Accidental Meeting {Daisuke}

[Aimi Tsukimi]

Aimi walked along slightly lazily, mostly nervously. It was a weird combination of the two, but she managed it somehow. She was dressed in her usual garb, although that was accompanied by a water bottle today. She wasn’t sure how to feel about suddenly being placed on a new team. She was supposed to meet them sometime soon…but…she didn’t really want to. It was going to be hard to replace the void left on the team she was going to enter, and she already disliked them some for replacing the teammates she had already lost. It wasn’t fair. How had this happened to them? She didn’t know of any teams that had been as…demolished as theirs had been.

She supposed there was no use whining about it now. It was done, and there was nothing she could do about it. She walked solemnly through Suna, eyes wandering around. Some of the streets that she had gone through were bustling with people and tourists. Merchants trying to sell everything they possibly could to get ahead in life. Others were totally empty without a soul in sight. Aimi was tempted to stop and shop some, but she really didn’t feel like it. She wanted to, but her heart wasn’t in it. She rarely felt like doing things lately. Her mother had kicked her out of her home for precisely that reason. She was tired of her daughter moping around the house.

It’s not easy to be comforted in Suna. They breed the ninja to be uncaring; mostly unemotional. It confused Aimi, at first, why she had been chosen to be a kunoichi because of that. She was very much emotional…just not enough to not carry on for her teammates. They would have wanted her to get up and continue on with her ninja training, and so she did (even though she didn’t want to.) There really was no point of wallowing in self-pity. It wouldn’t help anybody.

[Daisuke Hizuhiro]

Daisuke's head hit the shop counter with a thud. Ugh... fell asleep again...? His parents had tasked him with watching the shop today, but business had been slow. A few elderly gentlemen looking for some very specific items that a general shop such as this rarely stocked. A young girl, maybe 7 or 8, looking for groceries for her family. A teenage boy buying a boquet of flowers for what was most likely his girlfriend waiting outside. Nothing more, so naturally sleep kept coming.

He looked out the windows of the small room to the bustle outside. It was nearing lunchtime and people would inevitably be showing up for groceries soon, but he figured he'd have another ten or fifteen minutes before business would pick up. He'd watched the store like this dozens of times, he did it once or twice a week. Among his ponderings of the day's business laid the thoughts of his once-complete team. His eyes glanced down at the scar along his forearm, permanent evidence of Shouten.

Just gone, like that. Abducted by an enemy ninja to learn the secrets of the Li Clan hidden jutsu... He didn't know why he got so upset about it, it's not as though there was anything he could have done. But still the thought couldn't leave him, and what's more, he thought of Mizuki. Apparently some sort of training from Masami had gone horribly wrong and she'd had an emotional breakdown... deemed unfit for being a ninja due to mental instability.

Daisuke's eyes shifted up from the desk with a menace. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that Masami's so called "training" had been the culprit. Daisuke's mind flashed back to the first time he met the man, so cold. Then when they all fought in the desert, so irrational and violent. He shuddered to think what could have driven her to such a state, though he'd heard something of Masami assaulting her with Wind Jutsu, and somehow he knew that it wasn't unlikely.

The worst of it was how purely alone he felt. Sure his parents were there, but they would never truly understand, they weren't ninja. So he'd been internalizing everything he felt, and in a moment of sadness he looked up and saw the face of someone who he'd remembered from the Ninja Academy walking in the streets just outside the shop. Since the windows and doors were open, she could easily hear him yell out "Aimi!"

He didn't know her very well, but he could remember her name. Really he just wanted someone to talk to.

[Aimi Tsukimi]

Perhaps she should have just gone to go and find Takeo. Her brother was the only best friend she had left. The two people she had come to grow close to were currently…maybe it would be best to go and find him. He would be able to cheer her up. And, well, if he couldn’t…he could always beat the crap out of her until she snapped back to attention. Hideki was currently away on an A-ranked mission. She loved going over to his apartment and having him tell her all about it. It rarely happened nowadays since he was always gone, and they weren’t the closest out of all the siblings, but she loved spending time with him, too. It was Isao and Kazuo that got on her nerves.

The twins absolutely adored picking on their younger sister. They teased her about everything. It made her want to throw multiple shuriken at them, or even learn that one earth styled jutsu where she could drag their bodies underground. Their heads would be left sticking up, and her and Takeo could just laugh at them. Her mother, although she would get on to them for laughing eventually, would probably appreciate the Chuunin from breaking her things. Their dad would probably just scold her for doing such an irresponsible thing without informing him of her plan, first. Yes, she had a close family considering some of the people around town, but…they still kicked her out of her own house.

Couldn’t they understand that the kunoichi didn’t want to spend any time outside? How was it fair that Aimi – arguably the go-between on the team – had survived when the strongest one hadn’t? How was it fair that her grey eyes would be able to look around the village when their eyes would never shine again? Her arms were swinging back and forth. Their hands would forever remain at their sides as they were curies within the sands. A sob caught in her thoughts, and she fought to retain a neutral look as she passed shops.

Aimi had just been about to turn around and head for home when someone called her name. In the middle of her step, she turned around with the grace of a ninja and swept her bangs out of her face, eyes searching for the face who was calling her. When they landed on a familiar face, the sob escaped her through. Her eyes still felt watery, but the need to cry wasn’t there anymore. After all, she was sure that Daisuke probably didn’t want to hear anything while he was at work. She smiled and gave a four-fingered wave before slowly heading towards him. It was odd. It wasn’t as if she had really talked to him during the Academy. Actually, Aimi hardly remembered saying more than a couple of words to him before.

He was one of the people, though, that she didn’t mind getting along with. He wasn’t a bad person, not that she could remember. There certainly were worse people out there. Once she reached him, she gave another greeting. “Hello, Daisuke.” She glanced around the shop and smiled slightly, although she wasn’t sure she couldn’t keep the sadness out of the smile. “How have you been?” She hoped that he had a story to tell. Anything to keep her mind off of her own…off of her own dead teammates. It hurt her to think about them like that. She preferred, although she knew she was really only tricking herself, to think that they were away on a two-man mission.

[Daisuke Hizuhiro]

As the girl entered the shop, Daisuke cursed his spontinaety. He didn't know what he planned to say to Aimi, he didn't know her well enough to go into detail on any of the happenings with his team. So as she approached the counter and made some small talk he gave a small smile and nod. His mind was overanalyzing things as always so he decided to force himself to just smile and enjoy the conversation, if talk of his old team came up, whatever.

"Hello, Daisuke. How have you been?"

He had to fight a scoff away, he had to remember to be nice despite his troubles. "Well, not too great actually. Do you remember Shouten and Mizuki from our class? I was assigned to a team with both of them but for multiple reasons the team has broken up. Now I've been killing time waiting for the village to assign me some new team members, watching the shop when my parents ask me to. How about you? How have you been?"

Daisuke leaned forward on the counter, he was still a little groggy from his multiple unintentional naps.

[Aimi Tsukimi]

Perhaps she should have just waved at him and went along on her own merry little way? She had made a plan, and she couldn’t even stick by it. In her defense, she hadn’t been banking on being called over, and she wasn’t…impervious enough to not catch the look of dislike that had flashed momentarily over Daisuke’s eyes. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been that formal. They were, after all, only acquaintances. It wouldn’t have been too weird…It would have been expected.

In fact, now she was slightly confused. Actually, it was custom for acquaintances to refer to each other by their last names. It made her wonder why Hizuhiro hadn’t referred to her by Tsukimi. Everyone on her old team had still called her that. They had been on their way back when she had finally convinced them that, if she was supposed to call them by her first name, then they had to extend the courtesy to her, too. Aimi may have been weird for that, but she didn’t care. All she wanted was to feel accepted by them, and she did feel that way…once they had called her by her first name.

How was she supposed to know that the border patrol was going to go so wrong. They had been attacked by rogue ninjas. She had been the smallest on the team. Not the weakest, but definitely the smallest. She had been yanked out of the way by sensei, and told to find the nearest team for backup while the three of them stayed behind to try to hold the team of Jounin off. She had hesitated for a second, and had only moved whenever one of her teammates had gotten cut down. She withheld a scream within her and took off, barely restraining the tears from leaking down her eyes. When she finally found a team of Chuunin and they rushed back, both boys were lying on the ground; one dead and the other barely breathing.

She held his head on her lap as she and the female Chuunin desperately tried to heal his wounds. They had removed the sword that had been stabbed through his chest. He was weak and he tried to talk to her, to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, but she couldn’t believe him. She should have stayed. It was something Aimi kept telling herself from the self-inflicted confinement she had given herself. Sure, she would have lost, too. She was sure that she would have died too. They would have had to had her name added to the list of those killed, but that wasn’t the point. She would have died with her team.

“Mizuki?” She blinked. She had been one of the girls that Aimi liked. They weren’t friends, but the teenaged girl could count the amount of friends she had on one hand, easily. “I’m sorry to hear about your team.” She told him, earnestly. She only understood that, but that’s when it hit her. She quirked her head and raised an eyebrow. “You’re getting reassigned, too? Me too.” She would have smiled excitedly at the prospect, but she couldn’t do that to herself. She was too sad to let that work. He asked her about how she was doing…How was she supposed to answer that? Every time she did, she wanted to break down and cry.

“Oh, I’m doing good…I think.” Aimi shrugged absentmindedly and fixed her bands with her hair. “I don’t suppose you were close to Kiku and Yuki, my teammates, were you?” She asked, wondering if that was the right place to start.