This is impossible.
Haku has fought difficult odds before, gone up against stronger ninja than he and still come out on top. But this, this chakra, this boy, is unlike anything he's ever seen– the paralytic in Haku's senbon should have left the boy helpless for more than a day, but he's standing as if there were no poison at all, as if the red lotus toxin Haku had slathered across his senbon couldn't stop a charging bull elephant in it's tracks.
Where the hell is all that chakra coming from?
A shining amber shroud of it drapes and curls around the boy's shoulders like a cloak, twisting in rings and spirals down his limbs. It's visible, impossibly visible, glimmering like blood stirred with molten gold. It radiates an angry potent pressure on the air itself, pressing in on Haku's lungs and making it hard for him to draw a deep breath. Dread and primal fear pulse deep in his gut, and only years and years of conditioning keep him from succumbing to the desire to freeze or flee.
Haku isn't stupid. He'd seen the power the dark haired boy had pulled from seemingly nowhere at all, sees now the dark determination that pulses through the golden-haired boy's sharp and animal eyes. He knows this kind of strength, the kind you drag from the deepest darkest parts of you to protect what is yours. These boys are precious to each other, it's painfully obvious now, and Haku had not counted on that, had not counted on the lengths they would go to protect each other, on the extent of their buried strength.
He had not anticipated what monsters they would release to defend their precious people.
Against this overwhelming power, against the uncaged animal in this strange boy, his shallow-sea eyes now dyed a gilded ruby; Haku knows his chances are slim. The chakra in the air alone tells him that.
But they're not the only ones who have something to protect.
If he fails here, Zabuza will be overwhelmed, and he can never let that happen. He will not let his teacher die.
He dips his hand into the pouch at his hip, taking hold of the last of the pills resting there. He almost hadn't brought them, hadn't thought it necessary against Genin, but now it's obvious that these Konoha-nin are far more than mere Genin, and without them Haku would have lost this fight already.
He pops the artificial chakra pills into his mouth, all four of them at once, and swallows hard.
Naruto hasn't used Kurama's chakra uncorrupted since before his mad rush to Uzushio, back before he'd shifted the seal and meshed their energies together in order to save him. Since then, most of Naruto's chakra interaction with Kurama has been channeling his own to the bijuu to help him recover from the massive deficit the corruption had left him with. His friends aren't stupid– any more and he would have exposed himself.
This is not what he remembers.
Before, it had been a burning rush through chakra vessels half empty, the pull of ancient and wild chakra tearing through his system in familiar torrents.
Now, instead of burning through his chakra vessels like acid through blood, it saturates his every cell, the burn radiating through him until that's all he feels– the intense and feral energy twisting through his own chakra in sync. Instead of drawing from bijuu's power like pulling the plunger on a syringe, he feels Kurama rise up through him, using his body as a medium to bring his chakra to the surface. His fury is Kurama's fury; their anger and their strength are one and the same.
~We need to make this quick, Kit.~ Kurama warns, his consciousness so close to Naruto's that he feels the words more than he hears them, Kurama's voice almost indistinguishable from his own thoughts. ~The little Uchiha's heart is still beating, but given the strength of the poison, it might not stay that way for long.~
"Sakura. She has a cleansing serum in her pack. He won't die, not a chance."
Naruto feels Kurama's animal grin, all fangs and no humor. ~No need to hold back then.~
The entire exchange takes place in less than a second, a flow of thoughts so fast it's over with in the space between his breaths. He looks to the mirrors, to the plethora or reflections of Haku's form in their depths. Only one of them is real, and if he want's to break up this jutsu, it's the original he needs to tear apart.
His eyes will only hinder him here, so he slips them shut, gives himself over to the strange sixth sense Kurama's energy allows him, and feels instead.
The chakra pulses around him, interlocked and uniform; the mirrors are identical, carbon copies of each other. Naruto rolls his muscles from shoulders to fingertips, lets the animal override the human being, and waits.
Sure enough Haku makes the first move– he hears the whistle of senbon fly through the air from four different sources, and raises an arm.
No hand sign needed, Naruto slashes a clawed hand through the air and chakra follows, racing along in its wake to create a whirlwind strong enough to make the mirrors groan. The senbon scatter as their momentum is inverted, clattering to the ground gracelessly or embedding themselves in the ice of the mirrors.
A rush, a charge, a flash of presence, and Haku is fast but with Kurama's chakra searing through him Naruto is faster still, and when Naruto spins, hand wide and claws spread, he makes contact.
Naruto's strike hits Haku in the lower chest, right under his sternum, claws digging five bloody points into flesh even through layers of cloth and body armor. The Kiri-nin reels back towards his mirrors with the force of the blow, but Naruto follows after almost as soon as he's finished the strike, leaping to run him down before the missing-nin can get his breath back.
To Haku's credit, he rights himself fast.
But not fast enough.
In the soupy grey mist created by Zabuza's signature jutsu, Kakashi lets his senses stretch, listening for any tiny sound in the fog that will give the swordsman's presence away.
"You doing alright, Sakura?"
A snort sounds from somewhere in the soup behind him. "I got this. Go kick his ass, sensei."
Kakashi can't help the huff of laughter that escapes him. He's not sure what he expected her to say, but who is he to turn down good advice?
So he straightens, dips a hand into his pouch to ready a string of shuriken, and dives into the mist.
Zabuza is a sneaky bastard, he'll give him that, but Kakashi has more than one trick up his sleeve when it comes to a hunt. Besides he prides himself on being the sneakiest bastard around. He's not about to let a washed up Shichinintai steal his title.
But he's stalled mid step by a ringing in the air, the roar of a chakra signature that even now, after all these years, makes his stomach drop through his sandals. It's been more than twelve years since Kakashi last felt the angry ancient power of the Nine-Tailed Fox, but it's radiation in the air is unmistakable– nothing else could be this potent, this dense.
His stomach instantly rebounds, hurtling from his feet all the way up into his throat.
Naruto.
Purpose momentarily forgotten, Kakashi takes an instinctive step in the wrong direction, towards the release of chakra, ready to abandon Zabuza to go to his Genin's aid and leave the bridge builder to his fate. But he stops again when the energy hits him full on, and forces himself to rein in his first instinct to rush to Naruto's defense.
He remembers that night as if it were a day ago instead of a decade; the lash of chakra had lit the night sky a bloody red, fury had permeated the air like deep-sea pressure, and the hate in the atmosphere has been so sharp and thick it choked.
This power is the Fox's, no doubt about it, but it's not the same as it was in Kakashi's memory, and his memory is flawless. All the jagged edges have been smoothed out, it flows instead of rages, and the emotion that rings in the air, while furious and intense, is not hate.
The Nine-Tailed Fox in Kakashi's memory had been nothing but hate.
This power is just as potent, but it's curled tight, controlled somehow, not the unstoppable tide it would be had the seal been stretched or broken. Whatever this is, whatever strength of the Kyuubi's that has come unleashed, Naruto is in command of it.
Pulling his mind back to the fight at hand, Kakashi pulls a well-loved scroll from his belt. He hadn't planned on using his trump card so soon, but if things are this bad, he needs to move up his timetable. Tucking the scroll into the fold of his vest for quicker access, Kakashi flicks his fingers into a sequence of hand signs.
"Katon: Lotus Pyre."
Haunting blue light bursts to life and scatters, casting dancing shadows into the smoky darkness created by the mist jutsu. The cast shadows twirl and spin like playing children dancing to the tune of an unheard nursery rhyme, half ninjutsu, half genjutsu. Kakashi watches through the ashy fog, searching for the shadow out of place amongst its fellows.
A low chuckle resonates around him. "Very clever, Hatake." Zabuza mocks, voice echoing in the cover of the ashy fog. "That's a Kumo scout special, if I remember right. Do you even have a single technique you can call your own?"
"Not many, no." Kakashi remarks cheerily, deliberately raising his voice, and dives to the side when Zabuza flashes forward from behind him, spinning his sword down hard. Kakashi uses his momentum to swing sideways, slipping his fingers through curled strands of ninja wire, and arcs his rigged shuriken net wide like a deadly spider's web. It wraps around Zabuza's non-dominant arm, pulling tight and cutting deep lacerations from wrist to bicep.
Zabuza snarls, heaving his sword from the valley it had cleaved in the earth. But Kakashi twists to unravel the wires before Zabuza can fully slice through them, pulling a few of the bloodied shuriken back to him as he leaps into the cover of the mist again. That much scent is plenty.
Kakashi's hounds have tracked on less.
How anti-climactic. Haku can't help but think to himself. A monster indeed.
The golden haired boy had kept his word.
A shame that Haku hadn't managed to keep his own.
Zabuza will die now, because he was weak. Useless. Pointless.
A clawed hand curls around Haku's throat, talon-like fingernails only centimeters from digging into his veins and ending his life. Haku can't bring himself to care; he's dead already, dead to Zabuza, and dead to himself as well by default. So he closes his eyes and waits for this golden-haired amber-eyed animal to tear out his throat.
He doesn't.
For a long moment Haku doesn't open his eyes, doesn't dare to breathe. But then something shifts around his neck, and Haku's flutters his eyelids up reflexively.
The eyes looking back at him are blue now, the same shallow-sea tone that Haku had seen before his change. This isn't the monster, this is the human being; the amber hue still lurks around the edges of his irises, but it's held at bay by pure, powerful cobalt.
"Why?" the boy asks, eyes bizarrely curious.
"What?" Haku chokes. There's blood welling in the back of his throat from where he's bitten his tongue, but he gets the word out, of only barely.
"You want me to kill you now." The Genin accuses. "Why?"
Haku snorts at the question. "I am of no use to Zabuza now. Broken tools should be discarded." he rasps.
The words draw a reflexive tension to the muscles of the boy's arm and confused anger flits across his young face. For a second Haku is sure he's about to do it, about to kill him for his response, but how the boy reacts is unfathomable.
He lets go.
The golden-haired Genin releases him and draws back, rising to his feet in a single fluid movement to glare down at him.
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." The boy says frankly, remorselessly and with conviction.
It startles a mad laugh out of Haku that cuts off into a choking splutter. He turns, tips his head to the side and spits dark blood across the grey stone. "What would you know about it?"
"I'm not sure about this whole tool bullshit," The boy growls, "But that Zabuza guy is precious to you, isn't he?"
Haku freezes. He doesn't ask how the boy knows that, because he can't know– it's something Zabuza himself isn't really aware of, something Haku has kept close to his chest all his life as not to let his attachment appear as weakness. But there's no point in trying to hide it now, he supposes, not when this golden-haired boy so obviously does know, somehow.
"What of it?" he asks.
"If he's precious to you, who the fuck cares about useful? If you love something, protect it. Period. End of story. This whole tool and monster nonsense you're spouting sounds a hell of a lot like an excuse."
Haku's eyes widen and snap up to the boy, but the golden-haired Genin is already turning away from him.
Haku tries to sit up, coughing as the blood goes the wrong way down his throat. He has broken ribs, at least four, but he pushes through the pain anyways, because the brat can't just say that, can't drop words like that down Haku's throat and walk away.
"What? Where the hell are you going?" Haku coughs, struggling to sit upright.
"Screw you." the boy snaps over his shoulder. "I have more important things to protect than your messed up sense of honor. And you know what? So do you."
And just like that he's gone, at his friend's side in an instant, leaving Haku sitting on the hewn stone reeling over those last three words.
So do you.
Tazuna startles from behind Sakura when the jutsu mirrors shatter, practically leaping into the air. "What the hell was that?"
"Shut up." Sakura snaps at him. "I need to hear."
Foreboding crawls around in her chest like a restless nest of hornets, worry making her temper sting-sharp as she closes her eyes and attempts to discern what's going on through sound and sense alone. She may not have Naruto's gift for chakra sensing but she knows her idiots; she has the chakra compositions and signatures of her teammates memorized down to the molecule by now, and could pick them out of any crowd no matter how much stupid water chakra is hanging around in the air like smog.
Tazuna is still jumping at shadows, even though Sakura has told him multiple times not to worry about Zabuza– Kakashi-sensei can more than handle the Kiri-nin with compensation issues. Even if Zabuza does try the same tactic he had on the path and attempts to attack her and Tazuna from under Kakashi's nose– which Sakura doubts, Zabuza strikes her as many things, but stupid isn't one of them– Sakura will see him coming long before Tazuna could hope to.
Sakura isn't scared, not remotely. She is, however, pissed. The next time someone suggests she take civilian babysitting duty, she'll punch them in the throat.
She straightens when she senses movement nearby, but relaxes again immediately when she registers it's Naruto. The mist parts around him strangely, clearing away like morning fog burnt off by rising sunlight. His chakra is behaving oddly, Sakura can see that now that he's close, and there's another signature wound in with it that Sakura doesn't recognize.
To her relief he looks relatively unharmed, though his overshirt is gone and parts of his shinobi pants are burned and scuffed in places. Her relief is short lived however, because she spots Sasuke unconscious on Naruto's back, and her mind starts whirling into diagnostic mode.
"What happened?" she demands.
"Paralytic poison." Naruto says immediately, dropping down to a crouch to lay Sasuke between them.
Sakura makes a mental note to buy Ikari-sensei a new coffee machine with the money from this mission as she digs into her pack for one of the vials he had given her, a cleansing serum he'd developed from the secretions of some of the Aburame clan's insects, and an extremely potent antitoxin.
"Sit him up and expose his arm." She commands as she preps an emergency syringe with careful practiced hands. Naruto obeys without a word, expression disarmingly solemn. Naruto leans Sasuke up against his chest with an arm looped beneath his shoulders and pulls his sleeve up, uncoiling the limb wrap from his wrist so that Sakura can work unhindered.
"Stupid jerks, the both of you." Sakura mutters under her breath as she presses the end of the needle slowly into Sasuke's arm. "Taking on stupid missing-nin by your stupid selves, leaving me to watch the stupid civilian while you go off to be morons."
Tazuna opens his mouth like he wants to be offended by that, but then he seems to remember that she can lift his body weight with her pinky finger and shuts his mouth again.
She's tucking the syringe away when the sound of the clash between the two jounin in the mist meets an unseen climax; in a rush of cold wind the mist around them is dispersed, along with the phantom fires that had been dancing in it's depths. Before them their teacher and Zabuza become visible again through the dissipating gloom, and it's pretty clear which one of them turned out to be top dog.
No pun intended.
Zabuza is pinned down by the collective teeth and claws of eight ninja dogs, ranging in size from loaf-of-bread to full-grown-man.
"You're right, Zabuza." Kakashi-sensei is saying. "I don't have many jutsu of my own making, and really only one I ever use. But since you asked and all, it would be rude of me not to show it to you."
Kakashi-sensei shifts, a dangerous sway as he lifts his left hand high.
Suddenly the air is filled by the eerie hum of what sounds like thousands of chirping finches. Light, blindingly white, streams and cracks from Kakashi's fingers like he's clutching an angry star, energy flitting out between his knuckles as the atmosphere begins to crackle like the inside of a thundercloud.
Zabuza's eyes widen and he attempts to struggle harder, but the hard clamp of the jaws around his extremities and shoulders keeps him almost entirely immobile as Kakashi readies for the killing blow.
The feel of Kakashi's Chidori in his hand is an unwelcome familiarity. It's resonance with his body and chakra is a grim one, a preparation for loss, for pain. The technique has only ever had one purpose, and to this day it has performed that purpose flawlessly.
To kill. To end a life.
He doesn't have to worry about hitting his dogs, he never does– they can sense the electricity in their fur and know exactly when to drop.
They do, but as his ninken pull away from Zabuza a second, faster presence jumps forward, and Momochi's apprentice, the dark-haired, pale-skinned Haku, materializes between them.
The shift of emotions across Zabuza's face happens so fast that if Kakashi's sharingan hadn't been trained on him so closely, he'd have missed it entirely. The man's expression shifts very briefly to confusion and then jumps head-first right into blind instinctive panic– the kind that registers so fast there's no way to conceal it, the kind that comes from the overwhelming dread that you are about to lose something close to you.
Kakashi is very familiar with that dread, and when Zabuza moves his wounded arm as if to shove Haku aside, he recognizes the protective instinct for what it is. Kakashi too, upon seeing his own desire to protect reflected back at him through Zabuza's eyes, acts on instinct.
He pulls his weight to the side last moment so that instead of driving his hand through Haku's chest, it goes right through the flesh of Zabuza's left shoulder.