.-.-.-.


The sound of Karin kicking down a door and bellowing Sasuke's name isn't exactly unusual by this point, but that doesn't make it any easier to sleep through.

"I'm blind," she's howling, in the next room, "Sasuke, I fucking mean it, I can't see for shit –"

Karin resigns herself to waking up, rolls blearily over, and realises, in increasingly rapid succession, that her sheets are soaking wet, she has no immediate awareness of exactly where Sasuke's chakra is, and that she's Karin – not whoever's next door, currently still howling – and she kicks aside the sodden tangle of her sheets to launch herself from bed.

There's light spilling into Sasuke and Juugo's room through the demolished doorway. Karin's double is right there, wearing the clothes Karin went to bed in, brandishing a water bottle in Sasuke's direction and threatening dismemberment with violent eloquence.

"You!" barks Karin.

"What the fuck!" wails her double, wheeling round to face her, wild-eyed and bedraggled from sleep.

"You tell me, asshole," she says – or rather, tries to say, because she bites straight through her tongue instead. Water floods her mouth, and she doubles up choking for breath and getting only water, more water, slamming a fist against her chest as she wheezes.

"Is there a problem," says Sasuke. He's propped himself up on one elbow, eyes glowing red in the gloom.

"I'm Karin," Karin's double says, vehemently, and grabs a handful of her own red hair as though to illustrate the point. "Fucking – Karin! Not Suigetsu!"

"Yes," says Sasuke, after a moment.

"No," says Karin's double, "I mean, like, yeah, but –"

Karin spits out a mouthful of water that was probably at least half of some vital organ. "I'm Karin, you bastard, and if you don't get out of my body I'm gonna –"

"Gonna what?" says her double, voice skidding shrilly up towards hysteria. "Gonna hit me?"

Her fist's already cocked to punch; she stares at her double, and forces herself to lower it. Like hell she wants her body back with half its ribs shattered, courtesy of herself.

"Do you think we could talk about this in the morning?" says Juugo. He's rubbing sleep from his eyes in the futon behind Sasuke's, his curtain-cape draped over his sheets for extra warmth; he still hasn't grown back to the size he was before they faced the Eight-Tails, and yet everything about him seems suddenly so offensively ordinary that a lurch of infuriated envy bursts through Karin – and something happens inside her at the same time, a feeling like her stomach just – came loose – swilling inside her, liquid and agitated, repulsive

"I agree with Juugo," Sasuke says, evenly. "We have a long day tomorrow. You two should be sleeping, not fighting."

"We're not fighting!" howls Karin's double. "I'm fucking telling you, I oughta be Suigetsu – I am Suigetsu –"

"Sasuke," says Karin, in her most reasonable voice, which is not coincidentally also one of her most alluring voices, "Sasuke – you have to understand." She kneels down beside his futon, and does her best to ignore the immediate downward flicker of Sasuke's gaze. "Would Suigetsu –" she takes an accidental bite out of her tongue, spits away the water, "– touch you like this?"

She rests her hand tenderly against Sasuke's cheek.

It stays there for a moment, and then Sasuke removes it. "Yes," he says. "Suigetsu, I don't care if it's the middle of the night, you don't leave your room without clothes on. Karin, you need your sleep. Juugo and I will see you in the morning."

Karin looks down at herself. It's not the first time she's seen Suigetsu naked, or the second, or probably even the hundredth, given his aggravating tendency to regard clothing as optional when in Sasuke's vicinity, but it's the first time from this particular angle. This particularly personal angle. Karin looks back up. Her double's staring wildly in her general direction, red eyes unfocused without her glasses. Maybe it's a nightmare. If the world has the slightest respect left for her, it'll be a nightmare.

"Sasuke," Juugo says, jolting upright in sudden panic, "I think I'm –"

Karin lunges for the exit. Her double is already pelting down the corridor. There's the sound of a brief squabble, abruptly curtailed by the slam of their door, and silence returns.

"You think you're what," says Sasuke, after a moment.

"Uh," says Juugo, who is showing no signs of incipient transformation, and looking rather more bashful than monstrous, "I'm – well, I'm fine, actually. I just thought it'd make them leave."

"Hm," says Sasuke, and then, so gruffly it's as though the very brief praise hurts him to deliver: "Thank you."

.-.-.-.


.-.-.-.

Dawn's pouring in through the window when Karin wakes up, squares of thin pink light stretching out across the floorboards. The briefest of investigations tells her that she's occupying the body of a naked man with unnecessary teeth, which presumably means that the night before was not a bad dream brought on by too much of Sasuke's shitty cooking, and that her double, sleeping in the next futon with one arm slung across her face, is not in fact her double, but the only version of her, and more likely currently Suigetsu.

She picks his clothes out from the crumpled pile beside his bed, and gets dressed. A sense of surreal calm has come down around her. The sun keeps on rising, almost like the world isn't over, and slowly their room floods with honeyed sunshine.

After a while, there's a groan from the next bed. Suigetsu removes the arm from his face and stares blearily up at the ceiling, then sits up, and stares blearily round at Karin. "Fuck," he says.

"Yeah," she says.

"Fuck," he says again, after a moment, and flops back down. "Don't touch my sword."

"I wouldn't touch it if you paid me," says Karin. She feels the sudden, keen loss of having enough hair to toss it back across her shoulder, and settles instead for the most dismissive sniff in her repertoire. "Put my glasses on, I'm not having you ruining my eyesight."

"You haven't got any eyesight," Suigetsu objects, but he does, after an unnecessarily long pantomime of patting about on the table between their beds like they're not right there, black and obvious, and within extremely easy reach. "You're blind," he informs her, squinting about the room. "No wonder no one ever taught you to fight, you can't see for shit. You're a liability. I'm telling Sasuke you should be off the team."

"I'll consider it," says Sasuke, deadpan – and at the sound of him, and the completely unexpected sight of him, Karin startles so violently she liquefies.

Suigetsu's regaled them before with tales of how he couldn't keep a reliably solid state until he was four years old, but Suigetsu's been an idiot since birth and Karin has an incomparably sophisticated understanding of chakra flow. She gets the trick of it in minutes, and pulls herself together just in time to see Juugo appear behind Sasuke in the doorway, half-dressed with his toothbrush in hand, half-sized with his curtain trailing on the floorboards behind him.

"Before you say anything," Karin begins, but Suigetsu is laughing so hard he's making her own voice sound insane, so she hurls his own water bottle at his head and raises her voice loud enough to drown him out, "before you say anything, Sasuke – it's because you took me by surprise. Because usually, I know where you are."

Sasuke says nothing.

"Exactly where you are," Karin stresses. "At all times. No matter what. Even if I'm a hundred miles away I can still –"

"What was last night about," Sasuke interrupts. He's still watching her, the wheels of his sharingan slowly turning.

"Last night?" says Karin, whose train of thought has already derailed into close study of Sasuke without his chakra, his form unlit, his energy hidden, the pulse at his very core closed off to her –

"I'm Suigetsu," says Suigetsu, "and that's Karin, and we dunno what the fuck's going on, we didn't touch any cursed-looking swords or anything – didn't touch any swords, actually, which might be the problem now I think about it –"

"You'd think you could stop obsessing about swords for once in your life," Karin interrupts, "given the emergency situation –"

"You'd think you could stop obsessing about Sasuke for once in your life," Suigetsu mimics immediately, "given the emergency situation –"

"He's team leader, dumbass! What the hell am I gonna do? Ignore him?"

"Or just, like, don't literally melt when you see him?" A sudden look of delight spreads across Suigetsu's face – across Karin's face, which has never looked so unremittingly fucking stupid before in her entire life – and a feeling of pre-emptive fury boils up inside her. Whatever he's about to say, he's almost certainly going to regret it. "Would you say that's the wettest you've ever got for Sasuke, or...?"

The fury boils over. With a cry of outrage, she launches herself across the beds between them.

"Juugo," says Sasuke.

Juugo follows him obediently into the corridor. "I think it's real," he says, once Sasuke shuts the door behind them, though Sasuke hasn't asked for his opinion – only stared at him blankly, but that's how Sasuke asks for most things, nowadays. "I mean, if it isn't, they must be... playing a joke on us, or something. And they'd have had to... talk to each other, for that. And agree with each other. And –"

Inside Karin and Suigetsu's room, there's the sound of something very heavy colliding with the wall. A moment later, there's an explosion of screaming so loud that Juugo can't imagine either of them actually understands a word the other's saying.

"So I don't think it's a joke," Juugo concludes, once the racket has died down a little.

Sasuke looks at him a moment longer. Then he nods, briefly, and steps back inside the room. Someone who looks like Karin is trying to buckle Suigetsu's sword harness tight enough to fit around their waist. Someone who looks like Suigetsu is offering their loud, jeering commentary on the process. The bedside lamp is shattered on the carpet; at least one futon seems to have been ripped apart.

"We can't afford to waste time," Sasuke says, his voice raised above the noise. "If it's a jutsu tied to the location, then travelling will take us outside its range."

"And if it's not?" Suigetsu demands.

"It's a cold day," Sasuke continues, blandly. "Get your cloaks. We'll be leaving in fifteen minutes."

"Oi! Sasuke, I said, what if it's not –"

Sasuke's gone. Juugo hesitates for a moment, looking between them; then he tightens his grip on his toothbrush and darts after him.

"This is your fault," Karin announces. "You talk so much shit that Sasuke can't even trust you anymore. He doesn't even listen to you anymore."

"Not like he listened to you either, though," says Suigetsu. He's trying to lift his sword; he's failing miserably, but Karin's feeling exactly none of the spiteful joy she'd usually be feeling at the sight of Suigetsu failing miserably to do something. She can hardly mock him for it when it's her body that's giving him the trouble, and her mood is getting sourer by the moment.

The handle of the sword lifts half an inch off the ground – Suigetsu drops it with a crash and steps back, breathing hard. "I hate being this weak," he says. "How the fuck do you even live with yourself? I bet Sasuke doesn't know how weak you are. I bet he'd never have asked you on the team, if he knew. I bet –"

She shoves him aside; she takes the sword. It's not even difficult – it's a fucking stupid shape and unwieldy as hell, but it may as well be carved from chipboard and painted silver for all the effort it takes to lift it. "I'll carry it –" and before he can object: "Look, we both know I'm not gonna enjoy it. Give me that harness."

He throws her a look of purest resentful hatred as he begins to unbuckle it. Like hell if Karin would ever admit it, but in that moment even she has to concede that he's indistinguishable from the real Karin.

.-.-.-.


.-.-.-.

Sasuke and Juugo meet them outside the inn, their cloaks fastened against the chill of the mountain foothills. Juugo's still hardly as tall as Sasuke while he's standing at his side, wearing his curtain folded over to keep it from dragging on the ground; for the first time ever, Karin can see the top of his wildly scruffy head. If Sasuke's hood wasn't raised, she'd even be able to see the top of Sasuke's head – and while usually she'd have the energy to appreciate the ominous and darkly striking figure that he cuts against the morning skies, sleek and black and hooded, she's just not feeling it today.

"...Karin?" It's Juugo, sounding uncertain. "Is that still you?"

"Unfortunately," she says.

Juugo nods. "I was just wondering," he says. "Because of," he gestures up, behind her, "the sword. Um. Suigetsu's sword. Which you're carrying. Even though it's his."

"This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me," announces Suigetsu, and pulls Karin's cloak closer around himself. He's already been complaining of the cold, but he's gonna keep on suffering from the cold for exactly as long as he refuses to sit down and pull her stockings on as well. "I lived in a fishtank for three years, and this is still the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Let's just get the fuck out of here, I don't wanna hang around."

Sasuke looks between the three of them. "Hm," he says, at last, and turns away. "We're going higher into the hills. Don't make trouble."

.-.-.-.


.-.-.-.

[A.N.: I'm slowly cross-posting all my AO3 fic over here, but this one is still a WIP. It's a three-chapter fic, and the rest of it is nearly finished, so hopefully it'll be up before long!]