As fury ebbed, inevitably, away, allowing sensory organs to take charge of awareness, Itachi's failing eyes tried to focus with clinical interest on his little brother's arm protruding from Naruto's torso.
Sasuke's brain attempted not to process the information they relayed. But touch provided far more information than dying sight – Sasuke's third finger rested against the smooth curved hardness of a back rib, while the others held themselves stiffly in the ruin they'd made of front ribs, lung, diaphragm.
Finally, too soon, time unfroze.
Naruto smiled, bloodred leeching from his eyes (luckily Sasuke could still see bright color) and erupting in a feeble – feeble! – cough from his ruined chest.
"Gotcha" the cough said.
And Sasuke realized he couldn't move.
Vultos emerged from the trees, and he recognized them more by qi signature than by sight. At Sasuke's back, moving forward at a steady but extremely rapid rate, was the deer-herding shadowmancer.
"Do you know," Sasuke asked, determined to do as much damage as he could with his jaws as the long-ago father-warrior had done with his own, after thugs had broken the man's arms and family and pride, "Why chakra is written "qi" but pronounced "chakra"?
He was no scholar, as both he and the towheaded family-less idiot before him knew. He could sense Naruto's eyebrow lift sardonically, and waited a touch longer before proceeding.
It was a gargantuan effort, but the full force of his rage surpassed the Nara's protective instinct and he closed his hand into a fist, leaning in so close that he could smell the ginger-garlic blend under the blood frothing on his worthless archenemy's lips.
"'The visibility to the naked eye of 'Qi', or what we call "chakra" for the channels it runs through, means that all is as it should be. When you can see Qi, the body is healthy, is right. But when 'Chi' is visib-'
Sasuke's jaw clicked shut. A shadow raced along his arm, delicately filling all of the voids his movement had left in Naruto's innards and staunching the flooding metals and lymph and hemocites called "chi." Under the pungency of rust and garlic and sweat, Sasuke could smell the trace amounts of ginger-clove oil that the Nara sometimes used to warn the forest creatures away from a battle site.
This was not what told him that Naruto-the-mouse had attempted a cat's trap. Nara was the only stealthy one among his comrades. Everyone else was heard long before Sasuke could smell them. Though far enough away to have avoided detection by signature, they'd clearly probed the lecherous hibiscus-haired traitor for all she was worth, having hidden themselves in what ought to have been plain eagle-sight, mere meters away from his farthest limits. Now the Leaflings swooped in, a blur of colors and scents and, most of all, infuriated screams. Apparently, the fool hadn't deigned to share with them the means through which the last pair of Holy Orbs was to be captured. Their fury seemed to be equally distributed between the needlessly dying god-vessel before them and the villainous traitor who'd dared to slay the brat-turned-hero.
Sasuke probed deep into his old friend's psyche, mostly to get far from the maddening crowd, but partly out of curiosity. What could the Beast tell him about Sasuke's manipulative ancestor, the near-immortal great-grandfather whose destruction of the Leaf Sasuke was now enabling? Would the Beast tell Naruto of Sasuke's plan in time to allow Naruto's warning to get the not-so-merry idiots back on the front lines of Madara's corpse-fueled attack?
But Naruto's psyche was gated shut, despite the fool's physical weakness. There were no chinks in his armor, no weak bits of wall that would enable Sasuke to punch through with his own flagging strength. Sasuke opened his eyes wide, determined to refuse the déjà vu that invaded his mind when they were shut. Still, he felt as if he was running desperately from the memory of being trapped in immobility while face-to-face to the gentle, bloody smile of a deeply-hated brother.
What if, whispered the child in Sasuke, once he's dead I learn to love him too? What's left, now that I've dealt that fatal blow? Can I make him my raison d'etre against his will, as I did to my aniki? Can't I finally die along with the bastard I kill – the Sharingan-stealers, the Leaf-corrupters, the murderers of children and old folk, soldier and civilian alike - instead of living to learn they weren't villainous at all?
He strained against the shadowmancer's bonds, determined to choke himself on the slim, razor-sharp filament binding his throat or cut his wrists wide open on the thinner, sharper bonds twisted 'round his arms.
Still he could not move.
Still Naruto smiled gently, a bloody, idiotic parody of the saint who last pinned Sasuke with fear, only to free him with love.
Sasuke might have counted seconds; he might have used the movement of wind and sun as units measured against this or that tree or leaf; he might have listened for the ticking of certain time-keeping instruments, but he did not.
He let time maintain its eerie irrelevance until Naruto dropped to one knee and the deer-clanned shadowmancer pushed Sasuke down in time with gravity's pull on the Host, keeping damage to a minimum.
Four medics approached – his ex-teammates, one no longer rogue and flippant, the other no longer effeminate and fluttery – along with a petite Hyuuga and a curvaceous mindbender.
Naruto turned to the white-eyed girl first. An apology was made, for wasting the life she'd died to save. She nodded and kissed him on the forhead, at which point his face tilted up, up, up, to meet her lips and redden them with the blood that had finally stopped burbling. "I wish I'd been who you needed," he murmured, voice less marred by sputtering now that his lungs were mostly clear of blood.
The girl shrugged, and Sasuke realized she, too, was no longer effeminate or fluttery. "You were what I wanted, for awhile. That was enough"
The fool had the audacity to wink lasciviously "Think I could get a little more than a last kiss?" he asked.
The once-timid girl looked around, exchanged a look with the other medics, and then held her hands together in an all-too-familiar sign.
Gloriously naked bodies topped with blue-black, platinum blonde, hibiscus-red and sakura-pink stood among clouds of steam that dissipated to reveal… extraneous fifth members.
Leaflings choked and catcalled and the stagling desperately moved to extend a third shadow-tendril towards Naruto's temples – his nostrils had bled for only a split second, but there were veins bulging in his temples that would burst any moribundo's overexerted cardiovascular system.
Sakura aimed a beautifully executed knife-kick at the fool's fuzzy yellow head. "No last words yet, idjit." She announced with perfect control in her unwavering voice.
"Still," a fifth voice murmured quietly. "You may wish… just in case."
An enormous hand rested on Sakura's shoulder, and Sasuke felt the slightest shudder behind him. Ah. The obese best fried.
" Ok," She mumbled. "But this is… only because… Sensei couldn't make it. And someone from our team needs to show Naruto-kun…"
Sasuke knew she was glaring. He refused to raise his eyes to hers. Refused to look as he felt her kneel gracefully and join the tug-of-war game Naruto was playing with gravity, supporting his weight as gently as only a medic knows how. He heard a soft kiss planted against the vessel's cheek, and a private apology along with it: " I'm so sorry… that for so long it was him when it should have been you."
The salty tang of tears and catarrh joined all of the other smells assailing Sasuke's senses, and if he'd been able to exert the slightest control over his vocal folds he'd have let out an embarrassingly wordless shout.
Naruto, at least, opted for opening his mouth not to speak, but to lick away the tears with childish joi-de-vivre. Sasuke was spared more nauseating puppy love - not that Sakura's shrieks of disgust were any more bearable than her sickeningly syrupy declarations of infatuation.
Bile rose in his petrified throat, coated his tongue, rose up a nose that wasn't allowed to sneeze it out. His eyes would have watered if Itachi hadn't taught him to control the mundane reaction. It was infuriating. These creatures were frozen in a dreamlike naivete not unlike that which they'd had when he left them. Had their loins been touched yet, much less violated? Much less repeatedly? How could the Leaf hoard such sheltered childhoods for a select few? Even the orphan had the simple infantilism Sasuke had always been denied!
Sasuke swallowed before he realized that he could.
If he could swallow, he could crush them all.