It is pulsing now, persistent, pleading. Much though he just wishes it would leave him be, the light persists, and for the first time in a long while, he must open his eyes.

The world is all green, green and gold. The green of the forest. And the gold of her.

Ino's progress through the forest was slow, and the rain had redoubled, spilling down from the canopy in a steady torrent. Water streamed into her hair and eyes, soaked through her clothes, slowed the movement of her feet through the mud. Each step came with more difficulty than the last, her ankles breaking free with the sluuurp-pop of soaked earth that splattered her skin all the way to the knee. Every time she pushed water out of her face, it seemed more took its place, clouding her vision; as the deluge poured on, she could barely see a foot in front of her. She could only hope that she was headed in the right direction.

If, in fact, there even was a right direction.

But she worked through it all, persistent despite nature's opposition to her mission. The steady chant of not real, not real, not real drove her forward. Shikamaru might be just on the other side of that next tree, and she would be damned if she let a little imaginary rain soak her. Even as she thought the words, she shivered. Just because it was imaginary, it apparently didn't keep her from getting chilled.

All this rain reminded her of a mission, though it took her a good ten minutes to figure out exactly which one it was. But the memory of rain stinging her eyes and the mud threatening to suck her down was a strong one, and finally the full recollection came bursting forth, like a floodgate opened.

In retrospect, she didn't know how she could have forgotten. Perhaps her head injury had been worse than she thought. It was their second attempt at the Chunin exams – hers and Choji's at least; Shikamaru had passed on his first try, the smug bastard. Held in the Hidden Mist, the exam had, unsurprisingly, featured a mist-filled maze as the second task. The weather had been just like it was now – pouring rain, everything obscured by a thick cloud of water. She, Sakura, and Choji had gotten separated somehow, pulled on by mirages of one another, only to be left alone in the depths of the maze. Ino still remembered the way it felt, the terror squeezing at her heart as she realized she had lost sight of all her allies. As she realized that, without any visibility, her jutsu was almost useless. Not to mention that, without Shikamaru, for the first time since her days at the Academy, there was no one there to catch her.

She had crawled, on hands and knees, pushing through the dirt and gravel until scratches criss-crossed her arms and she was pleading, begging, praying that if she just made it out alive, she would be better. She would stop harping on Asuma-sensei about smoking, and stop giving Choji a hard time about his eating habits and Shikamaru… well, she would be nicer to him too. She would train better, work harder, if she could just get out. In the fog of her panic, she even forgot her perpetual competition with Sakura. If she could make it out of that endless mist alive, she might even concede her claim that she was the stronger competitor. Finally, she had collapsed in a heap of bleeding limbs and shaking nerves, shedding a rain of tears that was immediately lost in the moisture surrounding her. At that point in her life, it was the most hopeless she had ever felt.

She had let herself get overwhelmed then. Eventually, Choji had found her, and they had worked through the maze together, found Sakura near the end. But it had nothing to do with her own strength. Had she been relying on her own strength, she might still be in that maze today, her flesh just more fodder for the violence of the Hidden Mist. She recovered later, still made it to Chunin, but that one moment might have been enough to end her, back then.

But now, as she pushed through the brush of the forest in Shikamaru's mind, half-blind, body quaking with shivers, she was only more determined than ever. She was not that scared little girl. She was alone, yes, and she might even be lost, but this time, she wouldn't be cowed by her own fear. Arm stinging, head throbbing, she batted away a branch, pushed around a tree.

And broke into the startling brightness of sunlight.

"Her temperature just plummeted!" The frightened attendant explained, shrinking under Shizune's sharp gaze.

"Well, it's not like we can't do something about that!" She snapped back at him. "You know where the blankets are, go and get some! I'll see if I can figure out what's causing it."

Shizune felt bad, even as the young man sprinted down the hall to the supply closet. She didn't like to yell at people – not the way Tsunade did – but she was growing tired, and tiredness made her impatient.

Through the glass divider, she could see Choji in the other room, sitting with hands folded, knuckles white, watching his two immobile teammates with a look of consternation. Shizune tried to block out his gaze as she checked Ino's pulse and examined her other injuries. Mako was right: she was ice-cold. But at least she was showing no other side effects. Her pulse was steady, her breathing normal. She was just shivering, almost as though she were seizing, though she showed no signs of strange neural activity.

Mako returned quickly, three blankets in tow. They packed two around Ino, and set one to the side, just in case the same symptoms began to emerge in their other patient. Finally, after a few moments of tense waiting, the shivering subsided, her body temperature climbing steadily higher. For now, it seemed, they were in the clear.

Shizune dismissed Mako, giving the poor boy a much-needed break. Without him fluttering anxiously around her, she was free to sink into the chair they had brought into the room for the attendants. It felt good not to be on her feet.

After a few moments of silent observation, Shizune pulled the papers from her pocket. She had spent the hour before this combing through Inoichi's account, searching for any tiny hint that might help them treat their silent patients. But most of Inoichi's words proved useless – they had more to do with the mechanics of navigating Shikaku's mind than anything else. These would have been more help to Ino than to her hapless medical attendant.

The only mildly useful portion of the entire document was the short paragraph in which Inoichi described his recovery at the hospital. If Ino emerged – when Ino emerged, Shizune had to remind herself – at least they would know the former medics had tried that didn't work to revive her.

As she scanned the paragraph for the sixth time, Shizune felt a small bubble of an idea begin to rise to the surface of her thoughts. This was Inoichi's account, but surely the medics on his case would also have been keeping records. Catapulting herself out of the chair and out the door, she managed to find Mako just as he was returning from his break. He would be able to look after their patients perfectly well while Shizune did some digging.

It was a long shot, and she knew it. Many of the clinic's long-standing medical records had been lost in various filing changes through the years, and more still had perished during Pein's invasion of Konoha. But if they were here, she knew how to find them.

Drawing on her determination to slough off her exhaustion, Shizune headed down to the basement.

And just like that, the rain had stopped. She was not out of the forest – though she had reached a large clearing, Ino knew instinctively that this was not the end. She had not passed through to the next layer.

She was still drenched – perhaps that was how she knew she was not yet out of the woods completely. But her shivering from the cold had stopped. And then begun again, but for a vastly different reason.

She knew the place – knew it like she would know her parents' flower shop or her classroom back at the Academy. There, out in the distance, was the forest and nearer to her, the bounty station. And closer still, two figures in a deadlock. The sunlight glinted off Asuma's headband. Ino's stomach dropped.

She had lived this scene, over and over and over again in her nightmares, watching as that beast Hidan cut their sensei's body to shreds, all without even touching him. His demonic laughter echoed in her ears. Sometimes, even now, she woke from dreams in a cold sweat, still hearing Hidan's crazed voice crying out, calling from the beneath the earthen prison where Shikamaru had buried him.

She watched it happen, dared not move closer. Watched as Hidan stabbed, and blood sprayed, and she saw her own self, younger, arrive too late to do anything.

And then it began again. As if the world had reset itself, she was watching the same scene over, metal glinting in the sun, Asuma unable to even touch the blade that would be his death. She watched Shikamaru, helpless, lean over their teacher's body, saw Choji bent double with grief. And still, she was rooted to the spot, unable to draw her eyes away from the massacre that happened again and again.

But then, after about the fifth time, it began to change. She was seeing Asuma still, but the bounty station had morphed, transforming into a building she recognized as the Intelligence Headquarters. She barely had time to recognize it before it was blasted to smithereens, shattered like glass under the impact of the Tailed Beast Bomb.

And then she was in the rubble, where she was sure she had never been, but her mind – or maybe Shikamaru's – propelled her right along, through the carnage: bodies missing limbs, limbs missing bodies, and all death, death, death, piled all around her, bleeding from every stone. She saw a flash of gold, then a flash of black. She knew without looking who those bodies belonged to.

Ino pressed her eyes closed, her breath hitching, unwilling to look upon those broken faces. No, she hadn't been there to witness the destruction, but her imagination had done the work for her so many times that she almost believed she could have been. Her father's death, unlike Asuma's, was still a fresh wound, one she had been careful not to prod. But even then, she couldn't avoid accidentally reopening it, like the day she had found one of her father's old mission reports, misfiled in one of her desk drawers. She had taken a long lunch that day.

Shikamaru's father had been lost in the same accident. They hadn't talked about it much – only once, soon after they returned to the village, but then only briefly. Shikamaru's relationship with his father had been more complicated than Ino and Inoichi's had been. Even so, she knew Shikamaru, knew the impact it had on him, even if he didn't admit to it. Shikamaru had loved Shikaku, in his own stubborn way, just as the surly man had loved his son. Seeing these images only confirmed what Ino had already known in her heart of hearts – though Shikamaru may have been better at hiding it, he, too, had not fully escaped his demons.

Even with her eyes shut, Ino still heard everything going on around her: Hidan's hysteria, punctuated by Asuma's groans of pain; the deafening impact of the bomb; the groans of the dying around her. She couldn't make herself open her eyes, but the alternative was just as bad. Even with her eyes closed, she could see the carnage painted along the inside of her lids, a canvas smeared in crimson.

But maybe that was it, after all. Against all her better instincts, Ino opened her eyes. What good was closing them? These were just nightmares. Even Asuma's death didn't look real anymore, painted against the backdrop of the exploding HQ. It was just an amalgam of images – terrifying, horrific images – but no more than the conjurings of the mind. The fear wasn't gone, but these events were. She looked down at her feet. Her father was dead. So were Shikaku, and Asuma. The admission made tears sting at her eyes, but through those stinging tears, her vision began to clear.

The earth became forest once again, the flowing blood leeched away, replaced with the rich, green carpet of grass. Trees grew up around her, their branches twining over her head. Softly, rain began to fall once again.

Ino swallowed once, forcing the lump in her throat down. Then she began to move through the forest once again.

The journey was easier now. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, and the ground was damp, but not soaked. Mud still caked her legs, but it flaked away gradually, falling into the dirt. Even her head seemed to be clearing as she walked. Hopefully, Ino moved her hand, flexed her fingers.

The movement brought a wave of dizzying pain.

Too much to hope that everything could improve, she thought.

The forest was clearing: she could see a light ahead, and it wasn't the sudden brightness of her earlier encounter. It was the natural end of the forest. She was perhaps ten trees away, if she could accurately judge by sight.

But when she heard the final cry, she almost wasn't surprised.

It wasn't a scream she recognized. It was the low, guttural sound of a person watching someone else die. When she stumbled into the next clearing, she almost didn't understand what she was seeing.

Shikamaru was sitting against a tree, cradling a body in his arms. He was bent so far over that she couldn't even see the face at first. But then he leaned back, another wail of anguish and anger bursting from him. And then she knew.

It was strange, to see one's own body splayed out like that. Her blonde hair was loose, her limbs slack and covered with blood – someone else's, it looked like. One of her arms hung at an odd angle, obviously broken.

It was only when she moved a step closer that she noticed that the body in Shikamaru's arms was not, in fact, dead. Though her body hung limp, her chest still moved, a pulse still thrumming somewhere within her. But her eyes stared up, unseeing.

Finally, Ino understood what she was seeing.

It was a scenario she and Shikamaru had discussed only once, out of necessity. He had seemed reluctant to discuss it further, and now she knew why. With the Mind-Body Transfer, there was a strong chance of getting stranded while inhabiting someone else's body. If your body got injured or killed, you could be trapped in that person's mind forever. But, on the other hand, if the person you were inhabiting got killed before you could get out, well…

Shikamaru didn't look up as she approached. He was bent over the body, shaking, though no tears were visible on his face. His knuckles were white, clutching her limbs as though he could will life back into them through the force of his rage.

Though she knew it was no more than a conjuring of his mind, Ino knelt next to the image of Shikamaru. She put a hand on his shoulder.

"She's gone." He said, quietly, almost inaudibly.

"She is." Ino confirmed. In the clutches of his fear, he couldn't know that the girl he sought was the one with her hand on his shoulder. His nightmare saw only the body in his hands.

"It was my fault." He said flatly. Then, more vehemently: "It was my fault. I thought it was a bad idea. I had a feeling. But there were so many ways the strategy could have worked. And she told me. She told me she could do it, and dammit, I believed her."

He shook his head.

"And she did it. She damn sure did it. She took care of him before he could even get a hand on me, stopped him from plunging a knife straight into my neck while I guarded her body. She saved my goddamn life, and probably the whole goddamn village, but she…"

His voice cracked. He let out a string of curses, quiet at first, mumbled under his breath, then building, until he was screaming them out and the body in his arms was shaking with the convulsions of his shoulders. Ino stayed quiet, and waited until he was finished.

"Is this what she would have wanted?"

Shikamaru looked at her through red-rimmed eyes. "What kind of troublesome question is that?"

"Is this what she would have wanted? To die a hero? Saving her teammate from imminent death? To die protecting the people she loved in the only way she was able?"

Shikamaru gritted his teeth.

"How many times," Ino said softly, "did she tell you that if she died out there, while her body was here, that it wasn't your fault? That you did the best you could, did everything you could, to keep safe what she had given you? She trusted you. She trusted you, knowing that this could and would happen, and she didn't regret it." Ino cleared her throat. Her gaze flickered to her own vegetative body. "You kept her safe. You did what she asked of you. And she would thank you for that."

She reached out a tentative hand and touched his pale cheek, which was scratched and spattered with dirt. "You were her guardian to the very end. You always have been. And knowing she was safe in your arms, she never feared death."

And in that moment, Ino knew the words were the truth.

A light brightened Shikamaru's eyes. But then, just as quickly, he was gone, and the body too, fading back into the forest like all the visions before. Ino's hand was still outstretched, but it touched empty air. She sat like that for a few moments more, thinking.

Then she stood, and in three slow, measured steps, she was out of the forest.

His heartbeat quickened. Even as the throbbing light blinded him, he felt the urgency of its steady pulse.

She is here. She is here. She is here.

A/N: To the anon who kindly inquired about this fic on Tumblr oh-so-many months ago: I haven't given up yet. I may not be able to deliver on the timetable I promised back in April, but I will finish. Thanks for helping me find the motivation to do that.

To all of my reviewers and readers, thanks for your support. As always, I'd love to know what you think of the chapter.