Naruto: Ero-ninja

Night Terrors

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Author's Note: Hello everyone well for most people that have followed this far they know an Author's note usually means something. If you checked the warnings tag you'll also have noticed a new one for this chapter. For those that didn't there is going to be a scene where a character is taken against her will. It is the one that starts off the chapter if you must know. The reason for this note is to warn people as I said I would back when people were stating that Eroninja was getting too dark. I said there was a chapter where it would seem even darker and this is it. I'll admit to being rather uncomfortable with this scene, but in the end still felt it necessary to add for various reasons. I'll go into them in an author's note at the end.

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Chapter 68: Night Terrors

Taji was breathing hard as she leapt through the trees located on the ANBU Black Op exam course. The sun had long since set, and most of the other hopefuls that had been getting in some last minute training had gone home in order to rest before the exam that was scheduled to last two days due to the number of hopefuls, and was being held over the weekend. She however was continuing to push herself since her group's timeslot to take the exam was rather late in the afternoon. She saw the final section of the course and prepared her kunai to hit the targets spread about the area. Despite the darkness, she let them fly having done the course so many times that she almost didn't need to see the targets anymore, but would do her little good tomorrow as the targets would be changed and booby traps added.

She didn't spend time to look if she hit them since she was confident that during the day it wouldn't be an issue, and because she had only a handful of moments left before the time she needed to complete the course in would end. The timer on her watch went off causing her to curse under her breath since until she finished the points she had already accrued would be subtracted. She put on a final burst of speed finding that her tank was just about empty considering the number of attempts she had already made.

She cleared her mind to ignore the burning feeling in her legs, but despite her success in disregarding her physical pain. She couldn't stop herself from fearing that much like had been the case since awakening from the coma that she had been in since being attacked by Tobi. She would fall just short of succeeding in the ANBU exams as she had in every exam since awakening as a result of the Chakra Pulse that had appeared. In her first attempt, she had fallen well short as she had refused to wait to take the test, and while in the second she had improved quite a bit, the subsequent attempts failed to yield much better results, but were close enough to passing to keep her motivated.

Taji heard the second beep of her watch which told her that based on her score in the previous run-through she would have failed. She didn't let it get her down too much, aware that even an ANBU in peak condition should have had difficulty completing the course in time not to be penalized on one attempt. Being on her third, she felt a bad time could be excused.

She knew she probably shouldn't be pushing herself so hard the day before, but couldn't help it as it had become the one goal that she almost needed to attain. As while she had easily regained her rank as a Jounin, it hadn't been enough to fill the emptiness she had felt since coming out of her coma. For Taji, becoming ANBU again was important because it was the one thing from her life before her coma that she could actually reclaim. Before that horrible day, she had been a young woman of twenty-three with a finance that she was madly in love with and her whole life ahead of her. Then in the course of a second everything went dark and she awoke sixteen years later with nothing. The man she had loved naturally had moved on with his life and had married Taji's best friend. They had said what had happened to her was what brought them together, yet sometimes she couldn't help but wonder was if it had just cleared the way for them. She knew it was wrong to suspect as much since she had no proof. But she couldn't help feeling bitter, since she had checked the visitor logs of the coma ward that she had been kept in and found that within a few months both had stopped visiting. She had never brought it up; mainly as she was sure they would already have some sort of excuse ready. Besides which, it was abundantly clear to her that her presence made them both uncomfortable. Whether it was guilt or just a difficultly to reconnect, Taji wasn't able to say as shortly after awakening she had stopped visiting something which both her former fiancé and friend seemed fine with as they made no effort to contact her.