I remembered lights, heat and the smell of burning meat. The sound of screaming and the crackling roar of fire. My mother pushing me away as I fought to cling to her. The smell coming from us both.
Mother's eyes widened as her right side was covered by a sheet of molten glass. She let go of my hand and immediately I tried to crawl back to her. She raised one hand and curled it into a fist, mouth shaping something I couldn't hear. Suddenly she rocketed that fist at me but it never made contact. Instead something huge hit me like a wall and I went flying out of the fire and twisted, melting metal. The fire surged up about the crumpled pile and I cried out for her, opening my eyes in a white room with harsh light in my eyes.
"-ana! Wake up! You're okay, wake up!"
Mother...! I started to cry. She had died in that accident. Pushing me out before the car blew up. In spite of that I almost died on the way to the ER. The doctors had saved my life but they couldn't save my face or the patches of skin that had seared by the fire. Dad had no choice but to send me for reconstructive surgery. Everyone in the family had pitched in to help pay those monstrous bills. Dad's old mentor and my grandmother had gotten in touch with the best of the best and as a result the scars on my face had been removed. The worst ones had been on my stomach and back and on my left thigh. The doctors hadn't been able to remove those completely. Those had been decreased so jagged scars now crisscrossed my torso and thigh.
"Diana, what's the matter?" somebody asked.
I sniffled and rolled over, burying my face in the pillow. That was Ibiki's voice. I pulsed my aura outwards, feeling the blazing pain and sensing no less than six other people in the room and nine more outside in the hall. Two of those auras felt like massive suns there was so much power contained within them.
"Diana? What's wrong?"
I knew that voice and I couldn't make up my mind if it was a good thing or a bad thing he was here. It did make sense though, I thought as I rolled over and looked up at Sarutobi. I would naturally be of great concern to him if he believed what Ibiki had reported and Inoichi confirmed. He stepped closer to the bed. Instantly everyone in the room protested but he ignored them and reached down to wipe the tears from my face.
"What's the matter? You were screaming, and Dr. Kanami said you had lost your voice." He sat down in the chair by the bed, revealing the person standing behind him. If I could have gotten up and run as far as I could, I wouldn't have gotten very far. Danzo would have caught me, or one of his ROOT members. Freakishly enough, they were the same two that had appeared in the Kage Summit Arc. I recognized them; Fū Yamanaka and Torune Aburame. Danzo's uncovered eye flicked from me to his guards and then bored into me so fiercely that I promptly looked back at Sarutobi.
I tried again to speak. "Nightmare," I whispered.
"Can you speak up?" asked Sarutobi.
"Night...mare." My voice cracked on the last syllable.
"Of what?"
I tried to speak but nothing came out. I stared at him helplessly and Ibiki stepped forwards with a notepad and pen. I sketched a woman holding the hand of a chibi version of me and then a tombstone with a bunch of flowers on it.
"Your mother?"
"It was an accident..." I could barely force the words out. "She saved me... pushed me out of the car..."
"Car?" he didn't understand the word.
"Motor vehicle... It mal... functioned and exploded." I remembered something and sketched on the pad again. One vertical stroke down and three strokes across, each shorter than the other overlaying a infinity symbol. The pendant of my mother's necklace. It should have been lost, she always wore it, but that day she had left it in my dressing table. Jewellery wasn't allowed at my school so I always kept it in my pocket.
"Did-" My voice cracked again and I drew in a deep breath, "Did you find this... in my pocket? It was... hers."
"Lord Hokage, that symbol was recognized. It would be imprudent to return it and keep this girl alive any longer," Danzo interjected. "The Guild of Vhal are not our allies."
Well. This was new. Vhal? What was that? I'd never heard that place mentioned in the series before. And how in the could my mother's necklace be recognized as belonging to this place? I stared at Sarutobi, wondering what he would do.
"Your recommendation is noted, Danzo. The Guild is not our enemy either. If Diana belongs to them then we should make an effort to get her back safely."
What? Send me where? "Where is... Vhal? What is it?" I swallowed, trying not to grimace. My throat was drying up, I needed a drink of water.
"You don't know?" asked Danzo."Didn't you say that necklace was your mother's?"
"Yes."
"Then she must have deliberately-"
"Enough, Danzo. If her mother chose not to tell her, then it was for a reason. The Guild will inform her as they see fit."
"There is also the small matter of what she told Ibiki, Lord Hokage." Danzo's voice was colder than any I'd ever heard. "If she is telling the truth about coming from a world where this is only a story then undoubtedly she knows enough that we cannot let her leave. She does not know everything, just enough so that her fate is sealed."
"Danzo! Enough." Sarutobi turned away from his old teammate. "What do you know, Diana? You don't know everything or you would know what the Guild of Vhal is but what do you know about the Village Hidden in the Leaves?"
I thought quietly for a few moments, laying back and twiddling the pen between my fingers. My mother had been killed in that crash, so had all my memories of her past that point. When she pushed me out of the burning car I passed out after screaming for her. On waking up in the hospital I could only remember the accident and her saving me, but I did not remember that the woman in the wreck had been my mother. I had to be told who she was, and shown pictures of her and I together. The doctors hoped they would come back but they never did.
If she had told me about the Guild of Vhal I could not remember it, the memory would have been lost along with the others. So, maybe I did know, but had forgotten. That still left the question of what would I tell them. I was an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy and everything I'd read said that by giving knowledge of an event would either change the future drastically for better or worse, or, leave the previous future writ in stone and create a new timeline entirely.
In my case however, I was telling them nothing of what would happen, only what they knew had happened already in order to prove my honesty. I did however, have to choose several solid events that would most likely seal my fate, to paraphrase Danzo, as a prisoner here. I now had to choose between a gilded prison or a stone cell. I didn't think I could leave in either case.
I picked up the sketchbook.
Sarutobi nodded when I showed him. "Everyone, leave the room please." He handed it back. "Danzo." The heavily swathed man stepped up close to the bed as the rest of shinobi filed out.
===
The hospital was large and white and indifferent to me. It didn't care about my situation and cared even less about the ANBU stationed always somewhere around me. They were irrelevant in light of the fact that I was someone who needed treatment. I wondered why I wasn't just kept in the ANBU base and have the same doctor that treated me first continue to do so. That might be more efficient. After all, I would have less of a chance to run away, not that I could, and they would have more opportunity to question me if and when they chose to.
Instead, they put me in a small room somewhere to the rear of the hospital. There was a window that looked out over a dusty fenced-in bit of earth with a few barrels and a dumpster and beyond the wire, a narrow street that hardly anyone used. I know, because I stared at that street most of the time. The room itself was painted a pale, nauseous shade of green. It contained a firm bed with a pillow, a chair in the corner next to the window and a blank whiteboard mounted on the wall to the right of the door.
The day I was moved to that room the sun was beating down like it wanted me to stay inside the ANBU base. I wasn't strong enough for much traveling over the rooftops and I could have passed out from the heat, so they waited until it was afternoon and marginally cooler, then put me in a small palanquin with a guard and set off. It didn't take very long to get there but I was still sick from the little motion that I could feel and the lingering heat.
We arrived and the guard with me picked me up and handed me down to another ANBU's waiting arms. This one's mask was so familiar I stared at him in panic, wondering if the Hokage had done this on purpose but no- he didn't know precisely what and who I knew, only that I told the truth. I must simply have been unlucky enough to have this man assigned to me today, and I probably would not see him again.
I dragged my eyes away from his mask as he started walking inside and stared firmly at his chest. Once we passed through the door I began looking around. On the inside it looked like any other hospital, except that the staff wore a different uniform. We walked deeper in the hospital, and higher, until we came to the room I was to stay in for the next three months. Two women and the doctor who had treated me, Dr. Kanami, were waiting.
Tenzou set me down on the bed and a nurse leaned over me, attaching an IV drip to my arm, Dr. Kanami launching into a long explanation of why I had been moved from the ANBU hospital and that I was to stay in this room until I had regained my strength. My illness would be treated with injections of the liquid form of medication every two weeks. During the second month I would start physical therapy and during the last month of my stay I would be allowed to leave the hospital for a short walk every other day. She informed me that the Hokage had made arrangements for me to stay with someone when I was well enough.
That was logical: a guardian or more specifically, a watchdog.
If there was anything I needed I could ask one of the nurses around and they would see what they could do. Here Tenzou chimed in that there would always be an ANBU stationed outside for my protection. I eyed him, pasting the most sarcastic expression I could on my face, cursing the mask he wore that shielded his expression. As if they'd do anything less.
There must have been a sedative in the IV. My vision blurred and my body felt heavy. My head seemed to be filled with cotton as I passed out.
I spent the first two weeks lying in bed sleeping or staring out the window between meals, bathroom trips and frequent doctor visits. After that I got so bored the next time a nurse came in I asked for a notebook and a pen or at least some paper and a pencil. One can spend only so much time doing nothing, even one as lazy as I could get. To be honest though, the longer I stared out that window, the more the thought of my future plagued me.
I needed something, anything to help me calm my mind and like I had for most of my life, I turned to my art. The nurse brought a small notepad and a cheap looking pen when she came back that midday with my lunch. I set them on the corner of the tray and bolted down the food, eager to start drawing. When she left with the tray I sighed with pleasure and picked up the pen.
===
The side of my right leg just above my knee had a dent in it where a portion of muscle had been removed. I hovered my fingers over it, cringing from the pain and the redness of the wound.
“Unpleasant to look at. I’m sorry,” Dr. Kanami murmured as she wrapped it up again in clean bandages.
“The bite became infected?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, yes.” She sat back in the chair. “The animal that bit you was one we’ve been trying to clean out of the village. It’s becoming quite a problem. Its bite is extremely nasty and is as infective as a human’s.”
“Almost all human bites become infected, right?”
She smiled. “Correct. This animal isn’t particularly rare but you don’t see it that often either. It tends to keep to itself and its home, a nest deep inside one of the trees. Recently though there have been more drills being held in the forest within the training grounds and apparently they don’t like that very much. Once in a while they come over the fence and bite villagers but they rarely do it in these numbers. The last time was about fifty years ago.”
“Maybe it’s a population thing. Too many of them in one place and they’re trying to migrate?”
“Yes, that is what happens. We have treatments for the bites but in your case it wasn’t enough. Your body was resisting almost everything we tried until your chakra settled down and then the virus had spread too far. I’m very sorry, Diana.”
“Don’t be, I’m ok.”
She smiled and patted my head, then left. She knew it was a lie but there wasn’t anything to be done about it anymore. I was on a timer and we both knew it.