Naruto (Kira's Story)

***Oh, Brother…***

{With Sasuke}
Sasuke held back a yawn, angry with Naruto and Sakura for waking him up. They had disturbed his sleep for a search for Kira, worried out of their minds for some reason. He didn’t understand why they couldn’t leave her alone. Him as well. They always seemed to butt into everything. He had reluctantly joined in the search, halfheartedly looking into rooms for the familiar red and black figure. But they found nothing, and their calls went unanswered.
Despite himself, he began to feel slightly worried. Not because he cared in particular for her safety or what his sensei might say if she was missing, but because she was a skilled ninja, perhaps the only one on this team that was worth having besides Kakashi and himself. He could trust her to take care of herself during a mission, unlike Naruto and Sakura. He also knew that she had very good hearing. It was nearly supernatural. She had been able to hear things long before them and, even more amazing, tell them what it was with complete accuracy. She had demonstrated this ability many times on the road, telling them to get off the path and into hiding long before the people came into sight. It worried him that she could not hear them now. Or, another thought made itself known to his mind, perhaps she heard them, but didn’t want to acknowledge it.
He looked towards the window in thought and saw Kira’s cat sitting on the sill. Beside the window was the back door that led to the dock. Maybe she was out there. But before Sasuke could take more than a step towards the window, Naruto ran into the room right past the window. He took a casual glance through it before continuing on. Then he stopped and ran back, staring out through the glass.
“I found her!” he yelled excitedly and dashed out the door without pausing to close it again.
“Hn,” Sasuke grunted, angry and annoyed with the blonde.
He walked to the doorway and leaned against the open door, watching as Naruto ran towards the end of the dock. Kira was laying there, her head supported by her arm while the other hand dabbed lightly at the water. He could see most of her face and he was captivated by it: how gentle the features of her face were, and the sparkling fascination that lit her eyes with a lovely light. He pushed those thoughts away and looked on, slightly irritated with himself, as Naruto stopped a few steps away from her and bent down, his hands on his knees, to catch his breath.
He took those last few steps at a reasonable pace and yelled, “There you are, Kira! We’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
He couldn’t hear what she spoke, but Sasuke watched as she calmly said something short and to the point to the orange-clad ninja. Whatever it was, it caused him to drop his mouth open in shock. Sasuke had to hold in a chuckle at the absurdity of his expression.
“Oh, Sasuke!” he heard Sakura gasp behind him.
He felt like gnashing his teeth together from irritation as he heard her begin her stupid ramblings about how great he was. He wished he’d had any girl other than this one on his team. She was all over him all the time and he hated it. She didn’t know anything about him.
He ignored her to the best of his ability and looked out towards Naruto and Kira once again. He was crouched down next to her and she seemed strangely uncomfortable. He narrowed his eyes in thought. It wasn’t from his closeness. She’d been closer to all of them at some time or another. It must be their conversation, he determined.
“Oh, that Naruto!!” Sakura fumed angrily beside him suddenly. “He’s bugging her about her past. I just know it!!”
He watched her march out to give Naruto a lecture and smirked despite himself. It was always funny to see them fight unless it was concerning him. It was like watching an old married couple quarrel about something unimportant.
She yelled Naruto’s name and Sasuke watched as he whirled around and fell into the water. He allowed himself a few quiet chuckles at the unluckiness of the young ninja. What happened next, however, made him ponder.
Kira offered him her hand to pull him out. They seemed to be having a conversation on a level he couldn’t understand as they held each other’s eyes. Naruto finally accepted her hand and Sasuke watched impressed as Kira lifted him bodily from the water with one hand and set him on the wooden boards of the dock. Sakura was as speechless as he was and he watched, interested as she spoke to him again in a voice too soft for him to hear. Naruto nodded and stepped forward but clumsily slipped on a puddle from the water running off his body. It was bad enough that he was so unskilled that he was clumsy. What was worse was the buffoon fell into Kira, taking her with him.
The one thing that truly caught his attention though was her eyes in the instant before she hit the water. It was an expression he had never seen before in the young kunoichi. Both her face and eyes were filled with undisguised terror.
He shook it off, telling himself he must have been seeing things. She would be fine. It was just a little water. She’d be fine. But he quickly began to doubt that as Naruto’s head reemerged from under the surface and Kira’s didn’t follow. He rushed to the end of the dock to stand next to Sakura.
“Where’s Kira?” Sakura asked worriedly.
“I don’t know, she disappeared,” the blonde admitted. “Did she not come up?”
“No,” Sakura said, more worried than before.
{With Kira}
Her back hit something hard, gently. She thought she had imagined it in her near-unconscious state. Then it happened again. She looked behind her with effort, straining to see through the darkness. Suddenly the water was lit with sunlight as the cloud moved. It was the bottom. Her oxygen deprived brain struggled to understand the implications. When it did, she hastened to place her feet against the sandy floor. It was so hard. Her body was sluggish and slow from lack of air. She gathered herself and pushed as hard as she could, hoping she had enough strength in her legs for that one push to take her to the surface. Her life depended on it.
{With Naruto}
A shiver of dread went up his spine when he heard that she hadn’t appeared. What if she couldn’t swim? It was his fault if anything happened to her because of this. He felt guilty, and scolded himself for being so clumsy. She was the only one his age who was kind to him. She’d even helped him many times without any spite thrown his way afterwards. She seemed to genuinely care about his safety and that made her more important to him than anyone knew.
He turned around in the water, searching for any hint of the young girl. There was nothing but the surface winking innocently at him. He and Sakura shouted, calling her name in the hopes she had exited the water somewhere else, while Sasuke scanned the area with his eyes. But, the only answer was the echoes of their initial cries. Suddenly a line of bubbles rose and burst at the surface from the depths a few feet out from his position at the edge of the dock.
“Look!” Sakura shouted, pointing.
He quickly swam towards them. He stopped where the bubbles had appeared and looked around again while treading water. Suddenly, he saw a dark shape rise near where the line of bubbles had been and he moved towards it with a surge of relief.
{With Kira}
She rose through the water quickly at first, slowing down the closer she became to the surface. Sunlight danced on the surface, blinding her as she tilted her head back so she could see it, careful even in this predicament to keep her hat on her head. Her lungs burned and dark spots clouded her vision. A dark shape near to her caught her eye and she thought it might be a person if it wasn’t a hallucination from her oxygen starved brain. Her head broke through the surface long enough for her to gulp in a huge single breath, before gravity pulled her under again.
The feeling of the water closing in around her head again caused her to panic and reach towards the surface with both hands. To her surprise, her hands fastened around a handful of cloth swathing a shoulder. A pair of hands fastened about her upper arms pulled her back to the surface and she coughed in relief, gasping for life-giving air, as her head again cleared the enclosing water. The person placed an arm around her back and swam strongly to what she could only assume was the dock as her vision went completely black from the sudden inflow of air.
She felt a pair of hands fasten around each of her upper arms and pull her onto a solid surface. Her knees hit it with solid thumps and she realized she was on the dock again. The two people let go of her arms and she collapsed heavily onto them, kneeling on all fours as her body violently expelled all of the water from her lungs with choking speed. A hand gently rubbed her back and she involuntarily flinched at first before relaxing. The sounds of disrupted water and the thumps of limbs hitting wood from behind her told her that her rescuer had just climbed out of the water.
Her coughs ceased until she was only gasping in shorter bursts. And suddenly, Miko was there, rubbing against her face, telling her: how worried he was, and that he wished he could have jumped in to save her himself, and how happy he was that she was safe, that she was lucky Naruto had pulled her up, and that she was to never let something like that happen again.
“I promise,” she whispered weakly to her worried animal counterpart.
She stood up on legs not yet recovered, grabbing Miko in her arms on the way. She kept her head bowed and struggled to keep her terror at bay, failing to stop her muscles from trembling. She stared silently at the feet of Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto for a minute, noticing the pool of water under Naruto’s.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, before moving with enough speed to make her vanish from their sight into the house.
She ran away, she knew. That was exactly what she was doing. She ran not only because she was embarrassed at having been seen in such a weak state, but because right now, she was weak in other ways. She ran through the hallways, dripping water the whole way, and allowed the tears to fall from her contact-covered eyes. She didn’t want them to see her this way. But more importantly, she didn’t want to tell them anything. That was exactly what would happen if one of them tried to comfort her while she was in her current state. She wouldn’t be able to help it and she feared what they might think afterwards.
{With Miko}
Miko watched her with sad eyes from his perch in her arms. He knew exactly why she was behaving the way she was. And if he didn’t know exactly what she was feeling, he had a general idea.
No one knew it, but their parents hadn’t been as great as everyone thought they were. In public, they were the perfect example of a proper shinobi. They acted superior but not conceited around those of lesser power and perfectly respectful around the ones they should. He’d watched many times as they acted friendly, courteous, and even deferential before the Kage’s of the many villages they’d visited. It was so completely different to how they really were: conniving, greedy, bloodthirsty, hateful, and rude among other things. Yes, they were the perfect ninja to the world but only their children and close servants knew what they were really like. Now, Kira and he were the only ones still alive who knew the truth.
He held back a shudder. It was because of them that Kira was the way she was now. It was because of them that she was so terrified of water. They shouldn’t have done it to her, any of it. Just because she was what she was didn’t mean she was less than human. She was a very sweet child, in fact, one that had been forced to hide her docile nature from birth. He knew it killed her inside to pretend to be distant and cold, an unfeeling killing machine.
Yes, the death of their parents was probably the best thing that had ever happened to either of them except, of course, his current predicament. It would have been a wonderful thing if that had not occurred. And also, if he had realized how much Kira loved them despite what they did to her. She had been broken inside that night it happened and he wished he didn’t feel so happy about their deaths. But he did. They deserved to die. The world was better off without them, the two of them included.
Kira placing him on the floor of her room awoke him from his somber thoughts. He watched as she tossed the soppy hat from her head and wrung out her hair, careful to avoid the strange appendages that protruded from the top of her head. The jacket fell to the ground next and her skirt quickly followed, allowing him to see another of his sister’s strange additions to the human anatomy as she stood in her black bodysuit. He politely turned away as she turned her back to him and removed the soaked bodysuit from her lithe body. The sounds of her hands and the soft brushing of a towel wiping away the water from her body made his ear twitch.
It wasn’t necessary for him to look away. They’d taken baths together when she was still small, but watching her undress had never seemed right. Most especially these last few years. She was growing up, her body changing from girl to woman. Somehow, watching that would seem like incest.
“I’m decent,” the soft voice of his sister said.
He turned to look and saw she had on her undergarments and was digging through her bag for an outfit.
“You call that decent?” he asked.
“For you,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Going around naked in front of you wouldn’t bother me, but it would bother you, so I make sure the important parts are covered. For anyone else, I would have all of the clothes on first. With you, it doesn’t matter. You’re my brother. Ours is a different kind of love.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that it isn’t!” he exclaimed, blushing under his fur.
“I didn’t say you did. I just know that I don’t need to worry about it,” she explained calmly, pulling out her clothes from the bag.
“Still,” he stated, his fur still a little ruffled. “It’s not polite.”
Kira chuckled quietly, slipping on a pair of baggy black pants and tying the drawstrings.
“Don’t laugh at me!” he yelled, indignant and blushing again.
“I’m not,” she replied. “It’s just funny how shy you are.”
“I am not!”
“Yes you are. You’re blushing.”
“Are not!”
“Then what is this?” she asked, poking the burning spots under the fur on his checks.
“They’re…I’m just warm from sunbathing all morning,” he stuttered.
“Maybe you should stay out of the sun if four hours is enough to burn you through your fur,” she said slyly.
“Uh, yeah. I’ll be more careful from now on,” he replied, realizing he’d lost.
He went back to watching her in silence as she put on a tight, black, long-sleeved t-shirt that said, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and stopped right above her bellybutton. She brushed her hair and placed a large black squishy looking hat with a square rim on her head to cover the protrusions. Now fully dressed, she gathered her wet clothes, strung them on a line from her pack and hung them from the rafters in front of the window after moving her bed so it wouldn’t get wet.
She turned back to him and spun around slowly.
“How do I look?” she asked.
He realized the real underlying question: ‘Do I look normal?’ and looked over her carefully.
“Everything looks normal,” he reassured her.
Someone knocked on the door and they both jumped, having not heard anyone approaching.