Chapter 14
Chapter Summary
"And is it worth the wait,
All this killing time?
Are you strong enough to stand,
Protecting both your heart and mine?
Who is the betrayer?
Who's the killer in the crowd?
The one who creeps in corridors,
And doesn't make a sound." - Heavy In Your Arms, Florence The Machine
There are lines all around her.
Every line is an event, and there are thousands, with one single line at the epicenter of it all.
Kannabi Bridge.
Sakura's perched in a tree, carefully camouflaged and just barely inside the range of her seals. She can still feel three seals pulsating in the distance dead ahead of her, and one is so far she can barely feel it.
Minato, gone to reinforce the front lines to the north-east of them.
Sakura leans back against the tree trunk, arms folded across her chest, and she's the perfect picture of comfortably at peace.
But she isn't remotely close to peaceful. Her mind is spinning viciously, overwhelming and anxious at the flow of her thoughts.
So many lines. So many events, all surrounding this event now. If she changes this one event, the entire web falls apart - and she lived an entire life on that web.
Everything stands here and now.
And she has no idea what to do.
Sakura closes her eyes, taking slow, carefully regulated breaths. If she weren't, she'd be hyperventilating.
Before, it had been easy to get lost in the new world. Everything had been unrecognizable and strange - but this was too recognizable, and it's suddenly striking her how woefully unprepared she is to face it.
What do I do? Sakura wonders, opening her eyes and looking out at the forest anxiously. There's nothing around her, of course. She's miles inside Konoha's territory, and extremely well hidden besides. Even if Iwa was to venture far enough in to see her, the chances of spotting her were very, very low.
So long as she doesn't move.
What do I do? Sakura's mind returns to the main problem and her breath catches slightly. She's running out of time to make a decision, and there's too many options and consequences laid out before her.
She needs to save Obito. But save him when? Save him how? If she doesn't save him now, how will she find him again? If she does save him now, how will she find Madara and Black Zetsu? If she saves him now, who will take his place as Madara's slave? Who will take Rin's place as a sacrifice for Madara's cause? If she saves him now…
But what if she doesn't.
What if she doesn't save him now, but instead later?
"I've never been able to walk the straight path… but this time, I think I'm doing the right thing." Obito had told her when she held Naruto's heart in her fist, keeping it beating after what the man had done to him.
He'd saved him.
He'd given his life in save them all, in the end.
And Sakura's sitting there debating whether or not to save him in return.
She narrows her eyes, lip pulling back in a disdainful sneer at her own self.
How could I even be struggling about this?
She can practically hear Naruto's disappointed lecture.
I can't let him down, Sakura thinks wryly. Not in this life, or my last.
With that thought, she shoves to her feet, shaking off the jutsu that had camouflaged her against the tree bark, and jumps.
She hits the ground carefully, landing on the balls of her feet, and springs back up and runs.
The flaring of one of her seals tells her she won't quite make it in time.
By the time Sakura flings herself full-speed into the valley, two teammates are in a hole in the ground, and Kakashi's crouched over a dead body and looking inside the hole.
The rock-jutsu hill they're occupying is surrounded by Iwa shinobi.
Sakura asks no questions and doesn't so much as slow down.
Instead she charges straight for the first shinobi she sees and smashes his face in so hard there's little left of his skull when he drops. With her other hand she swings her sword, cutting into the next person, and then swings it up to swipe a kunai away from her face. "Get out of here, Kakashi!" Sakura shouts before she leaps up and kicks another shinobi in the throat.
With the strength Tsunade had taught her, even out of practice with it as she is, the man's dead before he hits the ground, and the blood spray is frankly fantastic.
She twists between two more shinobi, springing out of the way of an earth jutsu, and stuffs the two shinobi right in it's way instead.
The spear of earth goes through the head of one and the chest of the other.
Sakura spins away from another kunai, sheathing her sword as she does, and then goes for pure taijutsu.
She sees Kakashi on the other side of the field, pulling Rin away by her wrist, and the girl's mouth is open to shout something, but Sakura can't hear it over the fighting. She ignores it, focusing instead of keeping the shinobi thoroughly distracted.
It takes ten minutes for her to kill them all. By the time she's done, she has more injuries than there are bodies around her, but few of them pose any danger. One man had gotten in a good slash to her side, dangerously close to her lung, but that was the only one that she was really concerned about.
Sakura scans the area, bent over a bit and catching her breath, before she starts to limp her way over the jutsu-created cave in the unnaturally raised earth. She would heal herself, but she's not sure how much chakra she's going to need for-...
Sakura blinks, peering into the cave, and then blinks again.
"...Obito?" She questions.
There's no response. There's no Obito.
There's a number of giant boulders, an alarming amount of blood on the ground under one in particular, but there's no body there to provide the blood.
"Obito?" Sakura asks again, utterly confused.
How could he have possibly…
….No, that's not possible. Sakura's brow furrows and she jumps down into the small space, tucking a hand under the boulder as far as possible. It's wet with fresh, cooled blood. With a burst of chakra, she swings her arm up and sends the boulder flying out the hole and landing with a crash in the distance.
She thinks she hears a tree fall over, too.
There's more blood under the boulder. A lot more.
Arterial, she thinks immediately, narrowing her eyes at the blood spray arching out from under where the boulder had directly touched the ground. The curve had allowed blood to spread further out after a certain point, and she follows it to another boulder.
This one, she punches so hard it turns to dust.
One horrible coughing fit and a bit of regret later, the air clears enough for Sakura to find the answer to one of her questions.
Where Obito had gone, though not how.
There's a tunnel before her now, previously hidden by the boulder - and Obito had somehow passed between two massive rocks and landed himself in the tunnel. What the hell? Sakura wonders, gaze darting warily into the dark tunnel. There's very little lighting at all, and only part of Obito is even visible to her eyes with the lighting so poor. She creeps towards him, one hand going to her katana, but when she reaches him, nothing has jumped out to attack her.
What the fuck is this? Sakura wonders, looking between Obito - who shouldn't have been able to be where he is now - and the tunnel - which is clearly jutsu-carved and eerily pitch black.
She hesitates for a long, long minute before she slowly crouches down at Obito's side and sets a hand to his left shoulder.
Her other hand rises from the hilt of her sword, making a sign in front of her face. Yin Seal: Release. Strength of a Hundred.
Thick black lines shoot across her body, down her arms and hands and into Obito's own skin. The lines cover them both, head to toe, and Sakura grimaces at the immediate chakra drain.
She lowers her free hand back down, this time to examine Obito's wounds, and her grimace darkens.
Even the Strength of a Hundred might not be enough to save his arm. It's been mashed into something more akin to jelly than flesh and bone - and the Strength of a Hundred, while the most powerful healing jutsu out there, couldn't regenerate bone.
His arm might as well be severed, for the state that it's in.
Oh, Obito, Sakura sighs softly, looking down at the boy.
In the faint light of her chakra, he looks so innocent compared to the Obito she remembers in her nightmares.
Kakashi's prepared to stare down death when the red-haired woman had sprung unexpectedly into the fray. Drawn by the seal on Obito's arm, he has to guess, but he doesn't have long to think about that.
The woman takes out two shinobi in the blink of his eyes (Obito's eye) and turns to him with an expression so fierce he flinches a bit at the sight of it. "Get out of here, Kakashi!" She shouts, snapping him out of his frozen state.
He twists around, leaning down to shove a hand into the hole of the cave. "Rin! Take my hand!" He says urgently, the girl looking up at him with a conflicted, tearful expression.
"Go." Obito whispers, and the weakness of his voice only makes Kakashi's eye throb fiercer.
He sounds like he's already drifting away from them.
"Rin!" Kakashi urges when the girl still doesn't move. He hears screams behind him, flesh against flesh and jutsu's being shouted in desperate tones. The distraction is working, but it might not for long. "Hurry!" He pleads, and finally, Rin shakes her head. Tears fling from her face, but then she looks up at him with determination and takes his hand.
"Goodbye, Obito." Rin says shakily.
"Bye… Rin… Kakashi." Obito whispers back, faintly enough that Kakashi almost doesn't understand the words.
He pulls Rin up out of the hole. There're two shinobi pierced by a rock jutsu of their own, bodies propped up hideously not far from them. Rin makes a noise at the mangled corpses but Kakashi ignores them, dragging her with him and rushing away from the battle. The Uzu Clan Head has the Iwa shinobi focused on their side of the battlefield, freeing the path to…
To Kannabi Bridge, Kakashi realizes after a moment.
Not to Konoha, to safety, but to the heart of their mission.
The message is clear to him, leaving him feeling a bit shaky inside.
They've got a mission to complete, even without Obito there. Even without Minato-sensei, or the Uzumaki woman. Rin's breath hitches on a quiet sob as they run and the sound makes his heart clench even worse. His eye throbs. A few tears escape it, making the raw skin burn furiously, and they roll down his cheek against his will.
He blinks hard.
He takes a deep breath, squeezes Rin's hand, and heads for Kannabi.
They have a mission to do, with or without the rest of their team.
The tunnel is unnatural.
She knows it is. It screams it at her every sense, making her skin crawl and her mind race and her breath hitch every time she lets herself think about it.
She tries to ignore it the best she can, focusing on trying to repair Obito's arm as best as possible. It's a lost cause, though, she's beginning to suspect - and the longer she tries, the more evident the tunnel's strangeness becomes to her.
She feels like she's being watched.
It's not until she cancels the Strength of a Hundred that she realizes she actually is.
She gives up on the arm and she cancels the seal, ready to amputate instead, but she doesn't see the ill-lit shadow rising from behind her. She doesn't hear the creature peeling slowly out from the wall.
She doesn't realize the truth of it until a blow to the back of the head sends stars bursting in her vision.
She falters for a moment, falling forward and catching herself on one hand - but a second blow has her crumpling into the bloodied dirt.
White hovers over her, distorted by her unfocused vision, but even without a clear look, understanding dawns.
White Zetsu.