Kakashi has never liked Neji Hyuuga, who's really nothing more than the poor man's Sasuke Uchiha: a beautiful prodigy broken by his family. Neji's much less stylish about it, much more a whimper than a scream.

"I talked to him," Neji says. "He was all right." He's not speaking to Kakashi, which shows what he knows.

"Indeed," Itachi says. To Neji's ears he'll sound inscrutable, but Kakashi hears the tint of surprise. He doesn't turn around as Itachi steps past Neji, who will be made to feel by the movement that he's dismissed.

"It was an unexpected thing you did," Itachi tells him at last, when Neji's gone.

"It shouldn't have been," Kakashi says. "Not to you."

Itachi after all had asked him, months ago, What do you want with him?

Kakashi had smiled, the empty smile, the scarecrow smile. To place him like a seal over my heart.

In the present Itachi makes a non-committal sound. "Mother was upset."

There's no polite reply to this. While Itachi understands that his parents are hypocrites and weak, he'd hardly relish Kakashi pointing it out. Kakashi, who has never defended his own parents nor felt driven to, would not.

In any case Itachi's parents aren't the issue. "I owed it to Minato."

"He's a shifter."

"You should have done it, then."

Again Itachi sounds surprised, now that Kakashi has long since stopped trying to provoke it. However there's no doubt, no hesitation. Itachi never doubts. Itachi is a true believer. "I certainly don't owe Minato Namikaze anything."

"I meant because you owed it to Sasuke." He hasn't looked at Itachi since Itachi arrived, and he doesn't now. Keeps his eyes on the sun, what little there is to be seen of it beyond the thickening clouds.

"What was done to Sasuke was done for the greater good."

Kakashi smiles. It's his default expression, these days. He used to keep his face perfectly expressionless, but that takes such effort, it's so obvious when someone has broken through your masks, your shields, exposed the raw pulp underneath. It's better to smile, to channel any emotion into the same unchanging and thus safely meaningless expression. He's looked at the smile in a mirror and it looks like a wound in his face. "I've never understood why you imagine that should matter."

"Children die every day – very many children, and very horribly – why should he matter more?"

"I don't know," Kakashi says, and then after Itachi's silence has changed, has become victorious: "He just does." There's defeat in the words, but no doubt. This one thing he can say with Itachi's absolute conviction, which has lead Itachi to so much glory and so much death.

Itachi lifts his right hand, pointing at a leftover demon that his gestures purifies out of existence. Watching him, Kakashi remembers explaining exorcising to a kindergarten-aged Naruto: Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

Itachi's voice comes calm and contemplative. "Are you suggesting we should rather have entered into WW4?"

Kakashi turns away from the setting sun, making for the car. "Sasuke was one part of those negotiations."

"A key part," Itachi says, but he accepts the move, away from the battlefield and away from the conversation.

They have driven for several miles – Kakashi's sipping a gigantic slushie and listening to a radio show teetering on the fine line between absurd and absurdist – when Itachi, looking steadily ahead through the windshield like a responsible driver, finally says, "You really believe it wouldn't matter to Sasuke that it was done for the greater good?"

"How can that possibly not be obvious to you?"

"It was some time since I spoke to him," Itachi says carefully.

There's a question in that, and Kakashi is too worn down, has loved Itachi for too long, to resist it. "I do know him."

"Yes," Itachi says, dryly, lightly. "Biblically, I should imagine. No – don't answer that. He was…" And Itachi sighs, and touches his own face, in a gesture that will one day too soon mean rubbing at his own wrinkles. "He was always a little attention whore. You take care of him."

Kakashi smiles.

In his head there's a lapsed conversation, put on pause in Minato's office as he searches for a reply.

Why would I want you here? Sasuke demanded.

Because I didn't want to betray you is not something you can say to someone you have betrayed.

And in the end it's quite plain. Kakashi has no excuses.

He first discovered this when his father failed, and he first experienced the need for them; when he first found himself deemed wanting, found himself standing accused do you have anything to say for yourself, and came up empty.

It was a long time after that before he had anything to say again.

He was little, too little to reach things on the table without the help of a chair, too little to understand the problem. They brought orders to his father, and his father did well with orders, he was White Fang, a great warrior of God.

The orders weren't about demons this time, but to exterminate a shifter settlement. His father was unhappy, for reasons unknown, made a face and then made a ruckus.

This made no sense, because orders were orders, and shifters weren't real people. They were only like real people. Probably some sort of demon spawn, his teachers had said, some sort of halfbreeds – halfwits certainly, the lot of them, only half human.

Still his father wouldn't do it, or his mother either, though she was sad to say so. They told him – indirectly, they were ostensibly talking to other people, but they must have known he could sneak quietly these days so certainly they were also telling him – that Uncle Jiraiya was a shifter, which was an absurd lie because Uncle Jiraiya had always been kind and clearly human.

So his father wouldn't do it, he went against the mission and was shunned.

And Kakashi was not a good enough reason for his parents to stay alive, after. They received orders to martyr themselves, and these orders they did obey.

He had no excuse for that.

The only way to handle this was to make sure he would never again need excuses.

Orphaned, he was sent to boarding schools and training camps, and eventually on missions. He did the work of God, honoured his duty, fought for this world that his parents had failed to protect.

It was on a late summer day when the grass had turned brown and he was walking home from the shops that he saw was his father had chosen to protect.

Uncle Jiraiya's heavy, sloping bulk, and behind him a blond boy that Kakashi at first didn't recognise. Jiraiya had aged, that much was evident although Kakashi only looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Jiraiya, too, looked away from him. That was for the best: Jiraiya belonged in the past, and should stay there.

It was Minato who looked at Kakashi. Minato, strange and golden, who had inherited Jiraiya's lofty dreams. Kakashi's parents had always said Jiraiya was brave, said he'd have to be to dream so big and so foolishly. He didn't anymore, that was clear, but Minato looked at the world openly and brightly, like a challenge to be met.

Kakashi had thought, afterwards, that he should maybe mention something about a shifter approaching him, but then he'd need to bother the senior exorcists, need to speak… In the end he said nothing.

He especially didn't say anything after Minato came looking for him. They were in a forest, no Jiraiya this time, no other people. Nothing worth protecting, like Kakashi wasn't.

"I thought I recognised you," Minato said. "I didn't want to say until I was sure you wanted me to."

Kakashi nodded, felt the movement jerky and too fast.

"How are you?"

Kakashi had nothing to say to that, so didn't.

Minato nodded back. He looked sad, even when he smiled. "I'm very sorry about your parents. I didn't understand, until after, and I… I hope you're well. They did something very great, something I don't know how to repay."

Kakashi didn't know either. Some lives are worth more than others, and shifter blood is cheap.

"Hey," said Minato, and reached out in a movement like he'd ruffle Kakashi's hair. Stopped short, so there was the gift of the intention without the intrusion of carrying it out.

And so into Kakashi's tawdry, raw and lonely life stepped Minato Namikaze, this laughing blazing sun of a man. The arctic winter of childhood ended: the secret door appeared.

He belonged to Minato, then. Gave himself over in a sort of slavery to a bemused Minato, who'd never wanted to own another person.

Then of course there was Yui, and the door started closing, Kakashi had to stick his foot in to avoid being locked out. He knew Yui thought he was creepy, that he stared at her with greedy eyes. Woven into those covetous stares, into acidly polite conversation, was the insipid refrain, he was mine first.

Fortunately, he'd eventually been able to distract himself with Itachi, and later on with Sasuke.

He first met Itachi in a hospital corridor, shortly after getting his face scarred. He was very, very good at what he did, and the mission came first – before injury or disability, certainly before the stupid children, some of them trice his age, who were supposed to be his teammates. Because of that, he had demon energy trapped under his skin, flowing over his cheeks and chin and neck. Gabriel's archangel light isolated and contained it, but couldn't extinguish it.

So he was sitting in that corridor, in a quiet corner away from the beeping of the machines, when a short Asian kid walked by. When the boy pulled his ponytail over his shoulder, Kakashi saw the clan crest on the back of his shirt, and realised he wasn't a stranger after all. The boy's eyes in return skimmed over the clan mark on Kakashi's sleeve, and then never looked at it again, even though everyone knew about the Hatake, about the greatness and the fall.

"I'm Itachi Uchiha," he said, offering a tiny hand. They were about the same age but Itachi was built on miniature lines.

Kakashi took his hand. "Kakashi Hatake." After a moment's consideration, of Itachi's silence blending with his own, he added, "I thought the mission went well?"

"It did. I'm here for my brother." Itachi's missions always went well, just like Kakashi's. Another thing everyone knew. Itachi added, almost an excuse, "He's very little."

"Of course," Kakashi said, and later when he saw Sasuke he understood.

A very little boy, Itachi had told the truth on that account. Framed by the large hospital bed and sedated, covered in bruises and bandages, he looked like a dying human child.

Kakashi had stopped by hoping to see Itachi, and was not much interested in an unconscious child he'd never met. He stayed for some time all the same, because there were adult voices in the corridor outside, audible if he stood very close to the door.

Someone unknown, possibly Ibiki Morino: "…is murder, Fugaku."

Itachi's father said something about how Itachi had been sent on missions at that age, to which hardly anyone had objected.

"Itachi," Morino broke in, "is as close to the second coming as any of us are likely to see."

He must have left then, because a woman spoke up, in an entirely private tone. "That's enough. No, Fugaku – if you'd been sent on that mission at his age, you'd have died." A colourless sigh, from this woman who must be Sasuke's mother. "You might as well publicly beat him to death."

Neither of them came into the room, which was convenient since Kakashi had no reason and no excuse for being there.

Next time he saw Sasuke, there was no trace of the hospital on him. This was later, after Itachi had become a frequent coworker and had taken to sometimes bringing Kakashi home with him for breaks. Itachi's parents didn't mind: Kakashi had redeemed himself by then from the sin he inherited from his parents.

Sasuke, who followed Itachi and by extension Kakashi around like a persistent gnat, was an entirely different matter.

Kakashi wasn't old enough to find children cute, but Itachi clearly did. He carried Sasuke around, ruffled his hair and poked his face, let him cling and blabber away in a language Kakashi didn't understand.

He'd thought of Sasuke as shy but realised it might just be he didn't speak much English yet, his words stilted and stiff. Every now and then he'd address Kakashi-niisan, which Kakashi didn't know what it meant, but going by Itachi's reaction it was apparently funny and rather sweet. Sometimes, it even seemed to make Itachi jealous, which was definitely funny and rather sweet.

This was in the days when Itachi loved Sasuke, the sort of love that would never have allowed Orochimaru to lay a finger on him.

Well, Sasuke's not the first person to be failed by love.

Itachi spoilt him, protected him, to a degree, from the cold humiliation of abandonment. That sort of kindness was cruel, because it couldn't last, but then Sasuke was used to cruelty. Fugaku wouldn't touch him, not even in punishment. Mikoto, who did touch, looked through him.

"They are weak," Itachi said one evening, his face distant under bonfire shadows.

Kakashi had thought of them as strong, thought of them as warriors and leaders, but then he'd thought his own parents were strong too, before he knew better.

And so Sasuke was the way he was, shunned and spoilt and strange. Always top marks and with the snake eyes of killer instinct, but obviously he wasn't fit for the battlefield. Morino, or whoever it was, had been right: sent on adult missions, Sasuke would die.

It was a few weeks later, during the first summer he spent with the Uchihas, that Kakashi discovered that he was wrong. Sasuke wouldn't die, because Kakashi would protect him.

This revelation came to him on a day painted in the primary colours of childhood, with the sun hot on his hands and Sasuke's noises in his ears. Itachi was quiet, the trained quiet of a soldier, the quiet that filled Kakashi's life, and of which Sasuke was utterly incapable. He touched the boat railing too hard, walked across the planks too fast, breathed too loudly. He hung over the edge of the boat, reaching for the glitter of fish or perhaps just for the coldness of the water, hazy in sunlight so acute it left him almost a silhouette, branded his skin a sharp gold.

"Enough," Kakashi said, getting up on his knees to reach for Sasuke, pull him back safely into the boat. His fingers very just closing around the back of Sasuke's shirt when the world tipped over.

He was in the water then and not breathing. The world tipped over: who has tipped them, where's the danger, how will he kill it?

But there were only Itachi and Sasuke, Kakashi's sudden wings a white-golden haze bisecting Sasuke's face. It was a distinctly displeased face, but an entirely unharmed one. He scrunched up his nose and swatted at the wing.

Such trust in the world – in Itachi – Kakashi thought, with something altogether too numb to be surprise. To feel it break around you and be able to go with it.

Not actually very good at swimming, Sasuke looked to Itachi for rescue, but Itachi ignored him, busy righting the boat. Eventually, in gratitude for Itachi not mentioning his now retracted wings of paranoia, Kakashi fished him up. Stiff with humiliation and unfamiliarity, Sasuke nevertheless clung to him. Kakashi had hardly ever touched another person, not since his mother died, and never a child. Now there was this small, squirming, alien creature stuck to him, Sasuke's arm locking onto his shoulder, Sasuke's feet climbing his ribs, and yes, Kakashi would protect this.

He thought that, was certain of that. It wasn't the first time he was wrong.

Because it became clear that the world he'd built around himself was fragile, and in the end it broke around him like an egg shell under a hammer.

Sasuke was given over to Orochimaru, by Itachi, and so the Sasuke and the Itachi that Kakashi had known were gone, might as well have suddenly died from him.

Then Yui died, and so in essence did Minato: the Minato that Kakashi had loved. Everyone he'd ever tried to hold on to was gone.

There was Naruto instead, this little brat in screaming colour. He always carried a fox plushie, after Kakashi had finally resigned himself to the fact that Minato wouldn't handle things, and had given it to him: a way of pretending that Kyuubi having opinions was just pretence. Because it was Kakashi, suddenly, who was the adult, like in those first chilly days after his parents were gone. Kakashi deciding that Naruto couldn't be recognised as a shifter and be safe, Kakashi who had to find solutions, because Minato couldn't take care of his son and Kushina wouldn't. Naruto was down a mother and Sasuke was down a foot, and both of them were down a home: Naruto practically lived at Sakura's house, for a few weeks, before Tsunade stepped in.

Though usually when Kakashi saw Naruto, it was because Naruto was around Sasuke. Naruto had been relatively fond of the Uchihas once, explained at one point that he liked the smell of Mikoto – that "she has mum smell, Kyuubi thinks so too". Very early, that must have been, before Mikoto had ceased in any meaningful way to be Sasuke's mother, and Naruto had taken against her.

After that, after Orochimaru, they were mostly fighting, eyes bleeding red with actually insane hatred. For the first time it became clear that Sasuke hadn't been protected, not by Kakashi and not by anyone else, and he didn't need to be. Ferocious and crazy, breaking and burning and, after all, the host of an archangel, Sasuke wouldn't die.

The one time he was calm, during those first turbulent years, was when he understood that Kakashi knew. They were in one of those hellish corridors, linoleum and beige light, when Sasuke understood this, understood that Kakashi knew not only that he'd been entrusted into Orochimaru's care, but also about what Orochimaru did to him. Something, Kakashi still thinks although that may be conceit, something died in Sasuke then. His parents had taken parts of him, and Orochimaru decimated most of what was left. More died slowly, gradually, winked out like a light that's stood for a long time in a draft and finally goes out. Itachi refused to help him; Kakashi tried, once, took Sasuke by the hand and walked and walked, but where would they go? In the end he didn't fight it, he surrendered Sasuke to Kabuto when they were confronted.

Love had failed, his mother's favourite novel once told him. Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things.

Sasuke seemed to be of the same opinion. No, he said years later, I wasn't surprised. If Itachi had taken me, he would have kept me. But you're not Itachi. He sounded off-hand about it, sitting in Kakashi's desk chair pulling on his boots.

Itachi did, Kakashi pointed out in a lazy drawl, with something he told himself was just curiosity, hand you over.

Yes, Sasuke agreed, eyes on his own fingers, tying his laces. What is it he always says? And he looked up, with a sharp smirk like broken glass. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

I was hoping, Kakashi said, in a slow, sugary, sarcastic voice, that you'd say you know I would have never.

Sasuke had snorted at him, not particularly unfriendly, twisting the laces to make the boot close around the narrow metal of his left foot.

Really Sasuke was never a subtle child. It was when his foot was gone that he stopped trying to run.

But all of that was years ago. Finished with the slushie, Kakashi chucks it into the backseat, turning up the volume on the radio and humming along to whatever insipid song is playing.

Itachi glances at him out of the corner of his eye. Kakashi is broken differently now. Love has rent him.

Regrettable, but really no surprise, because human love, greedy and incomplete, will do that. One needs to love God.

Kakashi would tell him to piss off, if he voiced these concerns, which is too bad for Kakashi.

xxxxx

"Let's stop for a bit," Temari says.

"But –"

"Let me rephrase. We will stop. Among other things because nobody wants you to pee yourself."

Raidou snickers. The car stops.

Outside is a rainy afternoon, soft and grey as wet wool. They've arrived in one of those roadside villages that haven't quite become towns, the sort you can walk straight through in an hour.

"Let's go find lunch," Kiba says, matching Naruto's stretching. "I'm starving."

"Might as well," Naruto agrees.

It's a relief, to be out of the city more than to be out of the car. Sasuke too moves more freely, more carelessly.

Some of the guards stay with the car, the rest of them start walking. They're only two streets away when Sasuke stiffens. It's a remarkably different stiffness from the one he's displayed all morning, the haughty uncomfortable stiffness of a loner forced into company. This stiffness in contrast is anticipatory, predatory rather. "Demon."

The sudden adrenalin rush is contagious and giddy . "Where?"

Sasuke just starts walking again, quicker now, with purpose. He does toss a, "Leave the human" over his shoulder.

"No worries," Shikamaru mutters, letting the rest of them pass him by.

It's no more than a block before Naruto can feel it too, the faint wrongness like hints of a poison gas in the air. The feeling is sharper than it used to be, more certain: tinged with Sasuke's exorcist sensibilities. It's another block before the others visibly become aware of the threat, so yes, this is Sasuke's awareness, Sasuke's magic a purgatory burn across the inside of Naruto's face, leaving his skin tight and tingling.

There are, he thinks, no people. The demon must have been here a while, and this place must not be priority, must not have merited an exorcist. Whoever survived has fled or hidden.

Another street, picking up the pace, around the corner of a building, and yes, there. He sees it more clearly now, with Sasuke's mind tied to his, but it's still a hazy thing, still something that human eyes cannot translate into a comprehensible image.

It turns towards them immediately and with alacrity, must be able to scent Sasuke's magic.

Sasuke smirks at it, the smirk Naruto's thrilled to and wanted to beat off his face since they were five.

There is light then, divine grace held tangible in Sasuke's hands, coalescing into a blade between his fingers.

And Naruto is on the ground, kneeling like a sinner, and Naruto is on fire, burning like a sinner. The white light of God eats through him, turns to hellfire crackling under his skin.

"Run. Run!"

Sasuke pulling him up, Sasuke dragging and kicking him until he runs. The fire's gone, and so Naruto can stumble into a decent run, Kyuubi too wild and raw to really heal him yet.

They stop a few corners away, shocked panting faces all around. "Fuck," Sasuke says. "We need to go."

"We can't just leave everyone," Naruto points out. "It's just one demon, we can take it."

"It's not just one," Sasuke says, but it doesn't matter because the demon too turns the corner. Sensing Sasuke, presumably, sensing something holy to defile.

Naruto hangs back for a moment, trying to get his unaccountably ragged breathing under control. But everyone else is getting into position, and he slaps open one of the backpacks to extract a weapon.

Demons are incorporeal, utterly invulnerable to physical attack: what's needed is energy. Preferably exorcist magic, but high-tech human weapons and shifter magic can dispel them too.

There's a certain irony in Sasuke, crusader prodigy, hefting a DEW gun. Most of the shifters, the stronger ones, do better with their magic, keeping the guns for backup.

The demon roars. This is a soundless occurrence, but the shockwave smashes Raidou and Kiba into a wall, hard enough to break it. Naruto curses and forces energy into his hands, shaping it into something he can throw, something that explodes on impact and disintegrates part of the demon's blurry outline.

Temari slashes wind at it, energy winds that tear off chunks of demon, and Sasuke keeps firing, and Kiba's up again now, and this is working. This is happening. Someone throws a grenade into the demon, which lurches sideways into a house hopefully empty of survivors.

And something cuts through Naruto.

He's still and stupid with shock for a second, Kyuubi rushing senselessly and uselessly through him, searching for an injury that doesn't exist.

Sasuke, who stood untouched by the raw energy blasted by the demon, is hit by rubble. And physically Sasuke is so horrifically fragile, human fragile. It's easy to forget, between Sasuke's cocksure arsehole attitude and Sasuke's invulnerable magic, that this little thing – a hit any shifter child could shake off, that an adult shifter would hardly react to – registers on Sasuke as critical injury.

There's a terrible moment of shell shock fear before Kyuubi rushes across the bond, and Sasuke's fine, Sasuke's safe. Life goes on again, after that frozen moment of maybe.

He turns with renewed energy to the demon, which is hardly half its previous mass. They've got this.

Hardly a minute later they're grinning all around at each other, sharp and victorious and relieved. Only Sasuke remains stiff, antsy even in stillness. He blinks through the blood dripping down his face. "Incoming."

"Holy fuck."

Three demons, four, five, and that is too many. That is desperately too many.

"Che," Sasuke hisses. There's that light again, a sharp sudden slash of holiness. It snaps through one of the demons, and the demon disintegrates instantly.

It also snaps through Naruto, who is flayed on the inside. There's dust in his eyes, blood in his mouth: he's on his face, has fallen utterly helpless, smashed headfirst into the ground. Brought low so easily, by their one effective weapon.

Someone – not Sasuke – pulls him up, supports him. "Fuck you, Uchiha! You can't do that!"

Naruto tries to speak, to say Sasuke has to do this, the alternative is coming closer fast and is a devouring demon, but his mouth just snaps soundlessly.

"Carry him," Sasuke says, bending for another grenade. "We need to move."

There is, Naruto discovers while hanging limp over someone's shoulder, nowhere to run. No safe haven appears, and the demons are closing in.

They stutter and stumble into a broken building, and Naruto's world grows steadier. It stills moves in starts and stops, sudden whiteouts, but the colours are beginning to resolve into recognisable patterns.

Not all of them, Naruto blearily realises, have made it here. People are missing.

Love is a terrible thing, because it makes that all right: people are gone, but the person, his person, the person that matters, is here.

Is turning impatiently from Temari and an apparent strategy conference, and towards Naruto. Temari takes a swift step after him, and Kiba crowds them, but Sasuke has never been a team player, never hade any patience at all for other people. Has always has the power to deny them, negate them with the force of his disregard.

"Do it," Naruto grounds out. There aren't enough people left to reliably make it out, not with Naruto out of commission. "I can handle it."

Protests, Temari sneering that she'll knock Sasuke unconscious if he tries, but what matters are Sasuke's eyes, certain and furious. "No."

"Sasuke – "

"No!" Sasuke snaps. "I will not be stolen from again."

"Fuck," Kiba grumbles, dragging Naruto out of the way as the wall crumbles under the demons' assault. "Hurry!"

Back out on the streets, mist and stillness and energy ripping through it, the darkness hunting them. It grows cold inside his bones, makes them heavy and alien as rusted metal when he tries to move on his own.

And then.

Light, softer and warmer than Sasuke's icy purity but of the same heavenly ilk. It burns against his closed eyelids for a long moment before he can open his eyes again, squint at the golden silhouette of a winged girl dancing through the air and incidentally through the demons.

He's standing on his own, though leaning heavily on the remains of the wall, tension cut so abruptly he's ready to fall again, when she lands. The lightning whip becomes a lance and then disintegrates; the white-golden aura fades until there's Ino Yamanaka's vaguely familiar and vaguely supercilious face scowling at them. "What are you idiots doing here? Sasuke! Oh my god, what are you doing here?"

It's always been so obvious, how the rest of them cease to exist as soon as another exorcist is spotted. You don't talk to a dog when you can speak to its owner.

Sasuke grunts something at her, rubbing the drying blood from his eye.

"Oh my god," Ino says again, stepping closer but then stopping, not entering shifter lines. "You're hurt!"

"I'm fine," Sasuke says, surly and possibly insulted. "Why are you here?"

Ino makes an airy gesture. "I was sent out to clean up some of the nearby towns." She shrugs. "I mean, they're nothing big, but they bought their indulgences so…voila, here I am. Then I felt them gathering here. They must have reacted to you." The play of expressions over her face, animated and bright, grounds to a slow, uncertain halt. "Sasuke. What are you doing here? I mean, I mean – I heard, um."

"We're just passing by," Temari says. "It's not exorcist business."

"You know you can't go around infested areas on your own," Ino tells her, and it's not snide, not really. All the more condescending for it, that Ino's even speaking with a sort of weary, impatient concern, as though to a foolish child she doesn't much like but has been charged to look after. "If you absolutely have to go, you need to bring an exorcist."

"We did," Kiba snaps.

Now would be a great time for Naruto's throat to start working, to push out words instead of helpless little gasps of air that still taste raw and bloody, taste of burnt innards.

Ino blinks, all lashes and avoidance. Her voice comes very tentative, but it comes. "Sasuke…why didn't you…?"

Perhaps, Ino's face suggests, she has spoilt Sasuke's escape plan: the plan to let the demons slaughter the rest of them, so Sasuke could go home after he'd exorcised them.

It might have worked, too, if that had really been Sasuke's plan.

Sasuke shrugs. Kiba, guiltily, looks towards Naruto. Sasuke speaks up before he can blurt anything. "Bond fucked with the seal."

"Oh," Ino says. "Do you want to… I mean. Are you coming with me?"

Naruto feels Kyuubi's agitation as a sudden acute tension, his muscles spasming. But he knows, really.

Sasuke says, "No."

"Oh," Ino says.

Sasuke looks at her for really the first time, with no particular emotion. "Nobody expects you to force me. Just be on your way."

"Maybe you wanna say hi to Shikamaru first," Naruto suggests, lurching forward, keeping himself upright by moving. Just two steps, three, and he's next to Sasuke. Feels immediately steadier, comforted, Sasuke's warmth and Sasuke's smell.

"You brought Shikamaru here? You irresponsible arsehole! Of course I want to see him!"

"He brought himself," Temari says dryly, but she doesn't protest Ino joining the group. Naruto keeps to the back of it, focussed on expediting Kyuubi's healing, and Sasuke stays with him.

For a moment it makes him furious.

Terrible indeed is love. It has brought him so low. Sasuke hates him, and Sasuke's magic, the holy calling that Sasuke lives for, burns Naruto like purgatory flames. They're walking past dead guards, dead people he knows and couldn't protect, and he's so weak, so fucked up, that when he bends to close their eyes – what little is left of their eyes – he falls and scrapes up his knees. All this, and yet what he's truly aware of is Sasuke's presence, and Sasuke being here makes everything bearable, and it pisses him off so much he wants to cry.

Sasuke, he understands, could do anything. Naruto will still love him, still need him to live. Will have to forgive him, to be able to go on, because this is the big love, the terrible love, which can't be altered by Sasuke doing unforgivable things.

If Sasuke murdered everyone in the world that Naruto has ever cared for, Naruto would still love him.

"You're going to hyperventilate," Sasuke says.

"Go to hell."

"I won't carry you."

"Go to hell," Naruto says again, ragged now and raging, his voice thick, with blood or tears he can't tell. "I wasn't expecting you to, I don't need you to!"

Love makes you strong, they say.

That's not true, not really.

Hatred has never mastered him like this. Hatred could never make him cry and beg or hit and demand, could never make him do the unforgivable or overlook the unforgiveable.

"Fuck you," Sasuke says, and turns his back.

I will not crawl after you, Naruto tells himself, but his legs wobble and he half falls and for a terrible forty centimetres he does.