Warning: the shinigami have been watching this fight, as well. They're about to claim their due.

Chapter 27 – A Promise Made

In the stillness, a heartbeat echoed. Akane had been monitoring it for the past few minutes, keeping it at the back of her mind while using the Mystical Palm on Itachi. Forcing cells to replicate, differentiate and grow to perform their function in a manner of minutes was no trifling matter. Yet for all the concentration the technique demanded of her, she would have been a poor medic if she did not possess the ability to multitask. Luckily for them, Shisui's jutsu, whatever it was, had provided much needed cover for the moment.

"Breathe in deeply," she said, and Itachi conformed. "Now out, slowly."

The air hitched and he felt it rumble somewhere in his right lung. Akane's hand moved over that spot and cool chakra seeped in to dissolve the small blood clot partially obstructing one of his airways. After a few moments, he repeated the exercise at her behest and his breathing was normal again. Or so it felt.

There was lingering damage in Itachi's lungs that would only mend in time and for all her skill, Akane could not do anything about whatever harm Suisen's Gentle Fist had done to his chakra pathways. She wrapped it up, nevertheless. Judging by the state of their enemies and knowing Itachi, her efforts up until now would do. They had to. The regular beats at the edge of her awareness were slowly gaining in tempo. She could sense their mounting urgency beckoning, demanding her attention.

Drip.

Red bloomed on glimmering white at his feet. His breath quivered as it came out of his lungs to mist in the frozen, still air. On its way in, it carried a metallic scent. His left cheek was coated in warm blood, yet his right one was cold.

Drip, drip.

Shisui removed the trembling hand he was holding over the gaping wound across his chest and shoulder. It was painted in slick, dark red. It had soaked through the dark undershirt and stained the front of his ANBU vest. His sharingan could see the fibers engorging as they absorbed the blood, his blood, like blotting paper soaking up ink. His left arm was tingling, his fingers were already cold and numb, deprived of their supply.

Every fiber of his being ached, as if each chakra needle in the volley his Susanoo had unleashed upon the enemy had been torn and shaped from his very flesh. His head was swimming and despite his best efforts to anchor himself, his legs gave out under nothing but his own weight. Shisui collapsed on one knee, gasping for air. More blood splattered on the snow. His vision doubled and blurred. The Susanoo's armor retracted.

"I have to go."

Itachi sensed the dark undercurrent in Akane's voice, nodded and rose to his feet. The Susanoo's fist felt like a tingling against his skin, its energy making his hair stand on end. However, something had changed about it over the last few moments. Looking at the ethereal avatar, he saw what had alerted him: its armor had gone, exposing the construct's flesh. It was not as much the regression which worried him as what had caused it, because even in its humanoid form, nothing could get through the Susanoo.

Then he saw Shisui down on one knee inside it.

Akane dashed out of the Susanoo's protection, and Itachi fought down the shiver of dread creeping into his bloodstream. He needed a clear head; he could not afford to feel, could not keep his heart. He turned his gaze away from Shisui, toward the enemy. In a battle, medic-nin were a prime target. The only thing he could do to help Shisui at the moment was keep Akane safe. As he made up his mind, the Susanoo's fist vanished.

Suisen untied the knot of the tourniquet, which had accomplished its purpose. Losing the arm for keeping it bound for so long seemed inconsequential judging by how things were progressing, anyway. The bleeding would stop soon, and although he had lost enough blood to make his head spin, it would not be more of a danger now than it could have been. Juri had almost been his undoing - a feat she would have never managed in different circumstances, damn the Uchihas.

He saw the medic sprinting out of the green avatar's cover shortly before it disappeared altogether. Her captain moved to get between her and them, correctly anticipating his intent. Not that it would matter. Suisen had been waiting for this moment for quite some time. Even in his state, one Uchiha would not stand in his way. "Another Uchiha for you," he told Juri. "Don't fuck up this time." Without waiting for her reply, he pushed himself into a full-speed sprint.

Itachi saw him coming and met Suisen half way. They clashed in a blur of weapons clanging and pure taijutsu, both of them fighting with renewed strength. However, for all his verve, Itachi felt his opponent was not engaging him wholeheartedly. When Juri came in from behind her partner to cover his escape, he understood why. It had been a feint. Before he had time to reengage him, Suisen had already gone after his real target.

Katon: Housenka no Jutsu!

Itachi's volley of small fireballs flew after Suisen, who only briefly paused to deflect them with his kunai. None found their mark this time. What Itachi believed to be a blind spot in the byakugan's extensive field of vision kept shifting as Suisen moved to strike each of his shuriken down, and Juri was keeping him too busy for him to fine tune their trajectory. As Itachi turned to catch up with Suisen and stop him, Juri's sword veered and only narrowly missed him. He had shifted his stance at the last moment, courtesy of the sharingan anticipating the hit, but it became clear that she was not willing to let him disengage.

His one remaining option for quickly dealing with Juri was genjutsu. The fact that she was avoiding his gaze was insignificant, but she could not have known that. He molded chakra and gathered it in the tip of his left index, then pointed. She paused, eyes glazing over for a moment before her face twisted into a scowl and Juri bared her filed teeth at him.

"You bastard," she said in a tone low as a growl, trying to come to grips with the splitting headache now ravaging through her brains. "Kusogaki!"

Itachi's heart sank as he ducked to avoid her subsequent retaliation. He had felt the impediment the moment he had attempted to alter her chakra flow, and had known the genjutsu would not ensnare her mind. There was another chakra in her system, one which her body did not use and would not permit an illusion to take hold. So, this was how Suisen had broken Shisui's Kotoamatsukami, with no regard for his partner's life. What was worse: his gamble had paid off.

The snow crunched under Akane's feet as she ran. At this point, leaving footprints was the least of her worries. She could hear the sounds of weapons clashing behind, albeit dim compared to the two hearts pounding in her ears, louder than the rest: Shisui's and her own. The green avatar looming ahead was now stripped of its flesh, down to no more than a spine and ribs glowing around him. Shisui was trying to stand, and failing.

"Don't move!" she called out to him as her eyes fell on the dark snow at his feet.

"Behind you!" Tenzo shouted as he started running towards her.

Akane sensed the presence which had materialized seemingly out of thin air in her proximity, but did not have the chance to react. She felt a hand enclose around her wrist and was whirled her around with such force the air stopped in her throat. It remained trapped there for the longest moment as she looked up into a familiar pair of pale eyes, her every nightmare over the past months come to life.

"Did you think I'd forgotten about you?" Suisen asked in a quiet voice.

Her mind came to a screeching halt at the sound of it, darkness all-encompassing, static drowning out her senses.

Suisen saw the bug-eyed Konoha-nin running towards them from behind and smirked. He turned the kunoichi around like a puppet and secured her against himself with his left arm, then raised a kunai and placed it at her throat.

"Not another step," he warned.

Tenzo halted, a bead of sweat rolling down on the side of his face. He could not mold chakra and he was still too far to have any chance of preventing Suisen from drawing the blade across Akane's throat.

Her skin was crawling as if millions of ants were spreading out underneath it from his touch. She was breaking into a cold sweat and shivering, every muscle tense, paralyzed with fear. She could not even let go of that one breath. It was suffocating her. Do something, a small voice at the back of her mind begged. Anything. A single tear formed in her left eye and seared against her cheek as it fell.

Suisen's grip on her was firm, adding to the unbearable pressure in her chest. His body was radiating warmth against her back. A wave of nausea roiled in her stomach as his breath blew against the shell of her ear, and her body shuddered with revulsion. Itachi had once cast a genjutsu on her, in which he had recreated Suisen. Perhaps she would have never managed to break free from it, had it not been for that touch to tip her off. The real Suisen's touch was burned into her skin; an invisible, yet inimitable scar.

For all its firmness, however, his hold felt wrong somehow. Lulled out of its stupor by that idle observation, Akane struggled to pursue it to its source. He hasn't secured my hands, her numb mind formulated. A shinobi's hands were more dangerous than any blade. Suisen was too calculated to have made such a grave mistake, but he had succumbed to hubris and committed an even worse one: he had overestimated his effect on her.

As that realization set in, the tension in her muscles began to wash away under a spell of numbness. Her jaw clenched as fear and revulsion turned into wrath. Every moment of pain, every tear and every scream in the night fanned its flames now. Something stirred within her, dark and consuming. Her trembling hands formed the seals, harnessing that power and bending it to her will. She was not a helpless target. She was a shinobi.

Chakra crackled in the air, a thousand birds suddenly screaming in the electrical discharge she released from her body all at once. Driven by impulsiveness and unpracticed, the modified Chidori zapped her too, but she barely felt the sting of its burns on her skin as Suisen released her and air rushed into her lungs. Akane whirled around to face the monster who had haunted her day and night, already starting a second set of hand seals.

"You cast me into the darkness," she said, unflinching under his pale gaze, "but you had no idea who I am." Her hands locked into the Rat seal and her voice resounded in the clearing as a warning to her teammates. "Kage no Mai!"

Suisen saw her shadow darken and twist, nine tendrils springing forth from it in all directions, writhing like something from a nightmare. He had worked with Naras during his time in Konoha, but he had never seen anything like this jutsu. He leapt backwards once, twice, and was about to do so again when the shadows caught up with him. One of the tendrils latched on to his shadow and his body froze. To his left, he saw that Juri had been ensnared in the middle of a Tensenrin swing by the same jutsu, which now spanned almost the entire clearing. For a few, impossibly long moments, none of them moved.

Akane steeled herself. Sensing that none of her teammates had been trapped, having stopped moving at her warning as they had practiced so many times, she channeled her fury and her chakra into taking the Dance of Shadows to its final level. She focused on the shadow-tails which had stilled upon trapping the enemy and pulled at them with all her might.

Suisen felt himself being swept off his feet by nothing tangible - by nothing more but his own shadow. The cold air whistled in his ears as he was dragged across the snow-covered ground and then flung into a nearby tree like a rag doll. The impact knocked the breath out of his lungs and a sharp pain shot through his torso as several of his ribs cracked. He fell on the ground, gasping for air like a fish out of water, struggling to get up as the shadows released him. He failed.

Akane spun on her heel to face the momentarily stunned Suisen, muscles tensing for the sprint as she gathered chakra in her hand. The Chidori chirped and crackled, its blue light making the snow glitter around her, even as the arcs of electricity zapping from her palm towards the ground caused it to melt. Her mind was all too quiet, entirely focused on the kill, but her heart was howling with unbridled rage. It clouded her vision and drowned out everything else, until there was nothing left of her but anger.

Yet in that deafening silence rose the sound of a struggling heart. It brought Akane to a standstill as she was about to take her first step. For the briefest of moments, she was torn. Suisen was down on the ground, defenseless, and the Chidori was chirping in her hand, crying out for his blood, for vengeance, for death. Shisui was behind her, his heartbeat signaling distress.

Kakashi's voice echoed in her mind. Your choice between a life to take and a life to save?

Another tear rolled down her cheek as she recalled her answer. It's not a choice. Saving a life is my duty. Akane curbed her ire and the Chidori's light faded as she turned away from Suisen. At the same time, the Susanoo vanished from around Shisui. She rushed to him through the snow, forcing herself to shift her focus on the task at hand and ignore the pain of walking away from the one person in the world she wanted to destroy.

Shisui was almost as pale as the snow around them. He cracked a wan smile as Akane lay down her cloak for him to lie on. Her eyes quickly took in the gash which extended diagonally from the left shoulder down to the base of his sternum. Juri's sword had cut through a few superficial veins, but had not reached deep enough to deal any damage to more important vessels, which was why the amount of blood Shisui had already lost puzzled her. Chakra glowed in her hands as she began the standard procedure for this type of wound, one of the most commonly encountered in the field.

"You're a sight for sore eyes," he said, looking up at her.

Meeting his gaze, Akane noticed something that further raised concern. His left eye was still bleeding, but the other one was not and the trails of blood on his right cheek had dried. Although not much time had passed since his fight with Juri, the wound on his chest showed no signs of hemostasis having even begun, as would have been normal. His body was reacting as if it were aware of the blood loss, but not the wound itself.

"Don't move and try not to talk," she instructed calmly, letting none of her worries slip through, to the surface. Juri had clearly coated her sword with something, most likely an anticoagulant, though it did not explain the absence of the vascular spasm. At the first sign of bleeding, the smooth muscle in the walls of the affected vessels should have contracted. It had not.

"I happen to be terrible at both those things," Shisui said.

Akane cast him a reproachful look and kept one hand on his chest, healing, while the other rummaged inside the pouch attached to her hip. She extracted a syringe filled with a transparent, yellow liquid – an antihemorrhagic agent to force the onset of hemostasis, and administered it while she worked on boosting his platelets and stirring them out of their stupor. She began to realize that there were a lot fewer of them than there should have been, and most of the ones remaining were misshapen, with an abnormal structure.

"Did something happen to your left eye?" she asked, filled with a growing sense of suspicion.

"She spat in my face," he said with a weak chuckle. "Had quite the aim."

Her heart sank as realization set in. She turned her head to the battlefield and saw Itachi preparing to tackle Juri, who had already risen from the ground. Even from across the clearing, Akane could tell that the blood coating her weapon looked freshly spilled. "Don't let that blade cut you!" she shouted at Itachi.

"Figured it out, have you?" Juri shouted back. "For all the good it's gonna do you!" she added, then threw her head back and laughed. The sound of it cracked like a whip. The only dose of antivenom she had had on her, she had already given to Suisen. Even if they did catch her and forced the venom out of her saliva, they would never get the antivenom's formula and make it in time.

When Akane turned her gaze back to Shisui, she saw the understanding in his eyes. Of course, he had been clever enough to realize why all on his own. "Spider venom, is it?" he asked in a low, strangely calm tone.

"I'm going to lower your heart rate to slow the blood loss," Akane said, noticing that the antihemorrhagic agent was, indeed, not working. "You might get dizzy and feel something like pressure in your chest."

He huffed, watching the small breath cloud in the frozen air and disperse. "I see your bedside manner hasn't improved," Shisui told her, pale lips curling into a smile.

"You're right," she said, "I'm sorry. Yes, it's… it must be venom. I can slow down the bleeding, but without the antivenom…"

He closed his eyes and paused for a moment to recompose himself. "I understand."

Growing up as a shinobi had made Shisui ponder his own mortality often throughout the years. His father had died. His mother had followed him. Losing a teammate had awakened his Mangekyou. Many in his generation had not lived past twenty years of age. Death had been all around him, watching, waiting. Now his turn was coming. Perhaps if he had been in any pain, he would have felt it looming over him, but Akane had taken that away and so… it felt almost surreal. The one thing he could feel was the biting cold…

… and the anguish of leaving behind the one person that death had not seen fit to take away from him, the only one he had left to love. Itachi would never know just how much. It tore at his heart like nothing ever had, clawing away at his determination like a maddened beast. He had kept it locked away in that secret place inside his heart, tormenting himself for years. Perhaps Tsume had been right and he had been wrong in depriving Itachi of his choice, for fear that choice would hurt him. Now it was haunting him all the same.

Shisui bit his lip. "Akane," he said.

She took off her mask and looked at him. He appreciated the gesture more than she knew. It would be nice if the last thing he ever saw was a friend's face instead of an ANBU mask. He hesitated before speaking.

"Tell Itachi…" His voice lost its strength and she bent down for him to whisper in her ear. When he finished, she straightened herself back up and he smiled at the look of surprise written so plainly across her face.

"How…?"

"Trust me, you'll know," he said softly. Akane nodded uncertainly, and he glimpsed a shadow of sorrow cross her face for the briefest of moments before her training kicked in and chased it. "There's one other thing," Shisui added, watching her carefully. Her lips pressed into a thin, pale line as she picked up on the undercurrent in his tone, but she bent down to listen again. Halfway through she pulled away, and this time he saw the hurt in her eyes.

"But that will-"

"Please," he said. "Promise me."

His head was swimming. He could feel neither his arms nor his legs. His vision blurred and then cleared as he forced whatever little of his chakra remained into his eyes to maintain the sharingan. He could have used a genjutsu on her, some dark part of him thought as she put off her reaction. It would have broken his heart to do so, considering what it would force her to do and the fact that he was about to ruin her pristine record, anyway. To his relief, however, one of her hands rose up to form a seal.

"I promise," she said.

A murder of crows descended upon them, their cawing and flapping wings filling his ears as they swirled around them in a whirl of darkness. Instead of tears, he cried blood.

I'm sorry, Itachi.

Light faded and all that remained to him was the sound of the black birds flying in circles.

I'm getting tired now.

A warm drop fell on his face from above, and then another. He smiled.

I'm going to rest for a little bit…

Itachi pushed off Juri and drew back. He heard the Scattering Thousand Crows jutsu break behind him and glanced over his shoulder as the black birds flew towards the sky, released. He had wondered what that had been all about. He saw Akane standing, her face pale and her eyes red-rimmed. He saw the blood drenching her hands and forearms. He saw Shisui lying at her feet, still and bloodless under the crimson streaks across his cheeks.

No medic ninja shall ever stop medical treatment until the lives of their party members have come to an end.

At first, he did not understand what his mind was trying to tell him. Then he refused, rejected the very idea of it. He could not be. Shisui would never. No. Something inside him broke. His eyes burned. He heard Juri's battle cry as if in a dream, felt his body turn to face her mechanically, almost against his will, because he could not tear his gaze away from Shisui. But then it locked on to her instead and a sharp pain flared up in his right eye. Something warm ran down his cheek.

Juri's battle cry turned into a scream of agony that tore through the deafening silence. Her sword fell in the snow as black flames enveloped her, and she collapsed, writhing and howling as she burned.

Itachi gasped and his hand flew up to his eye as the pain spiked and shot through his head along the optical nerve. He drew in sharp, cold air, teeth clenching as he held back a scream of his own. The pain in his head was nothing compared to the one in his heart.