Shiranui Genma stared at his small refrigerator with an intensity usually reserved for the battlefield. He stood in front of it in his dark apartment, leaning on the door, with his lean, muscled form bathed in the yellowish light pouring from the open box.

Gods, he was hungry. He hadn't eaten since, what, four or five days ago? Well that wasn't entirely true. He'd eaten his last field rations bar only three days ago. And he'd eaten what he could scrounge while on the run back to Konohagakure. But he had been on the run. It wasn't like he'd had the time to do anything quite so elegant as hunt or fish or rig up a snare. He hadn't even had time to scout for berries or edible roots. And since it was the dead of winter, there wouldn't have been much to find even if he had been able to look for it.

By yesterday morning, he had been grateful for the few handfuls of moldy, dried barley he was able to scrape together from the feed boxes in an old, disused farmstead's barn. The farmhouse itself was long gone ? just the outline of a foundation and a broken chimney remained ? and the barn had been practically falling down, one side still bearing the scars of enormous claws from the Kyuubi's attack four years ago.

The former occupants were long gone, too. Almost nothing remained. And he hadn't been able to linger. In fact, he may have been foolish for having taken the time to search the wooden feed bins and scrape the remnant grains from the musty corners with the tip of a kunai. It wasn't necessarily the case that it was his detour in search of sustenance that allowed the Earth Country ninja pursuing him to catch up to him for their final attack, but it wasn't obviously not the case, either.

And attack they had. By the time it came down to it, it is was just the two of them and himself, in a blood-soaked last encounter where he'd finally sent them back to the soil. A week and a few days prior, he'd taken out three of their comrades. They, in turn, had killed his mission partner Ryouji. It wasn't clear to him, in the fragmented memories of that chaotic battle, what the sequence of events had really been, although for his mission report Genma would have to lay out some plausible story of strike and counterstrike. Of ambush and combat. Of capture and escape and flight.

It was that four days' flight that really did him in. Four days running through chill wind and driving rain, after two weeks in the field and their carefully planned and executed sabotage of the enemy's supply lines. Four days of fleeing towards Konoha with Ryouji's tags and mask, all that remained of the ANBU jounin he'd worked alongside for almost a year. Four days running on what he guessed was probably a broken shin, on no sleep, on a body depleted of iron through the gashes here and there where enemy blades had bit deeply into tender flesh. Four days trying to ignore the ache in his side where the enemy's jutsu had blasted him into a stone spike. Four days trying to pretend that it was normal to wish he could just stop breathing rather than deal with the pain of inhaling again.

So Genma was a little shaky, a little weak, as he held that door and peered inside. Even this search of his icebox was an on-the-run affair. He'd slipped past the gate sentry with a shadowy cloaked and masked nod, and headed straight for his apartment in the ANBU quarters. He knew he had a duty to report in immediately. Knew he had injuries that needed treating. Knew that Ryouji's death made any delay on his part unpardonable. But he was so hungry he was ready to collapse, and surely they would forgive him for stopping to grab some kind of food to take with him to the debriefing. Since it was four in the morning, whoever was going to be the one to take his report would appreciate the extra ten minutes of sleep, he reasoned.

He stared into his refrigerator, and a vast, echoing emptiness stared back. There was a pair of mismatched foreign beers. There was half a jar of mustard. There were some unpleasant looking things that may have once been eggs. And there were bare wire shelves. How many times had Raidou bemoaned the state of his pantry and fridge? "You can't live on imaginary food, Genma," he'd chided.

He shut the box with a weary sigh. Now what? Forgetting about it seemed like the best bet for now. Unless Raidou was home. But the apartment next door was as bare and empty as his own had been half an hour before. No, the man was on a mission, and his apartment was nicely rigged with traps in his absence. He couldn't just go on a raiding party. Not as tired and hobbled by injuries as he was now. That would be inviting trouble. Sighing, Genma turned and limped back down the corridor. Time to go report in.

The trouble started when Genma was making his report to the ANBU Intelligence agent assigned to debrief him.

"Ryouji and I completed the primary objective and were returning to Konoha. We were approximately thirty kilometers away from the site of the action when we discovered several Earth Country ninja were lying in ambush for us," Genma started, reasonably enough. But the room was overly warm, or maybe overly cold - he couldn't tell which - and his vision was blurring so that the violet-haired young woman sitting across from him kept seeming to lose her features.

"Genma-san? Genma-san?"

Someone was calling his name.

"Are you sure you're able to continue? Would you like me to call for a medic?"

Genma blinked and shook his head. "No. Just a little tired." He picked up Ryouji's tags and clanked them together, feeling the bumps in the metal that spelled out his name, his reg number, his blood type.

"You were saying you encountered an ambush?" the woman prompted.

"Right." Genma blinked and rubbed his eyes. "There were... lots of them... bad ones... and they... canyon... couldn't avoid... captured..."

"Genma-san?" the woman cut him off.

He blinked at her. What was her problem? She kept weaving from side to side, getting closer and farther. If she'd just sit the hell still. A man was dead for crying out loud. And he had to tell someone about it.

"Genma-san, you're not making any sense."

What the hell? Not making sense? He'd told her. The mission objective was completed but Ryouji was dead and he'd run for days and days and the fuckers had wrecked his knee and cracked his ribs and practically cut him to ribbons but it hardly mattered because Ryouji was dead with the top of his skull cut clean off and he had his mask splattered with blood and a set of dog tags to prove it and he was so hungry but Ryouji was never gonna eat again except for imaginary food that Raidou could give him if only he were home but he wasn't and maybe if Raidou would just come home he'd be able to explain to this woman what Genma was trying to say. He just needed someone... who understood him...

The woman caught him before he hit the ground. And shouted for a medic. And since this was ANBU and it wasn't all that uncommon for their operatives to come home looking like Genma did, with a dead comrade's tags and mask, and a battered body barely functioning, medics were close at hand.

When he woke up, it was to the sound of someone humming. Low voiced, and warm. Quiet. Humming a folk tune, Ninja's Passing, and slowly turning the pages of a book. He recognized the voice. The presence.

"Raidou?" Genma's voice croaked out of him, and moving his face made him aware of the strange feel of oxygen tubing snaked across his cheeks.

"You're awake?" Raidou put his book down and turned, yawning and stretching to look at his friend.

Genma made a complaining noise. One that said, yes I'm awake, but I don't have to like it. He squinted at his surroundings and groaned. "Fuck. When'd I end up here?"

"Where?" Raidou asked. "Home? Hospital? What do you remember?"

"You weren't home," Genma wheezed. "Said I shouldn't- shouldn't have imaginary food."

"Yeah? Well if I wasn't home, I don't know how I told you that," Raidou grinned. "But I was right."

"The fuck?" Genma asked, and coughed, grimacing. He grabbed at what turned out to be a bandaged chest, with an arm tethered to an IV line. "Fuuuuck."

"You've got some broken ribs," Raidou told him. "Nicked a lung, the doc said."

Genma made a face.

"Yeah, left leg's broke too. And evidently you ran for like three or four days straight like that."

"I remember that. Just not how I got here." Genma thumped the bed beside himself.

"You remember getting debriefed?" Raidou asked quietly.

Genma shook his head. "Looked for you. You were gone." He took a slow, halting breath, wincing as his chest expanded.

"I was in the field. Got back a little before noon. Found out you were here."

Genma nodded. "When'd I get here?"

"Sometime early this morning. Five-ish. Little before," Raidou answered. "It's almost ten now. Night."

"Ryouji-" Genma started, and Raidou put a hand on his friend's bandaged arm.

"I know." Raidou looked at Genma with tired eyes of his own. Ryouji had been a protégé of Genma's. A rookie who'd made it past his first six months in ANBU to become a colleague. He'd looked up to Genma, learned from him, learned from Raidou. How many more of these kids were gonna come and go? How long was it really possible for either of them to keep beating the odds? To keep being the ones who came back carrying someone else's mask? To keep being the one's bearing silent witness while another set of kanji was chiseled into the Hero's Stone?

"You think you might eat something?" Raidou asked, to change the subject. To take his own mind off the dark, labyrinthine paths it threatened to wander.

"Not hungry," Genma answered automatically.

"Yes you are," Raidou retorted. "The doc said your blood sugar was so low when they brought you in they were surprised you'd made it back to HQ at all."

Genma made the start of a contrary face, but Raidou just went on, not allowing for interruption.

"And you've been raving about food in your sleep. How I wasn't home and all you had was imaginary food."

"Now you're just fucking with me." Genma scowled.

"Am not." Raidou picked up a small container from a table at the side of the bed. "Why would I do that?"

"Because you think it's fun?" Genma suggested.

"Well I'm not. And you should eat. I brought you this." Raidou opened a styrofoam container and set it on the bed table. Warm, spicy smells drifted out, mingling uncertainly with the antiseptic hospital odor.

Genma's look softened, and he struggled to sit up.

"Let me help, idiot," Raidou said. He cranked the head of Genma's bed up and shoved a couple of extra pillows behind his friend's back.

"Can do that myself," Genma protested, even as he listed in Raidou's arms.

"Yeah, yeah, just like you can feed yourself. Here." Raidou sat back down and pushed the bowl of food closer to Genma. "Stewed kabocha in Grass Country spices." His voice was gruff, and his face a mask, hiding what Genma was pretty sure was the hint of a smile.

Genma picked up the spoon Raidou handed him and took a bite, then another, suddenly ravenous. "S'good," he mumbled. "How'd you get it to stay hot?"

Raidou gave him another what-kind-of-idiot-are-you look. "Chakra. What'd you think, I brought a camp stove in here while you're on O2?"

"You wasted chakra keeping pumpkin stew warm for me?" Genma was shocked enough to stop eating, despite his hunger.

"Wasn't a waste," Raidou muttered, looking away.

"Yeah." Genma smiled and resumed eating. "Thanks."

It beat the hell out of imaginary food.

ooo

Author's Notes: For JBMcD for her Birthday, which came just after my own. (grin!)

The song 'Ninja's Passing' can be found in the story of the same name by the eminently talented Kilerkki.

Thanks to Telos, Kiki and Momo for pre-read feedback

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