Author's notes: Not as soon as I expected, but here it is. Besonderer Dank geht an: SunflowerIce.
Disclaimer: I do not, have never, nor expect to ever own Naruto.
Ino felt the crunch as Daruma's nose buckled under the force of the kick. It was a nasty feeling and sound, but amazingly satisfying at the same time. The momentum of the kick also snapped his neck back and sent him sprawling. His hands flew to his face, and the kunai sailed clear.
But she wasn't done yet. Daruma had proven multiple times that he was as tough as nails, and she didn't want to have to go through another altercation with him. She dropped to one knee, looked at him through the seal she formed with her hands, and took control.
'Ninpou: Shintenshin no Jutsu!' she caught the agonised expression on Daruma's face, before her soul shot forward to occupy his body. There was a moment where Daruma resisted her intrusion- not very well and unsuccessfully, which came as a surprise. Her imagination had been inflating him into such an unstoppable monster that his feeble attempts to fight her control was almost funny.
It stopped being funny at all when she gained control of his senses.
The first thing she noticed was the broken nose. She had expected that, but it was still an extraordinary amount of pain to receive so suddenly and she continued to cradle Daruma's face with his hands.
The leg was another matter. No god damned wonder Daruma hadn't been able to keep running or stand up. The whole thing felt like it was on fire, with a glaring hotspot around the area where Ino had hit him with the shuriken at Kimimaro's house. It refused to respond to instructions, and every attempt to move it produced a variety of strange feeling from various tendons and brief stabs of pain from the muscles around them. Ino rolled the body back onto its knees and tried to ignore the intense, sick feeling that seemed permeate Daruma's every pore. The must have been running on nothing but adrenaline and testosterone from the moment he made his escape. Ino half coughed and half gasped a shuddering exhalation that sent strings of blood and saliva flailing forwards from the hand that still clasped the broken nose and tried to remember where her body was.
This proved to be quite easy, but she had somehow managed to turn Daruma completely around and her own body was well out-of-reach. Fortunately she seemed to have collapsed as intended, years of practice ensuring that her unconscious form hadn't been injured in her absence. It only took a measure of uncomfortable crawling to reach her hip pouch and collect the makibishi she had left.
Drawing in a painful breath, Ino willed Daruma's body to rise. The injured leg remained stubborn, but she was able to stand using the spare. She carefully distributed the makibishi evenly in as large an area as she could manage, pulled a thick chord from her hip pouch before tossing it back towards her own body, and started tying Daruma's hands together. This was somewhat difficult, due to the fact that the hands she was binding were the only set she had to use at that moment, and using Daruma's teeth made the chord fairly slippery from all the blood still flowing freely from his nose.
When she was satisfied that she had restrained him properly, she manoeuvred Daruma to face away from the makibishi and jumped backwards just high enough to get him airborne. Then she left him to his fate, and returned to her own body.
As soon as her eyes opened, she turned to make sure Daruma was down. What she saw was both unexpected and massively irritating.
When people in Daruma's physical condition had their minds beaten into submission by Shintenshin no Jutsu, they often didn't regain consciousness for hours after the skill was cancelled. This was not one of those times. For some reason Daruma had been able to move immediately after she relinquished control of his body, and he had done the only things he could in that situation. He had, it seemed, managed to twist his body to the side in mid-air and let his disabled leg cushion the fall. It had landed on several makibishi and Daruma had to be in intense pain because of it, but he had resisted the temptation to scream because he was concentrating so hard on not having the same thing happen to the rest of his body. Though he had sacrificed his near-useless leg, and the way she had bound his hands prevented him from easily avoiding the rest of the spikes, he was desperately trying to balance on one elbow, which he had shoved resolutely into the clear space between three makibishi. His expression perfectly defined "working-under-pressure."
Ino couldn't take much more of this. She rose hurriedly, mindful of her broken arm, and lurched towards the struggling Daruma- who was even starting to try and chew through his bindings. She decided to vent some stress by screaming at him too.
'Why won't you just die already?!'
'What...what am I looking at here, Yuuki?' the leader of the Kirigakure party asked one of his subordinated and massaged his temples. Yuuki had her head titled to one side, a bland expression plastered across her face as she watched the antics of the two shinobi on the roof three hundred metres away.
'I think that's Shuu, and the Yamanaka from Konoha,' she suggested, curiosity evident in her voice. '...What do you think he's doing, Captain Matsushiro?'
Matsushiro buried his face in his hands and forced a deep breath between them. 'I have no idea,' he said eventually. Yuuki tilted her head in the opposite direction, as though this might give her some additional insight. When no insight was forthcoming, she frowned. The entire group watched the scene unfold for a little longer, until one of them had the presence of mind to suggest that Shuu probably wanted some help.
'Ah,' Yuuki said in surprise, having genuinely forgotten. 'That signal before was probably from him, wasn't it?'
'Now I remember why I keep you around,' Matsushiro said darkly. 'I could never have worked that out on my own.' A normal person might have detected the huge amount of sarcasm in the captain's voice, but Yuuki took the comment at face value.
'I'm always happy to be helpful, Captain,' she said with a warm smile, head still tilted at an angle. Matsushiro covered his face with a hand and sighed. He could already tell he wasn't going to enjoy hearing about exactly how Shuu had gotten himself in this situation.
'Alright, let's go then,' he said flatly and stood. He exploded out of the tree, and his entire party followed, zipping along behind him like the good boys and girls they were. And boys and girls they were; none of them were old enough to have fought in the Third Shinobi World War, and their inexperience was glaringly obvious to Matsushiro's eye. But, to give credit where it was due, they were exceptional compared to the soft-bodied incompetents the world had become used to since then.
He snorted at the thought and picked up the pace. The fact that none of the children following him fell behind was encouraging, but made Matsushiro wonder if he wasn't simply getting slow in his old age of thirty-four. He decided that bore thinking on, but put it to one side as they reached their target.
Shuu appeared to be teetering on the point of falling either backwards or forwards onto a medium-dispersal area of scattered makibishi, and his blonde opponent seemed intent on kicking him backwards in order to remove the element of uncertainty from the equation. Matsushiro landed on the rooftop softly, decades of experience unconsciously counteracting the pressure he exerted with his feet and muting the sound of the impact. The blonde Konoha kunoichi seemed to be aware of his presence, even before his marginally more clumsy companions landed beside him. She turned the momentum of the kick intended for Shuu into impetus to spin herself in his direction with commendable speed. But, she was far too late.
'Suiton: Suiben no Jutsu!' The rope of water snaked forwards in a blur of movement. The kunoichi tensed to defend herself, but the water shot past her and wrapped itself around Shuu's waist. Matsushiro flicked the whip back deftly and called a curt warning to his subordinate.
'Catch.'
Evidently unprepared for this, Yuuki failed to catch Shuu and both of them went down in a surprised, cursing heap. In an admirable attempt to save face for himself, his village, and his subordinates, Matsushiro pretended not to notice this, and stared the Yamanaka down resolutely.
'Well, well,' he said mildly, stepping forward and letting the tube of water collapse out of his hands, 'I was expecting my Kill Team to be back -or dead- by now, but this is a surprise.'
The kunoichi refused to rise to the comment and instead remained silent, which was undoubtedly the wisest choice. On the other hand, the fact that she took a small step backwards illustrated that she knew precisely how outnumbered she was. Without taking his eyes off her he gestured to his party's medic to see to Shuu, even while Yuuki was engaged in disentangling herself from and/or fighting him.
Though his directive to kill the woman was technically no longer relevant, the temptation to take a member of a prominent Konoha clan into custody was tempting in the extreme. He started to say something else, then closed his mouth with a click.
'Captain-' Yuuki began, taking her attention away from Shuu, before Matsushiro silenced her with a gesture of his hand. He hadn't wanted to give her any unnecessary hints but, between his odd verbal indecision and Yuuki's interrupted warning, the Yamanaka had noticed that there were others approaching. Friends of hers, he guessed, and decided that that explained how it was that Shuu had been in this position by himself and how he had lost his team-mates.
The second in which Kimimaro caught sight of Ino and the Kirigakure shinobi was the same second that he knew he would not be able to avoid detection. This was, of course, because they all seemed to be staring right at him at that precise moment. Kimimaro and the Konoha shinobi stopped running immediately.
'Well, they know we're here,' Shikamaru said in airy tones that were unsuitable to the situation, almost shouting in order to guarantee the Kirigakure shinobi heard him. The gesture he made with his hand was more subtle. Chouji and Naruto, the two people Kimimaro would have least expected to be able to remain unnoticed in this situation, had both been out of direct line-of-sight and disappeared into the streets below silently when they saw Shikamaru's hand move.
'This is bad,' he said much more quietly, still with an arrogantly confident smirk on his face for the Kirigakure shinobi to see. 'I count eighteen, not including Daruma.'
'Eighteen,' Sakura agreed, masking her own apprehension with a concentrated glare. Kimimaro's face remained carefully blank.
'Frankly, I think Daruma was enough trouble by himself.' Shikamaru studied the other group, trying to quickly figure out exactly what type of mood they were in. If they were willing to negotiate, so much the better, but they had a decidedly unfriendly feel about them. 'I am open to suggestions, by the way,' he added quietly.
The only thing that occurred to Kimimaro was to charge straight in and try to cause enough havoc to allow Ino to escape. The attractiveness of this plan was slightly degraded by the fact that it included the word "try." Eve his knee-jerk reactions could tell that eighteen Kirigakure shinobi would take exception to him trying something so crass.
As it happened, it seemed that the Kirigakure shinobi had their own ideas about how to deal with the situation. A man who appeared to be the leader and a woman, who appeared to have been trying to thump the living daylights out of Daruma when Kimimaro first saw her, approached Ino slowly. Ino, knowing that this was not the time for heroic actions, spoke to them briefly and allowed the woman to restrain her hands. Placing her into their custody, it seemed. The man then waived his hand at Shikamaru to indicate he was about to do something, then began making his way towards them while being careful to not make any sudden movements. His other accompaniment held their positions.
'Oh, looks like he wants to talk,' Sakura announced unnecessarily. Since the man was almost certainly within earshot now, Shikamaru refrained from trying to whisper anything else to either of them.
'"Nara," is it?' the man asked when he got close enough to talk, but not so close that they could take him hostage instantly. 'I was told you were the one to speak to.' He let the words hang in the air, inviting Shikamaru to contribute something, and taking the opportunity to take stock of the three youngsters before him. Kimimaro took the chance to do likewise.
The man was of about average height, he supposed, with jet-black hair that fell just past his shoulders. In keeping with tradition, his Kirikagure forehead protector was precisely positioned on his forehead above a weathered, suspicious face supporting a small beard and moustache. His eyes were black, or such a dark brown as to make it impossible to tell, and had a decidedly shrewd look to them. Kimimaro had the distinct impression that he did a slight double-take when their eyes met, but he found himself second-guessing the impression when the man didn't so much as bat an eyelid before turning back to Shikamaru.
'"Nara" will do fine,' Shikamaru confirmed his last name with some reluctance. 'And who am I talking to?'
'I am Matsushiro Tomoya. Address me however you like, Nara-kun.' Shikamaru bristled a little at that -apparently he didn't like being called by his family name either- but Matsushiro continued before he could say anything.
'Whether you realise it or not, you have something I need. But because I'm a busy and tolerant man, I'm willing to exchange your friend for them,' he gestured back at Ino, just to be sure there was no confusion about who their "friend" was.
'And what is it that you want?' Shikamaru asked plainly, becoming less and less comfortable with Matsushiro's negotiating tactics. And again, Kimimaro could swear the Kirigakure shinobi's eyes flicked over him again.
'Two things, actually: information and a weapon I believe you have in your possession.' Again his eyes darted to look at Kimimaro for a split-second. 'First, the information: it would seem that you have made the acquaintance of one of my subordinates, Aoyama Shuu.' He paused to see if the name registered, but continued after seeing their looks of non-recognition and dawning realisation. It was impossible to tell from his immobile expression if the fact that "Daruma" had never given them his real name pleased Matsushiro or not.
'When I sent him away he had two others with him. I would like to know where I might locate their bodies.' This time when he looked at Kimimaro he held his gaze for a few seconds while he spoke. 'Kirikagure takes care of it's own.' If there was some kind of veiled threat there, Kimimaro tried very hard to ignore it.
'Also, on that point' Matsushiro interrupted Shikamaru's response. 'One of them was carrying a rather curious weapon- hence my second request.' Rather than reply verbally, Shikamaru began to slowly and deliberately remove the dagger from behind his hip-pouch, where he had put it for safe keeping. It had been wrapped for security rather than easy-access, having very quickly realised he couldn't use it effectively and had a tendency to blind them by accident, so his prolonged fumbling gave Sakura the chance to ask a very undiplomatic question.
'How do we know you won't just kill us after we give you what you want?'
Matsushiro gave her a very slow look before answering. 'You don't,' he said simply. 'But I might point out that I probably could have gotten the information from your friend over there,' again he gestured to Ino, 'and gotten the weapon after killing you five.'
The casual implication that he was aware of Naruto and Chouji's attempts to remain hidden seemed to settle the matter. Sakura became a few shades paler, and Shikamaru hastened his efforts to recover the over-wrapped dagger. And since the bodies were still near his house, Kimimaro tried to work out the best set of directions he could think of.