Chapter 1: The Break

After a loud noise, the human ear will perceive dampened sound as it tries to repair damage to the eardrum. When this happens, the adrenal glands release a burst of their finest hormone, jolting the body into a defensive state. The pupils dilate, the hearbeat races, and conscious thought is replaced by an eclectic mix of instinct and training.

Naruto looked around helplessly, his hearing damaged by the colossal bang of the explosives. The horror of seeing Tazuna's bridge, the last hurrah of Wave Country, sink into the ocean was replaced by terror. Ahead, the unfazed Kakashi unveiled his sharingan, searching through the mist kicked up by the explosion. To the right, Sasuke looked ruffled but otherwise prepared, a windmill shuriken clenched in his right hand. Behind, Sakura looked as fearful as he felt, holding a kunai with two hands and circling Tazuna nervously.

Zabuza had obviously been ordered to destroy the bridge by Gato, likely after hearing that the famous Sharingan Kakashi had been assigned the mission to protect the architect. Now, however, it seemed Tazuna was a symbol of hope for the people of Wave. As long as he lived, the reign of Gato's corporation couldn't be complete. The Demon of the Mist would have been ordered to take the old man out. Which meant…

"Sakura!" Naruto screamed, whipping around and dashing towards his stunned teammate. Just as he reached and passed her, the kubikiribocho's razor edge swung through the white haze. He blocked the strike with a kunai, slashing wildly through the mist at where Zabuza's body should have been. The knife met nothing but air, and Naruto quickly abandoned the tactic to rejoin Sakura by Gato.

Kakashi, turning away from the bridge, used his sharingan to locate the telltale swirls that moving objects made in the mist. Sasuke was still visible, but he could only find the faint outlines of Sakura, Naruto and Tazuna. Zabuza remained out of sight, somehow able to move without stirring the fog. The veteran ninja's analytical mind decided that the best place to be was within arm's length of Tazuna.

Sasuke fell forward with a grunt, a senbon forged from ice and chakra burying itself just above his kidney. He launched into a roll, rocking to one side to avoid another hail of icy needles. The shinobi masquerading as a Kiri hunter ninja jumped from the zenith of a nearby boulder, Ice Release dancing at his fingertips. Sasuke spared a moment to curse his own naiveté in trusting the unknown ninja before unsheathing and throwing a windmill shuriken. The oversized weapon missed Haku by a hair's breadth, opening Sasuke up to an answering volley of senbon. Only one impacted with him, on his leg, and from the way Haku cocked his head Sasuke assumed it had missed the intended target. He tugged lightly on the ninja wire trailing from the shuriken, and a trace of chakra raced down the line and abruptly changed the weapon's trajectory.

"Sasuke Uchiha," Haku intoned in his feminine voice. "Second of the last two members of your clan, survivor of a genocide almost a decade ago, and a prodigious shinobi." He smiled bitterly behind the mask. "Had you manifested your clan's bloodline limit, we would be remarkably similar." The slender boy leapt into a backwards somersault over the windmill shuriken, though Sasuke had the foresight to direct it upwards after him, followed by yet another hail of senbon. Sasuke drew a kunai from his weapons' pouch and charged forward, knocking the thin projectiles aside as he converged on the place where Haku would land. When he did, Haku slammed a black sandal into Sasuke's forearm, who retaliated by ducking to the ground and lashing out with a reverse slash. Haku dropped as well, and the two engaged in a fierce taijutsu fight, with Haku only slightly outclassed by the vicious Uchiha.

Meanwhile, Kakashi bit his thumb and spread the blood on his hands, coating them in a thin sheen of red. When Zabuza next veered out of the mist, his titanic sword swinging fervently, he was nearly able to deflect the blow and smear some of it onto the Demon's clothing. At the last second, he realized that the attack's target was none other than Sakura, whom he promptly tackled to the ground.

"Go..." he muttered angrily, shoving the pink-haired genin away from him. He rolled in the opposite direction, and a split second later the kubikiribocho sank into the ground between them.

"Wha...?" she exhaled, at a loss for words.

"Help Sasuke!" he ordered, and finally she managed to stand up and get away from the rogue ninja and his target. Kakashi supposed it wasn't entirely her fault; none of his students were equipped to fight the Demon and his apprentice. He only hoped that a three-on-one would hold the fake hunter ninja away. His sharingan recorded and catalogued her slightly limp and laboured breathing, suggesting that his tackled had broken a rib. He consoled himself with the prospect of beating the nonsense out of all of them when they got out of this mess.

Kakashi spread his legs, and the oversized butcher's knife slammed dangerously close to his groin.

"Seems you have a sense of humour, Kakashi," Zabuza remarked, and the battle was on as the Leaf ninja began running through hand seals.

Naruto backed up until he reached a scattered fragment of the bridge. Behind it, his recovering ears picked up the sounds of a potential survivor of the mayhem, a man lying on the ground and breathing heavily. He didn't lift a finger to help him, because his body felt heavy. Too heavy to move, too shocked to fight. In his peripheral vision, a flash of pink collided with a black blur, and Sakura was brought low by a masked ninja's bare fist. She barely made a sound as she dropped, the air going out of her in a light gasp. Sasuke picked up her slack in the fight, but it was painfully obvious that it was a losing battle. He didn't even know where Kakashi and Tazuna were.

'Damn it, I'm being useless!' he berated himself. 'But what can I do? With this fog in the way, I can't even go and make sure Sakura isn't trampled!'

"Kai!" Naruto exclaimed, hoping that perhaps the Concealing Mist was just a genjutsu. Sadly, with the fight taking place next to a river, and Zabuza had plenty of chakra, enough to keep the real mist in place.

"I need to—"

In the next instant, Naruto was abruptly detached from reality and drawn into a waking dream. The speed of the shifting mist slowed to a crawl, then stopped entirely. There was a gut-wrenching pull behind his navel, and suddenly he was rocketing into the sky. Unsurprisingly, there was very little above the layer of clouds, perhaps due to the fact that even if there was, Naruto had no idea what, and so his subconscious simply made it empty.

That is, except for the nine-tailed fox. Standing tall against the heavens, the fiery spirit stood rigid as golden chains pierced its flesh, trailing up into the sky until they vanished into the sun. Massive, ethereal shackles bound the fox's paws to each other and the clouds, and a white tag marked '9' hung around its neck. Nine ruddy tails marked it as none other than the Kyuubi.

"Uzumaki," said the fox in a deep, rumbling voice.

"D-d-demon!" Naruto shrieked, not at all in a girly way.

"Demon?" the fox snorted. "Your kind simplifies too much. To call me a demon is to call clouds white, or the sky blue."

"The sky is blue," Naruto pointed out.

"Only some of the time," was the cryptic reply. "That is neither here nor there, however, as I've brought you here for a reason, and time is short. Hatake is an even match for Momochi, but the Uchiha will be overwhelmed soon. Without my intervention, your team is doomed. I offer you my power, which is undoubtedly enough to subdue both of your opponents."

Naruto squinted up at the giant kitsune, looking pensive. "Iruka says I'm supposed to ignore you if you talk to me, ya know," he said suspiciously. "He says you want to get outta the seal and kill everyone in Konoha."

"In other circumstances, he may have been correct," the fox conceded. "In this case, however, I will grant you a fraction of my power as a sign of good faith."

"Huh?"

"We have much to discuss, and one tail should suffice in your current predicament."

"But the Hokage said—"

The fox growled impatiently. "If you must know, there are drawbacks. Your seal was specifically designed to allow my chakra to flow into yours, but there is still inherent danger in hosting too much energy in your body. As well, that much chakra may make it difficult to... focus."

"Oh yeah?" Naruto shot back. "Well, bring it on, demon! I ain't afraid of power!"

"Perhaps you should be."

With that, one of the flailing tails deviated from its erratic path and smacked Naruto down. He tottered backwards, the immense heat from the tail setting his imaginary clothes on fire, and then he was falling from the sky...

Kakashi wasn't doing as well as he should have been. Zabuza may have been from the finest generation of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist, but his sword was the weakest of them. If it was Fuguki Suikazan or Ameyuri Ringo, his current abysmal performance might have been acceptable, but Zabuza's blade was a bit player! Hell, in terms of performance his father's White Light Chakra Sabre was easily the better weapon. Yet here he was, back flat against the ground as he rolled desperately to avoid being peppered with stab wounds by the kubikiribocho.

Zabuza hefted the mighty sword like it was a toy and drove it at Kakashi's ankles. The Copy Ninja leapt over the strike, but the following kick caught him squarely on the hip. He skidded backwards, almost realizing too late that he was now over the water between Wave and the Land of Fire's eastern shore. A quick pulse of chakra stabilized him over the lapping waves, but now Zabuza was laughing.

"If you can get out of this, then I deserve to die!" he roared. He dropped the kubikiribocho, ran through nine hand seals, then threw himself onto his belly and shoved his left arm into the surf up to the elbow. The ocean around Kakashi rose up and crashed over him, and the last thing he heard before the ninjutsu dragged him under was, "Water Prison Technique!"

Elsewhere, Haku and Sasuke were discovering that neither had a significant advantage over the other. Both were fast, though Haku's offence and Sasuke's defence were slightly faster, respectively. After the third rain of ice needles, Sasuke had taken to blowing fireballs at them to melt the ice. Haku in turn had used his ability to freeze the ground in a massive circle around them, with Sasuke having to breathe fire over the ground or risk losing his footing.

He glanced furtively at Sakura, who lay still on the ground. Haku's ice was slowly creeping over her prone body, and Sasuke had to wonder if Kakashi would be angry for letting him die. It was her own fault for just walking into a fight between superior opponents. He sighed, distracting Haku with another shuriken hidden in a fireball, and then raced to her body.

Haku wasn't diverted in the slightest, and with a burst of speed he managed to reach Sakura first. He picked her up, gently, like a loving parent, and turned to face Sasuke.

"Do you think I am so heartless as to allow a girl to die, cold and alone?" he asked. "I do not approve of many things that ninja are required to do, but to kill in cold blood is beyond the pale, even for a tool."

"You sound so calm, like you think you know everything about the life of a shinobi. But do you really?"

"What makes you think I do not?" asked Haku.

In his arms, Sakura's left hand fell limply, the fingers trailing over her body on the way down. Her wrist caught on her weapons' pouch, then slid the rest of the way down. Her chest heaved, breathing laboured by her broken ribs.

"Because we aren't just tools," said Sasuke. "No man can completely subjugate his own desires in exchange for power."

'It must be. Why else would my brother let me live?'

"That, and you clearly aren't as perceptive as you think you are," he continued. "Even I would have heard the windmill shuriken coming from behind."

Suddenly alert, Haku strained his ears for the telling swishes of a four-pointed ninja star, but none came.

Sakura's hand, hanging below her body, held a kunai. Still in the mist, water had condensed on the metal's surface, and droplets were running down the blade. They gathered at the tip. One fell off, falling in slow motion from the point.

Sakura's eyes snapped open, and she thrust the knife into Haku's gut.

Naruto's senses came alive. Suddenly, his hearing and sense of smell were as powerful as his eyesight, and the tang of blood from all the way across the battlefield felt alive and sickening on his tongue. His soul was immolated, flames burning under his skin as demonic chakra burnt through his body. Then they were no longer contained within him, and with a cry of pain a hazy aura of chakra burst out of him.

He fell forward onto hands and knees, biting his tongue to prevent himself from crying out in agony as the red chakra swept through his body. His muscles clenched, and it took ever ounce of his stubborn willpower to stand up and assess the situation. Haku was nursing a potentially fatal wound to the belly as Sakura and Sasuke closed in, but his sensei had run out of steam long ago. Just below the surface of the water, he could sense the man struggling to reach the surface. Zabuza was... defenceless, actually, having to lie on the ground in order to manipulate the water. Naruto smiled grimly and surged forward.

Just as he reached him, Zabuza's instincts took hold and made him roll out over the water, keeping one hand in the ocean as he went. Naruto snarled and took a step forward, but the ocean failed to hold his weight. It figured that he was a jinchuriki and still couldn't walk on water.

"Huh," Zabuza commented. "You know, I couldn't understand how you obnoxious twits managed to defeat Gozu and Meizu. But now... now I can see what happened. You're a vessel, the nine-tailed fox sealed into human form. But now, what I don't understand is why you showed them mercy. I thought jinchuriki were mindless beasts in battle, like the Mizukage." He spat the name like a curse.

Naruto wasn't really listening to him. His partial use of the first tail was extraordinarily painful, and he had to focus on winning or risk destroying himself. 'I can't reach him with taijutsu, my ninjutsu is too close-ranged and I don't know any genjutsu. I don't think the Kyuubi can help me with throwin' shuriken, and as it is I won't be able to hit him. Damn it, he can reach me with that huge sword too. Thanks, you really bailed me out here, demon.'

Zabuza eyed the red hue of Naruto's cloak and considered his options. Kakashi was nearly dead, and Naruto needed to be taken care of. He withdrew his hand from the ocean and began forming hand seals.

"Water Dragon Bullet!" he announced dryly, as the ocean behind him rippled up. Naruto cursed and jumped back, dodging the dragon's initial flyby. The watery beast emitted a gutteral roar and soared into the air, twisting around to come back.

'You honestly can't finish this yourself?' said a voice in his head. 'I've had some clueless hosts in my time, but you don't even know what the hell you're doing!'

"Yeah, well, whenever you're ready to help, that'd be great," Naruto grunted. He sprang six feet into the air and managed to defy gravity long enough to evade the dragon, but his perception of the dragon was weak. It was silent and smelt only of salt, which wasn't much use in a cloud of mist. Worse, Kakashi was still dying (he refused to consider the alternative) and he didn't even know what was happening to Sakura and Sasuke.

'As you wish. Look at my energy. Notice how it contains two parts? For now, call them 'white' and 'black'. Try and separate them.'

As the water dragon spiralled into a corkscrew directly over his head, Naruto reflected on how mad his life had gone in the last six minutes. Then, dodging a thrown weapon from Zabuza, he mentally pried into the Kyuubi's chakra. In fact, there were two parts, though Naruto noticed that there was quite a bit more black than white.

'Good. Now, gather some amounts of both the black and the white. A ratio of 8:2 is the most stable way of doing it, so you'll need four times as much black as white.'

Naruto cursed, but did as the fox said. Something told him that now was not the time to mention his inexperience at controlling chakra.

Haku didn't even bat an eye as he removed the kunai. His wound spurted a few drops of blood, but the ice gathering at his fingertips allowed him to close the gap and seal it. Together, Sasuke and Sakura began slowly stripping away his defences, each punch and kick robbing him of a little more stamina, and making the pain in his chest spread higher and higher. Eventually, Sasuke's low kick made way for Sakura to chop viciously across his neck from behind, and Haku decided enough was enough.

As he stumbled away from them, reeling from Sakura's attack, he summoned the last dregs of his chakra and summoned the icy mirrors. The drawback in creating that much water was the depletion of Zabuza's mist technique, but the array of mirrors cut off any potential rescue. Haku reached into his robes and numbly chewed a soldier pill, ignoring the flaming pain in his ribs, and then stepped into the nearest mirror.

Sakura too was nursing a fiery bruise on her chest. The Demon of the Mist had been courteous enough to not kill her, but the broken rib was digging evilly into her lung. Any harsher exertion might just puncture it, but by that point Haku would probably have killed them both. Whatever ability he'd used to create almost two dozen copies of himself was surely chakra intensive, a sign that he wasn't nearly as battered as the two genin had hoped for. Sakura readied another knife, just as Sasuke formed the seals for another fireball, and together they faced the spray of senbon.

'This is... adequate,' the kitsune judged. Naruto's fledgling attempt and generating a Tailed Beast Ball were fraught with chakra burns and frustration, with the clock of Kakashi's life hanging in the balance. He readied the projectile, which swirled with the burning power of a tailed beast, and aimed for where he knew Zabuza to be.

'No. As a human, you've trained to throw weapons with your hands, but Tailed Beast Balls are always shot from the mouth, if not generated there.'

"What do you want me to do, eat it?" Naruto asked aloud, as the water dragon aligned itself directly between him and Zabuza.

'Yes. I wouldn't recommend swallowing, though.'

Naruto looked down at the basketball-sized sphere and groaned. With a jolt of discomfort, his jaw unhinged. Now armed with a mouth roughly twice as large as it used to be, Naruto crammed the chakra into his mouth, pointed it at where he knew Zabuza to be, and fired. The Bijudama surged forward, trailing traces of black as the fabric of reality parted in front of it. As it passed over the shoreline, the velocity of the ball kicked up a wake of water, almost like a comet's tail. The water dragon, now racing forward at him, opened its mouth to swallow the ball... and was promptly reduced to fog as the heat built by friction boiled the water. The terrified look on Zabuza's face was priceless, right before the ball disintegrated his abdomen. The Demon of the Mist's legs and upper body fell into the water, the latter half dragged down by the nigh-invulnerable kubikiribocho.

Naruto sank to his knees, nearly exhausted. His eyes roved the waves, searching for something, anything that could suggest that his sensei had survived.

With a shuddering gasp, a shock of white hair burst from the water. Defying gravity even while soaking wet, Kakashi's mask was now hanging down by his lips, though it still did an admirable job of hiding his face. Whatever he felt at seeing Naruto covered in demonic chakra with his mouth hanging open like a snake's was overshadowed by relief. Then, it turned to horror.

"SASUKE! SAKURA!" he screamed, for once breaking the calm demeanour of a jonin and desperately dragging himself towards shore.

Naruto spun around and assessed the situation through the rapidly clearing fog. It was only by instinct that he manifested four chakra arms, and it was only by instinct that they intercepted Haku between two mirrors.

It was not by instinct, however, that they crushed the aspiring ice wielder into a bloody pulp.

Kakashi took a good ten minutes or so to stop hacking his lungs out. A few seconds before the end, he'd given in and inhaled the water to calm the burning in his lungs. ANBU training reminded him that the need to breathe was caused by nitrogen in the blood, but for all his strength he couldn't resist. Now, he was paying the price. Very, very slowly, his greying vision began to clear. A few feet away, Naruto was panting heavily, the nine-tails' chakra having dissipated into the environment. Just beyond him was a red, mushy pulp which might have once been a human being. Sakura lay on top of Sasuke both children comatose and bleeding from hundreds of tiny cuts. As he watched, Sakura's torso spasmed, and she coughed blood. Her lung was obviously pierced, possibly collapsed. Zabuza was nowhere to be seen.

He stood up, feeling three times his age and stiff as a board. Kakashi skirted Naruto and the bloody mess to get to Sakura, who needed the help badly. He rolled her body off of Sasuke's, face up, and pulled out a blood-replenishing pill. Sending up a prayer to any deities who were listening, he slid his fingers around the errant bone and pulled. For the second time in as many minutes, Sakura's eyes shot open unexpectedly, and she screamed bloody murder at the realignment. Kakashi took the opportunity to shove the replenishing pill down her throat, which she nearly choked on before swallowing. He turned back around and headed towards Naruto, fingers brushing against a soldier pill.

"Look what we have here, fellas," came a low, corpulent voice. Warily, Kakashi turned around to face the oncoming threat. Accompanied by an entourage of samurai and other assorted soldiers was none other than Gato, the man who'd hired Zabuza to kill Tazuna in the first place.

"Leave," said Kakashi, his voice hoarse, but he knew the plea fell on unhearing ears.

"I knew Zabuza was too weak to handle you," Gato observed smugly. "Originally, I planned for you and him to tucker each other out so I could finish you both off, but this is almost better! Now, I don't have to pay that gilt bastard or his fairy-boy, and you're the only person between me... and that bastard Tazuna." The businessman's eyes narrowed dangerously. "You look like a drowned rat, Copycat Kakashi. Surrender, and I'll let you and your team leave in one piece. Otherwise..."

The man gestured at the fifty or so men standing behind him. "What's it going to be, huh?"

Kakashi was acutely aware that he was wet. He'd never liked the water, and now he was thoroughly soaked. He looked down at his hands, hands that were dappled with moisture and felt creaky and rotten. Hands that had killed over and over again, every name of every dead ninja tattooed on them in blood. But water was worse.

"You know I can't do that," he said, his voice sounding distant and weak.

Gato nodded. "Fair enough," he said. "Kill him! Thirty thousand ryo to the man who brings me the sharingan!"

Weapons are the lifeblood of a ninja, you must always take care to keep them in working condition or else they won't help you when you need them most. What good is a disarmed ninja, Kakashi? Good, make sure you oil your shuriken to keep them accurate and sharpen those edges, because a dull weapon is a useless weapon. Either fix them or throw them out, but don't throw a dull knife. Don't duel with a dull kodachi. Oh, Obito, the Chakra Sabre doesn't need to be sharpened! It's always sharp, always sharpening with lightning chakra. Never, ever use a wet weapon. They're unreliable, dangerous, and they'll rust away before you know it.

Kakashi didn't dry his hands before he ripped into the horde of samurai, each armed with mediocre skills and the best katana money can buy. They were covered in blood anyways.

With Tazuna carrying Naruto and Kakashi hoisting Sakura on his back, the two of them managed to revive Sasuke and haul ass back to the village down the coast. Kakashi was quiet the whole way, acutely aware that Sakura had no hospital to get to and lacked the resilience of the ANBU he was used to working with. Tazuna was mostly quiet as well, probably understanding that he was, by proxy, guilty of the deaths of Gato and a platoon of men whose families would have to make do without the breadwinners. Sasuke only spoke a few words after he revived, mostly to vaguely protest pickpocketing the corpses and to ask how his teammates were doing. Neither request had been dignified with a response.

When they arrived, Inari had taken Naruto's advice to heart and mustered a militia, but too little too late. All Kakashi saw were a handful of poorly equipped farmers and merchants. It was kind of sad, because in his state they could probably take him. Remembering something, he languidly pulled his forehead protector over his left eye and cut the flow of chakra to the alien organ. Without the sharingan active, he very nearly dropped Sakura. Sasuke shot out a hand to steady him, and Kakashi gratefully took the support as he adjusted to the shift in bodily function.

"Go home, kid," the Uchiha said to Inari. The boy with the crossbow released his white-knuckled grip on the trigger, but nevertheless stayed where he was. A few of the younger members of the lynch mob drifted off, and some of the women took to chatting in the streets.

"I- I don't understand," Inari stuttered. "What happened to Gato?"

Kakashi staggered over to him and dropped to his knees. Sakura hissed in her sleep, and he rapidly switched his grip to relieve the pressure on her diaphragm.

"I killed him," he said simply.

"W- No way!" Inari screeched. In response, Kakashi simply held up his bloody, wet fists and waited for a reply.

"In this world, there are people with power, and people without," he said softly. "Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's skill, but only power can trump power. When somebody else comes to this island, trying to take your homes and lives - and that's when, not if - you need to gather your allies. Do this again, because without a hero even the strongest of spirits can falter."

They left, and Kakashi wondered if he'd done more harm than good. The crowd thinned and dissolved, largely in good spirits after hearing the news of Gato's death.

Tsunami, ever the faithful housewife, opened the door as they approached. She whitened at the sight of the bloodstained group, but nevertheless showed them inside. Tazuna promptly dumped Naruto on a kitchen chair and dug out a bottle of moonshine. Sasuke pulled up another chair at the table and began brooding, while Kakashi put his most injured student on a couch. He cut the red quipao dress away from her body and observed the—

"Shit," he hissed. "Sasuke! What the hell did that girl do to you and Sakura?"

"It was a boy," Sasuke replied stoically.

"What did he do?"

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Haku attacked us with exceptional speed, possibly two or three times faster than myself. His primary weapon was senbon, enough to throw around like they were nothing. He can use Ice Release, a bloodline limit, which explains how he managed many of his ninjutsu."

Kakashi spared a milisecond to admire the potential of an endless supply of senbon, then felt exceedingly grateful that Naruto had killed him. In the same vein, he wondered how Naruto would deal with the trauma of having to kill not one, but two people. The fox was involved in this, there was no way one genin could kill two jonin-level opponents through such a thick mist, and Kakashi wondered how that would affect the outcome. Would it add or subtract guilt? Was the seal damaged? Could any more go wrong with this mission?

"Get Naruto out of the house!" he ordered frantically. The absolute last thing he needed was the Kyuubi to escape from the seal, and as little good as taking Naruto outside might do, it would at least give him the space to manoeuvre should he be the first line of defence between the fox and Konoha. Sasuke sent him a questioning look but nevertheless obeyed his commanding officer.

Kakashi went back to the more immediate problem of Sakura's wounds. They seemed shallow enough, but there were enough scrapes and lacerations that her skin between her armpits and navel was a bloody mess. He regarded the problem for a moment, trying to decide the best way to go about cleaning her up.

"Hatake," came a soft voice from behind him. Kakashi jumped at the sound, honestly startled by the silence in which Tsunami moved. Attributing it to his weariness, Kakashi forced himself to relax.

She held out a first aid kit, the red cross dingy from years in the dust. Kakashi accepted it, and together the began to disinfect and bind Sakura's torso. As they worked, Kakashi's mind began to slow, until he eventually ceased to think at all.