When Sakura skids to a stop beside Kakashi, they're about a mile away from the arena, and Kakashi has since gained a deep open laceration on his upper arm, as if a whip of Gaara's sand had caught him in the few minutes they were apart.
"Okay, we got him away from the crowds." Kakashi calls, swapping places with a branch to get out of the way of a curl of sand that would've crushed his ankle, and Sakura spits a water bullet at a tendril aiming to take out her liver. "What now?"
"Not gonna lie, didn't really plan that far ahead!" Sakura replies, dropping to her knees and calling forth more roots, but Shukaku seems to have realised she was responsible for the restriction before and multiple sand tendrils shoot out to get her off her knees and moving, making her unable to concentrate enough to direct the roots to restrain the jinchuuriki.
"Fantastic, that makes two of us." Kakashi quips, rolling out of the way of a wall of sand that would have likely broken every bone in his body and then some. "If you have any genius ideas for how to keep a jinchuuriki from fully transforming, now is the time, kouhai!"
"I have so-ome-!" Sakura yelps, not enjoying this high-stakes game of tag she's playing with pre-Naruto, half-transformed Gaara.
She knows that the moment either of them gets seriously hit, they're going to be out for the count, but she vaguely remembers Gaara needing to be unconscious for Shukaku to fully transform, so, in theory-
"I'm gonna need you to keep him busy, though!" she tells Kakashi, who snorts but obligingly throws a Fire jutsu at Gaara. The jinchuuriki roars and runs straight into the lightning bolt Kakashi sends at him immediately afterwards, though Sakura knows better than to hope it will keep him down.
Then, the sand around them comes together to form a wall, curling up behind Kakashi before it turns into a tidal wave of destructive intent, sweeping him off his feet and throwing him like a ragdoll into a nearby tree. Sakura has a moment where her heart stops in her chest as Kakashi crashes full-force into the tree, then sags with relief when ragdoll-Kakashi turns to smoke and the man himself comes dropping from the top of a nearby tree, Chidori chirping ominously in his hand.
Sakura seizes her moment.
She slaps her hands to the ground when Gaara focuses fully on Kakashi and calls on the roots of the trees around them. She knows Yamato had been able to restrain Naruto when the latter had manifested up to four tails, but she remembers Yamato using hand-seals and calling out jutsu names. Her Mokuton is just pure nature transformation and distilled intent – she doesn't know the jutsu Yamato had used, but she has to do something lest Kakashi gets turned into paste.
The roots wrap around Gaara, restraining his sand claw until he pulls and rips them off, attention snapping back to her, but Kakashi flips his strategy and uses that moment to throw water on Gaara's half-formed sand dome, seemingly having given up on turning him into a bauble again.
Following suit, Sakura redoubles her effort to limit Gaara's movement as much as possible, and, when she's got all the sand limbs as contained as she can get them, she darts forward before she can think better of it and gets as close as she can to Gaara's body, her focus intent on his forehead.
She can see the tag he's stuck to his forehead, can see his shadowed, purpled eyes closed, but the relaxation she'd expect from such deep sleep is nowhere to be found on Gaara's face. Still, she twists between the root-wrapped sand and reaches towards his forehead with her right hand, her fingers brushing the seal-
-and then everything goes wrong.
She'd forgotten, in the desperate need to restrain Shukaku's half-formed limbs, that Gaara's sand-dome was an unconscious protection.
No sooner do her fingers brush the seal paper on Gaara's forehead does a spike of sand pierce through her left shoulder, going all the way through the meat of her back muscles, the spike missing her heart by scant inches. Another tendril wraps around her right wrist and wrenches, crushing the bone, and she screams, the dual pain immediate and all-consuming and her vision whites out for a heart-stopping moment.
"Kouhai!" there are hands on her shoulders, wrenching her away from the sand dome, ripping the sand-spike from her body in a spray of blood, and Sakura can't fully stifle the sob that escapes her. Kakashi's breath stutters as he holds her, and a moment later he throws her back towards the treeline, the motion far jerkier and uncoordinated than Sakura would usually expect from him. She crashes into a tree trunk back-first and bites back another scream as she fights for the presence of mind to look for Kakashi. She felt rather than saw him substitute himself after he threw her away from Gaara, and when she blinks back the black spots from her vision she sees him about five meters to her left. More alarmingly, she notices that a chunk of his thigh is missing, skin, meat, muscle- all gone, and through the stream of blood that is rapidly staining his trousers, she thinks she can almost glimpse the white of Kakashi's femur.
Working on autopilot, Sakura reaches into her pouch with her good hand, shaking, blood-stained fingers pulling out two bottles – she pops a blood-replenishing pill and her second soldier pill of the day and dry-swallows, then throws away her morals.
She's been determined not to hurt Gaara too badly – or, worse yet, kill him – but she's not Naruto. She doesn't have an endless supply of chakra nor a bleeding heart; if it comes to keeping Gaara alive or keeping Kakashi in one piece, she knows who she's going to choose.
"'kashi." She rasps, throwing the blood-replenishing pills at the man, only somewhat cheered when he manages to catch the bottle with minimal fumbling. "Get up in the air."
Kakashi looks like he's going to argue, to demand an explanation, to ask how, precisely, she expects him to do that, but Sakura's done playing. She feels ROOT blankness steal over, firm her resolve, straighten her spine, rip away the guilt, and make the pain in her wrist and shoulder and side into background noise. She takes a breath, feels it rattle in her chest but she knows she can't waste the time nor chakra needed to heal herself, and allows for one final thought to penetrate the blankness of her mind:
If Gaara dies, he dies.
"Now!"
And then, in a move she hadn't used since she first called that wild, uncontrolled Mokuton to her in the concrete bunkers of ROOT, she reaches out to the trees in the forest around them with her chakra, digs deeper into the trees' networks and connects.
Her chakra coils burn, exerted beyond their usual capacity when she taps into the natural power Konoha trees are imbued with, but she can't find it in herself to care in that moment.
What follows is a battle of Gaara's sand against her wood, of Konoha's lush forests against Suna's arid deserts, and the space between them becomes filled with sand and wood and root, and Sakura doesn't know where Gaara is in the mix of jinchuuriki and natural chakra that surrounds the clearing, nor can she really tell up from down when the roots block out the light and the sand in the air scratches her throat and brings tears to her eyes.
Then, there are hands under her arms and Sakura lashes out, but the hands remain firm and she's lifted off her feet and taken above the pandemonium of root and sand and blood and destruction on the forest floor. They land on the crown of the tallest tree in the clearing, and she sees Kakashi catching his breath nearby, looking almost as bad for wear as he had during the worst battles in the War.
Sakura's head pulses then, a stabbing pain in her temples brought on by the conflict between her confidence that whoever pulled her out has to be an ally if they went through all that effort, and the bone-deep paranoia that demands of her to never leave an unknown at her back.
The paranoia wins out.
Sakura twists, craning her head, and blinks sand from her eyes until she focuses on blond hair and shadowed seafoam eyes and-
"What-?" She tries to ask, but her voice catches in her throat, scratched raw as it is, and she bends over and coughs until blood splatters from her mouth but she feels like she can breathe again. "-how?"
Inosuke doesn't look great either, but he's here and whole and sans Chie, and Sakura doesn't know what she feels just then. Isn't sure she's feeling anything at all.
"Idiot child." The man chides, his voice also hoarse, and there's a wicked burn on his left arm and a deep cut on his right cheek – I did that, Sakura thinks distantly, and another, louder part of her snaps good – but Inosuke looks at Sakura like he's relieved. "What were you trying to do?"
"Restrain him. Kill him. Whatever came first." Sakura replies, the words not hers, but she's at least somewhat aware this time, not enough to stop what she's saying but enough to register that her voice has gone flat and cold.
"There was a seal on his forehead." Kakashi offers after a beat, when neither Inosuke nor Sakura say anything else, simply staring each other down. "I think it's keeping him unconscious to let the Ichibi take over."
If Sakura were fully in control, she'd have been impressed at Kakashi for putting the pieces together so quickly. As it is, she keeps her eyes on Inosuke, both parts of her psyche for once in agreement that the man is an ally.
"How close have you been able to get?" Inosuke asks, his eyes on Sakura even though his attention is on Kakashi.
"Touched the seal." Sakura murmurs, then balls her hand into a fist and feels the blood that had dripped from her shoulder and dried over her knuckles crack like mud. "His defence isn't a conscious one. Unless something keeps all of the sand occupied, we get too close, we die."
"If I take out the conscious defence and you restrain him with all you've got," Inosuke nods to her, then glances over her shoulder, "Hatake, can you get the tag?"
"I can try." Comes the wheezed reply, and Sakura wants to glance over to check how Kakashi's doing, but her body isn't hers right now and she's freaking out. Kakashi keeps talking, though:
"How do you plan to 'take him out' though?"
"Never possessed a jinchuuriki." Inosuke shoots back flatly, the corner of his lips quirking up even as he glances down at her. "Might be fun."
It takes Sakura all of a second to understand what Inosuke is suggesting, and-
"No."
Between one blink and the next, her hand is on Inosuke's forearm, nails digging into the flesh, eyes glaring up at him.
He seems momentarily startled, then something like understanding flickers through his gaze. "Ah. Hello, Tori."
Sakura feels the- less dominant personality? mental disorder? remnant of ROOT conditioning? – feels its shock at being addressed directly, and she uses the moment to claw back control. The moment she's fully in her body once again feels like breaking the surface of the water after a long time under, and she finds herself taking a deep breath only to wince when her shoulder and side and throat flare up with pain.
"N-no." she repeats, gazing up at Inosuke again, and she notes some surprise in his eyes even as he grabs her elbow to steady her when she staggers at the lance of pain that goes through her ribs. "We'll find another way."
Just then, half dozen of the trees around them fall to the ground, ripped up or pulverized when Gaara's form doubles in size.
"No time!" Inosuke snaps, then jumps down to the ground, Kakashi following on his heels.
Sakura curses, assesses her chakra reserves, and curses again.
It's only been a month since she fought Orochimaru – only a month since she took four chakra pills in the space of less than an hour, and she may not be an official one in this timeline, but she's still a medic. She knows her chakra coils aren't fully recovered, knows it would be moronic to try and go further than the two pills she's already taken, but-
It's a chakra pill, or natural energy. And she doesn't quite fancy being turned to stone if she loses control of the latter.
She pops another chakra pill and throws herself off the tree, following after Kakashi and hoping that they'll make it out of this alive.
(in the end, the choice is taken from her hands, anyway.)
Sasuke curses as he fends off another puppet, hoping Naruto is having better luck with the Wind user. His arm is numb, whatever poison is glinting on the tips of the weapons embedded in the puppets having worked its way into his system. His breath is ragged and he can't use his right arm which means he can't use seals which is inconvenient considering he's trying to keep the goddamn puppeteer away from him.
And then, just as Sasuke decides that he's going to have to start taking some strategic hits, the poison slowing him down too much to keep up the stalemate, the puppeteer calls out something that freezes his blood in his veins. "Now, Temari! He's slowing, grab him!"
Sasuke spares a glance over his shoulder, keeping the puppeteer in his periphery, and catches the moment the kunoichi throws Naruto into a group of two other Sand shinobi. She turns to him and her brother, expression grim, and swings her fan at the same time as Kankuro reaches out for the puppet Sasuke had been fighting.
Neither of them looks happy to be doing what they're doing, but neither of them looks about to back down, and Sasuke is down to one-armed taijutsu and the few techniques he can pull off one-handed.
"Your teacher took our brother." The girl spits as she swings her fan again, and Sasuke braces for the cutting winds, sticking to the ground with chakra even as he feels the chakra-edged gusts cut his arms and legs. "So we're going to offer him a trade, but you don't need to be conscious for that. Now, Kankuro!"
Kankuro hisses something and Sasuke startles, having almost forgotten the other teen, and he throws a panicked glance towards where he'd last seen Naruto, but the blond is nowhere to be seen.
He hears the poof of something unsealing and snaps his head to catch the puppeteer mid-motion, one hand extended towards the puppet that had been attacking Sasuke while his other hand holds a sealing scroll, index finger extended and controlling another puppet that must've fallen out of it.
The new puppet is big enough that it looks like Sasuke could fit in its stomach area, and Sasuke feels uncomfortably certain that it's likely exactly what the Suna Siblings intend to do.
He meets Kankuro's eyes for a split-second, catches the vicious glint that passes through the teen's eyes, momentarily eclipsing the panic beneath, then switches his attention to the offensive puppet. Its blades glint in the sun as it speeds at him again, and Sasuke has a swooping realisation that he's going to lose.
Kankuro's lip twists meanly as he comes to the same conclusion and he croons a quiet, satisfied; "Gotcha."
"No the fuck you don't." A new, familiar voice interrupts, and Sasuke opens his eyes, not having realised he'd screwed them shut as he braced for the attack, to find Shin in front of him.
Shin's back is to him, but even that is enough for Sasuke to note that the other teen is smeared with blood and soot, his hair a few inches shorter than it had been when Sasuke had seen him that morning. There were a few rips in his shirt, and Sasuke can see glimpses of scars criss-crossing across Shin's back, some looking like they were layered over even older scars, all pink and ridged like they were never properly treated.
Sasuke blinks, and then Shin moves, breaking Sasuke's focus as the older teen meets the puppet with his sword, digging the blade into wooden joints Sasuke hadn't even seen and dismembering the puppet with frankly frightening efficiency. At the same time as he's doing that, a young Inuzuka woman zooms past them, her three ninken tackling Temari and knocking the fan she'd been in the process of swinging out of her hands.
"You shouldn't have threatened my student, Suna-nin." Shin murmurs, and his voice is low and even and icy-cold, and Sasuke feels frozen in place even though Shin's anger is not directed at him. "Kakashi is the best person who could've gone after your brother, because he will do his best to avoid killing him. I, however, am not so considerate."
And then Shin moves, his KI lashing out in a wave of aggression so potent that Sasuke gasps. Where Orochimaru's KI had shown him all the ways the man could kill him without so much as batting an eye, Shin's KI is more primal, like a wolf baring its teeth, only to sink them into its prey's throat a second later.
It's violence, pure and simple, but to Kankuro's credit, he doesn't stagger the way a nearby Konoha-nin does, though his eyes widen as he quickly yanks the bigger puppet to shield him from Shin's sword.
"Sasuke, find Naruto and bring him back here." Shin instructs, not even raising his voice as he methodically takes apart Kankuro's puppet, not seeming fazed by the hidden weapons and tricks Kankuro tries to pull. "Hana! Restrain the girl!"
"Got it!" The Inuzuka from before calls back, and Sasuke startles at the sound, stumbling to his feet as he moves to do what Shin had asked.
Finding Naruto involves firing off a small Fireball, the only thing he can manage one-handed to make the Suna-nin advancing on the blond with a wicked-looking kusarigama back off. He ignores the warning tug of protest his coils give at his waning chakra levels and careless handling of his chakra and drops down to Naruto's position. He grabs the back of the blonde's jacket, pulling his teammate to his feet and tugging until he gets the hint and follows.
They stumble to a stop a few metres from where Shin is still fighting Kankuro, and it appears that Shin has the Suna-nin cornered. Then, Kankuro grabs something from his pocket, crushes it in his fist and brings it to his lips, opening his hand and blowing the cloud of-
-of what is likely poisonous gas straight into Shin's face.
Sasuke's vision sharpens then, the last of his chakra going towards activating his Sharingan – which he'd switched off for the very purpose of preserving chakra after leaving the arena – and just as he's about to throw himself at Shin and drag the older teen away from the noxious cloud, Naruto tugs at his sleeve, halting his motion.
And just in time, too, because Shin proves that he doesn't need help. Instead, he flips his sword grip and cuts right through flesh and bone, severing the hand in which Kankuro had held the poison from his forearm in one damning, decisive sweep of his blade.
He proceeds to blow a small gust of wind right in Kankuro's face, making the teen choke mid-scream as the cloud of poison he'd tried to catch Shin with is sent back at him.
"Kankuro!" Temari screams, fear and worry and dread in her voice, but she's helpless, tied up and guarded by two of the massive ninken while another holds her fan in its jaws and the Inuzuka kunoichi just watches from the side.
Sasuke feels sick, and he keeps his gaze away from the sobbing puppeteer, forcing himself to focus on Shin and only Shin.
Shin, who simply turns his back on the teen he's just crippled and sheathes his sword. Shin, whose face is blank and whose gaze is unflinching, and on whom Sasuke cannot see even a hint of regret or remorse.
It's only when Shin comes closer – and Sasuke can feel Naruto shrink back at his side, but he keeps his eyes are trained on the older teen regardless – that Sasuke notices that Shin's hands are shaking.
Before he can fully process that – because Shin has never been anything other than composed, and Sasuke had quickly learnt that if he'd thought Sakura unflappable, she had nothing on her brother – Shin is reaching for him.
Those same hands that have just crippled Sasuke's peer are now reaching for him, grabbing him by the arms and pulling him into Shin's chest. He lets it happen, lets Shin's arms come up and wrap tightly around his shoulders, lets the older teen dig his chin into the top of Sasuke's head.
It feels as if Shin needs to prove to himself that Sasuke is there, alive and whole, his grip a little desperate, and Sasuke feels no shame in wrapping his arm around the older boy's waist and fisting the back of his shirt with his working hand, trying to soak in the comfort of the unexpected embrace as well as wrap his mind around the events of the last few minutes.
When he lets himself melt the rest of the way into the hug, he realises it's not just Shin's hands that are shaking.
"Sorry for that." Shin murmurs into his hair, and Sasuke has to strain to hear even though he can feel the words rumble in Shin's chest. "But your cousin would never forgive me if I let you die."
And Sasuke – aware that there's still an invasion raging on around them, aware that he should be a lot more concerned than he is by the complete lack of care with which Shin has just crippled another teen, seemingly for no other reason than just because he could – Sasuke feels himself smile.
Family's more than just blood, Sakura had said on the second day of officially being their sensei, that means that you get to decide who you consider your family.
And, for the first time since she said it, having grappled with the idea since he'd heard it, Sasuke feels like he finally understands what she meant.
The Sandaime is dead.
A large part of the Village is in ruins.
Shikaku sighs as he catches up with the Chunin Commander's second-in-command, trying to assess the full extent of the damage. He's had runners confirm for him that both Yoshino and Shikamaru are fine, if a little beaten up, and that a group of genin of all people had had the foresight to make sure the Academy was safe instead of fighting losing battles in the arena.
Still, it's been barely an hour since the end of the invasion was officially declared, all the surviving Suna and Oto-nin who were too slow escaping already rounded up and escorted to T .
So when Shikaku spies the ANBU Commander duck through the hole in the arena's walls, trailing an unknown tiger summons Shikaku had briefly glimpsed around the arena during the worst of the fighting, he quickens his pace until he can fall into step with the masked man.
He feels the Commander slant him a glance, but he doesn't say anything at Shikaku's presence at his side, appearing content to follow the summon despite having no obvious explanation of their goal, and Shikaku simply resigns himself to getting his answers later.
With Sarutobi dead, it's inevitable that he, as the Jounin Commander and top three in line to the kage seat, will be working closely with the Commander as they desperately try to rebuild.
It's only with that thought in mind that he manages to resist the urge to demand just who had come into possession of a Noble Summons contract and why had he not been informed of the development.
And then, once they're a good mile away from the arena, they suddenly reach a break in the treeline, most of the trees seemingly felled by what looks like a mix of ninjutsu and sheer brute force. As his eyes fall on the occupants of the clearing, he decides that there are more important things than Noble Summons that deserve his attention just then.
Because the newly-made clearing is not just littered with corpses of Sand and Sound shinobi, no.
There's also the Ichibi jinchuuriki, unconscious, and restrained by what is undoubtedly Wood Release to their left.
And scattered around the clearing, propped up by rocks or tree stumps, are Kakashi, Yamanaka Inosuke of all people, and Kakashi's chunin assistant. None of them are conscious and none of them look good, and for a terrifyingly suspended moment, Shikaku's not even sure whether they're all alive.
Kakashi is sporting a deep gouge in his thigh, the muscle raw and shredded, a portion of the meat of his thigh simply missing, his pants leg stiff with dried blood and dirt. His mask – or what remains of it – is in tattered scraps that do little to actually cover his face, and Shikaku is somewhat concerned by the crusted blood on the man's chin and the corner of his busted lips, as well as the large canines that peek out every time Kakashi takes a rattling, too shallow for comfort breath.
Yamanaka Inosuke's right arm is in a state that makes shivers race up Shikaku's spine unbidden, while his left has had the sleeve ripped away and boasts a violently-red friction burn on most of his forearm. There's also a deep wound in his left side, the shirt and jacket around it dark brown and glistening wetly, and Shikaku knows just enough about stomach wounds to know that the man must've lost a truly alarming amount of blood.
The girl that the tiger gravitates towards and is currently nosing worriedly at is little better. There's a hole in her left shoulder, the wound looking like someone had tried to stake her and missed, though left a through-and-through between her shoulder and collarbone as a parting gift that probably missed her heart by centimetres. Her right eye is swollen shut and there's a cut on her head that has bled over most of the left side of her face, and Shikaku's mind runs through what he knows about head wounds without conscious input from his brain. And all that without counting the fact that just one of the girl's summons has more chakra than her and Kakashi combined.
But the most disconcerting of all, beyond the corpses strewn around the field, the unconscious jinchuuriki, or the physical state of two of Konoha's arguably best jounin, is the fact that the girl has leaves and little twigs growing out of her skin.
It leaves little doubt as to who the origin point of the Mokuton was, and Shikaku stops dead.
The ANBU Commander, though, just strolls further into the clearing, calm as could be.
"You knew." Shikaku says, and his voice is too flat for the words to count as a question.
The silence he gets in reply is answer enough, though the Commander does briefly glance back at him on his way to where the Yamanaka is slumped. As the man nudges the blond's knee with the toe of his sandal, Shikaku wonders what he'd missed around the Village that could've led to the ANBU Commander keeping secrets from the Hokage.
Because he's sure, absolutely convinced, that if Sarutobi had known about the fact that Kakashi's assistant was capable of Mokuton, he never would've allowed for her to become Kakashi's assistant.
"You look like shit." The Commander jibes, and it takes Shikaku a second to realise that he's talking to the Yamanaka.
"Still…better than you." Inosuke wheezes, his voice wet in a way that spells internal bleeding and likely some damage to the lungs, and the jab falls miles short of his usual deadpan.
Still, the Commander snorts.
"If you insist on being rude, I will leave you here." He threatens idly, and it's such a contrast to the calm, reserved man Shikaku has known him as over his decade as Jounin Commander that it's almost absurd.
He doesn't have more time to contemplate the shift because the tiger that had previously been nosing at the unconscious girl suddenly growls, snapping its teeth at the Commander, a threatening rumble emitting from its chests at the perceived threat of his words.
Shikaku briefly wonders just how familiar Kakashi's kouhai is with the Yamanaka if even her summons care about him that much.
"I'm not actually going to leave him. Focus on your summoner." The Commander throws at the summon and it subsides somewhat, going back to desperately licking and pawing at the girl.
The girl who's Shikamaru's age yet is here, having isolated and somehow restrained a jinchuuriki.
"I'm going to touch you and help you up." The Commander informs Inosuke quietly and matter of factly, ignoring Shikaku's presence entirely as he shifts into a more balanced crouch. "Don't try to kill me."
Shikaku privately reckons that the Yamanaka would struggle to so much as glare in his current state much less manage any sudden movements, but he's also just learnt that there's more than the surface-level, professional civility between the Commander and the man, so it could very well be that the Commander has precedent to fall back on.
"Shikaku, mind checking on Hatake?" the question finally forces Shikaku to unfreeze from where he'd stopped when they'd first entered the clearing and he heads for Kakashi, falling roughly to his knees beside the man. "And see if the kid's summon can carry her."
Shikaku goes through the motions of checking Kakashi's pulse – fast like a jackrabbit's – and doing the same to his subordinate – slow and heavy, fuck – and helps haul the unconscious kid onto the tiger's back even though it seems far too small to carry her weight comfortably. Then, he does his best to support Kakashi's weight as he stands up with the Copy-nin's arm swung over his shoulder and his arm around the man's waist.
"The jinchuuriki?" Shikaku feels the need to ask, when the Commander appears content to leave the kid where he is, tied up in Mokuton and unconscious.
But the Commander just tilts his head and flashes through some seals with his free hand, pressing his palm against the nearby tree instead of crouching, seeing as Inosuke's functioning arm is over his shoulder.
A moment later, the ground opens up, a maneki-neko bursting from the surface, its cell snapping into place around the immobilised jinchuuriki, the neko closing around him and sinking back underground, disappearing from sight.
"…Do I wanna know where you sent it?" Shikaku asks belatedly a few seconds after the cell disappears from sight, and he gets the feeling the Commander is grinning beneath his mask.
"T ." the man replies, and his voice is flat and even, not betraying any of the mirth Shikaku can feel radiating from him. "Ibiki deserves nice things."
Shikaku snorts before he can catch himself, then decides that there really isn't a way to reply to the comment, so he simply nods and sets a course for the hospital.
After the fighting had subsided, Shin escorted the assorted genin who had been protecting the Academy to their respective homes, Kakashi's brats following along like lost ducklings, uncharacteristically silent. Finally, when all other kids were off his hands, he walked Naruto and Sasuke to the former's apartment, promising to send Sai over to them as soon as he located him and made sure he was alright. To Naruto's visible surprise, Sasuke didn't object to the order of 'stay together', but Shin suspected Sasuke was a lot more shaken up by the invasion than even he realised.
Then, with the bratlings taken care of, he set off trying to locate Sai and Sakura, finally letting himself feel the anxiety that had been gnawing at him now that he no longer had to maintain a front for the genin.
He couldn't feel Sakura's chakra at all.
Only, on his way to where he could feel Sai's chakra among two Aburame and what was likely the Kiri-nin Sai had taken a fancy to, he's waylaid.
"Help! Please! My daddy's not moving!" A girl runs out onto the street, her mother making an aborted move to stop her from running off, but she doesn't actually chase after the girl, instead trying to push off what looks like the crumbled remains of a wall from-
-from a body.
Shin turns to the girl – she's covered in dust and soot like a lot of the civilians who happened to be too close to the fighting, and there are tear-tracks down her cheeks, but what catches Shin's attention more are her eyes.
Her active Sharingan eyes.
Shin freezes, then turns not to the girl, but the two other shinobi who had been passing by at the same time as him. He doesn't really have the chakra for jutsu, but he palms a kunai and flash-steps to just behind them, knocking them on the head with the back of the blade and hoping that they didn't actually see the girl's Sharingan.
Then, he focuses on the girl who, by all rights, should not be in Konoha.
She's wide-eyed, staring at him in horror, and he tries to remember anything he ever learned about how to handle kids that young.
She looks about the size Sakura had been when she'd come to ROOT, maybe six, seven-years-old, but Shin doesn't really do kids beyond 'toddler', 'child', and 'teenager'. The girl is definitely not in the first category but quite far from the third, so he takes the 'safe' option and crouches to be on eye-level with her, trying to ignore the way his ribs protest the motion.
He really should go to the hospital, huh?
"What's your name, kid?" he asks, mentally running through the list of the kids they'd saved and coming up with two possible options, but there's always the chance that her parents had-
"K-Kimiko." The girl hiccups, shooting her mom a panicked look before she turns back to Shin. "H-Haruno Kimiko, shinobi-san."
Shin stills.
His gaze darts to the girl's mother, but the woman has her back to him, still pushing pieces of debris to, if Shin had to guess, free the man trapped beneath them. Even under the coating of ash and dust, her hair is blond, but when she glances around frantically in search of her daughter, he catches familiar green eyes staring back at him.
Well, fuck.
He'd known Sakura's parents were alive, even if Sakura herself didn't seem to know, nor want to know, anything about her parents' whereabouts. Still, the probability of them not just adopting a child, but adopting one of the Uchiha children Shisui had asked them to save, was negligible.
And yet.
"Shinobi-san?" the girl asks, startling Shin out of his horrified contemplation of chance and fate.
He can't walk away now, he realises with a start. He's got not only Sakura's family, but Shisui and Sasuke's too depending on him right now.
"Shin." He replies distractedly, getting to his feet and starting a brisk walk to where Sakura's mother is trying to free her husband. "My name is Shin. Now come on, let's free your dad."
The girl – Kimiko – runs ahead, stopping at her mother's side and dithering, clearly wanting to help but unsure how, the motion so un-Uchiha-like that Shin wonders whether the Uchiha aloofness wasn't nurture all along.
"Haruno-san," he greets as he comes to a stop beside Sakura and Kimiko's mother, and the woman glances at him, eyes wide and worried, but unafraid. Shin takes a breath and tries for his least grimace-like smile, wondering when he'd last had to interact with civilians he actually cared about, "allow me to assist?"
The woman sags with relief and her sigh turns into a sob, but she shuffles aside and allows Shin access to begin pulling her husband out of the debris with minimal prompting.
Five minutes later, once Shin has cleared the heaviest of the debris, he realises that the man beneath is still conscious, if barely, though it would've probably been kinder on him if he'd passed out. His leg is crushed, but he's surprisingly uninjured beyond it considering he'd been buried under the debris for however long before Shin had gotten to him.
"Ma'am," Shin addresses Sakura's mother, and the woman wipes her eyes and gives him her full attention, looking expectant and determined, and Shin suddenly sees a glimpse of Sakura in the woman's face. "I'm going to take your husband to the hospital now. I know you likely want to come with, but I don't think that would be wise considering your daughter's…situation."
"I don't know why she has those eyes." Sakura's mother whispers, and Kimiko looks between them, clearly aware they're talking about her. "Nobody at the orphanage said anything about her being Uchiha."
"They wouldn't have, no." Shin shoots back sharply, then takes a breath and tries to strive for calm as he addresses the woman again. "But I assume you realise that it would be better if we limited the number of people who know about her lineage as much as possible, yes?"
"I- yes." The woman manages, glancing at Kimiko worriedly. "But what do you suggest we do? I don't think I can rent a hotel right now, and I am not about to make my way back to Tanzaku-gai without Kizashi-!"
"Do you know where the Barracks- sorry, the orphan quarter is?" Shin asks bluntly, cutting the woman off, and she looks momentarily miffed before she nods. "Building D4, apartment 3C. Here." he digs into his pocket and holds out his key, wondering how he's going to break it to Sakura that her mother and half-sister are going to be camping out at their house for the foreseeable future. "Make yourselves at home."
"I really can't-!" The woman begins, but Shin has officially reached the end of his patience so he hefts her husband's arm over his shoulder and wraps his arm around the man's waist as he stands.
"I insist." He cuts her off again, then manages a nod for the kid before he jumps to the rooftops, heading for the hospital.
Finding Sai and Sakura has now become imperative, but he is going to make sure he gets Sakura's father to the hospital and maybe gets a check-up himself while he's at it before he takes up his search again. He takes a breath and steadies himself, trying to find some middle ground between apathy and panic.
Half the Village is razed to the ground, his siblings are both missing, Kakashi's genin probably got an extra heaping of trauma from watching him dismember the Suna-nin, but Shin can't focus on that just yet.
Instead, he finds a grin pulling at his lips, wild and genuine and more than a little feral.
Sakura healed his lungs almost a year ago, but for the first time since they brought down Danzo, Shin feels like he can actually, properly breathe again.
The Sandaime is dead.
They're free.