The hospital at midnight felt like a held breath.
The daytime noise—rattling carts, arguing relatives, Migaki's barked orders—had sunk down into a low, steady hum. Monitors beeped in different rhythms behind closed doors. Somewhere in the building, someone was crying quietly into a pillow. Somewhere else, someone was not breathing anymore, and the night staff were pretending they didn't know that yet.
My shift technically ended an hour ago.
My chakra, however, had tapped out two hours before that.
I signed off on the last set of charts with a hand that cramped on the pen. Lee: stable, dreaming hard, chakra patterns still frayed at the edges but holding together under Mitate's patchwork. Hinata: pulse calmer, pathways sluggish but recovering, Byakugan channels like bruised petals instead of torn ones.
"Go home," Migaki said, not looking up from his clipboard. "You're starting to list sideways when you walk. I don't want to write my own student into a collision report."
"That's just my natural grace," I said. "And I live like three hallways away. I'll go collapse on a bench."
He snorted. "Don't you dare sleep in a waiting room. It messes with the civilians."
"Bench outside, then."
"Roof, if you must loiter," Kumadori grumbled from his station at the nurses' desk, rubbing a hand through his wild hair. "Less paperwork when you kids pass out up there."
Iyashi smiled apologetically at me over an armful of blankets. "I can send word if Lee wakes," he offered. "But it's better if you rest where no one will ask you for anything."
That… was depressingly accurate.
"Roof it is," I said. "If I vanish and the moon eats me, tell Naruto he still owes me ramen."
"You assume he will not follow you and try to punch the moon," Migaki said.
I considered that, then sighed. "Point."
On my way to the stairwell, I passed the little alcove outside the staff lounge where the shift change board hung. Ugai was there, hunched over it, rubbing his temples with ink-stained fingers as Mogusa handed him a sheaf of forms.
"The ANBU kid in 3-B's temperature spiked again," Mogusa said around a yawn. "I upped his fluids, but his captain's going to have my head if his scar stretches."
"I'll go look," Ugai said. His chakra tasted sharp and overcaffeinated, fizzing yellow at the edges. "You go home before you fall into the specimen freezer."
"Tempting," Mogusa said. She spotted me and gave a little two-fingered salute. "Oi, Seal Gremlin. Still alive?"
"Debatable," I said. "But thanks for the bandages earlier."
"Trade you for coffee next shift," she said, already shuffling away. Her chakra trailed behind her like smeared charcoal.
Two floors down, a door stood half open with a thin strip of cold white light leaking out. A little brass plaque read AUTOPSY in tiny respectable letters.
Oyone sat inside at a metal desk, not a scalpel in sight, just a stack of reports and a cup of something that had long ago given up pretending to be tea. She wore her hair in a high knot and her glasses low on her nose. A cloth mask hung loose around her neck. Her chakra felt like thin gray paper—flat, steady, holding too many names.
I caught a glimpse of a report header as I passed.
MISSION FAILURE – RETRIEVAL / BORDER.
She didn't look up. Her pen scratched on, steady as a heartbeat.
Under the hospital, the dead were being catalogued.
Over it, I climbed toward the moon.
The rooftop door groaned when I pushed it open, like the hinges were complaining about having to work extra at this hour. Cool air slapped me in the face: sharp and clean and tinged with antiseptic from the exhaust vents.
The city spread out in front of me—rooftops and antennae, street lamps like little fireflies, the Hokage monument looming in the distance in its eternal stone judgment.
The moon hung above all of it, round and bright and unbothered.
It hit me like a hammer.
Pressure spiked behind my forehead, right at the place where my eyebrows wanted to meet. Cold, white pressure, not the throbbing red of chakra exhaustion or the muddy purple of a migraine. It was… cleaner. Crueler.
"Too bright," I muttered, squinting up at it. "Go away."
The moon did not care.
My knees went loose for a second. I stumbled forward, caught myself on the low edge wall. The concrete was gritty under my palms, still warm from the day.
Something in my head… shifted.
A pale hand, long fingers spread, reaching down through black water.
White ripples spreading out from a single point, silently, as if sound had been taken out of the world.
A voice, male and young and very far away, trying to wrap itself around my name and not quite managing.
s…yl…
My breath hitched. The scar along my ribs—the one that glimmered faintly when I pushed too much chakra through it—flared cold and hot at the same time, like someone pressed ice and a brand against it together.
"Not now," I whispered. "I'm off the clock."
The pressure ratcheted up anyway, a subtle tightening like someone was trying to tune the strings of my soul and missing the right note.
I fumbled at my belt pouch with one hand, fingertips numb. The little stack of tags Hiruzen had made me write trembled under my touch. I grabbed the least-offensive one I'd managed that day—the chakra-calming ring—and slapped it flat against my own collarbone.
My chakra answered the seal like someone had pulled a fire alarm and then replaced it with a dimmer switch. The wild flicker around the scar flattened, redirected, bled off into the spirals I'd drawn.
The pressure dropped from a scream to a hiss.
I sucked in air, lungs burning.
"Okay," I said to the sky. "Okay. Ground rules. You can haunt me, apparently. But you don't get to pick the time."
The moon stared back, impassive and huge.
For a second, I saw it not as a disc but as an eye. Blank and white and lidless, no pupil, just… attention.
Then the moment yanked itself inside out, and all I could see was a round rock again.
I laughed once, dry. "I really need more sleep."
"Or less moonbathing."
The voice came from behind me—smooth, amused, threaded with exhaustion.
I turned too fast and nearly fell over.
Anko leaned against the doorway, one hand braced above her head, the other clutching a stick of dango. She'd shrugged her coat half off her shoulders; the mesh underneath clung to bandages wrapped tight around the place where her curse mark sat. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth.
The chakra around her was a wild, deep violet, laced with neon-green threads where the mark lay under her skin. It tasted like venom baked into sugar, sweet and lethal.
"Hey," I said hoarsely. "Roof's taken."
"I see that," she said, sauntering closer. "My spies downstairs told me there was a tiny pink-haired gremlin muttering at the sky like it owed her money."
"Snitches," I said. "I was having a private argument."
"With the moon?"
"Maybe."
"Mm." She eyed the lone tag still clinging to my collarbone, then the shaking in my hands. "Lose?"
"I think I got a draw," I said. "It blinked first."
"Moon doesn't have eyelids, kid."
"Exactly," I said. "I improvised."
Her mouth twitched.
She flopped down on the low wall next to me, legs swinging out over the drop like she'd done this a thousand times. She offered the dango stick in my direction.
"Want one?"
I eyed the three little balls of grilled sugar. "Is this a trap?"
"Yes," she said. "But only in the sense that addiction is a trap."
I took one off the stick anyway. The sugar coating stuck to my fingers. It tasted like toasted rice and burnt syrup, way too sweet after a day of hospital air and antiseptic.
Anko popped the rest into her own mouth and chewed thoughtfully. With her free hand, she rubbed at her shoulder, fingers digging into the bandages like she wanted to peel them off.
"You're on nights?" she asked.
"Rotating," I said. "Migaki thinks I'm going to overwork myself and die." I licked sugar off my thumb. "Kumadori thinks I'm already a ghost."
"He's not wrong," she said. "You have that… underfed banshee vibe."
"Rude."
"Accurate."
She lit the cigarette with a tiny flare of chakra at her fingertip. The smoke curled up, white on white against the moon.
For a minute, we just sat there, listening to the building breathe beneath us. The vents hummed. Someone on the fourth floor sneezed explosively. A dog barked somewhere in the village. My scar settled down from "active volcano" to "simmering resentment."
Anko exhaled slowly through her nose, eyes half-lidded.
"Marks that don't belong to you always itch worse under the moon," she said.
The line landed like a thrown knife—casual, perfect, painfully true.
I glanced at her shoulder. The bandage edge had a faint dark patch where something had leaked through; the chakra there pulsed in a slow, ugly rhythm, like a heartbeat that had learned to limp.
"I didn't know curse marks had, um… lunar schedules," I said carefully.
"They don't," she said. "Not like mine, anyway. It just… feels that way."
She tapped a finger against her wrapped shoulder.
"Snake bastard branded me to prove a point," she said. "He was very into points. All about them, all the time." Her lip curled. "Sometimes I think I can hear him in my dreams. Smug. Breathing down my neck. Moonlight makes it worse."
My own scar ached in sympathetic echo.
Same architecture, different god.
Orochimaru had carved a hole in Anko's coil system and wired himself through it—spike and hook and poison well. Whoever or whatever sat up there staring through my skull had done something similar, but the lines felt… cleaner. Colder. Less "mad scientist" and more "ancient operating system."
"Do you regret it?" I asked quietly. "Taking his mark."
Her jaw flexed. For a moment, she looked older than anyone I'd ever met. Older than Hiruzen, older than the stone faces on the mountain.
"I regret a lot of things," she said. "Including my haircut in my first year as a special jōnin. But that mark?" She shrugged, then hissed as it tugged wrong. "He gave it to me because I was useful. Because I was good. It took me a disgusting amount of time to realize that being good at something doesn't mean the person using you is good too."
The wind tugged at the loose ends of her trenchcoat.
"Do I wish he'd picked someone else?" she went on. "Sometimes. Do I wish I'd died in the Forest instead? Sometimes. Do I wish I'd never been strong enough to attract him at all?"
She flicked ash off the end of the cigarette, watching it drift away.
"No," she said. "That's the part I have to live with. My strength is mine. The mark is his. I've spent the rest of my life trying to tell the difference."
I stared down at my own hands. Ink-stained fingers. Seal-burn scars. The faint glimmering lines along my ribs.
"My mark wasn't exactly voluntary either," I said. "I think. I don't remember it happening."
"Convenient," she said dryly. "That's usually what we call 'trauma.'"
"Fun word," I said. "Definitely adding it to the collection."
She peered at me more closely now, cigarette forgotten. Her gaze skated over my face, my collarbone, the spot where my shirt had ridden up a little as I shifted.
"Show me," she said.
My whole body wanted to say no automatically. Every nerve screamed mine. Mine, mine, mine, don't look.
I swallowed.
Then I tugged the hem of my shirt up with stiff fingers, just enough to expose the low sweep of my left ribs.
The scar there wasn't a clean brand like hers. It looked like something had been poured into me and then half-scraped out: a crescent of raised tissue, pale and faintly luminescent, edges feathering into normal skin. In the moonlight, the lines caught and reflected light in a way that didn't quite match anything else on my body.
Anko's pupils narrowed.
Her chakra flared, a little, like a snake tasting the air.
"That's not his work," she murmured. "Too neat. Not enough ego."
Her fingers hovered, then pressed lightly just outside the scar, never actually touching the raised part. The second she got that close, both of our marks flared.
Hers surged up in violet and sickly green, snapping like static. Mine answered in an almost-silent pulse of white-silver, the not-moon in my bones reacting instinctively.
For a heartbeat, I felt them together.
Two different circuits, two different signatures. But the framework—taking a piece of someone's coil and re-writing it—was the same.
"Same architecture," I whispered, the word Hiruzen had used for seal styles flickering up. "Different… source."
"Different tyrant," Anko said. "Same theft."
She pulled her hand back, shaking it once, like she'd touched a live wire.
"I don't like it," she said. "Not that my opinion matters. But you know that, right?" Her gaze pinned me. "Whatever put that in you doesn't own you."
"I know," I said.
I did. Intellectually. Emotionally… the jury was still out, hiding in a locker, smoking.
"And you can't scratch it out," she added. "Believe me, I tried. Stabbing it, burning it, smearing it with every dispel tag I could steal. All it did was piss it off."
Her mouth twisted. "Marks aren't dirty shirts. They're… foundations. If you try to rip one out without rebuilding everything around it, the house comes down on your head."
"Comforting," I said faintly.
"You're welcome," she said.
We sat there a while longer. The moon drifted a few degrees across the sky. The pressure in my skull ebbed, leaving behind a sort of phantom weight, like a hand on the door of my mind, leaning.
"Does it ever… stop?" I asked. "The feeling of someone else's hand on the inside of your skin."
Anko took a long drag from her cigarette, then let the smoke curl out slowly.
"No," she said. "But it gets… quieter. Or maybe you get louder. I'm not sure."
She flicked the half-finished cigarette into a nearby sand-filled can someone had put on the rooftop ages ago.
"My advice?" she went on. "Use it. Learn it. Map it. You," she jabbed a finger at my sealing pouch, "have ink. That's power. The more you build around that mark, the smaller it gets by comparison. Don't let it be the only thing that defines your chakra network."
"Build my own architecture around the parasite," I murmured.
"Exactly. Give it a shitty basement," she said. "Make it beg for sunlight."
I huffed a laugh. "You're very poetic for someone who stabs people for a living."
"Don't tell anyone," she said. "I have a reputation to maintain." She pushed herself to her feet with a wince. "Alright, rooftop therapy session's over. I've got a meeting with a bottle and six hours of pretending I'm not on standby."
"Important mission," I said solemnly.
She hesitated, then brushed a knuckle—light and awkward—against my shoulder.
"Hey," she said. "If the moon keeps bothering you, come find me. I'll show you how to bother it back."
"That's not how gravity works," I said.
"We're ninja," she shot back. "Gravity's a suggestion."
She vanished through the door in a swirl of coat and chakra, leaving me alone with the sky again.
I leaned back on my hands, looking up.
The moon looked the same. Big. White. Blank.
Inside my head, the pressure had retreated to a watchful hum. The pale hand, the ripples, the almost-name—those lingered, ghost images burned into the back of my eyes.
"Fine," I said under my breath, to the rock, to the eye, to whatever thing lived behind it. "I'll write this one down, too."
When I finally dragged myself back inside, the hospital swallowed me up with its soft, humming jaws. Ugai was gone from the board. Mogusa's mug sat abandoned on the lounge counter. Somewhere in the building, a baby wailed and then hiccupped itself quiet.
On the way to my tiny borrowed room, I ducked into the supply closet I'd quietly claimed as "mine" weeks ago. It held extra linens, a broken monitor, and a locked metal box tucked behind the shelves.
I brushed my fingers over the seal I'd put on it—my sigil, Kanpō's corrections, Hiruzen's notes. It recognized my chakra and clicked.
Inside, my journal waited.
Plain notebook. Cheap paper. The first half filled with normal handwriting and chakra sketches. The second half… sealed. Every page ringed with simple containment tags, invisible until activated.
I flipped to the next blank sealed page, pricked my thumb, and smeared a tiny line of blood across the corner. The ink lines lit up around the margin, forming a faint, private cage.
"Moon thing," I wrote at the top, because I refused to give it a better name. "Incident log, entry four."
I listed the visuals. The hand. The ripples. The almost-voice that nearly said my name.
I added Anko's line—Marks that don't belong to you always itch worse under the moon. I underlined it twice.
Then, almost as an afterthought, I drew two sigils side by side. One for the snake mark I'd seen on her shoulder. One for my own scar, as best as I could translate it into seal script.
Same architecture. Different gods. Same problem space.
My hand cramped around the pen. I set it down and pressed my forehead against my knees for a second, breathing in dust and linen and faint ink fumes.
Under the hospital, Oyone was still writing the names of the dead. Under the moon, something had my file open and unfinished.
Between them, on a rooftop and in a closet and in a cramped little heart, I was trying to write myself into the margin.
"Fine," I told the page quietly. "If you're watching, watch this too."
And I got back to work.
The hospital still wasn't sleeping.
It felt like it was just…holding its breath.
Lantern light pooled in the hallway like warm water, but the corners stayed sharp. The kind of sharp that made you check them twice even when you knew nobody was there.
My sandals barely made noise on the tile.
I'd learned that here.
You don't stomp near rooms full of injured shinobi unless you want a nurse to murder you with her eyes.
Lee's door clicked shut behind me, soft as a promise.
Inside, he was finally down—drugged enough that his body stopped trying to fight itself in its sleep. His bandages were clean. His breathing was steadier. Guy had hovered until the last possible second, then made himself leave like it physically hurt.
I'd stayed after, because I always stayed after.
Because leaving an injured kid alone in a war-world felt like walking away from a burning house.
My fingers still smelled like antiseptic and ink. The weirdest combo.
I turned toward the stairwell—
—and the air changed.
Not temperature.
Pressure.
Like the hallway had become a throat.
A shape stood at the far end, framed by lantern glow.
Red hair.
Dark-rimmed eyes that didn't blink enough.
A massive gourd on his back like a burden he'd been carrying since birth.
Gaara.
He hadn't even stepped into the light, and I could already feel him.
My chakra-sense didn't come as "he's angry."
It came as color.
His chakra tasted like old pennies and dry rot. It looked like sand grinding glass. A bruised, sick yellow-brown with streaks of black that weren't shadows so much as holes.
And under that—
something bigger.
Something that didn't fit in a kid's skin.
My stomach tightened.
I told myself to breathe.
I didn't, at first.
"Gaara?" My voice came out too careful. Too nurse-y. Like tone could civilize him.
He walked forward.
No hurry.
No stealth.
Just inevitability.
The sand at his feet whispered, faint, like it had its own lungs.
"I came here," he said, "to kill Rock Lee."
The words landed flat.
Not dramatic.
Not angry.
Just stated. Like he was telling me the weather.
My body tried to go cold all at once.
I stepped sideways, putting myself between him and Lee's door without thinking.
"Lee's asleep," I said. Stupid sentence. Like sleep was armor.
Gaara's gaze slid past me like I was furniture. "Then he will die without struggling."
My throat did the thing it did when old memories tried to crawl back up—my dad's voice, that tone where the violence was already decided and you were just waiting for it to happen.
I swallowed hard.
Forced my shoulders down.
Made my hands stay visible.
"Why?" I asked, because sometimes why bought you three seconds.
Gaara's eyes narrowed, and the sand around his ankles lifted slightly, like it was excited.
"Because he hurt me," Gaara said. "Because I don't like the way he looked at me."
My skin prickled.
That wasn't normal. That wasn't ninja rivalry.
That was something broken and hungry.
"Lee's… not like that," I said. "He doesn't— he doesn't want to humiliate you. He's—"
"Stop talking," Gaara said.
The sand moved.
Not attacking yet.
Just… testing.
Like a dog deciding if you were prey.
I backed one step, not away—sideways—keeping myself centered in front of Lee's door.
I could slap a tag down. Flash-seal. Smoke. Sticky trap.
I could.
But the second I did, the hallway became a battlefield and Lee became a target with a bullseye.
So I did the only thing I had left:
I kept speaking like my voice was a wall.
"This is a hospital," I said, harsher now. "There are civilians here. Med-nin. If you fight, the whole building—"
"I don't care," Gaara replied.
Of course he didn't.
His chakra was all thirst and grind and mine.
The sand rose higher, thin ribbons lifting off his gourd, unspooling like fingers.
I felt my pulse in my teeth.
"Gaara," I said again, and hated how small it sounded.
Then—
a new chakra hit the hallway like someone kicked a door open.
Hot.
Bright.
Unsubtle.
Naruto.
He came around the corner at a run, hair sticking up like it always did, face pulled tight with rage and fear.
His chakra felt like a bonfire someone had tried to bury under snow.
He skidded to a stop between us, stance wide, fists clenched.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Naruto snapped.
Gaara's attention snapped to him.
Instant.
Predator recognition.
The sand around Gaara's feet shuddered.
Not at Naruto's yelling.
At what lived inside Naruto.
I felt it too—the Fox, locked behind ribs and seal and stubborn kid-determination. It wasn't awake-awake, but it was there, a massive red pressure behind Naruto's normal heat.
Gaara's pupils tightened.
For the first time, his voice shifted.
Not louder.
Just… wronger.
"...You," he said, like Naruto was a stain he couldn't scrub out of his eyes.
Naruto took a step forward, shoulders squared like he was made of spite. "Yeah, me. So if you're here to pick a fight, pick it with someone who's actually awake."
The sand twitched again.
And under Gaara's chakra, something laughed.
Not a human laugh.
A sensation like teeth.
I swallowed bile.
Gaara's hand lifted slightly, and the sand rose in response, coiling—
Then another presence slid into the hallway like a shadow deciding to become a person.
Shikamaru.
He walked in like he'd been woken up mid-nap and was still offended about it. Hands in his pockets. Eyes half-lidded.
But his chakra—
steady.
Too steady.
A calm gray-blue, like smoke that refused to scatter.
He stopped behind Naruto, gaze flicking once to me, then to the door, then to Gaara.
"Troublesome," Shikamaru muttered.
Naruto barked, "You're late!"
Shikamaru didn't even blink. "You're loud."
Gaara's sand paused.
Not because Shikamaru was strong-looking.
Because Shikamaru was unmoved.
Like he didn't care about Gaara's "I'm a monster" vibe. Like he'd decided monsters were just logistics.
Gaara's eyes narrowed, and his voice slipped again—kid to something older, something that didn't belong in a genin's throat.
"Why are you all… protecting him?"
Naruto's answer came fast. "Because you don't get to just kill people! That's why!"
Gaara stared at him.
The sand around his gourd writhed.
His breathing changed.
Not heavy.
Uneven.
Like he was fighting something inside his own lungs.
I caught Temari's look in my memory from earlier—begging please don't.
I hadn't understood it then.
I did now.
Gaara's gaze flicked to Lee's door again.
Then back to Naruto.
Then to Shikamaru.
And for one heartbeat, his face… cracked.
Not sadness.
Not remorse.
Something like a child looking at a locked room and realizing it couldn't open it with brute force.
The sand lowered, slow.
Gaara stepped back.
One step.
Then another.
Naruto's shoulders stayed rigid, like he was ready to explode forward if Gaara twitched wrong.
Shikamaru didn't move at all. Just watched, bored on purpose.
Gaara's voice came out quieter.
"Rock Lee belongs to you," he said, like it was a judgment. Like people were possessions.
Then he turned.
The sand followed him like a loyal animal.
He walked away down the lantern-lit hall, footsteps soft, gourd heavy, presence leaving a smear of wrongness behind.
Only when he was gone did I realize my hands were shaking.
Naruto exhaled like he'd been holding his breath for ten minutes straight.
He glanced back at me, eyes wide. "Sylvie— are you okay?"
I wanted to say yes.
I wanted to say something cool.
What came out was honest. "No."
Shikamaru's gaze slid to Lee's door. "You should put a seal on it anyway."
Naruto frowned. "Like a lock?"
"Like a warning," Shikamaru said.
I nodded, throat tight.
I pulled out a small square of paper, fingers clumsy, and drew fast—ink lines forming a simple alert tag. Not strong enough to stop Gaara.
Strong enough to scream for help.
I pressed it to the doorframe.
Chakra sank into it with a faint, satisfying click.
Then I leaned my forehead against the wood for half a second and tried not to think about the sand sound of Gaara's breathing.
Naruto stayed beside me, too close, like he was making sure I didn't fall apart.
I hated that it helped.
I hated that it helped so much.