She hated this job.

Her sigh was the only sound in the clean, scarcely furnished room. It was dark. Her bright eyes glimpsed outside a relatively small window, watching the trees bow to the wind with a few leaves already blowing through the air.

With an unexpectedly loud snapping sound she pulled the rubber gloves off her hands, wondering why she had to wear them.

After all, she wasn't working with people who were sick in that way. There was no doubt that the people in here were ill, but Hinata didn't really have to worry about catching diseases from the patients.

Hidden deep within the forest near the borders of Konoha was a rather huge building with clean white walls. Light flooded outside through the windows and when you first looked at it, nothing seemed to justify that many people tried to avoid it as best as possible. Nothing except for the barbed wire fence that encircled the building and a beautiful green area with neatly manicured grass that didn't look, as though many people had ever set foot on it.

This was Konoha's asylum, a place any respectable ninja would never enter.

But she, Hinata Hyuuga, only 16 years old, had been told often enough that she wasn't a respectable ninja by many people, mostly her own father.

Hiashi Hyuuga hadn't liked his daughter's decision to stop working as a chuunin and to become a medic instead. Hyuugas were fighters, they weren't the people who watched the fight and patched up the wounded after the action was over. Without granting her another chance to try to improve in order to become worthy of being heir, he had simply disowned her, making her little sister Hanabi the heir of the Hyuuga clan.

To Hinata, it was the last connection she had had with her family and it was now more than obvious that she was the outcast in the family. The branch members still called her "Hinata-sama" honorfully, though she knew (thanks to the byakugan) that they threw derisive looks her way when they thought that she wasn't looking, and that they spat on the floor once she had passed them by.

It hurt. She didn't know why she had still been foolish enough to believe that her family would some day accept her, but realizing that nothing she did would ever gain her her family's acknowledgment was still a shock. One she had to bear alone, because all of her friends seemed to have better things to do than to tend to the insignificant girl whose eyes got duller and duller after she cried herself to sleep every night.

It was the next shock for her to realize, that all her friend didn't seem to care about her at all. And maybe she had always known it and secretly hoped that she was wrong, but all of a sudden she was completely alone with no one in the world to help her.

From that point on, things only went down the drain.

One day her father told her that he had gotten her a job, after she came home after another pointless training session. And she could already tell from the smirk that split his scowling face that he had come up with something very cruel.

And that was pretty much how she ended up here, in the loony bin. Fortunately not as a patient (she could have imagined her father locking her in here just to get rid of her) but as an employee.

Although she didn't know if being a patient in here wouldn't have been a lot better than working here as a nurse, constantly being yelled at (by doctors who were too lazy to make themselves a damn cup of coffee) being almost strangled (by some of the patient who still believed they were in a S-rank mission) or getting looked at as if she was something to eat (by someone who insisted that he was a lion and refused to take off his anbu mask).

Most of the patients were (ex) ninja who had seen too much during missions and hadn't been able to take it. As she was merely the person who made beds, pulled a food trolley behind her and cleaned off blood stains after another suicide attempt, she didn't really have any contact with the patients, so she couldn't really know how they had ended up in here. That was the work of the psychologists, who weren't as empathic and nice as they should have been in order to really help their patients. All they really did was shut them up with pills so they wouldn't have to deal with them.

Hinata, who had been appalled by their behavior at first, had quickly gotten used to the harsh treatment everyone received, including her.

To Hinata, who had been brought up in a very strict manner and would have been grounded if she ever forgot to say "Please" and "Thank you", it was quite uncommon that whenever she did what she was told to do, all she received was another order barked at her face.

She had also had to get used to the rough tone that prevailed in here. The psychologists, though probably reasonably intelligent and educated, did not refrain from calling the patients "nut cases" or "maniacs", which she couldn't really understand, because to some degree she could empathize even with patients who tried to kill her whenever she entered the room. They had been through a lot, so it wasn't really their fault, right?

"Hyuuga, get over here!" She looked up abruptly, not having heard the man with the white lab coat enter.

"H-Hai." she stammered and walked towards the small stripe of light that shone into the room from the bright hallway. She blushed a little when she realized, that it must have seemed as if she had been hiding.

"We have a new patient. Get a fresh bed to room 23." She nodded and walked passed him, blinking a few times as her eyes grew accustomed to the light again.

She walked down the hallway slowly, heading for a room with a "authorized personnel only" sign on the door, as she heard someone scream in the distance.

The door creaked lowly when she opened it, moving into the dark room where she met two other nurses who had been quietly talking to each other. When they spotted her, they immediately stopped talking, which made Hinata wonder if they had been talking about her. When she left the room again, shoving a mobile bed outside, she heard them continue to whisper and she swore she heard one of them say "creepy eyes" with disgust.

She swallowed, hoping that she was only being paranoid. Since she had absolutely no self-esteem she felt as if everyone she passed by was looking at her with contempt, talking about how useless she was. It was probably a rather stupid thought.

She took out a bundle of keys and unlocked the door, which didn't look as heavy as it truly was (after all, most patients were capable ninja).

The opposite wall was one huge window with a small glass door that led onto a balconywhich overlooked the treetops. However, somewhere in the distance, one could see the high fences that immediately gave away that you weren't as free as the great view fooled you to believe. The door to the balcony was locked.

Having done her job, she left the room again, quickly slipping into a random open door when she could hear footsteps approach.

"Let me go! Let me go!! I'm not crazy!!!" It wasn't hard to assume that the voice belonged to the patient, who was definitely male and probably around her age, probably a bit older. She inwardly cringed. Someone so young coming here was very tragic.

"Shut up!" one of the doctors yelled. The unmistakable sound of a punch ripped through the air. Someone gasped the word "Fuck." and she could hear the patient struggle some more, shouting various obscenities, before the sound of a door being slammed shut and locked echoed through the hall.

A minute later the door was pushed open and she backed away quickly. She hadn't even realized that she had taken refuge in one of the doctor's offices.

With a soft 'click' the light was switched on and three men stood in the door, looking at her sceptically.

"What the hell are you doing in here?" one of them asked, holding his bleeding nose. For a short moment Hinata felt the insane urge to laugh at him loudly for being punched, but she knew that that would only have caused her trouble, so she decided to gloat silently. Serves you right!!

"I-I'm sorry. I d-didn't want to be i-in the way, s-so—"

"Yeah, whatever. Get out of here. You're not paid to sit on your ass. Go tell the new guy what awaits him in here." She nodded and left quickly without casting them another glance.

The door fell shut behind her. She leaned against the wall, sighing and rubbing her itching eyes. It was so late already. She just hoped her shift would end soon, so that she could crawl under her bedsheets and hide until the next morning.

Knowing that postponing her first meeting with the new patient wasn't going to save her from meeting him, she took slow steps towards the room, hoping that it wasn't another violent man who tried to hit her for no reason. Some of the patients were aggressive and they were her least favorite cases.

All too soon she reached the door, pressing her right ear against it, in order to determine whether the man inside had calmed down yet. She was too tired to try to wrestle with a disgruntled young man right now.

When she couldn't seem to hear anything suspicious (except for the same shrill screaming from somewhere upstairs where the women were kept) she dared to unlock the door, opening it slowly.

The room was completely dark, since the sun had set hours ago. And she couldn't seem to find anyone.

Slowly, she pushed the door open a little more, still fearing that she was going to be overrun by someone who was eager to get out of here as fast as possible. Nothing happened however.

Finally, she dared to slip into the room, closing the door behind her quietly, as if afraid of breaking the silence. As if she could somehow wake a monster that slept in here.

She walked a few steps forward blindly, her hand reaching out to find the light switch, though she couldn't seem to find it.

"H-Hello?" she asked into the deathly silence, feeling anxious. Her heart was thumping violently in her chest, and she blushed at her own childish fear of darkness.

She decided to walk further into the room, crossing it with unsure steps, until her eyes focused on something that seemed to be even darker than the room.

Her heart skipped a beat when her knees hit the bed and she realized that she was staring into a pair of black eyes.