them sat by her side, looking wide-eyed as she demonstrated how to play dead, lying on the ground pale-faced and cold-fingered. Inori muttered under his breath how morbid this was while Kagome watched with eager eyes.
“Faking your death is such a coward’s trick,” Inori commented.
“It’s practical ,” Kagome countered, “think of all the use cases!”
She can add this to that list: getting out of hostile capture.
The swing of the captain’s blade is undisciplined, sloppy, and when she ducks, it misses her head and lodges itself in one of the links in her metal chain. Channeling her chakra through the weakened metal, the iron chain glows and cracks under the heat of her chakra.
Only one of the guards standing by the door rushes towards her. Kagome’s eyes narrow. She can’t afford to delay any longer.
A hard twist to the captain’s wrist and she relieves him of his sword, slicing his throat in a swift stroke, and then turns, narrowly avoiding a blow to her head as she sinks the borrowed blade to the hilt into the fourth man’s chest.
As they collapse, Kagome kicks over the fallen body of the captain, terrified eyes open as he gurgles his own blood from his slit throat.
“Should probably have bound my chakra instead of my wrists,” she tells him as she bends down to pull the key attached to his belt.
The iron manacles fall apart with a dull clang and she dashes out of the cell, scanning the corridor for the final guard. He’s reaching for the alarm at the end of the corridor. A surge of panic rises in her throat, but suddenly he keels over.
A single, gleaming needle sprouts from the dead guard’s neck.
A figure in a pale woollen cloak steps over the body.
“Kabuto!”
Relief washes over her as she runs towards the third member of her team. Over the past year they’ve been together, his growth spurt has hit him hard, so when she flings her arms around him she only comes up to his shoulder.
“What are you doing here? You should be halfway across the country by now!”
“I can’t just leave you behind.” He looks at the lacerations on her wrists. “They hurt you.”
Her wrists are raw and bloody from the iron manacles, and her body tingles with pain from the aftereffects of the electrocution. “I’ll be fine,” she insists, but doesn’t move away when he wraps his arm around her waist, supporting her weight gently. “The others?”
“They’re safe.” Kabuto scans the dark hallway. “We gotta go.”
Kabuto returns her weapons pouch to her, the weight around her hip a comfort as they creep along the dark passageways. In the dead of the night, it’s almost impossible to see more than a couple of feet in front of them, but instead of taking a torch, Kabuto runs his hand across the cold stone walls and leads them through the shadows of the winding corridors. A couple of times they almost run into more guards, Kabuto pulling her close to him around corners to avoid being seen, but eventually they make it to a hidden passage in the east wing meant for servants collecting deliveries to the palace. His deft fingers make quick work of the lock on the gate.
A fresh layer of snow covers the mountainside, practically glowing in the silvery light of an unobstructed full moon. As they step out, the snow crunches under their feet. When they first make the trek up the mountain, they took the paved road up, and even that took about an hour. To make it down on the other, untamed side of the mountain will be treacherous, but they don’t have a choice; the main road is too exposed. Trudging along the unpaved path down the mountain, their pace is slowed by the icy slopes. Kagome loses her footing more than once, slipping along the wet surface.
“Sorry,” she mutters after the second time, clutching tightly to the edge of her teammate’s cloak to catch her balance again. The shoes that she is wearing are not meant for harsh snow like this, and the biting cold gnaws at her skin. She shivers.
“Let’s take a break,” Kabuto suggests. ”Over there.”
The forest of evergreen pine trees up ahead gives them a respite from the prickling winds and cover from prying eyes. They find a hiding spot up in a tree, and Kabuto insists that he take a look at her wounds.
“I’ll heal them properly when I have my antiseptic with me,” he promises, bandaging her wrists. “For now, rest. I’ll keep watch.”
Kagome thinks about protesting, but he unclasps his woolen cloak and wraps it around her. Any thought of the danger gives way to exhaustion.
The adrenaline crash is intense. Tucked in his cloak, cheek against his shoulder, Kagome relaxes to the comforting warmth. Sleep comes quickly, easy as breathing.
She isn’t sure how long she drifts off for. When she awakes, the sky is dark, but he tells her that it’s less than an hour to sunrise. After rubbing the sleep from her eyes, they clamber down the tree and have resumed their hike downhill when he stops in his tracks.
“What’s wrong?”
Kabuto’s eyebrows furrow. “Someone’s coming.”
In the distance, Kagome sees it — a flickering flame of a carried torch above them, breaking up the darkness of the night.
“Maybe they won’t see us,” she whispers, hoping that the dark will grant them some cover.
Someone shouts, their voice carried away by the wind.
“They have a sensor,” Kabuto realises.
First there’s waving, and over the hill more and more lit torches start to converge. Then there’s pointing. One of the shadowy figures, lit only by the torches around him pulls out something that looks like a crossbow. They are looking in their direction.
Kagome grabs his arm. “Run. Run!”
Taking off down the hill, they duck and weave in and out of trees. Behind them, more voices, followed by more arrows zipping past them. Kagome narrowly dodges one that flies past her ear and embeds itself into the bark of a tree. Her breath comes out in visible puffs as she sprints towards the edge of the thinning forest and bursts into the open space.
Only to be greeted with—
“Woah!” Kabuto skids to a sudden stop on the icy slick slope.
—A steep cliff with a sheer plummet into a gorge.
Kagome nearly doesn’t stop in time, but catches hold of herself at the very last second. In the distance, she sees the dancing fire torches growing larger as the men converge on them. She curses. Walking down with chakra is not an option: the icy surface would likely melt under the heat of their chakra. If she turns back, they will have to fight, and if her count is right, that’s twenty-odd men against the two of them.
What do we do?
But Inori is not here to listen to her racing thoughts. A glimmer of movement catches her eye and she draws a kunai, slicing through the arrow just in time to stop it from hitting Kabuto. More arrows fly, so Kagome lets her chakra loose in a breath of fire, burning the arrows to ash.
“We need to—”
Kabuto’s voice trails off in a shout as the cliff crumbles away in a sleet of ice. Screaming his name, Kagome reaches out instinctively and he grabs hold of her outstretched left arm. But then the ground beneath her feet begins to crack.
With a sharp twist of her body, she strikes her kunai into the rock surface, and for an impossibly long second, the tip glances off and the wind rushes up around them as they both begin to slide down. She plunges her kunai into the icy rock again and this time it finds purchase, abruptly halting their plummet into the dizzingly wide chasm.
They teeter on the edge of the cliff with only a single kunai in her right hand dug deep into the rock to support their weight and Kabuto clinging on to her left. A moment after, pain bursts in her shoulder. It feels like her arm is being pulled out of its socket. Kagome screams reflexively into the crisp air, unable to muffle it. The bandage around her wrists loosens, revealing her bloody, raw skin as Kabuto struggles to find purchase.
“Kagome!” he gasps.
“I’ve got you,” she manages to grit out. The fingers around her kunai burn, but she grips even tighter.
“They’re getting cl—”
“—I know!”
Kagome strains to keep her grip, his weight threatening to drag them both into the abyss below. She makes the mistake of glancing down at him and the hundred foot drop underneath them and her head swims.
Their eyes meet. The same thought flashes through their minds.
“No.” Her fingers dig into his wrist, her grip tightening till bruising.
“ You have to live.“
The resignation in his voice shatters her. His dark eyes are rimmed with red, his eyeglasses start to fog up. Kagome can’t think of a single instance when she has ever known him to make that expression. Not in all these years, not in the countless missions they’ve been on.
“It’s okay—” he begins.
“No,” she repeats, interrupting him. Why is it so hard to breathe? Every part of her body hurts, from the exertion, from her injuries, but none more than the pressure building in her chest. “Do you trust me?”
The bewilderment is apparent in his face. “What?”
Above them, the men will be swarming the edge of the cliff soon. Beneath their feet, the ravine yawns open, a hundred foot drop into oblivion. The death trap snaps shut.
“ Do you trust me? ” she demands.
“ Of course I do!” he shouts back.
The cold wind whips around them, tearing at her hair and clothes. His hand in hers is the only warmth she can feel. She focuses on the feeling of his hand in hers, lets it anchor her thoughts and settle her mind and chakra. “Hang on.”
She releases her hold on the kunai, and then they’re falling.
Kagome hooks her elbows and knees around him, pulling his body close to hers. For a single, terrifying moment there is only the scream of wind and his racing heartbeat in her ear as they hurtle through the air.
“Summoning jutsu.”
To his credit, Kabuto doesn’t question her until they make it back to the boat.
“When were you going to tell us that you could do that?”
Usually being shirtless and stripped down like this — she’s dressed only her loose pants and chest bindings — wouldn’t embarrass her that much. Heaven knows that he’s healed her when she was even worse shape than this. At least, with her back turned towards him, he can’t see the flush on her face. “I was still working on it with sensei. Didn’t expect to use it on a mission yet.”
“ Still working on it ?” he repeats incredulously.
The week before they set off on this mission, the best she was able to call forth was a small messenger hawk. She had never intended to use her freshly minted summoning contract with the birds of Aosagibi Grove in combat so early, and didn’t even dare to dream about summoning the King of the Great Eagles, Garuda, so soon. After dropping them off in a safe clearing, Garuda warned her to never again summon him so recklessly. “If the chakra drain doesn’t kill you next time, I will,” he said, flapping his majestic, large wings before vanishing in a puff of smoke.
She swallows. “Well, we’re both here now, aren’t we?”
They’re sitting on the edge of a bed as he examines her injuries. With how utterly drained she was, Kabuto had to all but carry her the rest of the way slung over his back all the way down to the harbour. Inori ran out onto the dock to greet them, his earlier playfulness nowhere in sight when he saw how battered she was and immediately set her up in the makeshift medical bay in the ship despite her insistence that all she needed was some rest and good food.
Kabuto sighs. “Unbelievable.” The bed dips as he shifts his weight to get a better angle. After a minute or two, he instructs, “Try lifting your arm like this. Any pain?”
She does as he says. The piercing pain is gone, leaving behind only a dull ache. “It’s a lot better now.”
“Okay, good. Show me your wrists.”
The freshly healed skin is pink and tender when he runs his glowing green fingers over them and hm-s . A shiver crawls her spine, unbidden. His eyes flick up to meet hers.
The door swings open. Kabuto pulls away from her quickly, dropping his gaze to a random spot on the bed as their sensei ducking under the low doorway comes into view.
Before retiring from her role as an ANBU captain to become a jounin sensei, Furuya Misaki was called by many other names: Hirao Yuki, Nakao Takeko, Adachi Hana, but most notably by her call sign, Sparrow, known for her particular expertise in getting intel that nobody else could. Time and time again, her whispers have saved Konohan lives. Though it has been three years since she shed the name Sparrow for Misaki , the gaping loss she left behind in the ANBU ranks has not been filled to this day.
“How is she?” she asks Kabuto.
“The cuts might scar but she should be fine after some rest,” Kabuto reports.
What’s one scar more? Kagome thinks dryly, pulling her shirt on. “So what’s the play here? We going after the Regent or what?”
Misaki shakes her head. “You are on Princess-sitting duties for the rest of this mission.”
“You’re grounding me?”
For all her accolades, Misaki cuts an unassuming figure with ash brown hair pulled up in a high ponytail and a standard-issue grey cloak draped over her shoulder, but one look of her stern grey eyes snuffs out Kagome’s fiery protest immediately. “After what you pulled, young lady, you’re lucky I’m letting you out of my sight.”
So all Kagome can do while the rest of her teammates prepare to head out is to watch and sulk. Technically, you’ve got the most essential job of the mission, Inori pointed out as they planned their strategy to eliminate the threat to the Princess, and while it was certainly true, Kagome would rather be out there with her team than play guard dog.
“She’s just worried about you,” Kabuto says, organising his senbon set on the table. This time, they aren’t bothering to disguise themselves while going in, so they are arming themselves to the teeth. “We all were.”
It’s an open secret in their team that of the three of them, she’s Misaki’s favourite — Inori spends a good chunk of his time dedicated to his duties as the Yamanaka clan heir, Kabuto is often busy at the Konoha hospital, but Kagome is all Misaki’s.
A knock on the door draws their attention. “Ready to go?” Misaki asks.
Kabuto tucks away his weapons. “Yeah, I’ll be right out.” As he turns to leave, he pauses and reaches over to brush his thumb over her cheek. “Does it hurt?”
She shakes her head. The bruise on her cheek is patchy with discolouration, but it’s stopped hurting.
“Rest, okay? Doctor’s orders.”
“All right, all right.”
His lips curl slightly upward in a soft smile. “Be right back,” he says, and steps out of the door.
Loitering in the doorway, Misaki stares at her for a moment longer.
Kagome shifts uncomfortably under her discerning grey gaze. “What?”
Misaki’s eyebrows are knitted together. “Does he know about you?”
“What?”
“Does he know about you?” she repeats with emphasis.
Kagome is so thrown by the topic it takes her a while to answer, “No.”
“You can’t tell him,” Misaki warns. “You know that, right?”
“Of course.”
The wrinkle between Misaki’s eyebrows eases. As she nods and slips out of the door, Kagome watches her go with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Despite the initial complications of the mission, the rest of it plays out textbook. Reinfiltrating the castle is simple, embarrassingly so, and it isn’t long till the news of the Regent’s sudden and tragic ‘heart attack’ is on the mouths of every citizen of the land. It was telling that most of the Regent’s men were mercenaries or cowards who quickly abandoned the cause as soon as the Regent’s corpse had been discovered, grey-faced, blue-lipped and clutching his chest.
To respect and mourn the deaths of her uncle and the citizens who died at the ball, the Princess declares a delay in her coronation.
Which means that Kagome has been stuck playing Princess for a grand total of six weeks by the time she is finally, finally contractually allowed to shed the fineries of her Princess disguise for her usual gear.
“I can’t wait to go home.”
Beside her, Kabuto lets out a tinkling laugh. “You’re the only person I know who actually enjoys a party more from the sidelines,” he says.
“ You try having to smile at those old geezers for six weeks.”
“Try doing that for the rest of your life.”
“I wish Her Majesty good luck and my sincere sympathies.”
The Queen’s glittering crown is striking on her dark curls, eye-catching even in the crowd of people. Kagome wonders whether her neck hurts from the weight of it. Flanking the Queen are Inori and Misaki, staying close to her shadow.
Kabuto bumps his shoulder against hers gently. “Lighten up. If not for the coronation, then you can celebrate that this is the last night you have to spend here.”
The Land of Snow has its crystalline charm, but she misses Konoha dearly after so many weeks of being away from home. The streets here are lined with lanterns too, but without the familiar earthy smell of the dense forest and summer rain, it just doesn’t feel the same.
“Too bad we won’t make it back home in time for the fireworks,” Kabuto murmurs.
She turns to look at him from the corner of her eye. “We’ll have next year.”
The sound of joyful chatter and laughter wafts up to them as a young couple on the street passes beneath them, accompanied by the upbeat melody on a ukelele being played somewhere distantly. “Next year,” he promises.
A gust of wind teases her hair loose from the lazily put up ponytail falling over her shoulder and makes her shudder.
“Here.” He slips off his cloak and drapes it across her shoulders.
“I’m fine,” she insists, but pulls it close. It’s made of soft wool and smells faintly of him. It takes her a moment before she realises that Kabuto is staring at her. A warmth rises in her face. “What?”
“Nothing.” He’s still looking at her with such intensity like he is engraving the image of her into his mind. Reaching over, he brushes back the stray lock of her hair behind her ear, and the contact makes her skin tingle. His hand falters. The glow of the lantern lights from the street below them lines his silhouette in gold and reflects off the rim of his glasses.
In that moment, the world slows.
He takes a breath, and then another and his lips part, like he is preparing to speak, his shoulders moving up and down. They’re standing so close that she can count every one of his dark lashes.
“Hey guys!”
Abruptly, she steps away, putting space between them as Inori trods up to them. He glances between them and breaks into a grin.
Kabuto clears his throat. “Inori,” he greets, squaring his shoulders and straightening up. “Time to switch?”
“Yep.” Inori claps him on his shoulder. “Go and enjoy the party.”
“You do realise that we have a mission here, right?” Kabuto says dryly.
“And you do realise that they have a shaved ice stall down there, right?” Inori steers him to the stairs. “Go on.”
Kabuto grumbles something that sounds like who the hell needs shaved ice in this weather as he disappears down the stairs.
Inori sidles up to her. “So, Kagome.”
Her eyes follow Kabuto through the crowd as he makes his way to take up Inori’s former post. “Hm?”
“Has he told you?”
“Has who told me what?” she asks absentmindedly.
“Kabuto.” The name draws her attention. “Did he finally tell you that he’s in love with you?”
Kagome whips her head around. “What?”
She expects him to laugh it off, but Inori stares back at her unblinking with startlingly clear blue eyes.
“I—” she stutters. She cannot bring herself to string together a coherent sentence. “He’s not…”
“I’d have to be blind to not notice the way he looks at you.”
She can’t help but repeat, “The way he looks at me?”
“Like the sky could be falling and the only thing that he’d care about is if you were safe,” he states, like it’s obvious. “You should have seen how he reacted when we realised you had been taken. I thought he might fight Sensei when she forbade him to go after you.“
Inori may joke, but he doesn’t lie, not to her, and of all the members of Team Nineteen, he’s always been the most perceptive of them. They default to him as the team strategist for a reason.
“Look,” he says in response to her stunned silence, “I don’t want to get in between you two, but watching my best friends act like they don’t have feelings for each other is getting old.”
Getting old?
She leans against the balcony railing, gazing out into the night and finds her gaze magnetically attracted to Kabuto in the crowd. “How long have you known?” Kagome asks.
Inori smiles. “Well, I wasn’t sure about you until right now.”
She gives him a side glance. Oh, you sly bastard.
“But Kabuto…”
Inori trails off thoughtfully, and follows her gaze to Kabuto.
“Kabuto’s been in love with you since the very first day.”
She doesn’t get the chance to speak to Kabuto alone again until they’re almost back to Konoha. They’re about half a day out from seeing the towering village gates welcoming them home but it’s already getting dark, so they stop to make camp.
Kagome is assigned second watch (also known as the worst shift — much to her grumbling), but as she lies down in her makeshift bed by the fire, she can’t put her mind to rest. She’s been having more of that lately. After about twenty minutes of shifting around trying to get more comfortable and failing, she gives up. With a frustrated sigh, she gets up, rubbing at her eyes tiredly.
“Can’t sleep?”
Kabuto is sitting by the campfire, stoking the flames with a stick in one hand.
“Yeah,” she answers. “Let’s switch.”
He raises an eyebrow. “And take second shift? Absolutely not.”
Regardless, she can’t sleep anyway, so she shrugs and plops herself beside him by the fire. “Guess I’ll keep you company for first shift then.”
“You all right?”
“Mm.”
“Come on.” Because after three years of missions together he is now fluent in Kagome’s grunts, he moves his arm to pull her close, and instinctively, she tucks herself into his side, resting her head against his shoulder.
“Kabuto?” she starts.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think we would have been friends if we weren’t in the same team?”
He looks down at her. “Is it contemplate the universe o’ clock already?”
She hits him lightly on the shoulder.
“Okay, okay,” he says with a light laugh before settling down with a thoughtful hum, looking into the fire. After a long moment, he begins, “You know that time when you had just come to the Academy, and Kousuke was picking on you?”
While dropouts in the final year are common, newbies are rare. Most of the time they are dropped a year down to give them more time to learn and prepare for the final exam. Having a new student with no official record of attending any prior formal training join the graduating class of pre-genin students had initially caused scepticism among her classmates and made her an easy target for the class bully. That is, until—
“You mean how I beat his ass first time we got on the floor?” A small smirk curls on her lips. “I remember that.”
Kagome’s first spar with him had been so brutal that the Academy implemented a fresh set of guidelines on what was acceptable in a sparring match. Apparently, throwing sand into your opponent’s eyes is considered to be unfair. Like a real enemy would care about fighting fairly , she protested, red-faced and burning with the desire to prove herself. Nobody had dared to question her presence in the cohort after that.
“Yes, that.” He chuckles a little. “Then when they put us in the same team, I remember thinking, ‘I better get on her good side or she’ll literally kill me someday.’”
She lifts her head off his shoulder to look at him properly. “I wasn’t that bad.”
“You can be pretty scary, but I think,” he says, “I admired you, even then. Always have.”
The flickering flames reflect in his eyeglasses, and for a moment it looks as if the fire is engulfing his face.
“You know that doesn’t really answer my question,” she points out.
He looks at her, meeting her gaze with bright eyes. “I guess it doesn’t,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate.
This night in the forest is quiet with only the campfire sizzling and crackling breaking the contemplative silence. It‘s only in times like this, deep in the night, that Kagome allows herself to stop and indulge. She tilts her head and lets her eyes trail over Kabuto’s face. In the years they’ve been together, he has gradually lost the roundness in his face, slowly revealing his high cheekbones and an angular jawline with a dusting of stubble. (Inori, who hasn’t started growing facial hair yet, is wildly jealous of the fact that Kabuto has started shaving). His hair, silver as the moonbeams around them, has grown out over the past couple of months. He’s tied it back to keep it out of his eyes, but a couple of strands fall loose, framing his face. Kagome hasn’t really considered how much he has grown, how they both have, since they became a team.
All at once she is hyper aware of how easily they are tangled into each other, their knees and shoulders touching. They’ve done this a hundred times, snuggling by the fire like this, but it feels familiar and thrilling at the same time in light of recent events.
“What’s bothering you?” he asks.
Why did you come for me when sensei told you not to ?
She wants to ask, but the words get tangled in her throat. Instead she says, “I’m going on a solo mission. When we get back to Konoha.”
He blinks at the change in topic. “A solo mission?”
She nods. Why is she suddenly so nervous? “Sensei’s submitting my name for the jounin promotion. I just need one more successful solo mission to make up the pre-reqs.”
“Oh.” He pauses, and after a moment, manages a smile. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”
“Well, I haven’t made jounin yet .”
His smile softens around the edges. “You will.”
If she does, at fifteen, she’ll be one of the youngest among the current active jounin cohort. It is no simple feat, but he says it with such surety and seriousness that she believes him.
The morning that she leaves for her solo mission, she runs into the rest of Team Nineteen under a clear, cloudless sky.
“Hey!”
Her face brightens as she sees Inori. “What are you doing here?” she asks.
She lets Inori pull her into a hug as a greeting. “We just got dispatched as well,” he says, grinning, “some mission to one of the outposts.”
She cocks her head. “Going on missions without me already? You sure you’re fine without me?”
“Eh,” he shrugs, “it’s just a quick one. You should be more concerned about yourself going out there all alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” she reassures him. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
He pats her on the back. “We have to go out when you’re back. Celebrate your promotion to jounin.”
“You do realise that it’s not a guarantee that I’ll get it, right?”
“It’s settled! We’re going out for sushi when you’re back!” he announces excitedly. “Thanks for offering to treat us!”
“I never said I’m treating you.”
His blue eyes sparkle with mirth. “See you when we get back!”
“All right, all right,” Misaki says, ushering him away, “can we get on the road soon? We’re already late.” She turns briefly to Kagome. “Good luck. And remember to—”
“Strike early and strike fast?” Kagome finishes.
Misaki returns a smile that is warm and proud like the sunshine on Kagome’s face. “You’ll do great.”
Kabuto is the last to leave, lingering behind as the other two start heading out of the gate. Unlike the other two, he isn’t smiling and there’s a kind of inexplicable seriousness in his dark eyes when he approaches her.
“Kagome,” he whispers, and there’s something in the way he says her name like a prayer that sends alarm bells in her head. “There’s something that I need to tell you,” he continues lowly.
“Don’t.”
For some reason, saying the word makes her feel as breathless as when she was teetering off the edge of the cliff with only a kunai embedded in rock keeping her and Kabuto alive.
“ Kagome —”
“Please,” she blurts out as she feels her eyes burn.
You can’t tell him, you know that, right?
But how can she keep secrets from him when he speaks her name like that?
He reels back like he’s been slapped, eyes wide and brimming with a strange wetness.
“Not right now,” she emphasises. She inhales, a shuddering, shaky breath. “Just… I need some time.” Something changed between them on that cliffside that she isn’t ready to deal with, and the morning of her first solo mission is the worst time for this conversation. “We’ll talk about this after I’m back.”
He presses his lips together, reluctant.
After a beat of hesitation, a streak of recklessness jolts through her, and she surges up and kisses his cheek. His entire body goes still at the brief contact. As she pulls away, he reaches out and grasps her wrist. He looks at her like he’s trying to memorise this moment. Then, catching himself, he lets go of her abruptly.
“After,” she promises.
He nods slowly, swallowing the lump in his throat. “Goodbye.”
Kabuto turns on his heel and walks out of the gate to join their teammates. Not once does he look back.
By the time that Kagome returns from her mission, Furuya Misaki has been dead for over an hour.
They say that she bravely gave her life to buy enough time for Inori to crawl back to Konohagakure. That in doing so, she enabled him to expose high treason.
Gasping for breath in the hospital, Inori names the traitor who murdered them: Yakushi Kabuto.
Yamanaka Inori doesn’t survive the night.
All records of Team Nineteen are immediately expunged from public record and classified as S-rank village secrets.
Kagome is arrested under suspicion of being a co-conspirator. She misses both funerals because of it. All charges against her are dropped three days later.
The last known sighting of her is two weeks after that, when she is spotted walking straight off the cliff overlooking the Nara River.
Her body is never recovered.