In. Out. In. Out. Inoutinoutinout—

An elementary technique to pacify the body, alleviate a state of extreme stress or panic. It appeared to be failing.

He was starting to understand that he had effectively lost complete control of his own lungs—they kept seizing, almost as though he were about to cough, only then the cough never came, nor that final sense of relief, caught instead in an infinite state of suspension.

Admittedly, it was among his lesser concerns at the moment.

(Naruto and Yamato had been fully distracted by Kisame during their fight, but Sai had not. He had said he wouldn't interfere, but that hadn't meant he couldn't watch. He had possibly received more wounds on his body as a result, but the point had been—)

He didn't think he'd ever felt more caged (caged by a promise) than when Sakura had given him that final glance before she had run, Itachi slung over her back.

And he didn't think he'd ever felt more terror than when the copy-nin had followed.

Sai swallowed.

Kakashi's face when the genjutsu's hold had broken at last—he would…never be able to describe it. All Sai knew was that he had never understood the exercise of comparing a human to a demon in their common vernacular until that moment. And that, perhaps, no words, not even Sai's own brush, could begin to conjure the instinctual fear that had overcome him at that sight.

The copy-nin had followed her tracks without hesitation, without a glance their way, and he hadn't bothered disguising his killing intent in those few seconds before disappearing; it had been unfathomably strong, stronger than Sai had ever felt it. Everyone remaining on the field had frozen instantly.

A few seconds passed before any of them were able to move again.

Their own fight, Sai recalled, had not lasted must longer after that. Kisame had discovered his partner's disappearance belatedly and had taken off—to where, Sai had no idea.

Then Naruto had spotted Sasuke.

"What the—" Naruto muttered, crouched as he examined his former teammate. He stabbed his cheek with a finger, then brought his fists up defensively as though expecting retaliation. The traitor Uchiha didn't move.

"It doesn't appear as though Kakashi did this," Yamato observed. "Sasuke looks..." He gazed down meaningfully.

"More living than dead," Naruto acknowledged.

Sai was distantly aware of his mouth opening and relaying something—but the words seemed to plummet into some deep, unseen crevice in the ground, for all the reaction they gained. Maybe he had only imagined that he had said them.

Then Naruto's blue eyes narrowed and his head swung around.

"What." The singular utterance was short and dangerous.

Yamato huffed a small laugh. His smile dropped once he realized no one else was laughing. "You're…serious?"

Sai stared unblinkingly. "Yes."

The expression on Naruto's face was forbidding. He stalked toward Sai, shoulders—certainly broader than his own—high.

"No," he said simply, forcefully. "Sakura?"

Sai's eyebrow arched slightly. "Why not?" Did Naruto feel threatened, he wondered. Once Sasuke had left, everyone had regarded Naruto to be the strongest member of Team Seven (likely, Naruto himself as well). Sai had believed it initially too.

Several expressions flitted across Naruto's face, before he settled on something between hostility and vulnerability. "I'm her teammate. And if—if she was capable of that—I should have known. She should have trusted me."

The raw emotion in Naruto's voice seemed…somewhat more intense than his words—until, belatedly, Sai remembered that the notion of teammate for Naruto was utterly synonymous to that of friend. Sai wasn't accustomed to the role of the comforter, but Naruto was his…friend too, and he was willing to try. He shifted forward, just about to bring up his hand—

"But you. You knew."

There was accusation in Naruto's voice; it was directed…inwards.

"She never told me anything directly," Sai said slowly. "I pieced most of it together on my end, and I had an…educated intuition that something would happen today. I know you both had to cover my back just now; it was because I was perhaps paying more attention to their fight than ours."

Naruto didn't appear appeased. "You would think after losing one teammate that I'd be good at keeping the remaining ones I have. But here we are again, and I'm…just as blindsided."

A firm hand landed on his shoulder. It wasn't Sai's.

"Often, it's easier for those who maintain secrets to identify others of their kind," Yamato said calmly. "We look more harshly at those around us; sometimes, I wonder, if because we're so revolted by the notion of being looked at ourselves."

Sai felt his cheeks burn.

"So Sakura…knocked out Sasuke and took Itachi," Naruto summarized roughly, "And Kakashi is following them. And we don't know what he's planning to do, and we also don't know why any of this happened. In fact, we don't know anything else."

"That seems to be about right," Yamato allowed, stress lines more prominent on his face than usual.

He wondered if this would be a good time to mention that he was ninety nine point nine percent certain Sakura and their captain had had sex at some point.

"Run faster."

Another jolt of chakra the legs, a burst of speed—and the world became static noise.

He ate his stew without tasting any of it.

"Seconds?" someone prompted.

Naruto jolted to attention, stiffening. His gaze passed over the narrow tent which had been built to fit two bodies, not three—certainly not four—and found Sai sitting not far from him, expression seemingly as calm as ever.

He knew, of course, that this wasn't true. He had spent hours and hours with that initial, blank Sai: that had been true, implacable calm. Naruto knew that every blink, twitch, microcosmic shift now communicated something.

Sai felt just as unbalanced as he did; he just did a much better job of hiding it.

"No," Naruto said finally, rubbing his eyes. "No, I'm good—"

The previously unconscious figure between them tensed, then flipped into a sitting position.

Sai placed the vessel down with a dull thud.

"Get these off me," the figure demanded, lifting his chakra-binding shackles.

Naruto stared at him for a moment. Eventually, his gaze flicked back to Sai. "As I was saying, feel free to finish the rest."

"Naruto."

"I think I will," Sai said calmly. He ladled the rest of the stew into his wooden bowl and began eating. Naruto raised his own bowl and started eating again.

"If you take me to Konoha," Sasuke threatened, eyes slitted, "you won't be doing yourself any favors. I'll burn that village down if that's what it takes to—"

And Naruto erupted. Before he knew it, he was standing, the bowl had gone flying into the side of the tent, and all he could see was red.

"Believe it or not, Sasuke—" was the red because of the kyuubi? He couldn't tell—"the world doesn't revolve around you."

Sasuke watched him, expression unchanging. And Naruto wanted to hit him as hard as he could right in that smug face. He might have, if the other boy hadn't been defenseless.

He stared at him, the sound of a war drum thudding in his ears.

And it all came out. "Ino, Shikamaru, Choji: they had dinner at each other's houses every night of the week. Hinata still makes ointments for Kiba and Shino before they head out on missions. We could have had that too, but you—you couldn't stand the thought of it. Why?"

Sai stood silently, edging not quite between them, but close.

"Don't presume to know how I feel," his former teammate said coldly. "You've never had what I had, what I lost—"

"You think I can't say the same thing?" Naruto hissed back. "You've never been ostracized or ridiculed or dismissed, you've never known what it was like to be looked at like a monster by everyone around you, you've— Should we keep comparing grievances, Sasuke? Should we argue about what was worse? Is there any fucking point?"

Sai's hand wrapped around his upper arm, restraining him before he launched forward. Naruto's frame trembled.

"How do we keep making the same mistakes over and over again," he choked out, gaze averted to the ground, "and now, Sakura—"

"Where is she?" Sasuke demanded.

Sai smiled politely. "Sakura took Itachi and ran. None of us know where or why."

Every angle of Sasuke's features hardened. "That's not possible."

"Yet, it happened."

"It wasn't Sakura," Sasuke responded, face abruptly unreadable.

But there was a look in his eyes that Naruto recognized—a darkness that had been there on that roof when they had aimed the rasengan and the chidori at each other. And that was how Naruto realized, even despite the contrary words, that Sasuke knew he had fought Sakura.

"Can we knock him out again?" Sai asked.

"Split the kage bunshins."

"I've already made ten."

"I don't care. Every half hour, make each clone summon four more and then send them in the cardinal directions."

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Feet or heart? It was impossible to tell.

"You want me to fractionalize my chakra stores exponentially."

"Do it."

He stubbed his cigarette on the ground and was vaguely gratified that there was no one to see it. Sometimes, there would be months without a single one, and he'd think then that he had truly shaken the habit. Then—there would be a day like this one.

Civilian background, likely coddled, had been Yamato's first impression. A well-meaning girl, certainly, but hardly useful. A distant sort of pity had once followed, knowing how his senpai must have treated someone like that.

That pity had transformed into something sharper and decidedly more complex now. Traitors always brought the worst taste to the mouth, didn't they? That bittersweet mix of revulsion and denial.

He could hear the chatter of voices from inside the tent. Not calm, but better than it might have been. Yamato had been meticulous about keeping his expression as smooth as possible in front of them—or, as much as was believable given circumstances.

Out here, though, there was no need to hide. So his fingers trembled, and he swiftly lit another cigarette and brought it to his mouth.

He hadn't been prepared for this assignment, he reflected blandly. He had naively thought nothing could match ANBU. He had left his team because someone had died in front of him one too many times, and he had wanted to know what it was like to not care as much (because, surely, hearing about a teammate's death was better than being there to witness it).

He wasn't quite sure when he had started deviating from that understanding. He had no justification for it. Team Seven was, perhaps more so than any team he had been on, profoundly flawed. Sai made Yamato look like a social butterfly and reminded him of times he would rather forget. Naruto, determined and principled as he was, saw primarily in tunnel-vision and dangerously so. And Sakura—

He exhaled smoke, watched as it traced lazy spirals in the air.

In less than twenty four hours, Haruno Sakura would be dead.

Worse, he could picture…exactly how it would happen. A hole in the chest from chidori or raikiri—depending on how much of a fight she put up—her body still charged with electricity for hours afterwards. Strangling was possible as well; Yamato had seen it once.

Or, perhaps, beheading—

Yamato took another inhale and then stubbed the cigarette, before making his way into the tent.

—that was how he had heard Kino had been killed, after all.

"We need to stop."

And as much as Sakura would have liked to disagree with Shisui, she couldn't: she had been on foot for almost sixteen hours now, her chakra had been depleted by the small army of clones she had sent out to leave false trails, and then—well, then there was Itachi.

The sour-rust smell of blood still coated her collar, fresh as it had been hours ago. Itachi was still bleeding. Sakura had done her best given the time frame with Itachi's battle wounds—on any average shinobi, that might have been enough. But Itachi's condition wasn't anywhere near what a medical professional might consider an ideal state of health, and it was clear now that the duress of Sakura's running as fast as she could was undoing much of her healing.

Sakura didn't want to delay getting back to Konoha. On the other hand, what was the point of talking to Tsunade if all she brought back was a corpse?

"Closest covering?" Sakura muttered.

The crow's sharingan was locked straight ahead. "We hit the mountains in ten kilometers or so—continue north."

It was impossible for her to see any mountains through the thick of the trees, but Sakura took Shisui at its word. She clenched her jaw and sent a jolt of chakra to her legs, boosting her speed. She made it to the cave in the mountain's side just as the first droplets began to fall from the sky in a gentle drizzle.

Debris—rubble, branches that had been blown in by the wind, and more—littered the ground. She swiftly cleared a space for Itachi to lie down. With some careful maneuvering, she shifted him from her back to the ground, gently placing his head down last.

"Thirty minutes," she said curtly. "That's all the time we can spare."

"Are all of your clones still intact?"

"Yes, none of them have returned yet."

She paused to look down at Itachi. His eyeballs were rolling beneath his eyelids, and his frame had started shivering violently. She shrugged her flak jacket off to cover him.

"He needs a fire," Shisui informed her. It had settled in the deepest parts of the cave, vigilant by its human's side.

Sakura glanced at the crow out of the side of her eyes, mouth curling. Again, she would have liked to disagree. Instead, she turned and stepped off the edge of the cave, plummeting to the forest floor once again—and quickly found that the rain had already drenched the ground near the base of the mountains.

Knowing she would have a better chance of finding dry kindling where there was denser foliage, she circled within a tight radius of the mountains. But it soon became clear that the fundamental task of scouring the ground for something as simple as dry kindling had somehow become infinitely hard; more than once, she realized belatedly that she had looked down and seen absolutely nothing.

She was…a mess, she reflected sourly—still as knotted and tensed and anxious just as she had been as she weaved that genjutsu; her mind couldn't focus now that the weight of Itachi's body had been removed from her back.

After a moment of consideration, she cupped some of the fallen water and rubbed it against the imprints of blood Itachi had left on her, hoping it would help.

It wasn't an immediate remedy, for sure. Slowly, still, she felt her body begin to respond. Fractionally, her shoulders started to loosen just a little, her breath came a little easier, and she no longer felt quite as much as though she were balancing on a kunai's edge.

She spotted a large maple tree a kilometer south, its trunk a lighter brown than its smaller neighbors,' and propelled herself toward it until she stood beneath its thick branches. She made a quick pass with her fingers over the mix of fallen leaves and branches below. She was gratified to find them mostly dry, having been shielded by the thick overcast of the tree's remaining foliage.

Unfortunately, the tree she had found was a large one, with correspondingly large branches. She began splitting the wood into quarters so that she could easily tuck them beneath her arm.

A crack sounded behind her.

She twisted around, teeth bared in warning, and—

All the blood drained from her face.

(It wasn't possible. How? How? Every single kage bunshin had split, and then those had split, and so on and so forth, just like the crow had said, and still.)

He was right there. Somehow, some way, in defiance of all probabilistic chance that he should be miles away with a kage bunshin in Suna or the Land of Tea or the middle of an ocean, he was right there, eyes dark and burning like he had been watching her for some time. As though, indeed, he had made that noise intentionally.

There was a choking noise coming from somewhere. Coincidentally, she couldn't find the air to inhale. Her hand scrabbled against the tree for purchase. She bent her head, forcing her exhales to slow down, to slow it all down, so that her fucking brain could think.

But it was too late, because now Kakashi's face was right above hers, and she couldn't deny it—every line, angle, and feature was drawn with barely constrained rage. His hand wrapped around her throat while the other yanked at her hair, forcing her head up.

There was no other explanation for the way that dark gaze lingered over the bridge of her nose, the cut of her jaw— every feature that was congruous with her ANBU double that he had never noticed before.

He knew. He knew.

Sakura shuddered for breath, and she felt his chest expand with hers—because they were so close, because his examination was so ruthlessly intent—and his breath, as it washed over her face, felt like it could scald her.

Her head whipped to the side, teeth cutting into the side of her mouth from the force of an unexpected fist. Sakura rocked on her feet as she spat out blood.

His eyelids were almost fully shut as he looked down at her.

That might have been slightly fair, she considered humorlessly. She peered up at him, swiping the remaining blood from her mouth slowly.

The waiting had been the torture, she decided. She had known she would have to confront him; she just hadn't known it would be so soon.

"Who taught you," he said, deep, arrogant voice almost soundless, as he forced her head to the side, "to do that to me?"

Her mouth flattened.

He had positioned her head away from him so that she couldn't see him, even as his gaze perused her freely, collected information she would know nothing about. Thankfully, she didn't need to see him to drive her elbow into his solar plexus or to duck when his hand swung out with a kunai.

"Still so afraid to give me credit?" she observed tonelessly.

Her feet shifted automatically, pivoting to sidestep his next attack. His left leg, hidden from her sight because of the way he held his body, whipped out with blinding speed, building force from the brutal power with which he twisted his own body. She brought her arms in tight to withstand the shock of his kick, skidding several meters back into the trunk of another tree.

She exhaled for a moment,

Then, she launched herself back in, careening through the air right again into hard muscle. They struggled for a moment, and maybe, she forgot herself for an instant—possibly, her heartrate stuttered when his fingers brushed her hair, maybe her face went a bit hot, and—

He shoved her back by the throat into a tree, and she felt the trunk crumble beneath her shoulders. Muscle memory kicked in. Sakura followed the motion backwards, breaking his hold and tossing him over.

Slowly, she brought her fists back up, shoulders tight.

Despite the violence in his face, he moved with a deadly calm. He took a step to his left, and she shifted incrementally. He took another, and she realized that he was circling her.

He hadn't used a single jutsu yet.

The discovery broke her cold calm for a moment.

Was it arrogance? the bitter, seething part of her prompted. Her face tightened further as she evaded the copy-nin's swipes. His fists flew with blinding speed, but she was attuned to the way his body moved now from hours and hours of observation, and she evaded until she saw opportunity.

A kunai sank into the muscle of her shoulder (like a kiss), and Sakura bore it with a snarl. She deflected his brutal upper cut, and her hand lashed out, just barely glancing cloth—just enough to rip the mask clean off his face.

The face that looked down at her was as she had never seen it before, terrible to behold, afflicted by an inhuman sort of wrathful beauty.

Sakura held the black cotton mask in her hand.

"It's not a bell," she announced, looking coolly down at it. "Is it enough for you to take me seriously, though?"

Her gaze flicked upward, her face contorting into a sneer.

And then she mouthed the fatal word.

(Sen-sei.)

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay! This chapter took a long time to figure out for some reason, but after that, the writing was actually pretty quick.

Also.

ALSO.

I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS FIC BROKE MORE THAN A 100,000 WORDS NOW?! I am OVER THE MOON! Thank you so, so, so much for encouraging me and sticking with me through this long journey. This is legitimately the first fic I have written for (relatively) consistently / diligently, and I'm really determined right now to keep this up until the end.

Also, if you're in a chatty mood lol, I legitimately want to hear your thoughts on the following:

What are your thoughts on Kakashi right now? / Like, emotionally, where are you? - help a bitch out (I'm the bitch)

What do you think Itachi *needs* for happiness? I want to hear other perspectives.

I don't think my story passes the bechdel test YIKES? Thoughts? Considerations?

Even if it's a short one (though I ADORE the longer ones oops sorry for the innuendo) please drop a comment! I'm already brainstorming for the next chapter, and I'm so excited! :D