Published: 10/14/2014

Age 11: Part 4

"God, I was a wreck the whole entire time."

"I'll say. Can you even comprehend how hard it was to carry all three of you back to the village?"

Something was wrong.

I felt it the moment I blinked into consciousness: heavy wetness, like a raging storm about to break. It was as if someone had sucked out the air around the camp and replaced it with gaseous lead; a stifling, eerie silence had fallen, tense and foreboding.

I rose slowly, pulling my chakra in tightly and quietly drawing a kunai from my holster. Rin appeared on my right with her own knife in hand and signaled me, asking if I felt anything.

I bit my lip and concentrated. Though Minato's sensing ability was at the point where he was passively aware of all chakra sources within a certain proximity, I had no such skill—in fact, I had to spend all of my focus just to pick up faint whispers. As it was, though, the only thing I felt was a cloudy haze of chakra. I couldn't even feel Rin, who was right next to me.

Alarming.

"There's some sort of technique obscuring all of the chakra signatures in the area," I hissed, jumping to my feet and curling chakra in my palm, ready to slap a seal down at a moment's notice. "Someone's coming—"

Even today, I couldn't tell you what exactly happened at that moment. I know a thick blanket of mist rolled in, and I'm reasonably sure I heard the chirping of a Chidori erupting in the distance. Maybe there were a few short yells, I'm not certain. All I really know for sure is that the world fell apart. Panic consumed me; I spun in frantic circles, searching for Rin, but I could hardly see in front of my face. Coupled with the chakra-clouding technique, there was no way to find her.

She screamed.

"Rin!" I lunged forward wildly, futilely throwing my arms out and hoping I'd land hands on her. My fingers grasped air.

No.

"Kakashi!" I screeched, not bothering to add a -san or a -senpai. "They took Rin!"

A blast of faintly crackling chakra immediately exploded several feet to my left, lancing through the technique's shroud and dispelling it. Kakashi was at its center, kunai drawn and Sharingan bared, ferocity bursting from his every movement. I whirled around, scanning the landscape for any hint where they might have gone, but the only sight that met my eyes was one of multiple shinobi, both Konoha's and Kiri's, sprawled over the ground. Several white-masked ninja were lying at Kakashi's feet, giant gaping holes in their chest—he'd run them through with Chidori—while others were strewn over the rocks in the area, kunai sticking out of their backs.

"Captain," one of the downed chuunin gasped. Kakashi took one look at him and dropped to one knee, pulling out a roll of bandages while yanking his hitai-ate back down with one hand. I rushed to his side, barely containing another full-out nervous breakdown.

Oh my God no no no Rin Rin Rin—

"You all stay here," Kakashi muttered briskly as he tied a quick knot, gaze full of purpose. "Take care of the others. I have to go after Rin."

"Captain, wait," the brown-haired man panted, glancing at me worriedly before turning to the jounin with pleading eyes. "We need… reinforcements. You can't go on your own…"

"I'm coming," I declared shortly, already feeling hot indignation welling up within me just at the thought of being made to wait here. "Don't you dare order me to stay put while Rin is out there. Don't you dare, Kakashi."

Ignoring summons, going on murder sprees, defying the captain... once we got back, the village was going to bench me so hard I'd get splinters. But I found that I couldn't bring myself to care, because this was it. I had spent so long building to this moment that I had no hopes or dreams left. There was nothing beyond letting Rin live.

The village could do what it pleased with me when this was all over.

Kakashi looked furious. His gaze held such a barely-controlled wrath that I was worried he might put me down for the mission right then and there.

"Take her, Captain," the chuunin on the ground next to us urged. Whether it was because he thought I was right or because he didn't want me to be nearby when I inevitably snapped and went crazy, I didn't know. "Let her... let her help you."

Kakashi barely glanced at him, for he was too busy setting his worst death glare upon me. I grit my teeth and held my ground, and we spent a tiny eternity trying to incinerate one another with our eyes. It wasn't until tears of utter, helpless frustration began spilling from my eyes that the silver-haired teen standing in front of me broke his suppressive stare in favor of taking on a look of alarm.

"Damn it, Kakashi," I choked, angrily swiping my arm across my face. I was tired of tears. What I wanted now was to take action. "Don't make me stand by and lose another teammate. I can't."

The silence was not so much deafening as it was thunderous. It boomed and echoed, filling my head with a noise like a three thousand pounding gongs. I thought I might explode with the cacophony roaring in my ears.

"...We're wasting time," Kakashi finally said, turning away and pricking his thumb on a kunai. "Kuchiyose no Jutsu!"

For the first time since we'd met, when Kakashi Hatake glanced back at me over his shoulder, I saw the gaze of a peer. In that moment, we were not insider and outsider or strong and weak or superior and subordinate. We were Kakashi and Suzu, two members of Team 7, united in the need save the girl who was holding our worlds together.

Kakashi said nothing after that. Instead, he brought up a hand with two fingers extended and flicked it forward. We took off without looking back.

The extraction went flawlessly; the guards were easily diverted and our pursuants easily evaded. I was probably biased, but the trap in this whole arrangement was so painfully obvious that I wondered how Kakashi could have missed it. Why was their hiding place so conspicuous, their hostage so easily found? No scent covers, no decoys… he should have realized straight away. But then again, he was just as emotionally blinded by these circumstances as I was, and unlike me he had not the advantage of foreknowledge. The only thing he probably cared about at this moment was the fact that he had to keep Rin alive.

I could sympathize with that. At this very moment I was desperately trying to figure out a course of action, knowing all too well that if I didn't do something now, it would all be over… not that I was having much luck. I was too distracted. Every moment that passed was an unbearable reminder that we were drawing closer and closer to Rin's demise. Every word she said matched perfectly with the canon: They performed some kind of ritual… There's something inside me… I can't go back.

The inevitability of it all was crushing.

The two Mist-nin behind us chose that moment to attack, snapping me out of thoughts. My teammates and I went careening from the treetops and past the forest's edge, flying into the rocky wastelands in a barely-controlled freefall. Kakashi immediately unleashed a hail of kunai to cover our landing, but as soon as our feet touched the ground, the earth beneath us exploded in a cloud of dusty smoke screen. Ten ninja came flying at us from all sides.

Damn it, really? Had they been herding us to an ambush site the whole way? Now that I thought about it, was that part of Madara's plan? Had he actually intended to let the Sanbi loose in Konoha, or did he just not care so long as he found a way to break Obito? I didn't have much time to contemplate it, though, because I nearly got my head taken off by a sword.

"Shit," I grunted, flipping onto my hands and smashing my heel into one of the Kiri-nin's chin, barely managing to lay one hand on his shin before being seized by the ankle and chucked up into air like a rag doll. Though the throw sent me spinning, I managed to keep my wits about me long enough to slap my right hand onto my forearm and pulse chakra through the cloth of my arm warmer.

(Minato had spent an entire afternoon inking out the seals he had invented on my left arm. Combined, they had been large enough to cover the entirety of my scar, but I often covered it up anyway—no limb was was a more attractive target for dismemberment than the one covered in an important-looking black marks, after all.)

The seal on the man's leg exploded with wire at the same moment I felt the steel threads materialize around my fingers. With a burst of chakra his calf came clean off, and he crumpled into a heap. I made sure to smash one foot into the back of his neck when I landed on him, pushing down with chakra just in case. More than one ninja had died because of people playing possum, after all. Better safe than sorry.

"Get back!" one of Kiri-nin shouted. The shinobi around me scattered, immediately darting out of taijutsu range. "Don't let her touch you!"

Crap, I'd hoped they wouldn't pick up on me that quickly. These days I settled most fights by engaging in taijutsu, stealthily putting down seals—Minato had taught me how—and binding or removing extremities as needed. I cast a quick eye around, but Kakashi and Rin had vanished into the smoke. Probably just as these guys had intended, I thought as I felt sweat begin to gather on my palms. An eleven-year-old in a crowd of ANBU… God, that sounded like the beginning of a bad joke. One with a really bad ending.

Well, I only had one option, then. I clapped my hands together and laid a seal on my right palm before shoving it in the air and letting the wire spew out around me. I quickly put out a wave of wind chakra while twisting around, surrounding myself in a cloud of hyper-sharp near-invisible strings. It wasn't the perfect defense by any means, but as far as keeping people out of immediate stabbing range went, it would work. I could deal with projectile weapons at this distance.

I took a deep breath. Time slowed down for just a moment as I reached into my kunai pouch and withdrew a knife; it felt cold and unusually heavy in my hands. If I could keep out of hand-to-hand range, I might make it out of this alive.

But ANBU were considered the elite of the elite for a reason. Though I was unapproachable for a minute or two, after watching my movements they quickly realized I was adjusting for the wind. After that, all it took was one well-aimed wind release technique from the guy on the right to screw me over.

"Fuuton: Daitoppa!" he shouted. My Great Breakthrough had nothing on this guy's; I might as well have been hit by a hurricane. I barely managed to stay on my feet, anchoring myself with chakra.

Of course, there was no better way to catch your opponent flat-footed. Even though it only took me a few seconds, by the time I had reained my bearings, three different hands clutching three different knives were on a collision course with my skull. I let out a gasp, futilely trying to drop into a crouch, but there was no way I was going to make it in time.

At just that moment, though, Kakashi decided to start skewering people with Chidori. He shot out of the dust cloud in a blur, lightning sparking in his hand. I barely saw his arm go through the man's chest before he was rocketing off in all directions, leaving a trail of dead ninja in his wake.

For a moment, I was so relieved that I forgot myself. I had fought with more experienced ninja before, but never like this. In fact, when I was alone, Minato had a standing order to run away from any ninja group of three or more, regardless of their rank. Going solo against multiple ANBU was so beyond my depth that it wasn't even funny. I was going to need to burn ten bags of incense for the deity above watching my back, because living through that had been a miracle, no two ways about it.

My relief didn't last long, though. After resealing my wires, I looked up and saw a blur of black and white diving at Kakashi. For a moment, I thought it was an enemy, but then I realized the white on this person was below the waist, not on the face. And there was only one person here dressed like that.

I didn't know my shunshin could cross thirty yards in less than a second, but I suppose being under the tutelage of the Yellow Flash had allowed me to pick up at least a little bit of his famous speed technique. I seized Rin's wrist and yanked on it so hard it was a wonder I didn't rip her arm right out of its socket.

She jerked to the side just as Kakashi's arm burst through her back.

The next sequence of events took place in a space of seconds.

Rin choked out Kakashi's name. Kakashi stood there in shock as she slid off his arm. Both of my teammates fell over; I screamed their names; there was a flash of yellow.

Minato Namikaze streaked out of the air and into our midsts. His eyes made one sweeping glance of the area, taking in the billowing smoke, the surrounding ninja, and the sight of two thirds of his team down on the ground. Without missing a beat, my cousin hooked his arm around my neck before seizing Rin and Kakashi both by the sleeve. The moment he had his hands on them I felt a tiny pinch of chakra, and suddenly we were sitting in the grass.

Two Konoha ninja were staring at us over their shoulders, looking shocked.

"Taicho? When did you—" the one of the left began dumbfoundedly. "—what the hell?"

Flabbergasted, I stared up at my cousin. How in the world?

"I didn't think you were still carrying that around," he murmured, looking at my hand. I glanced down and was astounded find myself clutching a three-pronged kunai, slightly rusted and dull with disuse. Its yellow handle was peeling slightly, stained with dirt, but the seal on it was still in tact.

It was the kunai he had given me at Tatsumi River.

...No way. How the hell? This thing been sitting at the bottom of my kunai pouch all this time, forgotten for two entire years? Holy crap. How hadn't I noticed when I'd drawn it? Surely I hadn't been that distracted by the ANBU. How had I not drawn it before? For that matter, how did I manage to draw it after not realizing it was there for two entire years?

Wait, no, back up a moment. I staggeringly threw Minato's arm off and got to my feet, vacantly taking in the sight of trees and grass and a campsite. What was this place? What had just happened? It was if we hadn't been fighting for our lives two seconds ago at all. I took a minute to stare blankly into the air, trying to process.

And then...

"Rin!" I cried, horrified, as I whirled back around. Minato immediately jerked his head left and laid eyes on the gushing wound in the team medic's chest.

"Oh, no," I moaned, only half-aware of myself tangling my hands in my hair and falling backwards into the dirt. "No, no, no, no…"

Oh, God, it was all over. I'd failed. She was dead. After all of these months of sleepless nights and anxious days, following her all the time, anticipating every moment, I'd failed. I'd focused so hard on just her, pushing everyone out, family and friends, to fail. I'd plowed on blindly while letting everything fall apart to fail.

I tore my life apart to fail.

"She's still alive."

"...What?" I breathed, looking up slowly. Minato was leaning over Rin, one hand above her mouth, the other rummaging forcefully through his pack.

"She's breathing, barely. She's alive," he muttered. His eyes immediately took on a look of unshakeable determination, the one he got when he was ready to move mountains. It was a glint of unbreakable focus. "Her thoracic cavity's been wrecked and her lungs are collapsing, but she's not dead."

"She's alive?!" I shot over, voice rising to a pitch I didn't even know it to be capable of. "She took a Chidori to the chest! I thought it was a one-hit-kill!"

"It missed the heart," Minato said, pointing to the hole. Now that I stopped to look, it was much farther to the right than I'd realized. "By an inch."

I felt my hands shoot up to cover my mouth. When I yanked on her arm—that had worked?

"But she won't last long like this," Minato murmured, withdrawing a scroll from his bag; from that scroll he summoned a bigger one, along with a calligraphy set. "Only emergency surgery from Tsunade-sama could fix this."

My stomach plummeted again. "Then…" I said, voice quivering, "...then it's too late?"

"Not if I have anything to say about it." Minato bit on the end of one of his brushes, as he often did when he encountered complex problems, eyes ablaze. "What do you need to do?" he mumbled to himself. "Classify. Okay, penetrating trauma… it's wide open. Air and fluid in the chest cavity. Heart's intact. Can this be even be called hemopneumothorax?" Minato blew out a sharp breath. "Need to stop blood loss. Need to keep her breathing. Need to… have to… but... shit."

Trembling like a child, I bit my lip and wrung my hands. Minato never swore.

I would never classify any movement of his as frantic, but he was far from composed as he began pulling out different seals from his scroll, glancing at their labels before tossing them aside. He had everything in there: storage seals, barrier seals, locking seals, exploding seals, gas-releasing seals… everything, it seemed, but something to save Rin. I felt blood begin to leak from my lip; every second he spend shuffling frenetically through his endless library was a second closer to our teammate's death. The two chuunin—whose names I couldn't remember—looked on in horrified fascination at the spectacle.

Minato's hands closed around a black scroll. I recognized it immediately: it was a scroll for storing corpses, known colloquially as body-bag seals. We used it to bring back casualties after battles; I'd actually used quite a few of them myself, having been sent on missions with Akihiko to clean abandoned battlefields of Konoha-nin's bodies. Beside delivering supplies and relaying messages, it was the third most common wartime genin mission.

Minato stared down at the scroll with his lips parted, gaze blank. My heart skipped a beat, and for one awful moment, I thought he'd given up. But then he scrambled for a clean scroll and took his brush to it, eyes wide. A seal bloomed under his hands, lines stretching outwards, spirals curling in, squiggles spreading themselves in rays like beams from the sun. With incredible dexterity and impossible precision, he filled in spaces with black marks and nonsensical symbols. When a bead of sweat threatened to drop from his temple and onto his work, he jerked his head to the side and sent it flying off into the grass. The sheer intensity of it was enough to make me stop breathing. Its effect was not unlike that of killing intent's—that is, completely immobilizing. There's something that happens when a ninja like Minato Namikaze focuses so completely and utterly on a single point. It was as though the world itself stopped entirely so it could witness his action.

As soon as he was done, a blast of controlled wind chakra dried the ink instantly. Minato gave it a single once-over, eyes scanning furiously, before he took a deep breath and smacked it onto Rin's stomach. A layer of chakra immediately began to coat her, thin over her limbs, thick over her head, and even thicker over the wound in her chest. Then it seemed to almost lock, ceasing all movement and forming some sort of cocoon. Rin seemed to freeze entirely; her chest stopped heaving and the blood stopped flowing.

A moment passed. She was perfectly still.

"It worked," my cousin breathed, looking both relieved and astonished beyond belief. "That… it actually worked."

"I…" I worked my jaw. "What did.. what did you do?"

Minato pointed at the body-bag seal lying next to his knee.

"I made one of those," he said a bit breathlessly, "and modified it for a living person. Replaced the storage function with a immobilization-barrier combination instead, kept the stasis one."

I blinked once, then twice, contemplating the implications of that.

"...Are saying you stopped time?" I asked, aghast.

Minato blinked and looked at me, brow furrowing.

"I… in a sense, I suppose," he murmured after a long moment's hesitation. "The stasis uses chakra to stop all cell function, so in a way, I've stopped her body's biological clock. That's not time-stopping in the traditional sense, though—that wasn't my intent. I just thought that if we could prevent brain death and stop her from bleeding out long enough to get her medical treatment…"

"So you stopped time!" I repeated, completely blown away. What the hell? Like, what the actual hell! I mean, if anyone could do it, it would be the fuuinjutsu space-time ninjutsu master, but, but… but still! One does not simply just… stop time!

Minato is a goddamn hacker. OP. So OP.

"Oh my God," I let out a hysterical little giggle. "You… you stopped time. Rin's alive. Oh, God! Rin's alive!"

"...Suzu?" Minato asked slowly, eyebrows rising as he turned to face me. I began laughing harder.

"Minato, Lord, the look on your face right now!" I chortled, feeling all sense of control begin to slip away. It wasn't long before my laughter degenerated into gasping sobs. "Oh, God… you did it, y-you… oh, she's alive. She's alive."

She was alive. Christ, this changed everything. Rin's death had been the start of everything. What had I altered? What was going to be different now? I couldn't bring myself to think overmuch, though, because at the moment my brain was only bursting out with one single thought: Rin Nohara was alive.

And just like that, my knees were buckling and my face was planting itself into the ground. After nearly half a year of operating at my limit, I felt myself finally giving out. Now that my only goal had been accomplished, there was nothing left to hang onto. Willpower had kept me going for a long while, and now that it was over, there was no need to cling so desperately anymore. Now, I could finally loosen my grip. A deep-seated exhaustion immediately began taking me over, crowding out my mind and taking over my body. I let it come gladly, because oh, I was so tired. I knew, in some distant corner of my consciousness, that a shitload of crap was going to hit the fan when I woke up, but I didn't care. I was tired and I was going to rest now, and that was that.

It had been a long time since I'd had any decent sleep.

A/N: Egads, I'm so sorry! It's been over a month, hasn't it? Yikes. This was a tough chapter, though, just saying. It's thick, it's heavy, and I'm not entirely sure it's well-done. What did you guys think? Was this believable? Was Minato too much of a deus ex machina? Are any of you upset that Suzu didn't get slaughtered by the ANBU like the noob she is? Did I give you mood whiplash from the angst-fest that was last chapter?

Man, this chapter makes me nervous. The canon-smashing has finally begun. None of my stories have ever progressed to a point where I could actually start overturning the plot, so this is uncharted territory for me…

Thank you all for your patience. I hope I don't let you down with the way I'm taking this story. I'm doing my best.

Cheers,

Eiruiel