Title: Dreaming of Sunshine

Summary: Life as a ninja. It starts with confusion and terror and doesn't get any better from there. OC Self-insert.

AN:

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Chapter 136

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You cannot step into the same river twice. ~ Heraclitus

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You had to give ANBU something.

When they tried to make the worst two weeks of your life happen, they happened.

"If an ANBU is seen," Magpie told us, "they have already failed. An ANBU mission leaves no witnesses behind, because it did not happen."

The foot on my back pressed me down into the ground, mud squelching the side of my mask. My breath hissed out into my mask, moist air hanging trapped and full of the unpleasant sour tang of ketosis.

The foot lifted, Bull stepping back and fading into the trees. I tried to follow how he'd done it, the tricks to the visual concealment technique that they were teaching us, but another demonstration didn't give me any more information than I'd had a minute ago.

I tucked my arms beneath my chest and pushed myself to my knees. They trembled. It was tempting to heal them, to recover more before trying to push myself onwards, but I didn't dare. Chakra was a precious resource now we'd started using it – with no sleep and few meals it was hard to recover – and I didn't want to risk running low.

Focus, I told myself. But it was so goddamn hard. I just… I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go home. I wanted to stop.

Was this worth it? It was just training. No one was going to die if I didn't get this right.

To my left, another trainee pitched forward, concealment technique breaking as Bull swept his legs out from underneath him, appearing the instant the jutsu faltered in the slightest.

"You just compromised your mission!" Magpie said.

Conceal, don't feel, I thought and hiccupped because I was too tired to laugh. I pushed myself back to my feet. Chakra suppression, easy. Scent blocking, doable. Visual concealment…

I layered the chakra and faded into the shadows.

Or not into the shadows because I could have done that. Not quite a genjutsu but not quite a ninjutsu but not quite Hiding With Camouflage Jutsu, this visual erasure was one of ANBU's cornerstones and signature moves. You could stand in a room with a dozen ANBU under this and never know. Theoretically.

I moved cautiously inching one foot forward. My technique held.

Then. Of course. It started to rain and we all became instantly visible.

"Pathetic!" Magpie bellowed.

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I dodged a wave of kunai, landing sideways on a tree and twisting through the projectiles – sluggish, but not slow enough to be hit. My attacker moved, position given away by pinpointing the direction they'd been thrown from, and tree leaves rustled as they relocated through the branches.

I would have noticed that, even if I hadn't been able to sense their chakra. The other ANBU, trainees and trainers both, honed in on it taking the heat off me for a minute that I tried to exploit to recover.

The downside to being a sensor, it turned out, was that once the trainers had noticed how unfairly well I was handling ANBU-grade hide and seek, I became target number one, with plenty of handicaps to try and trip me up. At this point, I suspected, it was a pride thing, and they were just waiting for me to make that single, fatal mistake.

I was damp with sweat, unpleasantly soaked, and my scent blocking technique was keeping it grossly contained near my skin instead of splattering off and littering the ground with 'here I am' signals. I was breathing heavily into my mask's sound muffling and my heart was thundering so loudly I was surprised people couldn't hear it outside my body.

I inched another step closer to the flag I was supposed to be capturing and that everyone else was supposed to be keeping from me. Eyes on the prize. Magpie's chakra was humming and suppressed and right next to it.

Go left. I circled sideways, careful not to stir any of the foliage around us, moving so slowly and cautiously that I left no mark and made no sound. My fingers lifted, reached out, brushed the fabric of the flag-

-and snapped back painfully.

"Nice try," Magpie said, sending a pulse of chakra down my wrist that shattered the concealment technique I was hiding in.

I groaned and dropped to my knees, hand twisting painfully.

The rest of the group swarmed around us, some more visible than others.

"You know what gave you away?" Magpie asked, almost conversationally.

I swallowed, mouth and throat painfully, painfully dry. I thought longingly of the canteen (and food!) I had tucked away in hammerspace – but with no privacy to access it or drink, it was useless.

"Air currents," I guessed. Or… "Vibrations." Silent stepping didn't negate all the possibility of giving yourself away walking, if Magpie was an earth type they might have been able to feel such tiny impressions.

"Close," they said, lifting their hand off of my hand and holding it inches from my arm. "You're sweating."

I was blocking that-

"Heat," I sighed. You sweated to lose heat via evaporation. But you also radiated it out – the human body at peak exercise produced far more heat than it could handle and of course someone could notice that.

"Well, you did touch the flag," Bull said, voice thoughtful in a way that meant nothing good for us. "I guess you just won the team a whole new lesson."

None of the other trainees groaned, but it was probably because none of us had the energy for it.

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Once we had the ANBU stealth down, we segued into ANBU style mission tactics.

At first, it was just theory – Magpie and Bull switched from drilling us on the code to throwing scenarios at us and getting us to sound out an attack strategy where anything that even remotely blew our cover was an automatic failure – and the break from terribly punishing physical exercise was a godsend.

Then things became not-so-theoretical which I felt like something we should have seen coming a long way off. There was no way to mock up a full mission, but there were definitely ways to simulate the feeling of running to Lightning Country, dodging border patrols, gathering intel, and identifying targets without ever letting our guards down or stopping to rest.

Two weeks of training sounded a lot longer when you realized that it was three hundred and thirty-six hours and that they meant to use all of it.

It wasn't that ANBU didn't sleep on missions, necessarily, but every minute you were in enemy territory was another minute you could be discovered and we were modelling worst case scenarios.

As demonstrated by the actual ANBU team that our trainers so kindly summoned on the last two days of our training, who hunted us all over multiple training fields. We weren't supposed to fight them, which would have at least dealt with the issue one way or another, though we did clash several times before managing to wiggle our way into evasion. Which felt, honestly, more like they were toying with us.

And then, just when I tilted off the knife edge balance of exhaustion and irritability… it was over.

"Congratulations," Magpie said, sounding softer than at pretty much any other point during the training. "You made it through. This training is not easy – it is designed to test you and push you to your limits. To give you the very smallest taste of what is going to happen if you continue on. How you feel right now? That is going to be your life."

I breathed in and out. Sweat was drying on my skin. My muscles were shaking. I was exhausted and hungry and a little dehydrated. I could use about a week of sleep.

But I wasn't hurt. I wasn't dying. No one around me was. The world wasn't about to end.

This? I could do this for the rest of my life.

"Once you take a ANBU mission," Bull said, picking up the thread, "your team is on their own. There will be no backup. If you get caught, Konoha will disavow all knowledge of your mission. There will be no rescue. Every time you leave the village may very well be the last. And you will never, ever be able to talk about what happens when you're wearing the mask."

All this had been in stark black and white in the ANBU code, but it sounded more serious now, said in quiet voices as it was about to become our reality. But how many missions had we ever had backup on, anyway? Once, with the Sound Four? And we'd been in the right time and place to provide it in Kubisake pass to a team that had never had the chance to request it.

Maybe it was different. Maybe not being able to talk to anyone – not allies, not outposts, not civilians along the way – would make missions more dangerous and challenging. Maybe. But I couldn't know that without having done it and on the surface it didn't sound so different.

"So, on that note," Magpie went on. "You have one last chance to turn aside. At five pm tomorrow there will be a swearing in ceremony with the Hokage, where you will receive your masks and team assignments. If you do not show up, we will know what your answer is."

And that was that. They led us to a dilapidated dojo on the edge of the training fields – one with boarded up windows that had never seen usage in my lifetime – that turned out to have a basement level locker room. With showers.

Sweet heaven.

Not that I'd never gone home covered in mission grime, but it was going to be so much harder to pretend that it'd been a nothing-interesting mission if I looked like I had been dragged backwards through a mountain.

Luckily for me, Shikamaru was out on a mission of his own.

"Good mission?" Mum asked, looking up from feeding Kino.

I yawned. "Tiring," I admitted, because it was really hitting me now. "Is there food? I want to eat everything and then sleep until my debriefing tomorrow."

She laughed and gestured at the kitchen. I assembled dinner and contemplated never, ever getting this hungry again. Maybe if I just made a food-only hammerspace directly in my mouth. As long as I could parcel it out by mouthfuls… maybe just liquid protein shakes…

I sank heavily down on the couch and listened to Kino babbling away. That was new. "Aren't you a little chatterbox?"

"More so than either of you were," Mum agreed. She grabbed one of his waving fists and kissed it. "He's started rolling, too, so be careful where you step. Yes, you have!"

"Escape artist, huh?" I yawned, and then had to force my eyes back open afterwards. My bowl of food tilted dangerously in my hand until I righted it. "Okay, I'm going to go do the sleep thing."

Sleep was good. Kino could have cried from dusk to dawn and I wouldn't have budged an inch. (That was a lie. I was entirely too prepared to be woken up by a sneak attack in the middle of the night. 'Training is over' seemed like one of those lies that Kakashi-sensei would tell. It didn't happen, though.)

Meeting at five had sounded excellent when I'd heard it, but now it just meant I had a whole day to prepare and anticipate and watch the clock so that I didn't even remotely run late.

I swung by the hospital to see what I'd missed in the medical classes, and that was a disaster and a half all on its own. Whatever reasons they had for not liking my presence in their classes was not helped by my lack of presence in their classes. I couldn't win. I could find out what we'd covered, but no one wanted to reschedule the practical parts, no tutors were free ever, and all the other students were paired off for the groupwork stuff.

Joy. I had half a mind to just throw the towel in on it all, but Tsunade had personally suggested I do it and I did, in fact, have clan resources to fall back on. Which was how I'd done as much medical training as I already had.

Clans ruled, basically.

And then it was four o'clock so I made my way to the changing station and dressed in the ANBU blacks that had been left for me with the same blank trainee mask. I felt the same nervous anticipation that I had when putting the mask on for the first time.

I was perfectly punctual, arriving slightly early. Two other trainees were already there, and the fourth arrived slightly after me. The fifth didn't. Our two trainers showed up and I thought that was it – and then the last trainee slid briskly into the clearing.

Magpie tilted their mask sideways towards Bull. "Told you," they said. "All five made it."

The larger ANBU grumbled slightly. "Alright, you win."

It would have been easy to be angry at the two of them, to hate them, since they'd been the ones running us into the ground. But they'd also been there every step of the way with us and that wasn't an easy task either. They'd suffered the lack of sleep and food too.

They led us to the roof of the Hokage Tower with a body flicker, then down the stairs to the Hokage's office. We ghosted past a group of chunin that didn't even blink at our passing.

I could get to like this 'invisible' thing.

There were six other ANBU-technique-muffled chakra signatures in Tsunade's office – one of which I would always recognize. I was therefore totally unsurprised to see the 'honor guard' around her desk when we walked in, though at least one of the other trainees faltered. They were an intimidating bunch, granted but the sight of the gleaming Hawk mask was only reassuring. The ANBU directly to the right of the Hokage was dressed in a white cloak, standing out shockingly compared to the black of all the rest.

Rank thing? It was probably a rank thing.

We came to kneel in the center of the room, one knee down, arms folded in a double block across our chests in the most formal Konoha salute.

"ANBU," Tsunade greeted, nodding gravely at us, with no distinction for those of us who were only trainees. Though I guessed that meant there was no distinction, anymore. "My congratulations. Your trainers have informed me that you were exceptional during training, displaying skill and courage and endurance that cannot be faulted. They recommended I induct you into ANBU without reservation. I do not doubt them."

Was that a normal recommendation? Surely it was, something they said about every group. But it felt like it held weight. I couldn't stop the little swell of pride that bloomed warm in my chest.

"Are you prepared?" she asked.

The silence was so thick and heavy in the room you could have cut it with a kunai.

"Yes, Hokage-sama!"

The ANBU in white stepped forward. "I am Zou," he said, though his mask didn't look exactly elephantine. "The Commander of the ANBU division. Your commander. The Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai is the most elite and classified division of Konoha… and the most dangerous. We are known as the Hokage's private soldiers and it is true - to become part of ANBU your loyalty to the Hokage must be absolute. Not to the village, or to your family or clan or friends. But to the Hokage first and only."

There was silence. He waited a long, long moment. Maybe for a reaction, maybe for an objection.

"From here on out," he went on, when there was none, "your mask will be your identity. The actions you take to serve the village will never be known. You will operate only under the veil of utmost secrecy. If you die on a mission, no one will ever know how. They may not even know you have died at all. Think very carefully about whether this is a reality that you can tolerate. Your last chance to withdraw is now."

He stepped back.

Not one of us moved.

Tsunade looked at us, seeming to meet each of our eyes through the masks. Of all the people in the room, she would be the only one to know who we each were.

She seemed satisfied. "Then swear your oaths."

"I solemnly swear," I said, echoed by the other four trainees in a rumbling unison, "to be loyal to the Hokage above all else, to execute the orders given to me faithfully and without question and to use the best of my ability, knowledge and judgment perform my duties."

Well 'without question' might have been asking a bit much.

"Stand," Tsunade ordered, and made us all step back. It became clear why, when Magpie fetched a giant scroll, of the massive tall ones that were mostly used for medical seals, and spread it out where we had been kneeling. The seal on it did not look like a medical seal at all and I started picking out the purpose of it.

Signal. Identify. Alert.

Ah. The ANBU tattoo. There were four other scrolls leaning against the walls.

I watched avidly as it was applied to the first three trainees, the ink writhing off the page and onto them to form a spiral, leaving only blank paper behind. It was complex and complicated, and delicate at the same time, twisting into their chakra systems fluidly and with many hooks.

Then it was my turn.

I knelt in the middle of the seal and squashed my apprehension. I'd known this was coming.

Tsunade paused, just a fraction, and met my eyes.

Then she activated the seal.

It was white hot like fire creeping over my skin. Not fire. Burning metal. Searing, carving. My breath caught, my teeth slammed shut like a vice, every muscle in my body went tense.

And I didn't fight it.

The seal hooked into my chakra network, a thousand tiny catches, like little needles, like Velcro hooks. It pulled, sideways, dragged with such a pull that I thought my sense of gravity had shifted, becoming a solid and heavy mass on my shoulder.

Then it settled. The pain faded away. The hooks remained, the seal remained. I tried to remember how to breathe again. No one seemed to have noticed anything had happened.

I stepped off the paper. Got back into line. Waited for the fifth and final person to be sealed, and tried to not be too obvious while I examined the seal on my arm. There was the faintest of ties, linking back to Tsunade.

Just because she set it? No, there was a … signal. That made sense. She could summon her ANBU through the seal. And there was a reflection… a way to detect other ANBU seals.

I had better be able to hide that. Either naturally, or with another seal… surely there was. I was far from the only paranoid ninja in Konoha, let alone ANBU. Something that identifiable was just asking for trouble.

There was something deeper, too. Some gathering bundle of chakra beneath the seal. A last resort technique? A dead mans trap? It was ringed with a whole lot of qualifiers and stop gaps, whatever it was.

Tsunade finished sealing her last victim and stood.

"Your ANBU tattoos are your pass keys into classified, ANBU-only areas. I'll leave it to your captains to explain how. They also," she formed a half seal with one hand, "allow me to summon you when your presence is required, individually or as a whole."

On my arm, the seal grew warm, like I was standing a little too close to something hot but not actually touching it. It was very, very noticeable but not quite painful.

"When this happens, report to me directly and be ready to take a mission immediately. More routine and less time critical summons will be distributed by hawk and through ANBU headquarters."

There was a flicker, like stars bursting into light – 6 of them, specifically, on the shoulders of the ANBU in front of us.

"They also," Tsunade went on, "have a signaling function so that you can identify each other and prevent infiltrators in your ranks."

"And lastly," Zou said, "if an ANBU falls in battle, their comrades may use the Body Destruction function of the seal to cremate them and prevent them from falling into enemy hands."

Yeah, no, that has to go, I decided. I didn't like the idea of a seal that someone else could activate on my body. Even if the limiters on the seal made it impossible to activate while there were life signs attached.

It seemed like Zou had very effectively killed the mood in the room, though. Someone that one statement had made everything more serious than every warning of how dangerous ANBU was that had come before it. Maybe how matter-of-fact he was about it, like it was definitely something that had happened before and would happen again.

"And now," Tsunade said, just a little dryly, "your captains."

Oh. So that was why the other ANBU were here. I was a little surprised... but Sasuke had been in ANBU for nearly a year now. It didn't seem so unlikely that he would have been promoted to a leadership position. And that meant I was about ninety percent sure as to who my captain was. It better be. Otherwise that was just cruel. And dumb. And a lot of other things.

The first three were assigned. I stepped forward.

"Hawk," Tsunade said, lips twitching into an amused smile for just a fraction of a second.

Sasuke stepped forward. Follow he signed with ANBU hand signs.

Affirmative, I signed back and wondered how long it would take him to notice. I wasn't so obvious this time as I had been last time, scars covered and identifying coloured nail polish removed. I gave it until … the first time he turned on his sharingan or I spoke, whichever came first.

Sasuke lead me out onto the roof of the Hokage tower and then towards the mountain. We slipped in through a set of tunnels that I had never been in before but that seemed half finished and unused. Which was an impression that held right up until the first checkpoint and its massively reinforced door.

Observe, Sasuke signed at me, and ran through a set of handseals to deactivate the wards and open the door. The chakra on his ANBU tattoo pulsed and resonated at just the right frequency.

I felt the shiver of the wards as we stepped through. And he repeated the process in reverse on the other side to close it behind us.

On this side the tunnels were far better constructed. They could have been any hallway in the tower, in fact. It was mildly disorientating.

Also it made me wonder just how close we had come to ANBU HQ when we had been running around up here chasing the trap master Genno. It couldn't have been too close or things would have gone in a very different direction.

"There are several entry points into Headquarters," Sasuke said, voice only a little distorted by the mask. "This is entrance seven, designated for small, non-urgent groups. The entrance code changes on a randomized basis and you'll receive the new code from your captain. Which is me."

Affirmative, I signed again.

With the mask on, it was impossible to tell if I was winding him up or not or if this was just standard and expected newbie behavior.

Sasuke gave me a very brief tour of the place, which was mostly just a function of which parts we crossed on our journey to wherever we were going.

Which turned out to be a stock room. Or quartermaster. Or… armory. Whatever they called it here.

"Kawauso! New recruit for you!" Sasuke called.

A grim faced middle-aged man limped out into the open, waving a hand. "Yeah, yeah, I know what day it is. The others have been and gone, what'd you do, take the scenic route?" He dismissed Sasuke at a glance and focused on me. "Well, what are you waiting for, babyface. Step up."

I stepped up.

He huffed. "Do the recruits get smaller each year or what? Next you'll have me making blacks for babies. Then again, there've been a few…" He trailed off, grumbling to himself, but starting to fetch things off the shelves, seemingly without thought and dropping them onto the counter near the door. Several sets of black pants and shirts, another white chest plate, more forearm protectors, a kunai pouch and holster, sword, a first aid kit, a sewing kit, a field rucksack that seemed liked it was packed already… the pile kept growing. He made me try on another set of boots, adjusted sizing's until he was happy with the fit.

Then he turned to the wall of masks hanging ominously to the side. "Got any special requests for a mask?" he asked, teeth gleaming in a smile.

It was a test, of course it was. I wasn't sure what it was testing yet, but I was absolutely sure there was a catch.

Maybe to see whether I would give my identity away. Or something.

But really, there was only one answer I could give.

"Bat," I said, trying to copy the voice distortion technique Magpie had been using. It… didn't really work, sounding more like I'd been eating gravel than anything else. Which, I guessed, was thematically appropriate.

Kawauso tilted his head, eyes narrowing as he considered.

Bats were associated with the Nara clan, though not specifically with Shikako Nara. If I ever ended up using Shadow Jutsu – and I could hardly see myself managing a whole career where I didn't at some point – then that was going to be a greater give away anyway.

But that really wasn't the point. There was no one in this world that would understand the logic behind my choice.

And that logic was this: be yourself, unless given the chance, then always be Batman.

"That's not in circulation at the moment," he said by way of agreement, standing and fetching one down off the pegs on the wall. It was very stylized, but yes, pointy triangular ears, protruding snout, and fangs. That did kinda look like a bat.

I held it in hand awkwardly. There was no particularly easy way to switch masks without anyone seeing and… well. That would be a great start to the whole secret identity thing.

Kawauso jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the small cubicle in the corner of the room. "Changing room," he said. "Go put it on, babyface. You're embarrassing your captain with that thing."

I did as I was told, slinking into the very small and cramped cubicle. It was better than nothing. There was a small, slightly blurry mirror affixed to the back wall.

Hmm. I took out my bun and split my hair into two sections, wrapping them up into slightly conical odango style hair buns just behind the ears of the mask. Utterly ridiculous. Perfect.

I bounced out of the changing room. There was a very faint snort that sounded like it had come from the direction of my captain.

Kawauso didn't even pretend to hide his. "Great, now sign here," he tapped a pen against a standard form had been pre-filled out and now held my mask identification. "You're responsible for upkeep and minor maintenance; hence the sewing kit. It gets wrecked or irreparably stained; bring it back to me and I'll replace it but you have to do your own paperwork next time."

Affirmative, I signed and affixed as much of the stuff to my person as I could – sword and kunai pouches and kits – and gathered the rest of it up. Sasuke did not even remotely offer to help, just lead the way further into the headquarters. I hoped we were actually going to stop somewhere, or I would have tried to seal it all away.

It turned out our next stop was the barracks.

"Every team gets a sleeping quarters," Sasuke said, pushing open the door. There were two sets of bunk beds in a long narrow room, with four locked chests, and a single desk next to the door. "None of us are here full time; we all have living arrangements in the village, but if you need a place to crash between briefings and missions or… for whatever reason, it's here."

He identified which chest was mine and demonstrated the chakra key to open it. I made a mental note to come back and clean out my stuff into hammerspace when no one was watching me.

"Now, we're going to go meet our teammates."