Examination: Village
Time slowed.
Neji's control faltered, and with it so did the byakugan.
He didn't care.
In the centre of the crater, Uchiha Sasuke finished his morbid business, his hand wrenching free from Sakura's breast amid a glittering cascade of liquid rubies. Shock overrode Neji's every instinct; every last drive from his basest animalistic tendencies to the complex patterns of his training failed him as her blood spun in the twilight, trailing from her killer's hand into the dark. Sparks danced among the drops, singeing them into smoke where they touched; sparks that lingered around her form as she fell away.
Even as he ran to hold her, gravity had taken her in its unforgiving embrace and dragged her against failing knees to the ground, her hair floating upward around her face in an impromptu shroud. She shuddered in his arms, convulsing as her desperate muscles sought direction and found only the immolating electricity that had burned out her core.
Small fires surrounded them, the burning detritus of battle become accidental votive pyres as Sakura died.
For the first time in his life, Neji was at a complete loss.
The seemingly bottomless well that had furnished him with ideas and plans over the course of his entire existence was dry. No words came to him. No possibilities, no considerations, no future.
His hands moved on their own, clutching her against him as he stroked the hair away from her face as though to clear her vision, as though she could still appreciate the gesture. He'd done it a thousand times, maybe more, as she read next to him, curled against his side, too distracted to notice. He'd done it as they lay naked in silent celebration of mutual accomplishment. He'd done it as she smiled, shyly acknowledging for the first time that maybe they could be something more.
Her face, even frozen in death, had a peace in it, her mouth parted every so slightly and her deep green eyes just a little wide, as though in wonder. She was wonderful, endlessly curious, analytical and poetic at once. She appreciated the world on a deeper level than he ever had, seemed to understand the mysteries of the world and accepted them for the wisdom they offered.
But her eyes had gone cold, iced over, unnaturally still and forever staring past him at the greatest mystery.
He couldn't imagine it, couldn't see any way the universe could exist without her.
Grief struck him down more surely than any simple sword stroke, and Neji bent across her. She was still warm, and despite his deepest ingrained wish to deny reality in the hope that he could return her to life, her blood was rapidly cooling between his fingers, leaking away, out of her.
This blood that had been so hot, potent in the way the sun melted snow and brought leaves and life to the smothering silence of winter, potent in the way the storms of high summer blasted rain across the fields. She was life incarnate.
The world went dark with her gone. Fires dimmed; the stars snuffed themselves out in lamentation. He could do nothing but touch her face, her lips, her cheeks, wishing for just another minute, another word, calling her name in futile elegy. Ambition, desire, even justice fled him, and Neji found himself a hollow husk, weeping out what little remained within.
Nothing else seemed to matter.
"Neji."
The memory of her voice rocked him, and for the first time since his father, his last remaining parent, had left him alone in the world, water welled in his eyes and threatened to unman him. He didn't care.
Never again would he hear her call for him, searching for his presence when she came through the door. Never again would she scream frustration at a mulish refusal, or whisper her affection into the corner of his neck. Never again would she lose his name in mocking laughter, or in the throes of passion.
"Neji," the memory whispered again.
Words failed, sounds faded, the wind stalled. Nausea contorted in his stomach, pain crushed his lungs, and his vision blurred beneath the weight of his utter loneliness and his harrowing misery and the tears they brought.
Her corpse rolled in his arms as they gave out, and without her impossible strength, her limbs spilled about her in artless ignominy. Unable to breathe, he crawled across her to rearrange them, trying to provide her with what dignity he could.
Crying to himself, he shut her eyes with his fingers, closed his own and mourned.
"Neji," she whispered. "Open your eyes. Look up."
He had so little will remaining, so little concentration, so little control that he was drained, but the sound of her voice gave him the imperceptible impetus he needed to obey the ghost.
At first he saw nothing. Darkness had closed him off from the world, surrounding him in a tarry, obsidian desolation without beginning or end, a infinite void to swallow his sorrow.
The sound found him first, the distant rustle of a vagrant wind, and as the light grew overhead, it began to snow.
No, not snow. White petals.
Petals like fat tears, indented at the wide end, that danced on the wind, capricious and unassuming. Petals not quite as white as they first appeared, petals that seemed familiar, a long lost song from a time forgotten. Petals that fell in a blizzard across him as he knelt, clinging to his arms and Sakura's corpse in a fine dusting of just the vaguest pink.
The darkness receded, losing ground against this gentle storm, and her angel coalesced from the flurry.
"Neji," she said again, and she smiled, small and sad as he found her eyes, "you need to wake up."
He reached for her, knowing he would find nothing but air, but she took his hand, clasped it in cool fingers.
"This isn't who you are. This isn't your grief. This isn't how you would be."
He startled, nearly pulled back his hand in reflex, but her grip was strong as she descended to face him, desecrating her own body with her knees.
"You would want to avenge me. You would be enraged, Neji. I know you, and you're better than this. You wouldn't rest, wouldn't mourn until I'd had my justice."
There was something soothing about her words, something about the admonishment in her voice that pushed away the pity and the impotence that still gripped at his heart and lashed black tentacles against its beating.
"This isn't me," she said, in a low whisper. "I'm still out there, in the world. I need you to come back to me."
There was something out there, something she needed him to go to, something she needed him to do. Something he'd forgotten.
He opened his mouth to ask, but the question in his face said all he wanted to first.
"Sssh. Then I'll help you remember who you are."
She kissed him, and pulled away. With her went the darkness, and they were in a field of trees, the both of them still weathering the same incessant fall of petals. This was a memory, a kind and pleasant reminiscence violated by the corpse still lying at his feet.
"I quit ANBU," he heard himself saying.
"What? Why?" she said, blinking in disbelief, pushing herself off his chest. Her corpse lay just beyond her; she didn't seem to notice. "I thought..."
"Three to six month deployments were desirable when all I had to return to were more interminable meetings with the elders. Hinata and Hanabi can be pleasant company, I suppose, but they are overshadowed by everyone else."
"You're not making sense."
His arms lifted away from the folds of his hakama and gathered around her waist, pulling her back towards him.
"I have better things to do with the time I do spend in the village these days. Better reasons."
"You're terrible at this, you know," she said, but blushed a little anyway. "Just say it already."
"Three months away from you was more taxing than I thought it would be. I think I love you more than I thought."
He hadn't quit or even taken a sabbatical for anyone else, not in all those six years. Wouldn't have. He'd never thought her absence would have antagonized him as much as it had.
"You didn't have to do that," she said, pleasure and dismay mixing in her voice even as she burrowed into his clothes. "I know how important it is to you. I mean, you fought the elders so long just so you could get away from your clan duties here, and your friends are..."
"I wanted to," he said.
"I just don't want to be the one who holds you back."
He shook his head.
"That isn't what I need to do any more. It was an escape no longer necessary."
She smiled and reached up, brushing petals out of his hair and then tangling her fingers there.
"So do you need me?"
"No," he said, and shushed her before she could react. "I don't need you. If you disappeared tomorrow I would survive. If I needed you, what good would I be to anyone? I want you, Sakura. I want you to choose to be with me."
"...you're a terrible romantic," she said, hiding her face in the folds of his robes. "But I want you too."
He held her as they listened to the serene susurration of the falling heralds of spring and the fluttering of tiny wings learning to fly. Her breath whispered hot against his neck as she climbed him, draping her arms over his shoulders. He met her eyes, coy and half-hidden as they were, and let his own drift to her mouth when hers went astray in the same direction.
She smiled again, this time as open and sincere and outright happy as he'd ever seen her, and he could still feel her smiling as he leant his lips against hers.
He closed his eyes, and the memory faded, sucked away again into the returning darkness. Sakura was gone again, and so too was the storm of petals, leaving only the cadaver that had usurped her image to exploit him.
"I can't break it," she whispered in his mind. "It's too powerful for me to help you any more than this. But you can, I know it. Find me, please."
At first his limbs refused to move, still bound by the crippling agony of loss. But he remembered, gritted his teeth, steeled his muscles and bellowed into the faceless darkness.
Sakura's body decompiled, fracturing into disarray.
OoOoOoO
Sakura never had time to figure out just what had happened to Shikamaru and Temari before they'd disappeared.
Hinata's warning cry punctuated Sasuke's insane ranting. Lightning crackled to life in his left hand, and as Neji dropped to his knees in complete paralysis, she knew exactly what Sasuke had done, and what he intended.
He began his attack at the exact instant the pulse of super-concentrated chakra reached the soles of her feet, and she launched toward him in a desperate race. Fire burned in her side as she slammed into Sasuke, his powered fist just grazing her ribs under her arm, but the burn was worth it as her open hand connected with his shoulder and stopped him cold.
Stone cracked underfoot as the force of their collision ran through her, and as she directed the energy of his assault to the side in a tumbling throw, she chanced a look backward. She thanked the gods as the only evidence of injury was a deep red burn that slashed across Neji's right cheek, and as Sasuke rolled back onto his feet and swung his sword back out into attack position, she knew her husband had somehow become a liability.
"Fine," she said, letting her voice drop dangerously. "You want to know why I chose him? Because he's there when I need him! Because I know he's not going to leave me, and because I know he gives a damn about me!"
Her hands contorted themselves through seals, independent of each other, one hidden behind her profile as she turned to present Sasuke with a fighting stance.
She crouched, moving the chakra for the prepared techniques within her body while still sending pools of yet unused chakra to her feet and hands to ready herself for combat, and surreptitiously leaned back just enough to touch Neji's forehead with her index finger.
And then she exploded.
A hundred different versions of herself poured into Sasuke's conscious, more than enough to overload anyone's ability to cope. Some dashed in headlong so close together that they overlapped, fists back and raging forward, others flew in aggressive earth-bound vectors for aerial strikes, and still more Sakuras prepared ninjutsu or threw storms of shuriken, kunai, or explosives.
Sakura herself felt every one of Sasuke's ribs fracture as her knee slammed his sternum through his spine, and it was strangely cathartic, even when his form dissolved into smoke as she landed.
Sasuke decapitated her; she vanished in a flurry of petals. She threw him to the ground and tore his arm away; his body split into a nest of snakes that slithered into the darkness. He incinerated her; her ashes reformed behind him. She crushed his skull; he was still standing where she'd thrown him, waiting for a clear shot. She still stood between him and Neji.
"Hinata!" she called, "Cover!"
Luminescent whips twisted through the space between them, forcing Sasuke away as Hinata wove her web, and her friend followed up by filling the crater with a dome of pitch black, an inky shadow that blotted out the fires still burning and hid them both in its depths. She found Neji by memory, even as she sealed the bleeding on her sore flank and trimmed away the useless and burnt tissue.
"Come on, Neji. Fight it, you have to."
She made more seals, this time using both hands to economize her remaining chakra, and bound together the sides of the slash in his face. She wasn't sure if it would scar or not, but it was still fairly deep and burns were tricky. Frowning, she wiped the blood from his cheek and probed the illusions he was under.
It was still too much for her. The mangekyou was eating at his mind, and the most she could do as his first tears fell was to project a memory into his fading consciousness. Maybe there were too many trees. Maybe they were too pink. Maybe he'd find the missing threads of himself in the moment they'd both realized neither of them had anything left to prove to each other.
It was all she could hope for.
Sasuke seemed trapped in the jaws of some enormous, invisible monster. Ebony teeth and tongues slashed at him from the ground, and the stars shimmied and split as transparent fangs ripped down from above.
"Bloody hell, Nara," she heard Temari shouting, "the next time you do that give me some goddamned warning!"
Shikamaru grunted in response, and a new wave of wind and shadow gnashed across the ground as Sasuke dove between them, driven back by the unseen knives that threatened to rip him apart.
He moved right, and Shikamaru's shadow curved around him. He retreated, and Hinata cut him off. Temari's wind blew through the remaining gap, shredding a furrow through the dirt and two trees. It ended at a scorched line where he'd countered her with a wall of fire that obscured him and let him slip away from all of them.
Instinct told her to leap in as soon as the fire cleared, force him back off balance long enough for the others to get back into position, but Neji was still vulnerable. He stirred, only barely, the tail end of a sound that might have been a word escaping him, but that wasn't going to be nearly enough.
Sasuke emerged from the fire on his own, wary and clearly having shaken himself free from Hinata's darkness. His eye swiveled toward her, tears of blood spilling from his lower eyelid.
"Me," he said, in a dry, wretched whimper, and she could almost see the sad, forlorn child he'd once been looking out at her from his remaining, abused eye. "You said you would follow me! You said you loved me!"
"Once upon a time," she said, falling into a defensive crouch in front of Neji. "That was when I still believed you cared about us. Maybe you did, even. You threw us away, Sasuke."
"I didn't have a choice!" he shouted, and in the background, through the smoke, she could see the shifting shapes of her allies picking their way around the conflagration he'd left behind him. "I had to get stronger!"
Stall for time: the child was being devoured by the maniac again.
"You always had a choice," she said. Keep him talking. Keep pushing Neji towards the light with the thin stream of chakra she held against his forehead. "We all got stronger. All of us, together."
It didn't work. The fire was back in Sasuke's eye, murder lighting it, and Sakura braced herself.
"It should have been me! Not him! You lied to me! Just like everyone else!"
He lunged, and her fists pulsed with her remaining strength. Not like before, though. She'd burned so much chakra on the surgeries, on the genjutsu, on the one-handed seals, on fighting him alone, on trying to bring Neji back. She knew she was fading.
Before he could attack again, a new voice rang out, imperative and laden with disappointed admonishment. A voice she knew well, and one that shouldn't have been there.
"Stop it, Sasuke," Naruto said, and amazingly, Sasuke obliged.
He crossed his arms and began a slow descent into the crater.
Sasuke shuddered in recognition, and slowly raised a trembling finger as his face twisted through a dozen conflicting emotions, the same as when Sakura had first confronted him. He settled for rage, and all uncertainty ceased as he stabbed his finger at Naruto with vicious force.
"You! You killed Madara!"
"So I did," Naruto said, and shrugged, never slowing his pace, closing the distance step by step.
"What right! What right did you have? He was mine! He helped kill my family! He made everything wrong!"
Naruto stopped, taken aback, and his sapphire eyes hardened and burned with a fury to match Sasuke's insanity.
"I had every right! He was a threat to everyone! Everyone I know. Everyone I care about! He attacked us, Sasuke, and I -- we -- dealt with it. The world doesn't revolve around your vendetta!"
"After him, I had nothing left but vengeance," Sasuke said, voice cold but his personal demon browbeaten into temporary submission. Confusion and hurt warred with his insanity.
"You had everything anyone could want," Naruto said, and continued on, gravel crunching underfoot with every step. "You had friends."
"And you always could have come back to the village, you know," Sakura said, quietly, still confused, but unwilling to let Sasuke see that. "Especially since you apparently took care of that old snake you left us for. Until...until yesterday, you hadn't committed any crimes, you hadn't done anything too wrong."
She chastised herself as she suddenly remembered Haruka's biological mother, but it was too late to change the words. Until whenever he'd turned on that poor girl, she amended mentally.
But it wasn't as if Sasuke had heard her, either. Naruto consumed his attention, and they were nearly toe-to-toe now.
"I was supposed to avenge them," he said, grinding out the words between clenched teeth, the demon crawling back. The fingers of his free hand clenched over his missing eye; he looked to be in incredible pain, and Sakura was certain it wasn't entirely physical. "You took that from me, you idiot. You weren't, you weren't supposed to be...that...strong!"
The last word exploded out of him, and two things happened at once.
Sasuke's sword whipped out, blindly, at Naruto's head. Naruto's form blurred and faded, and the amorphous white blur of Hinata's white jacket flickered in the space where he'd stood, tiny flashes in the dark only just suggesting her application of the jyuuken.
Hinata's tiny hands touched the inside of Sasuke's left elbow and the inside of his wrist before the betrayal had entirely registered. Even so, she was forced away as the rage took him and he slashed at her with newfound focus.
"I'd hoped for more than that," she said, as she danced back to near where Sakura guarded her husband, and frowned an apology with her eyes as Temari and Shikamaru resumed their interrupted pattern. "I'm nearly done, I think. I don't have too much left, and he won't fall for that again."
Sakura knew she didn't have much left either at this point, but she nodded for Hinata to retreat and catch her breath. She would have liked to follow, but neither could she leave Neji.
"Why aren't you helping me?" Sasuke screamed at her, and she turned too late to get an exact fix on where he was coming from.
A dumb mistake was all would take to get anyone killed. No matter how good you were, no matter how smart you were, how much experience, how much strength, it was the dumb mistake that eventually claimed everyone.
The worst kind of dumb mistake was the one made through inattention, distraction, and Sakura realized that she'd committed that sloppiest of errors as she watched the point of Sasuke's sword gleam with fire as it came toward her. She was unprepared, too preoccupied with Hinata's deception and flight and Neji still kneeling, but any one of the hundreds of tactics she might have used instead would have required more time than she had.
So she froze and waited to die.
Neji roared.
He uncoiled, a tiger striking, and in her paralysis she could barely feel the rush of air as he melted around her. One leg looped around in front of her, and his hand found her shoulder even as it passed her face, and brushed her down and away with incredible tenderness for the speed it was traveling.
Sakura blinked, steadied herself as she discovered her hands against Neji's back.
Looking past him, Sasuke's weapon occupied the space she just vacated, except for the two fingers Neji had pressed up against the back of the blade near its midpoint.
"Never again," he said, and the metal began to mutate.
Not much at first, and Sakura very nearly missed it, but something shiny fell off the blade, glinting in the firelight. And then another piece, and another, until she realized that they were flakes, drifting to the ground like so many dead leaves. Stress lines appeared, deepened, and became fractures.
The sword broke, landing in the dirt next to an oddly shaped dagger that Sakura hadn't noticed before.
"Bad move," Temari said, ripping the activation cord from a flare enchantment.
A phosphorescent flash filled the crater, momentarily blinding Sakura as her eyes struggled to adjust. Her body moved as Neji lifted her without any apparent effort, and swung her into a new position.
When her vision cleared, she was behind Sasuke, securely held in Neji's protective embrace. Elation shot through her -- he was back.
"Figured he'd eventually go for the two of you," Shikamaru said, sitting down on one of the larger surviving boulders. An idle hand tossed his remaining chakra blade into Sasuke's new, perfectly defined shadow, the remaining half of his sword still shivering in the air while its master stood, paralyzed in the grip of Shikamaru's trap.
The air filled with the chittering of thousands of articulated carapaces, and a second shadow descended upon the last Uchiha, this time a ravenous, iridescent swarm of chakra beetles coming to feast.
The kikaichu gorged, leeching life from him with such ardor that it leaked from them. Tiny lights flared to life amid the swarm, beacons of wasted chakra glimmering from their anuses as they stuffed themselves beyond satiation.
At least, until they stopped, and buzzed in anger as they were denied access to their bounty. Try as they might they were forced away from Sasuke, sheathed in a second golden skin that surged forth from his body as he began to rise away from the ground.
Everyone stepped back as the field expanded and glowed in the twilight, a pallid imitation of the sun not yet risen as Sasuke climbed higher. New features appeared within it, ethereal bones, and spectral flesh, holographic as they shimmered and shifted. Even Shikamaru's trench knives had been torn from the ground, pushed away by the towering creature that now surrounded Sasuke, leaving him and his ghostly colossus free again to move as he willed.
"I was hoping we could avoid that," Shikamaru said, and Sakura was pretty sure she agreed.
OoOoOoO
With dawn came the birds.
In ones and two, with whistles and chirps, they reached out to each other in the secret songs of simple creatures. Even when the sun lurked beneath the horizon, beneath the curvature of the earth and the deciduous jacket that Ho no Kuni wore, they roused at first light, as they always did, and welcomed the new day.
No exception was made for the hospital of a riverside town halfway between Konohagakure and the border, and as the first fires of twilight glowed a chalky cyan against a few fingers of low-lying cloud, a blue-and-white flycatcher stalled out of flight and alit on the sill of a high window and twittered out a song.
On her over-soft hospital mattress, Ino roused beneath the thin sheets and realized as she blinked her way to consciousness that she'd somehow drifted off.
Now that the painkillers and the endorphins had worn off, she became further aware of just how ruinously sore she was. Everything ached, and even looking for the source of the pretty little tune coming from outside her window provoked twinges and cramps in muscles she hadn't been aware existed.
Even lifting her hands to rub the sleep from her eyes hurt, and as she let her arms relax back to the bed, she found she didn't have the energy or the motivation to bother moving them again.
Something shifted on the bed, not too far away, and she hazarded a look despite her protesting neck and the agony that still lingered in her gut.
Haruka was still where she'd been the night before, sitting at her bedside, head resting on curled arms, the scattered remnants of a pony-tail no longer pristine spread across the sheets behind her. For an idle moment, Ino wondered what had happened to her own hair-tie, but it seemed a silly and petty thing to worry about now.
There were still too many questions unanswered, things she didn't particularly want to think about, and the amount of time she'd spent unconscious meant she was entirely ignorant about the important things. Things like whether or not they were really safe, or if they'd run far enough.
In any case, there wasn't anything she could do about it now.
If Sasuke had snuck over the border to finish the job, she was pretty much a sitting duck at this point, lamed beyond being remotely useful for at least a week's time -- probably more. As loathe as she was to wish her experience on anyone, she hoped Sakura had been able to find Sasuke and deal with him, somehow.
She molded a small amount of chakra, as much as she dared, and laid the blue glow in her palm against her stomach. The pain ebbed, and she imagined it flowing outward, around the contour of her body and leaching down through the bed, away from her. It helped, a little, and she tried to sit up.
The bird outside twittered and she heard its wings flap as it took flight, and she envied it for its freedom as she failed and gave up.
The second attempt was more successful, and though the new pang provoked a cringe which provoked her damaged eye to complain in turn, she was happy just to have some control back. No doubt a nurse or a doctor would come to discipline her later, but she'd deal with that when it came. It didn't help that she could feel her innards shift in ways she was sure wasn't healthy.
She let herself settle onto her pillows, and the pain eased away as she became accustomed to her new position. At least this way she could actually see more beyond the window besides a small slice of sky, and it was nice to see trees again, even if only as dark silhouettes against the slowly retreating stars.
Ino sighed and tipped her head back. There really wasn't anything else to do.
"If she's bugging you, I can probably get her to move," Nanami said, punctuating her arrival with a yawn.
Ino brushed her hair away from her good eye -- realizing further she'd have to change the way she did her hair since she only had one to work with now -- and found Haruka's team mate only just leaning around the corner from the hallway.
"No, she's fine where she is, I guess," she said, waving the girl in. "She wanted to talk, earlier. Dai said he'd arranged rooms for everyone, though, so what are you still doing here?"
Nanami took a step closer, and leaned down to peer at Haruka.
"We never left, actually. Kiyoka's still sleeping in Kiba-sensei's room. I got up to use the bathroom, but Uzumaki here was gone so I went to look for her. Plus I went to check on Akamaru. How long has she been here?"
"She's been here since...I don't know, actually."
"Is she okay?"
"Well, I think so...I'm sorry, I didn't have time to make sure everyone was all right after we ran out of there..."
Nanami shook her head, and waved a couple fingers towards her face. It took Ino a second to understand she was pointing to her eyes, and when she looked up and met Nanami's gaze, the girl blushed, a dark pastel against the pale walls.
"I'm screwing everything up today," she said. "I don't mean to...like, your..."
"Don't worry about me," Ino said. "I'm doing fine."
"What I meant was...is she okay okay?" Nanami said, dropping into a whisper. "I kind of said some stuff that might not have been totally cool. I mean, I didn't make fun of her or anything but she was pretty upset. I just hope she's not mad at me."
If Haruka heard, she didn't move. Nanami played nervously with a short lock of brown hair and wavered from side to side on her feet. Her eyes were soft, still a little red, and flicked around the room as though she couldn't find any one thing to look at.
"I think she'll probably be alright. We had a good talk. What about you?"
"Me?"
Ino tried not to laugh as Nanami pointed to herself, puzzlement evident on her face.
"C'mere," Ino said, the old feeling returning, the one that told her to talk to everyone. "Sit down already."
Nanami hesitated, awkward without the space or the ability to exercise her habitual energy, but sat sheepishly in the chair next to Haruka anyway. It wasn't long before one of her knees began to bob in time with some unheard rhythm.
This wasn't her responsibility, really, Ino knew, watching as Nanami tried to make herself comfortable. She didn't really know Kiba's team that well, besides seeing them from time to time on the training grounds. They were his apprentices, and she had her own to worry about.
And at the same time, they were just genin, still just beginning to cope with the world they'd signed on to. A world which would probably never know true peace, one too consumed by greed and corruption, inflamed by old rages and ancient hatreds. If Uchiha Sasuke had first abandoned and then betrayed the village, it was a symptom of the greater disease of the world.
Even if Kiba wasn't in any position to do his job at the moment, she was. Even if it hurt, she'd cover for him, because that was the way things were done in Konohagakure, and she was convinced it was the right way to do things. Other villages could boast and bluster about their potency and their power, but when it came down to it, that raw ability and murderous strength had nothing on the community Ino was a part of.
"So: are you okay?"
"Sort of," Nanami said, and she glanced back at the door she'd come through. "Mostly worried. I mean, I've never seen him get hurt like that before, you know? He never gets hurt. Ever. Now it's like he might...he might..."
Nanami's tortured grimace spoke of innocence lost.
Ino remembered meeting Sarutobi Asuma for the first time, towering and cool, pulling smoke from the tail end of a burnt out cigarette before crushing it under a toe and smiling that broad, gentle smile of his that spoke of confidence and competence. She remembered thinking she'd gotten lucky pulling him as her assigned teacher. He was invincible.
Had been.
"Hey," Ino said, and her voice was still raspier than she would have liked, "he'll make it, this time, I think."
"What if he never walks again? What's he going to do? What am I going to do? They're going to give us a new teacher or something but it'll never be the same. And, like, he's like me! If he can't walk or use his arms he'll probably go crazy. I would."
Ino let her babble, let her unchain the story of anxiety told by her taut-wound body. Told her that she didn't think Kiba would become paralyzed, tried to explain that his muscles were still mostly intact, that they'd repair with time and some pretty horrific scarring. He might lose some strength, maybe, but knowing Kiba it was doubtful it'd keep him down for long.
It seemed to help. Nanami's voice quieted back down to something somewhat more calm, but then she drew her knees up, hugged them, and mumbled something into her lap.
"What was that?"
"I kinda...wish I was more useful," she said again, only daring to meet Ino's questioning gaze for a fraction of a second before looking to the floor.
"Why would you say that?"
Nanami sounded miserable, and Ino knew she was finally getting to the core of things.
"I couldn't do anything back there. Like, I can fight, a little, but Haruka's better than me. I can do some genjutsu and it's normally me that does stuff like clearing illusions and whatnot but I couldn't do anything to help anyone this time. I tried so many times but Kiba-sensei got hit anyway because he couldn't see with anything but his nose because I couldn't do it."
Despite the soreness that bloomed in her shoulder, Ino reached out and just managed to touch her fingers to Nanami's foot.
"It wasn't your fault, kiddo. You're not at the level to compete with someone like that. Not yet, not for a long time. Hell, I'm not."
"But that's my job, on our team, and I couldn't...I just couldn't do it."
"Doesn't matter," Ino said, "You're not at fault, and I know exactly how you feel."
"You got us out of there," Nanami said, insistent.
"Granted, but that's not what I mean. You know how I'm a medic, too?"
"You saved Kiba-sensei from dying right there, yeah. Thank you."
"Well, the first time it really, really mattered? I couldn't do that. Nanami, my teacher died in my hands, while I was trying to save him."
The memory was far from pleasant, and Ino winced -- twice, as her dead eye reacted poorly. The shock of the admission seemed to get Nanami's attention, and she stared before realizing what she was doing.
"So yeah, I do know how you feel," Ino said. "But I made a mistake, afterward. I don't want you to make the same one."
"What's that?"
"I was telling myself some of the same things you are. That I couldn't do it, that it was my fault, that I was useless. I spent months thinking about it, trying to figure out what I'd done wrong when I could have been getting better. We even went out, and got the guy who'd done it, and still I couldn't get rid of that feeling."
"Yeah?"
Ino nodded, slowly.
"Yeah. Here's the kicker, too. Asuma-sensei dying...it didn't even hit me as bad as it did one of my teammates. It changed him, and for a while he was obsessed with revenge and wouldn't talk to anyone. Even today, he spends most of his time far away from the village and I never get to see him much. And I should have been there, to talk to him, to make him talk to me, but I wasn't because I was too busy wallowing in my own misplaced guilt. And that's something that still bothers me."
Even curled into a hurt little ball, Nanami was one of those people who couldn't stop moving. Like she'd said, she was just like Kiba, and her toes flexed and curled in her shoe beneath Ino's fingers.
"So what do I do, then?"
"So you have a choice," Ino said, and smiled. "You can worry about being useless and weak, or you can tell yourself that you're going to be stronger, and then go and do that."
"Can I...can I learn how to fix people too?"
"How's your chakra control?"
"Um, good. Not as good as Haruka or anything, but Kiba-sensei says better than him. I think he says that just to make me feel good, though."
Ino snorted.
"He wasn't kidding, he's got terrible control. All he can do are big, destructive techniques that take a lot of raw power. Details are beyond him. I bet you're good enough to learn the basics, and you'll only get better with time and practice."
"Really? Thanks!"
"Sure you can. If Takashi can do it, so can you."
Come to think of it, it'd be good for Takashi to demonstrate what he could do to Nanami. Teaching her and practicing together would cement his own skills and resurrect his confidence, and really, Ino had been wanting to see more interaction between teams for a long time. She'd have to remember to set this up whenever it was they got back home.
For the first time since she'd come in Nanami looked hopeful, almost cheery, like the girl Ino had watched nudging her teammates as they dropped into the well in Sunagakure what seemed like an eternity ago.
Nanami moved to stand with enough enthusiasm to startle Haruka in the process, and hustled her groggy teammate out of the room before she could so much as ask what was going on.
Ino supposed the new, final solitude was a good thing. Being the only adult for six traumatized kids was exhausting.
Especially since she wanted nothing more than to curl up in front of a fire with some hot chocolate and be thankful for the fact she was going to see her thirtieth birthday after all.
OoOoOoO
With dawn came the light.
Light that was cold, thin, and pale as it crept over the low horizon of the valley, spilling slowly through lowlands and weaving through the trees as it went. Light that was as yet too dim to counter the stars yet still strong enough to recolour the sky; light that heralded the promise of a new day and a rising sun, and portended the death of the night.
Shikamaru rose to his feet and watched the coming of the light with a chilly caution, jaundiced as it was through prism of Sasuke's ephemeral cocoon. It towered over what remained of the battlefield, the torso, head and arms of a colossus with topaz flesh. It was a creature of pure will, molded by it's maker's insanity and made manifest by the crimson eye that still burned visibly in the air above him. It was anguish given form, and no birds sang in this dead land as the last victim of the Uchiha legacy screamed his hatred into the morning even as his eye wept blood to match the wound inflicted on its former partner.
A hurricane of transparent knives slashed against it, whistling with the pent up fury of an angry mother nature, but to no avail. Red lightning coursed through the impermeable skin of chakra surrounding Sasuke as a storm that would have leveled acres of forest was turned aside. Shikamaru shielded his face from the debris that whipped around him. Further away, Neji ushered Sakura out of the crater, moving together under the cloud of roiling dust kicked up by the attack, clinging to each other like the drowned.
Temari landed next to Shikamaru, and she turned aside and spat into the crumbled rock and bone dry soil, disgusted and disappointed.
"Doesn't look like I can get through it," she said, her fan folded and slung beneath one arm, but still ready nevertheless. "So now what do we do? Regroup?"
"Shouldn't be necessary," Shikamaru said, transfixed by the spectacle looming before him. He began to pace to one side, skirting counterclockwise around the perimeter of Sasuke's spectral armor. "It doesn't look very stable."
"You're sure? It looks like it's holding. I think."
She followed a few steps behind, steps even with a balanced readiness, her eyes flashing in the dusky twilight as the red storm continued unabated around Sasuke.
"I think if he could attack like that, he would have by now. Especially with those two that close. I think Shino managed to hurt him a fair bit."
A tendril of Shikamaru's retreating shadow retracted towards them out of the crater, shivered once, and vanished into the dissolute blob beneath him once it had relinquished its control over the knives it had collected. Shikamaru sheathed his weapons, and there was a hum as Shino appeared next to him. Or possibly Shino's clone, since another version was standing next to Hinata in the distance, who was brushing hair back over her shoulder.
"The kikaichu know their job is not complete," he said. "They are agitated, but I can confirm the Uchiha is a much reduced threat. If he were rational at the moment, I would suspect he would be planning an escape."
"Me too," Shikamaru said. "But if he were rational he'd have taken off after he lost his eye. Either way, this ends as soon as he comes out of there. We just have to be ready until he does."
"You're certain," Shino said turning hidden eyes towards Shikamaru and the woman standing next to him, his voice naturally flat, with so little inflection it was hard to distinguish between a question and a statement.
Temari grinned.
"Yeah," Shikamaru said. "I'm pretty sure. He can't have too much left after all the fighting we've done and what you did to him, Shino. And whatever that is, it has to be burning a lot of what's left in his reserve. Whatever this is to him, this looks more last-ditch than anything."
"You have a plan, then."
"Same as before. Tell your bugs they'll get to finish eating in a minute."
"I see," Shino said. "I will wait for you, then."
Shino excused himself and vanished, leaving Shikamaru and Temari to wait out Sasuke's temporary invincibility.
Night was a strange time to be a Nara, Shikamaru thought. Strange in that night was, in effect, nothing but an enormous shadow, one large enough to span half the globe. Night was the earth's shadow, and, one would assume, a playground for anyone who could use shadow anywhere near as well as his clan.
The irony of it was that it was probably the second-hardest time of the day to manipulate shadow in, after high noon, when shadows were at their smallest. After all, shadows were defined by the light around them, and in the absence of that light, it took a phenomenal amount of effort to make his shadow do what he wanted it to do.
Without the fires burning in the crater and the occasional, judicious use of flares and explosive tags, he would have been out of this fight long ago. If it weren't for the fact Sakura and Hinata had already started fighting, he would have preferred to wait out his vulnerabilities.
But with the dawn came the light.
And with that light, Shikamaru could be a puppeteer unparalleled.
Sasuke's jutsu was failing as he weakened, expended what remained of his reserve. Parts of it began to flicker and decay. Ghostly flesh melted away in places, exposing spectral bones before Sasuke forced it back into existence. Temari made things worse for him, waving her fan through a trio of broad arcs to crush Sasuke under the pressure. The walls around him faded and buckled in a rippling cascade of crimson lightning, and he began to fall.
The last Uchiha landed unceremoniously on all fours, and instinct and training pushed him through a roll, placing him precariously back on his feet. Miserable as he appeared, swordless, bandaged, one arm limp from the elbow down where Hinata had severed the channels that delivered strength, he was still dangerous, and Shikamaru had already finished the seals by the time Sasuke lifted his head to orient himself.
Ten kilometers to the east, a brilliant arc of molten gold lifted above the low cradle of the valley below. Saffron bloomed everywhere in the valley, touching every plant, every stone, every mote of dust. The river caught the light and burned orange, glittering with diamonds between the long, skeletal shadows of the parched trees scattered around it.
Shikamaru's back glowed the colour of a sodium fire as he turned away from the sunrise, and he let himself smile as his shadow stretched clear across to the other side of the crater, its edges scalpel-sharp and ruler-straight. He felt it come into being, an effortless stretch of his imagination, so unlike the burden of groping for it in the dark, and it expanded as Temari flicked her open fan into the dirt behind him to add its shadow to his.
Sasuke froze mid-step. Hinata moved one of her hands, and the invisible lash cut a bloody line across Sasuke's face, maiming his remaining eye in the instant before he was overcome by a wave of irritable, chakra-eating beetles.
Shikamaru had a hard time figuring out when exactly Temari had recovered her fan from its assisting position. Sasuke thrashed beneath the swarm, trying to free himself, but then Temari was on him, eyes glittering with the cold hard glint of vicious determination, and her folded fan stretched back. In another second, she'd have flicked it open with an attendant razor of wind to cut him in half.
She very nearly did, if not for Sakura's interference.
"Wait," Sakura said weakly, reaching out over her fallen ex-teammate even as Shino's sated beetles burrowed and buzzed away.
Temari's foot came down on Sasuke's good hand, hard, breaking fingers against the stone. Surprisingly, Sasuke made no sound even as the bones cracked and cuts appeared.
"You're kidding," Temari said, wary as she stooped over her fallen opponent, a hawk covering her kill.
"He has to go, Sakura" Shikamaru said, wandering closer and re-attaching his paralytic shadow to Sasuke...just in case. "It's not only our genin we lost here, but we stand to lose more if someone decides this is a good pretext for starting more trouble."
More war was the last thing anyone needed, and as nice as things were now, it was far from stable. Every short-sighted daimyo and lordling had their eyes on some prize or another, sought advantage for their personal and national armies with the services of the ninja, and that was the way of the world.
War begot war, and he wasn't going to risk it. Wasn't going to risk allowing anyone else he knew fall prey to it.
"Wait," she said again, staring at them with beseeching eyes. She was still weak, as she knelt beside Sasuke, and Neji helped her down when it became clear she might not make it on her own. She made some seals, apparently unsuccessfully, and looked back to Neji, who had knelt next to her. "Can I borrow some chakra? Please?"
Shikamaru's eyebrow shot up in perfect synchrony with Neji's.
"Sakura, he tried to kill you."
"I know!" she said, tortured, and she buried her face in his arm, clutching his torn, dirty sleeve in a fist. "I know and it's not right and I'll say it right now that I was wrong before and fine we have to do this but please, please let me try something. I went ahead because I had to know, and I'm sure there's more to it than this. He's not...he wouldn't have..."
Her voice dissolved into an inarticulate cry, and she wept softly, surrounded on all sides by stony silence.
Neji didn't say anything, and Shikamaru watched with a low, humming caution as his brow wrinkled beneath his hitaiate in thought, white eyes closed. He said nothing, but extended his palm to her, swirling with the soft blue glow of his unfocused chakra.
"Thank you, Neji. Thank you."
Shikamaru shared a wary glance with Temari as Sakura made the seals again, touching one hand to Sasuke's bloodied temples, and using the other to draw upon Neji's proffered gift.
"There," she said after a while, looking up at the assembled team in turn, before leaning close to Sasuke's body. She let go of Neji's hand, severing the stream of chakra, but gripped his fingers again when he began to pull it back towards himself.
"Why didn't you ever come home, Sasuke?" Sakura asked, in a whisper. "Why didn't you ever try to even talk to us?"
Silence answered her, and Shikamaru yawned. Temari's fingers drummed impatiently on her fan. Somewhere else, Hinata clasped her hands together and waited on tired legs beside Shino's impression of a statue.
When the answer came, Shikamaru had to strain his ears to hear it, and even then it was broken by the ruin of Sasuke's voice.
"Couldn't...anyone. Couldn't trust..."
"We waited for you," she whispered. "We looked for you, why couldn't..?"
"Lies," he said, and for the first time his voice wasn't eerily calm or burning with the incensed rage of an uncontrolled animal. Whatever Sakura had done seemed to have worked. "Everyone lies, everyone...village killed...clan. The clan wanted...to kill the village, my brother killed... them, Madara killed them. Can't trust anything. Anyone."
"I don't...I don't understand," she said, and sat up. Neji wiped a tear from her cheek as she let herself rest in his arms.
Whatever Sakura had done, she'd stripped away the anger and the calm at once, the two traits that had defined the Uchiha since Shikamaru had first seen him. There was nothing left but the broken, blinded body, and the thin, hurt voice that emerged from it, tired and young and lonely and frightened.
"Needed to kill...to fix everything...couldn't kill Madara...failed my brother...failed everyone and I don't..."
In a moment of dark sympathy, Shikamaru understood. He'd been to that place, if only for a short while, knew how consuming it was, knew how his usual petty desires had been pushed to the background. He knew how the fury had prowled in the corner's of his mind day after night after day, never letting him rest, driving him ever forward in pursuit of his teacher's killer.
And even though he'd been successful, it had taken him years to properly figure out all the meanings to the last words of advice he'd been given. Oddly, watching the crippled Uchiha speak, listening to him and pretending not to, he had the creeping sensation that he'd not yet learned everything Asuma-sensei had wanted him to learn.
"What about the girl?" Sakura was saying, and her voice still hitched from time to time, but she carried on with her last rites.
"All lies," Sasuke said. "Everything is lies. Everything is illusion. Had to fix everything so I lied...made us. Tried to...but I couldn't stop...thinking...couldn't be happy...failed...had to go but...made...us. Us."
"What about us? Me? Naruto?"
His face contorted with the mention of his name, and Sasuke's voice shifted and strained as the insanity began to hammer at the restraints thrown against it. He descended into incoherence again as the dissonance between his vengeance denied and the friendship and the love he'd secretly longed for swelled. Who knew how long Sasuke had lived in his own private universe afterward, to dull the pain of the lies that had been told to him by everyone he'd cared about -- everyone but his friends, who he'd discarded in pursuit of those untruths inflicted upon him.
Shikamaru's moment of sympathy cut short and he sucked on a tooth, trying not to think of anything.
Sakura quieted Sasuke, touched his shoulder.
"That's enough," she said, quietly, and then pressed her fingers against his head again. Sasuke fell silent, relaxed, and she whispered into Neji's ear.
Neji touched Sasuke's chest.
The scion of the Uchiha clan exhaled once more, and expired at last.
OoOoOoO
Hinata fidgeted, fingertips dancing across each other as she tried not to move.
Old habit.
She found herself at a loss, not quite sure what to do, even though everything had ended for now. Something heavy landed on her shoulder, and she looked to see Shino standing there. He gave her a gentle squeeze and a nod, the shimmering brilliance of the rising sun reflected in his mirrored lenses.
"It's over," he said, and she heard the earth around her chitter and writhe with the movement of his beetles returning to their home in his body.
That was the surest sign, Hinata knew. As good as her eyes were, she could never be sure a battle was over until the kikaichu declared it as such, and she'd missed the certainty that Shino could provide with only his presence.
Even so.
"Not quite," she said, looking over to where Sakura wept in Neji's arms, where he clutched her against him, the most precious thing in his restricted world. She thought of Haruka, of Naruto, and of the repercussions that would affect nearly everyone she knew. "It won't be over for a while, Shino."
She met his eyes again, somewhere behind those glasses, searching for an expression buried beneath his hood and cowl, but knew he understood anyway.
"As always, you are correct," he said. "Though there is little left for me to do here."
"Go on," she said, as Neji rose from beside Sasuke' corpse, carrying Sakura in his arms. "I'll be along right behind."
As they retreated, Shino nodded and followed them, and she was reasonably certain he was the only one among those three that was paying any real attention to their surroundings.
They'd left a mess, as always. Sakura's crater, the carbon-scored scars in the rock where fire or lightning had left their mark, the broken sword, and the blood-stains would remain as testament to what had happened here. Shikamaru and Temari remained near the body of their fallen opponent, and she moved toward them, not speaking until she detected a lull in their unusually quiet conversation.
"What now?"
Temari sighed, drew her legs up as she took a seat on a dislodged boulder, and rested her folded fan across her knees.
"Damage control," she said, disgust weighing down her tongue. "We'll have to show proof that we've killed him. Frankly I'd rather just cut off his head right now and be done with it but given the way your girl there can't stop looking back, I suppose we'll wait until she's out of sight."
"Plus I'll have to take his eyes -- what's left of them -- back to Konoha so we can dispose of them properly. It'd be bad if anyone else got hold of that, I guess. But yes, damage control. We'll have two nations we're already on uneven footing with breathing down our necks over this. It's going to be a pain in the ass."
Shikamaru rested easy, with his hands deep in his pockets, but the dull stare he was giving Sasuke's body suggested he was more worried than his voice and posture let on.
Hinata found herself staring at the corpse. The dirty black sleeve wrapped around his head, the blotted garnet trails running down both cheeks, the broken hand, and the twisted arm made her think of Kiba, and Ino. They made her think of the frantic hours of the deepest part of the night, stitching in desperate silence as her fingers went slick with blood.
She wanted to hate him.
She tried. Failed.
There was nothing left but pity. Pity that ached and mourned, not for his broken body, or for his aimless insanity, or for the hell-bound path of destruction and self-immolation he'd chosen or been forced on to. She pitied him for the lies. She pitied him for his treacherous clan, for their history of resentment, for the lies they'd told him. She pitied him for the lies he'd been fed nearly every day of his life, so thick, so numerous, so contradicting that eventually he'd been unable to differentiate between the untruths and the reality of his every day.
She pitied him because he'd broken under their weight. Not now, not ten years ago. He'd broken long before then, long before he'd even been made a genin of Konohagakure.
She pitied him because he'd never trusted, not truly. Not known, or else not recognized, what friendship was, what it meant.
"Hey," Shikamaru said, after a moment's silence while Hinata had been thinking about leaving them to their dirty work. He hadn't taken his eyes off Sasuke, didn't bother lifting his head to look at her. "How's Ino?"
"She'll be all right," Hinata said. "Changed, but all right, I think. She'll make it through."
Shikamaru nodded, absently.
"She misses you, you know. That's what she was telling Sakura and I the last time we got together. Chouji too, no doubt."
He finally moved his head, looked at her from the corner of his eyes, let his mouth bend into a wry smirk.
"Yeah, it's been a while, hasn't it."
Temari glanced up the ridge. The others were long gone.
"It's what I've been telling him forever," she said, combing through one of her dusty-blonde pig-tails with hardened fingers. "Let's get this done, and then we can all go sort out our personal and national shit."
Hinata excused herself demurely and left them to it.
The journey home was nearly as quiet as the journey out, though for different reasons. They travelled at a slow, steady pace, rebuilding strength bit by bit, stopping to rest here and there. Her cousin and Sakura isolated themselves somewhat, talking in fractured whispers and despondent sighs, and she let them be.
Shino had never been particularly talkative, but it was apparent that he, too, was relieved when they met the survivors of Sasuke's rampage and discovered Kiba's condition had stabilized, despite not regaining consciousness. Akamaru was clearly glad to see them, though he looked ragged and harried. He'd destroyed the corner of the hospital's garden beneath Kiba's window, pacing out a trail among the flowers and digging small holes in frustration and impatience despite Kiyoka's insistence that Kiba was going to be okay.
He wagged his tail exactly twice when she petted him.
When she reached Kiba's room, she found herself wrapped tight in Haruka's arms.
"Hi," she said when she could breathe again, and she returned the hug with a fondness that rekindled the subdued light of her soul. "How are you doing?"
"I was worried," Haruka said, pulling at her hair with an unusual timidity as they retreated to a quiet, dark corner of Kiba's room, away from the machines that announced his thankfully continued pulse. "I'm glad you're okay, Hinata. Is it over?"
"It is. There's nothing left to fear."
Haruka looked up again, her eyes returned to the opaque anthracite of her early childhood, though without the eager fire that had once burned there unabated, they seemed now more like obsidian, a little colder, a little sharper, a little more wary.
"What's dad going to think, Hinata? How am I supposed to tell him I'm...like this?"
"Don't worry about your father," Hinata said, and the thought of him brought a confident smile to her face, a confidence she knew she could share with his daughter. "You know him. You know how he is. This won't change how much he loves you, or what he thinks of you. He adopted you without knowing who you were or where you came from, Haruka. He's always been ready to accept whatever comes with you. It's up to you to take that and make him proud, in your own way."
"What about you?"
Hinata smiled wider.
"I've been through too much to abandon someone who only ever asked me for a little love. I love you as much as I love him, Haruka."
"Ew."
"Differently," she said, and the tiny choking sound that came out of the girl almost sounded like a laugh.
"Thanks. Though, um, I didn't mean that. I had a long talk with Ino-sensei...I mean, how do I tell him something like this?"
"Oh," Hinata said, and she thought about the malicious lies that had consumed every last Uchiha, the fabrications that ran rampant through the world, the delusions of her own clan.
"Why don't we start with the truth?" she said, "And then we can go from there."
The question as to how Naruto would react, however, would have to wait for days.
Days in which Hinata kept herself occupied with tidying up the aftermath and trying to avoid dealing with her clan. In her absence, however, Hanabi had taken a liking to torturing her elders with the malicious bits of information and scandalous rumors. Only the gods knew where she found her news and gossip, but her sister's new hobby seemed to be a sadistic involvement in clan politics.
Hinata was grateful for her sister's interference, although it was frightening to behold, because it freed her to visit Kiba, Ino, and her father, and tend to them as best she could in the interim. And, at the very least, Hanabi was telling the truth, even if she was deliberately choosing the least tactful things to say.
The day Naruto was due to return, Sakura met her at his apartment, and they waited.
"I think I'd better tell him," Sakura said, after their second pot of tea finished steeping and she'd served the both of them. "Rather than both of us."
"I thought we agreed..."
Sakura shook her head.
"No, I mean, I'll tell him. And then I think I'll have to leave. It still hurts, Hinata, just thinking about it. I can't help him sort it out because I don't have the answers, and I don't think I could bear trying to answer the questions he'll have afterward. Could you handle that for me?"
In the end, it didn't make a difference.
Naruto came in through the window as he always did, grinning with the satisfaction of a bloodless victory and a deal well bargained. His grin died when he noticed the two of them, and Sakura's bleak invitation to sit.
She explained, and Hinata stayed silent, holding Naruto's hand in hers and keeping it tight in her fingers even when his went slack from shock.
"...and so...that's it," Sakura finished.
He blinked a few times, ran his free hand through his hair. Pulled off his hitaiate, pushed it across the table. Frowned, worked his mouth in silence. Sakura had nothing left to say, and alternated her gaze between his eyes and the teapot resting between them.
He stood abruptly, and Hinata was nearly pulled into upright beside him before she unwillingly relinquished his hand.
"I think...I'm going to go for a walk," he said, and moved slowly around the table, nearly tripping over his chair as he fumbled his way toward the door.
Dumbfounded, Hinata wasn't entirely sure what to do. She'd never seen him like this, doubted anyone ever had, but she stood anyway, and followed with small, tentative steps.
Naruto touched the doorknob, hesitated.
"Hinata?"
"Yes?"
"Come with me?"
Together, they wandered through the village's back roads, into the forest, to an isolated pond, disused and choked with reeds. She held his hand, and for the first time she couldn't be bothered to care what anyway saw, what anyone thought. Least of all the undeserving, pompous oligarchs that ran the rest of her clan.
And when he was done screaming himself hoarse, when he let himself fall back against a tree and shiver with the breeze and drown in the uncontrollable river of grief running through him, Hinata discovered she could be strong in all the ways she'd ever really wanted to be, too.
OoOoOoO
"Anyone care to tell me where all these flowers came from?"
Because, quite frankly, Kiba was suffocating in them. There had to be a half-dozen vases scattered around his room, perched on the bedside table, the windowsill, and the shelf along the far wall. And while he could only assume they were supposed to be pleasant, there wasn't any wind to clear the smells out of such a small space, and they were starting to get cloyingly annoying.
"Um," Nanami said, pointing to the nearest, smallest vases. "These ones we brought. Those are from your sister, those ones from your mom, and those ones over there are from Hyuuga-san. And Aburame-san. And, uh, those ones..."
"Uh huh."
"Oh, and, and. Akamaru tried to bring you a dead rabbit or something, but the nurses freaked out."
"Right, see, he knows what he's doing. I appreciate the gesture, but you're supposed to bring a guy meat when he's laid up like this, not flowers."
Nanami looked at her teammates. Haruka shrugged, and Kiyoka looked somewhat appalled by the suggestion.
"You're kidding, right?" Kiyoka said, shuddering. "It was dirty and covered in drool and stuff."
"So give it a wash and skin it," he said, and laughed as Kiyoka went paler than usual. "What do you think I do when I'm out of rations? Seriously, I'm hungry as hell and the food here sucks. Help me escape. Please."
"Oh, sure," Haruka said. "I'll stand guard while you bash your way through the walls with your bandages and your grafts."
"Or you could just steal me a wheelchair or something."
"Because hey it's not like your arms aren't completely immobilized either. No, we're not pushing you."
Nanami laughed. Kiba sighed, and twitched, unable to really do anything until whoever was in charge decided he was allowed to even attempt moving his limbs again.
"Seriously, Kiba-sensei. Your sister told us not to let you do anything that the doctors say you can't do because she was sure you'd try."
"Damn you, Hana, damn you," he said, wishing he could shake his fists in mock anger.
The worst of it was how weak me felt. Movement was excruciating when he tried, so he didn't, even though he was still taking pretty heavy doses of analgesics. Besides his shredded muscles, there were the burns that covered them, and even though much of the damage had been rebuilt through what had apparently been about eight hours of miraculous seals and surgery, he'd be scarred worse than Kuromaru by the time he got out. And that was saying something.
"No, seriously, girls, I'm going crazy in here."
The girls looked at each other, and replied in unison.
"...I don't think it's the hospital."
"Traitors."
"They might have a point," Ino said, from behind the bed curtain, before she drew it aside. She was carrying another bouquet of flowers, although even to his untrained eye it seemed considerably more artistic. "You were nuts long before coming in here. Did you tell them yet?"
"Tell them what?"
Ino rolled her eyes.
"Well, because you're sure not leading the cell in your condition."
He'd forgotten entirely about it.
"Oh, yeah, that. So starting tomorrow, you three are going to be receiving a replacement teacher, at least until I'm, uh, up again. I got my old teammates to ask around a bit and..."
Nanami fairly gushed.
"Is it Hyuuga-san? Hinata's awesome."
"Uh, no," Kiba said, looking at Haruka significantly. "Close, but no."
"Oh, no. Don't tell me you got..."
"I saw him in the outside the hospital on my way in," Ino said, smirking. "You might want to be careful what you say right now, because he's probably watching you."
"Girls, we're in so much trouble," Haruka whispered.
"Hyuuga Neji will expect to see you on our normal training grounds at five, tomorrow morning. Don't disappoint him, because you don't want to know what he's got in store for you if you show up late."
Haruka and Nanami bemoaned their fate, though Kiyoka seemed reasonably happy with the arrangement, arguing there were probably worse people to have as a substitute. Haruka's response to that was that she didn't know him, to which Kiyoka countered that he was supposed to be very good and if he was good enough for Sakura-san he was good enough for her, which swayed Nanami's opinion.
"Alright, you lot," Kiba said, trying not to laugh at them. "Go on, get out of here. I guarantee today's your last free day because he will work you probably harder than I ever did. Go have some fun while you still can."
They filed out, making their farewells in between arguments. After they'd gone, and the door had closed, Ino sat on one of the chairs.
Looked at him. He looked back, opened his mouth, shut it.
"So...I got Konohamaru to take over my team for the time being," Ino said, breaking the ice. "I'm off duty, too, until I'm back up to speed as well, although you'll probably be out of commission a lot longer than me."
"Cool," he said.
The silence stretched out again. Kiba found himself unable to think of anything to say that wasn't weird and awkward. Ino seemed absorbed by her handful of flowers, and moved a few blooms around with careful fingers.
"Sorry," they said, at the same time.
Paused.
"What for?" they said, also at the same time.
"Aw, hang on," Kiba said, "I'll go first, then. Sorry about that. I kind of screwed up back there, didn't I?"
He wasn't sure why she looked so confused.
"What? No, you didn't. You did exactly what I asked you to do, I mean..."
"I failed, Ino. I screwed up, I was impatient. I nearly got myself killed. And you, too. You weren't even awake yet by the time I was down. Three minutes, ha. I didn't last nearly long enough."
She shook her head violently, ponytail tossing behind her, and she seemed more upset than he thought reasonable, given the circumstances.
"What are you...Kiba, I'm the one who screwed up. We could have had him the first time, I just...I chose the wrong technique, I took too long. We could have finished it right then and there, you know, I just...I'm sorry. I wasted it. I owe you."
"Oh, come on. You saved my life, too. All of us."
She bit her lip, looked down.
"Hey," he said, after a moment. "Let's call it even. Sound good?"
Ino looked up with a forlorn expression, and he gave her a bit of a smirk.
"Hey, you changed your hair," he said, because she had. Her hair swept to the other side of her face now, clipped there by pins, a mirror image of her former style. She still let them fall over her face on the one side, only now it was the other eye that looked out on the world, the same crystal blue he'd wanted to see again.
"I, well, yeah. I suppose people were going to notice that, eventually," she said, sounding unsure, and he couldn't tell why.
It seemed to be a reflex, the way her hand moved to brush her bangs aside and as she parted the pale blonde curtain away, he saw the reason. She had a scar now, just off the vertical, that divided her right eye in half from the disrupted, gentle arc of her eyebrow down almost to her cheekbone. And though her eye was open, he was certain she couldn't see through the milky grey circle that had replaced a cool window of sky.
He almost didn't dare to ask.
"That's how we got away, isn't it?"
She nodded again, and it was so unlike her, so painfully shy that he almost felt as though he was talking to the old Hinata again.
"Wow. I guess I should be the one owing you."
"We called it even, didn't we?"
"That was before I knew," he said. "You're even braver than I thought."
He could relate. He'd done something like that once before, when he'd stabbed himself in the chest to rid himself of a cancerous usurper who'd infiltrated his body in battle, violated the sanctity of his self.
"Not really, I just had to think of something fast."
"I kind of know how that feels. You panic, realize you've only got one choice left. It takes guts to go through with it, even then. Whatever, I'm glad you were there. I don't think anyone else could have gotten us out like you did."
"Thanks," she said, but she still didn't sound right. And, after a moment, she pulled her hair entirely out of the way. "It looks horrible, doesn't it?"
It sounded like a trap, actually. He'd had enough girlfriends to know what a question like this one really meant, and he'd not had enough girlfriends to know what the correct answer really was. He couldn't say it was horrible, because that would just piss her off, and he couldn't say it wasn't so bad, because that was pitying. And he certainly couldn't say it looked good, because that would be lying.
"It would make me think twice about messing with you."
She glared, the dent in her scarred eyebrow and the flat dead stare of the ruined eye lending the expression a sinister dedication, and his pulse shot up. But it was the truth. It seemed to him that it was a reflection of her deeper self, like someone had scratched away a fleck of her porcelain doll surface and revealed a bit of the amazon beneath. Not that he'd ever say that out loud. Not to her.
"Yeah, like that."
"Great," she said, still scowling. "Now I won't be able to find a date not just because I'm ugly, but because I'm scary to boot."
"I would," he said, surprising himself. He hadn't meant to say that, but there it was.
"What?"
"Date you," he said, again before he realized he'd said it. There was an oddly comfortable feeling in his gut, despite the death's head glare Ino was giving him. Something instinctive, something nice about the way it felt.
"You're just saying that to make me feel better," she said, crossing her arms.
"Why does everyone assume every time I say something that I'm not serious? I mean it."
Her eyes softened a little, and her frown turned a little wary, a little careful, like she wasn't sure where to step next.
"Because you usually aren't serious, Kiba. You're so...so flippant about everything it's hard to tell when you aren't kidding."
"I'm always serious," he said, letting a slow smile back onto his face. "About everything. I just have uncommon opinions. Offer's still on the table, although you should know I'm going to be a terrible date for a while. Not being able to move my extremities does that to a man."
"Oh, I don't know about that," Ino said, with a sudden, predatory glint in her eyes that gave her grin a feline cast. "I did volunteer to take care of your physiotherapy. So you'd better be serious about this or else the next few months could be a very painful experience."
Her voice tilted abruptly, deepened, softened to a whisper.
"Or...it could be pleasant. I didn't think you thought of me like that...you know, being friends and all."
Kiba shrugged. It was about the only movement he could make.
"Hey, things change."
OoOoOoO
a/n: almost done here. Just a bit of an epilogue to wrap things up next week.
Also I don't interact much with my readers, and I apologize. Largely I use the stuff I post as a test platform for things I want to try but can't be bothered to put a ton of effort into, and it gets varying success. To compensate, I'll field questions this week and answer them in the a/n after the epilogue.