A long overdue tale [P/NK/W/eElse]

The fan overheard should kill itself. For a fan that was supposed to provide a modicum of relief from the heat outside, all it did was move humidity around in Shina's small apartment. The kunoichi would have left ages ago to instead laze on a rooftop somewhere like a cat in the sun but she'd have to get dressed. And what was the point of off days when you had to put on clothes and go out.

So instead the kunoichi was curled up on her sofa in a tank top and sleeping shorts, using an important royal memo to fan herself since the actual damn fan couldn't do it's job. The jounin would have tricked out the electronics with jutsu but hearing her roommates (currently thankfully absent) bitch about it was not worth it.

It was as Shina was considering getting up to grab a cold beer that the doorbell rang, making the brunette glare at the door. Getting up, she marched over to tell off whoever had come ringing but halted when she saw who was on the other side.

The note, that's right. Shiroi was actually invited given she met the conditions. And eyeing the six pack over the shorter ninja's shoulder, it seemed she had.

"Come in, I guess."

Shiroi was 'wearing' jeans and a full tee shirt. She hadn't expected to find Shina so.. relaxed. Had she been like this all day? Or just settling in for the night? Either way, it didn't really matter. Shiroi made her way in, taking a seat at the first available chair near a table, unless there was only one chair in the room. In that case, she'd lean against the wall. First, however, she would put the pack on her back onto a table, and pull out the goods. One rather large bottle of whiskey and a six pack of beer. "I don't drink anything remotely hard, so I won't be touching the whiskey, but feel free to grab some of both." If Shina inquired into that, or even just raised her eyebrow or something else like that, Shiroi would just motion to her body as if to say 'I'm fucking tiny, I get piss faced in like two shots'.

Sitting and/or leaning back, she would stare up at the fan. "Does that even do anything? It's moving at like... fuck I don't know, but I can still count the blades. That the fastest it can go?" The heat and humidity in the room was quickly seeping through her 'clothes'. It was worse in here than out there. With a loud sigh, she threw together her hands. The jeans retracted into shorts, and the tee shirt started to be more fitting and even seemed to change materials into better at wicking away sweat, which had also happened to the now-short jeans. Of course all of this was a transformation technique, though not the generic one. It was the one that Shiroi could never manage to teach to someone else, no matter how she explained it. Quite perplexing, it was, but that wasn't the story she wanted to explore today.

Looking over to Shina, Shiroi would go "So, what now?", assuming some other topic had not been brought up already.

As Shiroi entered, peace offering in tow, the taller jounin directed her to the small dining table surrounded by three chairs, just enough for all the occupants of the house though Shina only ever used the table when her roommates weren't around, usually preferring to take her meals out to the roof where the two chunin wouldn't be able to find her.

When Shiroi asked what the fan actually did, Shina scowled. "Not a goddamn thing, from what I can see." The brunette cast a dark look upwards before settling down opposite her visitor. Reaching for one of the cans of beer, the fuin user was glad it was icy cold. Settling the steel container against the hollow between her neck and shoulder, the brunette sighed in satisfaction. This was more like it.

When Shiroi motioned that she got wasted pretty quick, Shina let out a short bark of laughter. "My condolences, I'll save the whiskey for later though." Of course she didn't tell the shorter ninja that liquor of good quality should always be shared with one Kyousuke Snow, but in all fairness Shina would never tell that to the red haired priest ether. This was just her way of reassuring herself that he'd be back, alive and safe and thirsty enough to guzzle some whiskey on a rooftop with her.

"Well, lets start at the start then," she began pushing stray tendrils of dark brown that had escaped her hairband back into place. "What do you remember about arriving in Hoshi?"

Shiroi leaned back in the chair, allowing her head to actually fall towards the ground over the back of the chair. At the same time, her legs rose up and crossed each other atop the seat of the chair. Sometimes, having a small frame was nice.

"Not... much, honestly." Her head lifted back up, enough to take a swig from the bottle of beer after she grabbed it and opened it. Head returning back to position, but not quite as far down, she continued: "I remember leaving my two adults when they handed me a letter they called important that was designated to someone in Hoshigakure. I don't remember if they actually told me it was for the Queen, or if they told me to turn it in to a guard or something. I know that on the way there, I was ambushed and the letter was stolen. I know I chased for a long time, I think a few days, and they... kind of gave up? I got attacked by something but I didn't die, and I got the letter. I don't think I killed them or anything, but I won in some way. Honestly that part's all hazy. I know that I somehow made it back to the village before collapsing, but I don't actually remember that, just heard that from people. For all I know, some Queensguard stumbled through the forest at the site of our 'battle', saved my ass, and carried me back, though no one's given me a reason to think that."

Shiroi sighed, letting her head fall all the way back again. "That's all I got. Next memory is waking up to a haze with a body that wouldn't listen, and wasn't mine." A slight shiver runs through her, remembering the terror of those first few moments. The muffled voices, the conflicting signals, it was all so weird, so alien. She controlled the shiver mostly, but if Shina was paying close attention, she might catch it. "Six years. Amazing, isn't it? A fucking potato for six years, yet here I am now. Fuck."

Shina remained silent as the younger jounin recounted her tale, only reaching out halfway through the story to grab another beer to swig at, leaving the first one to condense against her warm skin. Only when Shiroi was done did the fuin user put down her beer. She remembered those times, sometimes more vividly than she cared to admit. Those were the only time when she truly wished Den was around.

"So prim and proper now," she began, taking the makeshift cold compress from the right side of her body and moving it to the left to distribute the coolness evenly. "Shinobi, rank ups, missions, fucking reports." The last word was almost spat out in it's vehemence. "Wasn't always like that, was it. A couple years back you could die in the street and you'd be one of half a dozen lucky bastards because at least where you'd be going somewhere there'd be food and water - or no need for either. I wasn't a "ninja" back then, I was "guard duty wench".

Shina's childhood companions hadn't been two adults, it had been a stick. When she did good, she got to hold the stick and hit others with it, when she did bad, they got to hit her with the stick, it was the most reliable best friend the kunoichi had before Kyousuke. And on some days she still preferred it to the priest.

"Used to do errands for the bandit camps around the city outskirts. No one would notice another hungry girl on the streets, didn't for a long, long time." Until Akihana came and started taking a personal interest in all the hungry folks of the city. Sometimes Shina wondered if she'd done the right thing by not bolting when things started to get "organised" but then figured she could always bolt later. Whenever she wanted, at least that's what she told herself.

"I was there the day you came in, there was no knight in white armour rescuing you if you want the truth. You came in like the rest, half dead spouting something about the queen. Not uncommon, they lumped you with the dying, the kindest they got back then. But you hung on. I left when they were tossing you aside with the rest - no room or manpower to keep dinging graves you see - and I came back at night, you were still breathing."

"Reaching for the open beer once more, Shina took another deep swig. "Next bit gets ugly. You sure you're up for it?"

"Prim and proper, yeah. Nice for when you want to figure something out after the fact. Not so nice when you want to prevent that."

Shina's story was actually quite surprising to Shiroi. She never managed to find someone who could quite remember how exactly she first entered the village. This explained quite nicely that her hunch was correct: people who did know didn't want to say.

"Never expected that one. You've got me even more curious now, how'd I go from 'presumed dead' to intensive hospital care..."

Shiroi's left leg uncurled itself from the other as she planted the foot on the seat of the chair, resting her chin against her knee. She picked at her teeth a bit, waiting for Shina to continue.

The more Shina spoke about that time, the more she found herself remembering. The bandits had been pretty serious, passing around beer, bits of charred meats, errand girls like ehr. It wasn't a completely bad life she supposed if you didn't want for things like food and clean clothes and human dignity. In the end, her stick hadn't been enough to survive on, and the only way out of their clutches was into Hoshi. Shiroi had been her ticket in.

"I came back that night and you were still moving, barely. All you could do was breathe so i did what anyone would have done, searched your body to see what I could salvage, I found a letter that looked important. found some ryo which I pocketed and nothing much else." There was no apology in the taller jounin's tone, Shiroi had wanted the truth. The truth was unapologetic.

"Figured the letter was important, couldn't read back then but I recognized the royal seal. Figured I might get a reward for bringing it to the palace. I caused a scene instead. Suddenly they wanted to know everything, where I'd found the letter, how I'd found it, who else knew about it. I answered as best I could but they still kept me. I heard them give orders to retrieve you but the next time I saw you, you were lying pretty still. Thought you were dead but the healers said you were in some kind of coma. The next day you were taken to the palace infirmary where you were kept until the hospital was n better shape to treat people with extensive injuries."

Shina's life had to taken a different direction that day. Instead of returning to the outskirts of the city, the kunoichi had stayed in the palace, albeit in a glorified holding cell until they decided what to do with her. She hadn't minded really, any place with two sparse meals a day was and a perfectly good floor to sleep on was better than what most people got back then. After three weeks of forgetting about her, the "Queen" had decided that "the wench" would be legally registered and placed in one of the many orphanages in the city.

And thus Shina was born.

Shiroi let out a slight chuckle at the idea that Shina had been a little pickpocket, but otherwise remained silent. There wasn't much to interject into the story, especially considering she knew none of the story! When Shina finally paused, Shiroi decided to speak up a bit.

"You must tell me more of your story at some point, I never experience that part of Hoshi, really. Even after I woke up, I was really restricted to where I could go, both physically and conditionally. By the time I could walk normally, attacks had already started on the village. But I simply must ask, what was the letter?"

Showcasing the kind of politeness Shina only reserved for very special occasions, she merely nodded offhandedly at Shiroi wanting to hear the rest of her story. "There isn't much else to it," she shrugged instead of reminding the shorter kunoichi that they weren't friends, nor was she under any obligation to share her personal experiences with the other ninja. The fuin user had divulged the parts of the story that pertinant to Shiroi and that was that. On her part, the taller jounin didn't make "friends".

She did however find herself in need of something to add about the content of the letter. "I don't know what was in it, they didn't read it in front of me." It was true, they had told her to wait while the envelope was all but snatched from her hands and taken to whoever it was to determine her reward. Shina had waited, and waited, and waited, only to be retrieved by guards what seemed like hours afterwords and thrown into the glorified holding cell. But she had heard her captors (knights they were to the rest of the world) talking.

"But I did hear something about a child," she confided. The guards had thought she didn't know what "royal lineage" meant but she had, she still did to this day. "If I had to guess, I would say the late Queen wasn't as chaste and loyal in her marriage as these royals would like to think. The letter you delivered said something about a child, and I've been in and out of that palace for years now and no one's ever brought up this child to this day."