Great Lakes and Expectations chp 1

'The drop site is compromised.' 

 He didn't see anyone, but they were waiting for him. Jiraiya kept an easy smile and swaggered on up the road.   

  'Did my contact sell me out, or is it a third party?' 

 Whoever it was waited until he'd stuck a key in the post box. The kunai thudded into a metal mailbox when he dodged. A postal worker inside looked up at the sound and screamed. She dropped to her knees behind the counter as the second weapon shattered through the glass that separated the boxes and the mailing area. 

 Jiraiya winced. “Hey, hey!” He batted a shuriken off course and clapped his hands into rat. “Be careful! It's business hours.” The illusion he'd sensed melted away, revealing a minefield of traps. 

 His eyebrows shot up. “Rude.” 

 A woman wearing the band of a Kiri traitor silently dropped off the ceiling with a jagged sword. He cursed and danced away. She rushed him with a grim look, because that was just how Kiri made their shinobi. He gripped the first kunai and wrenched it out of the mailbox with a tooth-aching screech  of metal. He parried her strike almost lazily and stretched his foot out to trip her. She stabbed at it. 

 Movement behind. 

 Jiraiya leaned to the side- and the woman's comrade speared her with another kunai. She let out an indignant shout and put a hand up, too late.

   
 “You should get that looked at,” Jiraiya said helpfully. 

 He could see dirt under her blunt nails when she wrapped her hand around the handle of the weapon in her shoulder. She bared her teeth at him, because of course she did. 

 Jiraiya pre-emptively winced on her behalf because he could see where this was going. 

 The kiri woman pulled the kunai out in a spray of blood. He caught it out of his peripheral vision because two more shinobi were pincering him in. The next seconds were flashes of blood and steel- mostly their steel, because he was more interested in figuring these people out than impressing them with his repertoire.   

 Stranger two was male, with no headband at all. Number three declared current allegiance to Sunagakure, but that was probably not true. If Suna was accepting missions to attack Konoha, their ally, they wouldn't do it with village insignia on. 

 A lot of chakra was rising behind him. The kind of chakra that required his full attention. Jiraiya stole stranger 3's sword and kicked him into the wall in one movement. He was cutting out stranger 2's throat before he'd even registered the sound of bones breaking on impact. 

 The woman from Kiri was mid-summon, using a lot of blood. ...The blood from the wound near her heart. 

 “Shit,” Jiraiya said passionately. He tossed the garbage sword aside as he lunged toward the scroll she was using, reading it as quickly as possible. Something sentient, something from a great lake - 

 He didn't catch any more and the first thing he thought of was a mirror seal. He smeared it over the seal with the woman's own blood, covering part of her seal and corrupting the whole thing. If he was lucky, it'd create a loop, making the seal useless by calling on the user's chakra instead of the beast she wanted. 

 But there was smoke, even as the missing-nin gave a strangled scream. It ended on a high, sudden note. 

 There was a squelch. 

________

 She couldn't sleep. 

 Regina dully weighed the situation yet again. Her battery was at 6% now. She could read a little while longer. Or she could lean out of bed and plug it in, but then she'd have to put the phone down and lay alone with her thoughts. 

 'I don't want to let my phone die,' she tried to convince herself. 'I need the alarm.' 

 It felt bleak as hell to even think about going to work in less than 5 hours. She needed to sleep, but she couldn't because all she could think about was things that made her miserable, so she kept her mind busy with reading, which kept her further from sleeping. 

 Maybe food would help. 

 Virtuous and bummed out about it, Regina left her phone on the floor to recover. Without turning on the  light, she found her slippers on the end of her rug and stuck her feet in before she ventured out onto the hardwood. 

 She didn't have to step out barefoot to know that it was punishingly cold. That was all you could expect from winter here.   

 'I feel so weird.' 

 Regina rubbed at her chest, trying not to wince at just... she didn't know what, exactly. But she felt off. 

 Tomorrow was going to fucking suck. She should have been asleep three hours ago, but she wasn't, and she was exhausted but going to sleep was absolutely unthinkable. 

 She made it down the stairs with minimal creaking, which was good. But the fridge seemed utterly uninspiring. 

 Light caught her eye.   

 Regina flinched away with a frown, bringing a hand up.   

 'It's what, 3 in the morning? Who is up?' 

 She unlocked the door and pulled it open, trying to see what was going on. Someone's headlights, it had to be. But she couldn't see a car out on the road... 

 'It's coming from the other side of the house.' 

 Curious, Regina leaned out as far as she could without opening the screen door, but she couldn't see. 

 “I don't even think there's enough room to fit a car between the lake and the hedge.” 

 Did... did someone put their car in the lake or something? 

 ...Her boots were at the front door, on the other side of the house.
 She glanced down at her white slippers and the pristine glitter pompoms at the tips. She hesitated for a moment- she could shuck off her shoes and just go barefoot.   

 'Fuck it. It's too cold. I can replace these if I can't save them.' 

 Regina opened the second door and slipped out. The night wind slammed it behind her immediately, but she was already padding out to see what was going on.   

 The light was gone. 

 God. If someone was in the lake, what was she going to do? Sprint inside to grab her phone to call 911? She shuffled as fast as she could without losing her shoes. She definitely should not go in after anyone. One more person dying in Lake Superior wasn't going to help whatever drunk bastard had careened into the water. 

 She cleared the hedge and stopped. She could feel her brow drawing down, forming lines across her forehead and between her eyebrows. 

 It was eerie quiet. 

 Her muscles were stiff. Regina had the unsettling superstition that she needed to stay as still as possible, that if she even breathed she would draw some unwanted attention. 

 Ridiculous. She breathed in. 

 and gasped, grabbing at her chest. It was on fire! What was this, some kind of pain, a heart attack? No, it was too far up, almost to her shoulder. 

  
 She heard herself making a weird, high noise like a wounded animal. She stumbled back and fell onto the dirt. Her hand was wet. Disbelieving, she craned her neck to stare down, trying to see in the dark. But it wasn't dark anymore. The air was heavy and it stank like iron and salt and the light she'd seen before was ringing her feet, a huge spiral that dipped in and out of the water of the lake she lived too close to. 

 “This is some shit,” Regina said, disbelieving. The light winked out to total darkness- and then it was daylight. She bumped down onto a tile floor and suddenly had full visibility.   

 Regina grabbed at her shirt and pulled it away from her skin- 

 “Freaky.” 

 Her clothes were soaked with blood that had to be hers. But there was no wound in her skin. She leaned back shakily, setting her filthy palms onto the floor. And then she wondered what was under her legs. Regina leaned to the side to peer down and then would have screamed if she'd had any air. She scrambled back as fast as she could..   

 A dead woman grinned up at her, head lolling in a way that looked like she'd been dead when she fell and hadn't controlled her muscles at all. 

 Broken glass was sparkling around the floor, lit up in the sunlight and drowning in a puddle of blood. The woman was holding a big roll of paper- or her hand was on top of it, anyway.   

 A man was standing over both of them, and he was looking right at Regina. Her eyes went to his hands- he... he wasn't holding any weapon. 

 There were more bodies. Two of them. 

 Her mind was making an unpleasant connection between the three dead people and the very big man in the room. He did not look unthreatening. He looked scary- he had weird clothes and wild hair and tattoos on his face.   

 She swallowed. 

 The man raised his hands, palms facing her, and he said something in a tone that was more bemused than anything else.   

 She felt her brow furrow. “What?” 

 He looked as confused as she felt, but he repeated himself. In Japanese. He was speaking Japanese, which, frankly, she wasn't that good at. She'd done one semester study abroad in undergrad. She was not prepared for this sudden test. 

 'I understood that he said the verb “to know” in the past tense. And he said “she.” That's it. That is not very helpful.' 

 She did not understand what was going on. 

 Well. She knew how to say that. Regina opened her mouth and let out the saddest little, “分りません. 英語できますか？” 

 She never did find out if he spoke English, because his expression was suddenly furious. Regina flinched back but he was spinning around, leading with his fist. It crashed into a woman's face and straight-up reversed her momentum to send her flying through the jagged remains of what had been a glass wall. 

 'Where did that woman come from? Why was she attacking him? Which one of them killed these people?' 

 Regina couldn't breathe. She kept trying, but it wasn't working and black was flashing around her eyes. 

 The man straightened and gave her a worried look. “すみません。大丈夫だいよう、心配しないね。” 

 She disagreed. It seemed like a really good time to worry to her. She stared over at the woman he'd hit.   

 She was still, laying splayed on the floor where she'd fallen. By the way that blood was spreading, it was probably a good thing that Regina couldn't see the woman's face.   

 'That lady is not going to walk it off. She is pining for the fjords. She is pushing up daisies. She is feeding trees. She dead. Dead dead dead what the absolute fuck.' 

 Her whole body shuddered. She tore her eyes away to look at the only other breathing person in the room- holy shit, was this a post office? Was she having a hallucination about a post office? 

 The murder-punch man gave her a smile that would have been reassuring if she wasn't terrified of him. And then he turned away from her, took two steps towards one of the bodies- 

 and reached up to pull open a mail box. He emptied it casually, stuffing an envelope into a bag at his hip. He closed the mail box. Turned the key. And put the key back in his pocket. 

 'Is this death?' Regina wondered. 'Do I deserve this?' 

 It seemed like some bullshit to her. 

 The murder-man looked up, face hardening at something in the distance. He must have heard something the way he'd heard that woman attacking him from behind, because he was suddenly urging Regina on her feet. Terrified and baffled, she let him herd her up and out and into a run past a row of quiet, dingy looking Japanese-style houses. He glanced behind them, said something that was obviously a curse, and then picked her up. Like. The way she'd pick up an empty laundry basket. 

 She did not protest, nor did she have time to. Suddenly, they were going really fast.   

 Regina watched scraggly green bushes flash away and had a sickening realization hit the bottom of her stomach. 

 'I'm going to be really late for work.'