Ten deep, calming, meditative breaths later, and Rina was still trembling, her burned fingers clenched in pink flowered bedsheets until she could feel the seared flesh crackle.

Not far enough, her instincts shouted from the depths of her wild-animal consciousness. Impulses screamed through charged nerves to get up, run, go.

She took another slow, shaky inhale, the comforting scents of parchment and ink steadily displacing the residual taint of burnt ozone, lightning, and blood. With a stiff ache, she pried her left hand free from the sheets and reached over to her bedside table, blindly fumbling open last night's bedtime reading and pressing her cheek against the cool roughness of the pages. Drawing in, with intemperate gasps, the dusty aromas of home.

Never far enough.

She had peeked back over the edge, just once. His back had been turned to her, senbon-straight, head tilted up towards the sky. It should have looked peaceful. Serene.

Her knees hit the mattress before she even realized she'd lifted her hands for the translocation.

It wasn't even just fear, she knew. There had been something wrong about the way he was standing there, fifteen years old and brittle as bone. Like the weight of the world had rested on his slender shoulders, and he'd dropped it.

She was glad, right then, that she hadn't had to see his face.

A cold shudder numbed her fingers, and she dropped the book down on the bed, watching the pages flutter. Kotoyama Kouzou, Reflections on the Nature of Bindings. It settled on a well-worn page with a diagram she could have drawn in her sleep: the simple first-level constraint of a minor element. Fire, for her very first explosive tag.

She thought of Kakashi, that shock of white hair still downy with youth, kneeling quietly beside his father as he learned his own first seal. Thought of him crouched next to the brilliant and shining figure of the Yondaime, their voices low and bright.

Thought of how long it had taken her, struggling and dappled with stale ink, to evoke anything more than a feeble puff of smoke.

Would she have traded it all -- her family, her future, her simple dawn smiles -- to wear the expression he wore now? It scared her, a little, that she didn't even know.

But the choice, after all, wasn't hers.

The soft springs creaked as Rina shifted on the bed, pulling a small, neatly folded paper out of her pocket. A fresh sheet joined it, from her bedside drawer, and she poured a small measure of ink into the well of her antique inkstone.

Life wasn't fair, she knew. People didn't get what they wanted. They died, they suffered, they learned and they parted... it all just happened, haphazard scatterings of fate. And maybe she couldn't hope for anything better -- but she could at least have this.

Dear Kitanura-san, she wrote in her very best calligraphic hand. Regarding your offer of a position in the Seal Research Division, it would be my pleasure to accept...