Don't have to much to say here except that more people need to be reveiwing. I know more than one person is reading this, it shows up on my stats. Only a crazy person reads the same story often enough to give it 18 hits.

Disclaimer: Naruto is not mine. Characters listed previously, along with the almost nameless Iwa ninja, Jomei, Minoru, and Aneko, are.

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First Time

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"I'm going to die. I'm really going to die."

Hearing those words from his friend's mouth, Jotaro's eyes darkened from their light, natural brown to a dark orange. Instead of chasing after the one with the chakara strings threaded through the floating kunai, he plunged his sword into the upper abdomen of his partner. Said former Stone shinobi jerked his hand and pulled the knives toward him, ready to lash back out.

"Not so fast," he warned viciously. "I've got my sword in just the right position right now, just below the tenth rib." He let go of the handle after determining that his enemy was far too stunned to pose a threat. He tilted his hand to mime the motion of his sword. "If I move it up just a few centimeters, which I can do in less than a second, the sword punctures his left lung, and you've got a medical emergency on your hands, one that he's not likely to survive, I might add.

"My other option is to do severe damage to his spinal cord, which can also be done in a matter of seconds, before you'd be able to get to me, with either your knives or your physical body." Done demonstrating, he re-grasped the handle. "So I think your only option is to tell me which one of you has the scroll."

"What makes you think I'll do anything of the sort?"

Jotaro laughed a laugh not his own, too cruel for the situation and his personality. "You don't want him to die. It's written all over your face. If I just pull out the sword, he'll bleed, just like my teammate, but it's highly unlikely that he'll die, since I avoided vital organs and as many major arteries as I could. All you have to do to save both your teammates is tell me which one of you has the scroll, and where it is."

"Don't do it, Jomei!" the masked Genin yelled, suddenly responsive.

Ignoring his teammate, Jomei reached into the pouch behind him and pulled out a white Heaven scroll. "It's not a fake," he said, holding it out. "Now let him go."

Jotaro took it and weighed it in his hand. "Yeah, you're right, it's not." He yanked the sword and wiped it quickly on the ninja's jacket before he fell to the ground.

"I told you not to give it to him!"

"What was I supposed to do? Let you die?" he asked, helping his fallen teammates to their feet one at a time. "Let that bastard kill you? Come on, Aneko," he said to the girl already supporting Minoru. "Let's get out of here."

As it had been with the transformation to the deep orange, there were no witnesses to see Jotaro's irises return to normal. With lightly colored eyes, he wondered why the two Iwagakure shinobi were supporting their comrade like that, and why there was the fresh smell of blood over the metal of his wakizashi.

Behind him, there was a sharp intake of breath, making him turn around. His own two teammates were on the ground near their shelter. "No offense," Ryuchi was saying, "but you're not very good at that," in reference to the bandages Yoko was clumsily wrapping around his leg. She shot him a "you're not helping" look when he jerked.

Without saying anything, Jotaro sat down beside them. Ryuchi lifted his weakly closed left fist and said, "Nicely done, super freak." Jotaro knocked it back into his lap with the lightest of touches.

Yoko finished and lowered him onto the ground, placing his abandoned hitai-ate next to him. "You should get some rest," Jotaro said slowly. "I'm willing to bet you lost a lot of blood."

"Well, yeah," Ryuchi murmured, already half asleep. "It spurted."

They watched him to make sure he was really asleep before Jotaro started talking softly. "It wasn't too serious then?"

Yoko fished out a pen and pad of paper.

No, she wrote. I got the bleeding to stop pretty quickly. He did lose a lot of blood, but I think he should be fine in a day or two, if we help him walk.

"And he's still got the scroll, right?"

Yes, she scribbled after a less than friendly glance.

He ignored her hostility and nodded. "I'll take my watch now, and wake you up in three hours. We'll have to adjust, since there's no way he'll be able to take any of the watches for the next few days. If he's up for it, we'll get moving tomorrow afternoon."

He tried to tell himself that she wasn't glaring at his back as the tree enclosed the two of them.

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"I know you talked to me last night," Ryuchi said, when he and Yoko were alone. Jotaro had left ten minutes before with the canteens. "I wasn't totally out of everything, although I guess that was what you were aiming for."

Yoko took a deep breath. "I didn't think you'd be up for reading words of comfort instead of hearing them."

He chuckled and pushed himself up. "You're right about that."

"Can you read now?"

"I probably could, but I don't think I want to. I'm really dizzy. Dots," he clarified. "And besides, I like your voice."

She blushed. "It's nothing special."

"It is when you've never heard it before."

Her fingers brushed the hair away from his forehead. "Don't get too used to it. This is a one time deal."

"I see. That means I've got to get as much out of you as I can before Jotaro comes back. That's why you let yourself talk a little, right? Because it's only the two of us."

"That sums it up."

"Why won't you ever talk to him, if you'll talk to me? He… really likes you, you know."

"He annoys me," she said simply, avoiding his eyes.

"How? He'd do anything for you and…"

"That's just it. I never asked him to."

Ryuchi turned his head. "Okay, so I just have to tell him that you'll pay more attention to him if he stops advertising that he'd go to the ends of the Earth and back if you snapped your fingers."

"Don't tell him anything. This conversation never happened."

"So now you're in the ANBU?" he asked angrily. He hadn't been expecting her to dignify that with a response, but he hadn't been expecting her to walk away either. "Get back here!" he yelled after her. "You can't just leave me alone, I'm a patient! That's the first thing we were taught in first aid! What if I start bleeding again and die? It'll be your fault because you left me here!"

"What are you yelling about, Ryuchi?" Jotaro asked, more annoyed than concerned by the context.

"She left!"

"I can see that, but why?"

What Ryuchi knew he should have done was relay the conversation word for word, leaving out the taunt at the end of course. But for some reason, he instead offered up, "I don't know. She's a girl, and they get all moody randomly."

Jotaro knew there was something wrong with that explanation, first of all because it wasn't even an explanation, but he let it go. He handed Ryuchi a full canteen and asked, "Do you think you'll be ready to move a little tonight?"

"Hell yes. I'm ready when you are. Right now, if you want."

"Right."

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"Time," Jotaro called from the top of the stairs in the tower.

"Four of. Hurry up, super freak."

"You don't have to tell me. It doesn't take me a minute and a half to get down the stairs."

"That's because you're not a cripple. You try getting stabbed in the leg. Then you can talk to me about my walking speed."

"No thanks." He jumped from the top of the stairs to directly in front of the door where they stood with their anti-social Chûnin konoichi, who hadn't spoken to them since they'd inadvertently summoned her the day before when they reached the tower, a considerable feat since the room in the tower wasn't that big.

"Show-off," Ryuchi mumbled. "Three and a half minutes till three. I wonder if Hyuuga made it… or Shibasawa." He paused. "Wouldn't it be awesome if we were the only ones from our class who made it?"

"What I'm more interested in is whether or not any of the rookies made it, especially that Uzumaki kid. His teammate's the Hyuuga Neji of his year, so I wouldn't be too surprised."

"Give the kid himself more credit, Jotaro. He's not as much of a wimp as everyone seems to think he is."

"And you would know this because…"

"Because he's like me. Crazy enough to do anything to prove himself." He glanced at his watch. "Twenty seconds. Countdown… seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, open!"

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Jotaro, who was paying as close attention to this lecture as any other, narrowed his eyes. The preliminaries are being held right now… Ryuchi's going to have to drop out. There's no way he can make it through a one on one fight now.

Yakushi Kabuto raised his hand first, followed by both of Akira's teammates. Jotaro kept waiting for Ryuchi's hand to go up too, but it never happened. Both his arms remained firmly at his sides. Stubborn idiot.

He leaned back and put his arm on Jotaro's shoulder, taking his weight off his leg. "I thought you said you could walk on your own now."

"I can."

"So what are you doing?"

"Keeping my ace," he whispered. Louder, in reference to the display screen, he said, "The Uchiha rookie vs… who the hell is Akadou Yoroi?"

"If we get out of the way, we'll find out," Jotaro snapped, leading him up to the right balcony where the bulk of the Genin had gone, just to stay away from the creepy foreign ninja on the other side.

"Let's all win," Ryuchi said suddenly after the match below and above, started.

"All right. I think we might be able to pull that off."

Yoko nodded.

"Okay then. We're all going to make it."

Little did Ryuchi know just how wrong he was.

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