"So, you took down all four of those other guys, huh?" I ask, staggering to my feet. I turn away from the Iwa genin's corpse. "I think that makes us even. Six to six…" I trail off, blinking at my partner.
...
She's kneeling by one of the dispelled earth clones, cradling the hilt half of her broken sword. The cool expression that I've begun to associate with her is gone. She looks… lost? Or if not lost, stunned. I inch towards her.
"Samui? You alright?"
She closes her eyes, clutching the hilt. "No."
I pause, feeling awkward all of the sudden. "Was that, uh, an heirloom?"
"No. It was a standard issue." She sighs softly and places the broken blade on the ground.
"Oh. That's not too bad, then."
"It's not the sentimental value of it," she says. I'm not sure I believe her. "I…"
"Yeah?" I prod when she falls silent, conflicted.
She shrugs. "I guess it doesn't matter if I tell you at this point. I can't fight without my tanto."
"Wait, really?" I ask. "Not at all?"
"I can still fight with the other arts," she says, rolling her eyes. "But not well enough to compete. Kenjutsu has always been my specialty."
"So you're screwed for the other tasks," I say. She nods.
"And this one, if we run into anyone else."
The weight of the tanto on my back suddenly becomes staggering.
Tell her she's out of luck. Do it, Uzumaki. Tell her you'll do the rest of the fighting from here. No, stop reaching for that sheath. Drop your hand. What are you even doing.
"Here," I grunt. Samui looks up at me and the sheath held in my outstretched hand. Surprise dances across her cool blue eyes.
"What?"
"Take it. It's the same make as yours, right?" I ask, shaking it.
She glances from me to the sword and back again. "What about you?"
"My fighting style doesn't revolve around Kenjutsu," I say. "You can give it back when the exams are done." She reaches out, but hesitates halfway there. I beat back a groan. Just put me out of my misery already.
"Why would you do this?" She asks, voice quiet.
"Because we're teammates," I say, and despite my internal lament I smile. "And I don't know how it is in Kumo, but where I come from that means something."
She looks away, breaking eye contact, focusing on her broken sword. A long silence stretches between us, during which I try and fail to get a bead on what she's thinking. I'm considering putting the sheath back on and dropping the whole thing when her shoulders fall, a tension that I hadn't noticed was there melting out of the Kumo kunoichi.
She looks back at me, and there's a little smile on her lips. She reaches out and takes the sheath. "Thank you."
"No problem." That's… a really nice smile.
She pulls the tanto from its sheath, and blinks in surprise. She drops the sheath and stands up, swinging and jabbing the sort sword a few times. She goes through a quick kata, and when she's finished she's looking at the sword like it's a jumbo bowl of Ichiraku's.
She locks eyes with me. "Where did you get this?"
This time I'm the one to look away. When did the Land of Iron get so hot? "I, uh, snagged it off an ANBU and killed him with it."
Her lips part. "Cool."
...
"So, what are your teammates like?" I ask, taking a bite out of my fish.
It's been two days since we got ambushed by those Iwa teams. After we looted them all for their scrolls, leaving us with three complete pairs and a bunch of extra Loyalties, we took off north and made sure that we weren't followed again. We didn't cover much ground that day, since we were focusing on stealth over speed, but it paid off in the end. We haven't seen another team since then. And even though I was horrendously off the mark when we were fleeing from those Iwa nin, I'm pretty confident in saying that we're getting close to the finish line now.
That night I had been surprised to find Samui already preparing to go to sleep when I came back from taking a leak. She didn't even bring up the first watch, and when I roused her a few hours later and went to sleep myself, she woke me up with a prod to the shoulder instead of a tanto to the chest. It was nice.
These last couple days have been nice, aside from the giant animals which do in fact live here, and the deadline. The two of us have started to act less like enemy shinobi waiting to stab one another in the back, and more like partners.
"My teammates?" Said partner asks, pausing in the twirling of her own fish over the little campfire.
"Yeah, you know. How long have you been on a team with them, what's their favorite flavor of ramen, that sort of thing." I snicker. "I'm not asking you for a brief on them as shinobi or anything."
"Ah." She nods, turning back to her fish. "They're really odd. Omoi is like a conspiracy theorist, only less reasonable. You can't do anything around him without him twisting it into some grand tragedy. You can't even be around him, period." Her eye twitches. "He once told me that I was going to get him killed someday because I had large breasts."
"That's awesome." I grin, taking another bite out of my not-rations meal and puzzling over the familiar ring to the name. Where have I heard that before? "How did he justify that?"
"I'd rather not say," she says. "My other teammate, Karui, isn't as paranoid as him, but she's just as unstable. She's got a very short temper that Omoi can't seem to avoid setting off, so she's always beating on him when they're together. I've been with those two for a year and a half now." The fleeting memory of a red-headed beating on a boy with a toothpick in his mouth reaffirms itself in my mind, and I snap my fingers.
"I know those two! That Omoi guy kind of stood up for us in this weird roundabout way back in the spire."
"So you were the Konoha team they were talking about," she says, and I hum in agreement, taking another bite. She finally takes her fish off the fire and raises a dainty blonde eyebrow at me. "What about your teammates?"
"They're not as crazy as yours. Or maybe they are, but I love 'em anyway, you know?" I chuckle, scratching the back of my head. "Sasuke is the silent, mysterious member of the team. Likes to grunt and brood about stuff a lot. He's cool once you get to know him, though.
"Sakura is quiet too, but she's just shy. She's super smart and has a level head, which is nice because Sasuke and I are stupid reckless." I swallow the last of my fish and toss the stick aside, looking up at the sunset-tinted sky fondly. "I've been with them for around three months now."
"They weren't lying about that, either," Samui murmurs. "And yet your sensei still nominated you?"
I shrug. "We make a good team, and we're not half bad as individual fighters either. Plus, our sensei is a little… eccentric. Or psychotic. I think he just sees this as another opportunity to see us suffer more than anything."
"Yours too?" She asks. "Our sensei can't even talk like a normal human being. He has to turn everything he says into a rap."
I tear my eyes from the sky, giving her a confused look. "What's a rap?"
"It's a type of music. That's what he tells us, anyway. All I know is that he always rhymes his sentences even if what he's saying doesn't make any sense. He does it with with everyone, too, not just us. Whenever we get back from a mission he tries to rope Raikage-sama into a 'rap battle' while we debrief. It's mortifying."
"That's awesome!" I laugh, picturing Hatake challenging the old man to a rap battle. "I wish our sensei had a quirk like that. All he does is read porn in public sometimes."
"Don't even go there. Our sensei-" She pauses, stiffening. "Did you hear that?"
...
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