The hospital had a basement that wasn't on any map.
Every big building in Konoha did.
It wasn't superstition. It wasn't paranoia.
It was planning.
You didn't build a village that survived three great wars without learning where to put the things you couldn't afford the public to see.
The stairwell down was narrow enough that two people couldn't pass comfortably. The walls sweated faintly—stone holding on to cold like a grudge. Lanterns were kept dim on purpose, not because chakra was scarce, but because bright light made the mind talk. Bright light made people look at each other's faces. Bright light made grief contagious.
Down here, voices automatically dropped an octave like the air demanded it.
Yūgao moved through the corridor without rushing.
Not because she wasn't in a hurry.
Because rushing was how you tripped. Tripping was how you made noise. Noise was how you reminded everyone you were human.
Her cat mask sat on her face like a second skull.
It hid the worst parts: the twitch at the corner of her mouth, the way her jaw kept locking and unlocking like it couldn't decide whether to bite or scream. It hid the fact that her breathing had turned too shallow on the stairs—as if her body had remembered someone else's lungs and started copying them out of habit.
She forced a deeper inhale.
It scraped going down.
Above them, the hospital was a chorus of shouting and footsteps and wet, frantic instructions. The invasion had turned triage into a religion. You could hear it through the stone if you listened hard enough: the world ending in a hundred small ways and medical-nin trying to argue it back into shape.
Down here, the sound was swallowed into a steady, thick hush.
A medic-nin waited at the end of the corridor.
Kusushi.
He looked tired in the way only professionals got: sleeves rolled, gloves discarded and re-donned too many times, forearms marked by faint red lines where elastic had snapped. Clean hands. Ruined eyes. A man who had learned how to keep the panic out of his voice so other people could afford to have some.
He didn't bow.
He didn't say I'm sorry.
He just nodded once, like this was a handoff on a mission.
"ANBU," he said quietly.
Yūgao didn't correct him.
It wasn't wrong.
It just wasn't the whole truth.
"Kusushi," she replied. Her voice came out level—report-voice, not voice-voice. "You recovered him."
Kusushi's gaze flicked to the table behind him.
Metal. Locking wheels. All four brakes engaged like someone had been afraid grief might try to roll away.
A sheet-covered form lay beneath the clean white fabric.
Too clean.
That kind of clean didn't belong in a war.
"Yes," Kusushi said. "East of the perimeter. Forest line. He was found… after the main extraction routes shifted."
After everyone chased the headline.
After the village turned its eyes toward the bigger monster and stopped looking at the quiet edges where people bled out alone.
Yūgao stepped closer.
The table was cold enough that the air above it felt different. She could smell antiseptic. Dried blood. Smoke embedded in fabric. And under all of it—faint, stubborn—iron and damp earth, like someone had been pressed into soil.
Her eyes tracked the outline under the sheet anyway.
Shoulders.
Arms.
The long line where a sword had once rested comfortably against a spine that carried too much.
Hayate's body was still shaped like Hayate.
That was the most brutal part.
Kusushi kept a few paces back. Professional distance. Not abandoning her, not crowding her. Medical-nin didn't get to look away. Looking away was how you missed poison. Missed bruising. Missed the one detail that mattered when the mission report got written later.
His voice stayed clinical.
"Autopsy is complete. Cause of death was crushing trauma. Asphyxiation. Multiple rib fractures. Internal hemorrhage." He paused. His eyes shifted minutely, not to her face—never the face, never the eyes through a mask—but to her hands, like he was watching for movement. "The sand did most of it."
Yūgao's fingers curled at her sides.
Gloves didn't help. They only made it harder to tell you were shaking.
"The sand," she repeated.
Kusushi nodded once.
There was a fraction of a second where he looked like he wanted to say something else—something human—and then he swallowed it and stayed in his lane.
"As for the scene," he continued, "there were signs of an earlier engagement. Another body. Dosu Kinuta. Sound genin."
Yūgao didn't react to the name.
Not because she didn't recognize it.
Because none of the names mattered right now except one.
Her mask faced the sheet.
Her voice stayed flat. "Show me."
Kusushi hesitated.
Not long.
Not dramatic.
Just long enough for Yūgao to register it and feel the first crack of something hot and animal push against her ribs.
"Do you want—" Kusushi started carefully.
He didn't finish.
He didn't have to.
Do you want his face. Do you want the last image. Do you want to carry that with you forever. Do you want the reality that won't leave when you close your eyes.
Yūgao heard the question without the words.
She didn't answer immediately.
Because answering meant choosing.
And choosing meant admitting there was a part of her that still believed in choice.
Outside, above the basement, Konoha was on fire.
The village had been invaded in broad daylight like it was nothing. People screamed on streets she used to run across as a child. Somewhere, on a roof not far from here, the Hokage had fought a monster wearing a human face.
And down here, the world had been reduced to one sheet and one name.
Yūgao stepped forward and placed two fingers on the edge of the cloth.
The fabric was cool.
Clean.
Incorrect.
She paused with that contact—just a touch—like she was testing whether reality would flinch.
Then she pulled.
The sheet slid back enough to reveal his face.
Hayate's features were still Hayate's.
Sharp nose.
Thin mouth that always looked like it was mid-comment, like the next line of sarcasm was already waiting on his tongue.
That jawline that never quite decided whether it wanted to be boyish or stern.
Only now—
No color.
No cough.
No small irritating breath that always made her tense on rooftops because she could hear it and he refused to pretend he was fine.
There were faint bruises at his throat and along his collarbone. Shadows under the skin like someone had pressed him into the earth and held him there until his body stopped arguing.
The marks weren't dramatic. That was worse.
It meant it had been efficient.
Yūgao stared.
Her mind did something stupidly kind: it tried to replace the stillness with motion. It tried to make his chest rise. It tried to give him his next breath like this was a mistake and she was about to correct it by sheer force of attention.
Nothing moved.
The quiet was absolute.
The only sound in the room was the lantern wick and Kusushi's steady, controlled breathing.
Kusushi spoke again, softer. "There was no sign of prolonged struggle once the sand caught him."
That wasn't comfort.
That was fact.
Yūgao appreciated it more than any lie.
She let the sheet fall back into place with care, covering Hayate's face like she was tucking in someone who might wake.
Her voice came out even. "Where were his things?"
Kusushi gestured to a small tray at the side.
A folded hitai-ate.
A broken strap.
A pouch with a frayed tie.
Two senbon in a paper sleeve that had been dampened and re-dried—blood, rain, or both.
His sword wasn't there.
ANBU didn't lose swords.
ANBU died with them in their hands or left them somewhere no one was supposed to find. Blades went missing when missions went bad and the village needed them to go missing.
Yūgao's gaze lingered on the hitai-ate.
The metal caught the lantern light and flashed briefly—bright, indifferent.
She reached for it.
Her fingers hovered.
Then she stopped.
Because touching it would make it real in a way even seeing his face hadn't.
Kusushi watched her in silence.
Finally, Yūgao spoke again. "Did he say anything?"
Kusushi blinked. "When?"
"When you found him," Yūgao said. "When you recovered him."
Kusushi's mouth tightened.
Medical-nin dealt in bodies.
But some bodies came with stories you could taste in the air.
"He was already gone," Kusushi said quietly. "There was… no voice."
Yūgao nodded once.
Good.
There was something oddly relieving about that.
Hayate wouldn't want his last words filtered through an outsider. He'd want them wasted on the night. On the moon. On whatever stupid poetry lived in the space between breaths.
Yūgao turned away from the table.
The mask kept her face forward. Kept her posture clean. Kept her from doing anything ugly in front of a stranger.
But her mind slid sideways without permission, backward into memory, into that thin strip of time where he had still been alive and stupid enough to believe he could outrun fate by joking at it.
—
A month earlier—night before the finals—Yūgao had been on a rooftop with her arms folded tight against the cold.
The village below was unusually lively: lanterns, vendors packing up, a drunk laugh that didn't know it was living on borrowed time. You could smell grilled meat and cheap sake and the faint sweetness of festival dumplings.
The sky had been clean.
The moon hung full and white above the Hokage Monument like it was watching.
Hayate had appeared two roofs away, crouched on the ridge like a cat that had decided it was a person.
He'd looked too thin under the moonlight.
His uniform sat right, crisp, but his posture had that faint sag he always tried to hide, like his body had learned to carry pain in the spaces between movements.
Then the cough hit.
He turned his head away like manners mattered on a roof.
Like she couldn't hear it anyway.
"You're going to cough yourself into an early grave," Yūgao had said.
Her tone had been flat, but her body had leaned forward without permission, like it wanted to catch him if he tipped.
Hayate had straightened and flashed that crooked grin.
"Not tonight," he'd said. "Tonight I'm a professional."
"You're always a professional," Yūgao replied. "That's the problem."
He'd laughed—quiet, careful—then stepped closer along the tiles. His sword on his back caught moonlight.
Same style as hers.
Two blades. Two rooftops. Two people built for violence trying to pretend they were just doing a job.
"I'll be back before you can sharpen that thing," Hayate had called, nodding at the sword over her shoulder.
Yūgao had tilted her masked face toward him. Crossed her arms tighter, like she could squeeze the worry out of her own ribs.
"Liar," she'd said.
Hayate's grin had widened just a fraction—like her calling him out was a comfort.
Then he'd vanished.
Body flickering into the dark as he leapt to the next rooftop, moving fast enough that for one stupid second it was easy to believe he was untouchable.
—
Back in the basement, Yūgao's hands were still at her sides.
Still clenched.
Still useless.
She realized she was breathing too shallow again.
Like she'd been trying to match Hayate's broken lungs out of habit.
Stop, she ordered herself.
Stop doing that.
No more coughing.
No more time for tears.
She looked at Kusushi again. "What happens now?"
Kusushi's eyes didn't soften, but his voice did—just a little, like compassion sneaking through the cracks of professionalism.
"We keep him here until the village stabilizes enough for formal handling," he said. "After the invasion—after the Hokage—"
He cut himself off.
Everyone was afraid to say it out loud.
Afraid the words would make it real.
Afraid the village would hear and fall apart.
Yūgao's jaw locked.
It didn't matter if Kusushi didn't say it. She had already felt the change in the air above. The way messengers ran. The way the hospital's tempo had shifted from frantic to… brittle.
When the Hokage died, the village didn't just lose a leader.
It lost its spine.
Yūgao nodded once.
Then she did something that surprised even her.
She bowed her head toward the sheet-covered body.
Not deep.
Not ceremonial.
A small, precise motion.
A shinobi's acknowledgement.
Then she turned, and her mask faced the door like it was a target.
Kusushi's voice followed her, careful. "Yūgao-san."
She paused.
He didn't often use names.
Using her name now felt like a breach, like he was stepping one foot outside of his lane on purpose.
"Take care of yourself," Kusushi said.
The words sounded almost absurd in a village that was actively on fire.
Yūgao didn't answer him.
Instead, she reached up and adjusted the strap of her sword where it crossed her shoulder.
The familiar weight settled into place.
Comforting.
Horrible.
She walked out into the corridor.
The air felt warmer up here, like the world was less honest outside the morgue. Like the living insisted on heat and noise and motion just to prove they weren't dead yet.
As she climbed the stairs, the sounds grew teeth again.
A medic-nin shouting, voice cracking: "Pressure—don't let go—!"
A child crying somewhere behind a curtain.
The metallic clatter of a tray being shoved across stone.
A runner skidding to a stop and barking coordinates to someone who didn't have time to ask why.
Yūgao's mask faced forward through all of it.
The cat's painted eyes didn't blink.
Good.
Masks were useful.
They kept grief from becoming a target.
At the top landing, a Leaf chūnin stood with his back to the wall, panting like he'd sprinted through smoke. He saw her and stiffened—recognition, respect, fear, all tangled together. His eyes flicked to her mask and then away, like he didn't want to stare too long at someone who might be carrying bad news.
"ANBU-sama," he started.
Yūgao didn't stop. "Report."
The chūnin swallowed. "The barrier—collapsed. Hokage-sama is—" His voice failed. He tried again, brutal honesty punching through. "He's gone."
Yūgao's step didn't falter.
Inside, something did.
A small internal sound, like a joint popping.
Her jaw clenched so hard it ached.
"Orders?" she asked, because the brain liked orders. Orders were clean. Orders were how you kept your hands from shaking.
The chūnin licked his lips. "Kakashi-senpai is coordinating pursuit teams. The Sand siblings extracted the jinchūriki. There's… multiple fronts."
Multiple fronts.
That was how villages died. Not in one dramatic strike, but in a hundred simultaneous demands that pulled defenders thin.
Yūgao's mask tilted a fraction. "Where is Hatake?"
"East exit," the chūnin said quickly. "Forest perimeter."
Yūgao nodded once.
Then she kept walking.
No more coughing.
No time for tears.
She pushed through a set of doors and stepped into the hospital's upper level—white corridors stained by the reality they were trying to erase. People moved like ants in smoke. Medic-nin with blood on their sleeves. Civilians with blank faces. Shinobi sitting against walls with bandages already soaking through, eyes too wide, trying to pretend they weren't listening to the screams outside.
Yūgao didn't look at them too long.
Looking too long was how you started seeing individuals.
Individuals were how your hand hesitated.
She cut through the chaos and climbed to the roof access because the fastest lines were always above.
On the hospital roof, the air hit her like a slap—cold and smoky and full of distant fire. Konoha spread out beneath her in bruised patches: smoke columns, shattered rooftops, shinobi movement like scattered ink.
For a heartbeat, she could see the stadium in the distance—dark now, no violet flames, no polite silence. Just a jagged wound against the skyline.
Hiruzen.
Gone.
And Hayate—
She shut that thought down before it could fully form.
No time.
She leapt.
Rooftop to rooftop, her body moving the way it had been trained to move since childhood—clean, efficient, almost graceful. The village flowed beneath her like a battlefield map.
As she ran, she felt it—people's eyes on her mask. ANBU moved like a rumor: you saw them, and then you pretended you hadn't, because acknowledging them felt like inviting bad luck.
Yūgao didn't care.
Let them look.
Let them make stories.
Stories were easier than truth.
Truth was: she had just stood over the body of a man she loved, and she hadn't made a sound.
Truth was: she didn't know if that made her strong or broken.
At the east exit, she found Hatake Kakashi on a rooftop ridge, silver hair dulled by ash. He was giving orders to a cluster of shinobi and ANBU—hands moving, voice clipped. Calm, the way people got when they were one mistake away from collapsing and refused to allow it.
His mask hid his mouth.
It didn't hide the exhaustion in his eye.
When he saw Yūgao, his voice didn't soften. That wasn't cruelty. That was how you respected another weapon.
"Yūgao," Kakashi said.
She landed without sound.
"What do you need?" she asked.
Kakashi's eye flicked—tiny, quick—to her sword strap. To her mask. To the parts of her that were still functioning.
"Tracking," he said. "They've got a lead from Aburame insects and a summoning hound. Genin pursuit teams are engaged."
Genin.
Yūgao felt something in her chest twist—not surprise, not disbelief, but a familiar, bitter anger.
Of course the children were out there.
The village always ran on the backs of the young and called it tradition.
"Where?" she asked.
Kakashi pointed without pointing—just a tilt of the hand, the direction encoded in his posture. "Forest line. East-southeast. They're moving fast."
Yūgao nodded.
Then she hesitated, because her body betrayed her by remembering a name.
"Hayate," she said.
One word.
It came out quieter than everything else she'd said tonight.
Kakashi's eye narrowed a fraction. Not confusion. Recognition. He'd heard. Of course he'd heard. News like that moved faster than kunai.
His voice stayed careful. "I'm sorry."
Yūgao didn't let herself react.
She didn't nod.
She didn't thank him.
She just said, "I saw him."
Kakashi's eye closed for half a heartbeat—too brief to be grief, too controlled to be human. Then it opened again and returned to the job.
"They killed the Hokage," Kakashi said, low. "And Orochimaru escaped. I don't have the luxury of losing you too."
There was a command buried in that sentence. An anchor. A reminder.
Stay functional.
Stay alive.
Yūgao's fingers tightened around the strap of her sword until the leather creaked.
"I won't," she said.
Not a promise.
A statement.
Promises were for people who still believed the world cared.
She turned.
Kakashi's voice followed her once more. "Yūgao."
She paused.
"If you find him," Kakashi said—meaning Orochimaru, meaning the snake-shaped problem that had wrapped itself around half their lives—"don't go alone."
Yūgao didn't look back.
Her mask faced forward.
Her voice came out flat as steel. "I won't make that mistake."
Then she jumped.
The village blurred beneath her.
Trees swallowed sound ahead.
And somewhere, in the cold quiet space inside her where tears would normally live, there was only one thought—simple, sharp, and steady enough to carry her like a blade:
Hayate had promised he'd be back.
He hadn't been.
Fine.
Then she wouldn't make promises.
She would make sure the next person who tried to turn Konoha into a board game paid for it in blood.
Quietly.
Professionally.
No more coughing.
No time for tears.