Two days after the Battle in the Land of Frost
Somewhere in the Land of Hotsprings

The light was the first thing Yojo noticed, his eyes slowly prying themselves open, his mind coming back to him. It was late in the day, the sky above him was red, growing darker with each passing minute. It would be dark soon. Perhaps that, more than any other fact, was what told him that he was still alive. His brown eyes slowly looked up at the sky above him, still unmoving as he lay on his back, the lower half of his body still submerged in the stream that he'd likely been washed up from. "Gruuuuugh" he groaned. He wiggled his toes in his waterlogged sandals, then his fingers, then his knees, and eventually, after making sure he hadn't broken or dislocated anything, gently turned his head from side to side. Through some miracle, his spine was intact, as was his neck, which meant he could move without fear of injury for now. With his self-triage done, Yojo sat up in a huff, sitting on the stony shore of the stream. Instantly, a pain rippled through his torso. He winced, inhaling sharply before looking down to see what state he was in. Numerous cuts had ripped through his clothing, showeing his skin and where he'd been previously injured. He'd lost blood, a lot of it... But it seemed he'd pull through for now, his wounds were starting to heal and build scar tissure. He just couldn't push himself for a while... and that, of course, brought him back to the next major question.

Where the hell was he?

The Uchiha looked around, up and down the banks of the shore of the stream that he'd washed up on. It was quiet, the birds were chirping, and there was a feeling of tranquility that seemed more at home in Konoha's garden shrines than in some minor nation. Yojo staggered up to his feet. It took a couple of tries, he fell onto his bum a lot, he probably had a concussion, but eventually he managed to get solid ground under him. He tried to regulate his breathing, thinking back on all the lessons in first aid he'd slept through whilst at the ninja academy. In hindsight, while learning ninjutsu was far cooler than medical skills, perhaps the latter was just a smidge more important than learning to create crows out of Futon to pull pranks with. Yojo shuffled out of the water and fully onto dry land, his arms wrapping around his body to keep warm. The evening air nipped at him, reminding him of the fact that he was now very, very cold, and with little to no dry clothing whatsoever. He had to get warm, he had to start a fire or else he'd freeze to death from hypothermia before he could even think about getting back to the Leaf. Still, that tied back to question one of not knowing where he was. If he built a fire, it was possible that an enemy shinobi could spot him and attack him while he was weak and vulnerable. He could've been in the Land of Frost still for all he knew, even though his knowledge of the battlefield told him that the rivers at the foot of the waterfalls led into the Land of Hotsprings...

Wait, what had happened at the battle? Had they won? Had they lost? A million questions ran through Yojo's mind as he moved toward the treeline. They were ballooning within his mind. The only way he could keep from succumbing to uncertainty was to chop down a few branches and pieces of wood. He took rocks from the stream's edge. With cold and wet fingers, he clawed down at the dirt, creating a large pit. He placed the wood in the center of the pit, surrounding it with stones for an impromptu fireplace. Using what rudamentary knowledge he had of Katon, he made a spark large enough to get a small fire going. By keeping the flames themselves below ground level, at the center of his firepit, Yojo hoped to keep out of sight and avoid having the bright flames be seen for miles away. Once night came, no one would be able to see the smoke rising up into the sky, or so he hoped. It was the best idea he could come up with, and right now, that was what he was relying on to get him through all of this. His two swords were still fastened to his hip, sitting idly as he let his hands warm by the fire.

He kept replaying the vision he'd seen in his head. It was all too real for it to be a dream to him. Was it a repressed memory of his infancy?... No, that man, Yojimbo, claimed to have already hidden him away by the time he'd died, there would be no way for Yojo to remember something he had never seen. Whatever he'd experienced, it had been something else entirely, it had been a bridge across space and time. That thought made him shiver a tad, even as he was physically warming up. He'd never truly made peace with his lineage, nor with his sharingan. It had all sort of just... appeared in a rush. Honestly. One moment, he'd been fighting for his life in the Chunin Exams, and the next, his eyes had turned red and changed his life forever. How could he be someone he was not? How could he be part of a clan that he had never known? Why did people look at him different now that he had found his last name? When he was Yoshihiro Joe, he was an unassuming shinobi trying to just make sense of life and figure out what he was meant to do int it... But when he was Yoshihiro Uchiha? People feared him- if not knowingly, then he could see it in the small microexpressions of their face. They spoke to him different, looked at him different. It all brought him back to the dilema that had been eating at him since he had shed the mantle of 'Undiscovered'.

He had found himself and lost himself the moment he had awoken his Sharingan.

He heard a sound. His head snapped to his right, his hand reaching down to his scabbard. He narrowed his gaze, a hard expression on his face as he stepped out of the firepit he'd made. His blinked once, his Two-Tomoe sharingan flickering to life as his eyes opened again. He could see someone through the treeline, back on the rocky beach of the river he'd washed up on. They weren't moving.

Yojo stepped closer, pushing aside the branches and leaves in his way. He recognized the chakra signature even as the darkness of the night made his sight poor: it was the girl, his...his sister. Aye, he could see her better now. Her chakra was faint, the ambient life force of her body oozing out onto the bloodstained rocks. To think that she would wash up on the same stretch of rocky riverside as he! It must have been a sign of fate, that or some sick joke by the gods. He stepped out of cover, keeping an eye for any yin chakra trying to make its way toward him as he approached. She seemed a fan of using her hand seals as the triggers for her genjutsu, he had to watch her hands to be cautious. Standing over her, he poked her with the butt of his scabbard. She wasn't dead- but, so far as he could tell, she was hanging on by a thread... So, was he supposed to just kill her like a dog? He'd beaten her, it was his right as the victor- or something like that, the old time shinobi loved spouting that bushido crap like they were samurai. Besides, he had not truly won. He had mortally wounded her, yet she had removed him from the battlefield alongside herself. For all he knew, that alone was the greater strategic victory... Curse the sharingan and their shenanigans.

Yojo snorted. No death. Not today.

Instead, he fought through the minor cuts he had patched up and threw the waterlogged girl on his shoulders. He walked a short while back to his camp, jumping down into the dug-out fire pit and leaning her against the earthen wall. "Still alive? You're a stubborn brat, anyone tell you that?" he said to the near-dead girl as he pulled her shirt up off of her. Her clothes were waterlogged and freezing cold. She needed to get warm fast or the hypothermia would finish what her blood loss had started. Still, as he pulled off his sister's pants, he could not help but remain morbidly impressed. He had impaled her on his sword, ran right through her vital organs, forced her to endure fatal blood loss- and yet she was still somehow alive, too stubborn to give up. It reminded him of himself, at least when he had been in the Chunin Exams. Things had been easier then. Just defeat the opponent placed in front of you. It was all so simple, it all felt so far away from him now. Instead, Yojo placed the unconscious girl on the dirt as she rested in her underwear. He winced a tad as he saw the singular wound in question on her lower abdomen- it had grown yellow and infected, likely by being untreated for so long in the running water of the stream.

He sat there hunched over her between her body and the fire, trying to warm her up and stave off hypothermia while using what first aid medical ninjutsu he remembered from the academy to heal the wound in her gut. He'd go at it for hours if it took so, he'd go all night, but he had to have answers- answers only she could provide him. For that, he sat there over her, arms hovering over her wound as he waitd for any signs that she was awakening from her unconscious state.

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