Chapter 12

For two days the Kusanin and their captive had been traveling under a canopy so thick that one could hardly tell the passage of time. Around them, the forest buzzed with nighttime insects and a sourceless wind that made the stiffening leaves click together as though there were hostile voices everywhere. It made a man like Ri-Tou, more used to open spaces and prairie grass, feel an involuntary paranoia. He couldn't keep himself from nervously checking the rafters overhead periodically as he worked to prepare their hasty meal.

They'd been in their saddles almost constantly since abandoning Konoha, long enough for even the most experienced of riders to begin to feel weary. For the little teacher, who had almost no experience with the animals, the effect had been even greater. Almost out of his wits with exhaustion, he'd sunk into a grateful slump when they called a halt, head falling listlessly.

Ri-Tou offered him water from a satchel, helping him hold it carefully to his mouth since his bound hands made him clumsy. Afterward, he whipped a trace of water from the man's chin and rumbled, "Just breathe easy. In a minute you should stretch your legs."

The teacher's dark eyes looked up at him with confusion, as though he did not understand this gruff consideration. Ri-Tou felt sorry for him. What his captain said about their village's need was true. But, he thought grimly, this was hard, taking someone from their home. With a sigh, he checked that the bonds he'd tied remained tight.

Keno was caring for the horses, checking, double-checking their tack and equipment. He didn't dare look up from the task, but tone of displeasure and anxiety in his voice was clear when he muttered, "We're going too slow."

"Once we hit open land they'll never catch us." The captain's back was a straight line as he stared off into the dense foliage. "After all, there's a reason why Kusanin ride horses, hm?"

It was more than just the pace that was bothering Keno. "Suppose we're caught and taken back to Konoha. What help will Kusagakure offer us? Because this," he gestured emphatically at the bound chuunin sitting in the leaf litter. "This far exceed our orders."

Shouda seemed to very carefully shield his features. The long shadows of the forest made him a study in half-inked planes, but then, he had been increasingly difficult to read ever since the night of the festival. In fact, Ri-Tou hardly recognized his leader from the man they had road with from Kusagakure. Idly, he petted the teacher's hair, hoping he was worth it.

"You don't have to be so nice to him," Keno snapped, noticing Ri-Tou's half conscious movement. "He's done nothing but drag his feet the whole way."

The bigger man withheld a sigh. His partner, too, was changing as his fear grew. "I won't treat him like an animal, even if he is a prisoner," he said finally. It made Umino-sensei look at him again with that same questioning expression and the Kusanin grinned at him. "He's not ruthless, Sensei. Just nervous," he assured, and chuckled when Keno grunted in response to the gentle teasing.

Reaching to flick a burr from his leg, he noticed the teacher still watching him. He'd been quiet in these last days of travel, but now he was speaking with his eyes, a deep, altogether foreign brown from the innumerable shades represented in his own country. Like waves, the Kusanin thought out of nowhere. Only once, Ri-Tou had seen the ocean, but he remembered how it had overwhelmed him with sadness. Umino's eyes took him back to that beach, and subconsciously he pressed his heart.

"What?" he asked those mourning eyes. "Are you so sad to leave your home?"

A sniff, a lowering of his gaze to where his tied hands lay curled together like an egg in his lap. He lifted them to offer something to the puzzled Ri-Tou, who took it without thinking. The scrap of torn navy cloth, almost certainly from the man's uniform, floated into his palm.

Whispered words filtered to his ears like an apology. Iruka said, "I'm ruthless."

Adrenaline made Ri-Tou's hand clinch over the token even as alarm wrenched his arm away. He felt the sizzle: release. The last thing he ever heard as the explosion tore through him was Keno's throat-torn shriek, calling his name. His final meandering thought: 'His records…he's an expert with exploding tags.'

Iruka fled from his captors like a rabbit released from the talons of a falcon. 'Hide me,' he cried out fervently to the forest as he leapt into the woven green veil of laden branches, and the woods embraced him like a protector-friend.

Stoically, he tried to ignore the heat from his singed eyebrows and cheeks, the humming of his concussed ears, and the stickiness – the wet, blood-hot stickiness – that had sprayed over him with the force of the explosion. Instead of focusing on his coldblooded act of murder, he focused on footholds, the branches, on speed. He ran, even as a comrade's scream of grief and rage caught in the bark of the trees and become a part of their long, long memory, along with the sound of his wildly palpitating heart.

He knew that he could not reach Konoha. Though his distraction – costly, costly – had given him moments, they were moments only. Shouda could strike down a noosed bird in a matter of blinks, never minding the foliage curling protectively around him. 'It will have to be moments that count,' he thought, coaching his whirling mind into a shinobi's submission. His numb, swollen fingers worked laboriously while he whispered their meaning. The white of his charka flared.

The leaves chattered harshly – warning! But even as the noise erupted, the captain broke cover directly before him. Only the wildness of his forward momentum allowed Iruka to duck his head in time, and he fell under Shouda's arm, hands outstretched – reaching.

Bark rough beneath his skin, still felt though fingers that had been without proper circulation for far too long. Relieved, Iruka felt the charka with his jutsu leave him, absorbed easily by the tree, a tremendous, ancient hardwood. He sighed; time no longer had meaning. Calmly, he requested, 'Give them my message.'

Then the captain seized him up with an understated kind of strength. Pressed against the trunk of a tree, Iruka fought the instinct to resist. A hot breath against the bridge of his nose, and beyond that the mask of Shouda's earth-colored face. Iruka saw it through a few untidy strands of sweaty hair before his eyes. Blank and fevered – that was how Shouda looked at him. How could an expression be both? For some reason it reeked of danger even more than the fury he'd expected to find there.

"You know, Sensei," he said. Reasonably – as though reason had anything to do with this. He positioned one large hand carefully over Iruka's knee, feeling the groves, the knobs of bone. "Teachers don't really need to walk."

An arm snapped like the sound of dry wood. A crunching finger had a sound like molars grinding a chicken bone. But hearing the splinter and grind as his knee became fragments was like the noise made by an exploding star; too big to be heard. And feeling it, feeling it…

It was an inarticulate pain – deeper than the body. But before any sound could bubble up out of his soul, his nerves reached a threshold and Iruka sagged, mercifully unconscious.

Next Chapter: Naruto and Kakashi must decide between duty and loyalty.