Notes: I got so prosperous last night, I'm a half-chapter ahead! Woo! Anyway, thank you so much for your comments guys! Thanks for your devoted reading and support! I'm so glad you all want to keep doing this with me after all of that nonsense that I spewed in the earlier note. Anyhow, I just wanted to give you guys a warning about the upcoming events: Kyuubi Naruto is becoming problematic. Things in the Cloud country are getting extremely ugly, and Sasuke is being helplessly pulled in with it. You might not like me after these next two chapters, I feel. Sad. ;_;
6
They led their reluctant captive up the winding staircase to the top floors of the Anbu HQ. Her sour face and heated glares were lost on Jun and Haiyu, but Naori felt that her heart was being stabbed with a kunai each time the accusing eyes landed on her. All Haruno had wanted to do was help her life-long teammates and friends. She knew she'd do the same if Jun and Haiyu had gone on such a dangerous mission and left her behind. She felt Sakura's pain. Jun was very good at tuning out her emotions, but it also helped that Haruno-san and the Uchiha child had managed to disarm her and break two of her ribs.
"What's going to happen?" Haruno asked them as they left the staircase and entered a long hall with tan doors lined periodically on either side. This floor was the one containing the team meeting rooms—they were taking her to the Team Seven room until they could successfully summon the Godaime and lay down a punishment for her actions.
"You'll meet with the Godaime Hokage-sama, and she'll decide what to do with you after that," Haiyu told her. Naori heard the sympathy in his voice, no matter how hard he tried to cover it up. In truth, they all wanted to go and help Sasuke and the Rokudaime…but they had orders they needed to follow. Maybe if we plead to Godaime-sama along with Haruno-san, Naori thought, we could get permission to go after Sasuke-kun and the Rokudaime.
"Pfft, that old hag is going to punish me?" Haruno scoffed to Naori's surprise. "She's not the real hokage."
"Regardless," Jun snapped coldly, "she is in charge of all the hokage's affairs at the moment. So she is the hokage, until the Rokudaime returns."
"Who says he will?" she snapped back just as quickly. "They could both be dying out there!"
"They're capable of taking care of themselves," Haiyu said in a slightly assuring tone. "I mean, it is the captain of the Anbu and the Rokudaime after all."
"That doesn't mean that every attack thrown at them will just magically miss!" Sakura snapped angrily, throwing her heated glare at the three masked soldiers.
"Haruno-san…we know all of this," Naori spoke up as they opened the door to their team's private area. "But we can't disobey a direct order, just like you! Our hands are tied as well!"
"You three are Anbu!" Sakura raved back, whirling around to face them as they stood in the doorway, blocking her only means of escape. "Your job is to protect the hokage and all the villagers at all costs! And you can't even think for yourselves? This is bullshit!"
"I've heard enough out of you!" Jun lifted a hand and Haiyu instantly gripped her wrist and brought it back down.
"That's not necessary, Kigeki," he said quietly and both his tone and the fact that he had formally addressed Jun took both his comrades off guard.
"With all due respect," Jun countered, not sounding too pleased, "she's been bitching this whole time. I vote that we gag her until the Godaime arrives."
"Try me," Sakura growled, her eyes narrowing. Naori had to double-take though, because it looked as if Haruno-san's eyes had turned red for an instant…
"I'm worried about Sasuke, too," he admitted to Jun a bit sheepishly.
She sighed angrily: "He's a grown man! He can take care of himself!"
"Please, don't fight," Naori raised her hands in a calm-down gesture. "We're all concerned for Sasuke-kun and the Raikakge, even you, Jun."
"Hmph, please," the other woman crossed her arms over her chest and turned up her nose.
"I don't know about the two of you, but it makes me uneasy that they didn't at least take a medical ninja with them," she continued. "That raises their casualty rate by at least sixty-seven percent, given the danger of the mission."
"What can we do about that?" Jun spat back. "Nothing! Even if we were to turn this girl over to the hokage and follow them, Sasuke and the Raikage would most likely already be deep into the enemy's territory. We could never reach them in time to be of any help!"
"You're not even going to try?" Sakura spoke up from a long dark blue couch by the picture window that ran from one wall to the other. She was looking out to the city, away from the arguing teammates. "You're all worthless. I'm supposed to trust my precious person's life to you three?"
"No one asked you for your opinion!" Jun yelled at her.
"Kigeki Chikai, you will calm down right now!" Haiyu commanded.
"No, I won't!" she yelled back, finally ripping her mask up off her face and throwing it onto one of the other couches. "I will not calm down! Haruno is right—something terrible can happen to them out there, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it right now!" She turned her watering eyes away from her friends and Sakura. "We're helpless! We can't disobey orders! We can't do anything without the Hokage's say-so!" Her voice cracked threateningly. "Don't you see? We're so fucking helpless…"
"Jun…" Naori pulled off her own mask to look her friend directly in the eyes. "If you felt that way, why didn't you just say so?"
Jun gave a shaky laugh, "Yeah, right."
"Seriously, Jun," Haiyu unmasked himself as well. "Why didn't you just say something? You can tell us anything." He frowned: "I feel the exact same way, you know."
"Me too," Naori nodded.
"If you feel so strongly about it, then…" Haruno spoke up and they all turned to look at her, suddenly remembering that she was in the room too. "You should all just follow them and see if you can do anything at all to help. If you don't…" she turned from the window to look the three Anbu directly in their eyes, with no masks between them, "you'll regret it forever. And if they die, you'll never forgive yourselves. A shinobi that abandons their duty is scum," she said sternly, "but someone who abandons their friends in their time of need is worse than scum, don't you think?"
Before the three Anbu could retaliate to what she had told them, Sakura grabbed a paper from her hip pouch and flung it at the long picture window, then ran straight for it as she raised her arms defensively over her face and chest. The tag hit the glass and exploded deafeningly in the enclosed space, sending glittering shards of glass flying back at them and raining out and down onto the street below. Haruno Sakura lowered her arms—hooked glass shards peppered the flesh of her forearms and abdomen, blood painted half of her, glittering splinters of the broken window sparkled like diamonds in her hair—and leapt through the gaping hole and fell from the thirty-sixth floor of the Anbu Tower.
"Holy shit!" Haiyu yelped.
Her cuts burned. She desperately fought back the tears of pain, sadness, and fatigue. Her vision was getting blurry though, and as the ground rushed toward her, glittering with fallen glass, she chuckled weakly and humorlessly. Go figure…I'm useless, even in the end. Haku, she thought fondly of her brother, lying unknowing in his hospital bed. I am so sorry...I tried, I really did…but I couldn't…do…anything… Her eyes closed and she sighed with release, the last of her chakra drained itself dry and in mid-air she reverted to her small seven year old form. Hana was losing consciousness. A few tears escaped her and she let them; she was too tired to fight anymore. She'd let everyone down: Daddy, Uncle Naruto, Aunt Sakura, her mother, Haku...
"Haku…" she grunted, struggling feebly in her freefall. She managed to use the rushing air to flip herself upward lightly, going feet-first instead of headfirst. She wished she could use her hands properly, but they had bound them together to hinder her plans of escape. She thought if she had time, she might be able to wriggle her smaller wrists out of them, but there was no time, only the street rushing up faster and faster to meet her. "Ha…ku…!" she tried to muster up her chakra—there was nothing left, she was dry.
"Fuuton no jitsu!"
A warm, gentle wind enveloped her and slowed her descent. She tried to look around for the source but realized she was too tired to really care and just laid back and let it carry her softly downwards. I'm caught… she thought gloomily. Aunt Sakura will really be in trouble now... And that was her last thought before her exhaustion rose up and claimed her consciousness.
The little girl landed lightly in Haiyu's arms. Jun came running out of the building looking both panicked and angry, with Naori a few moments behind her, her face a mask of worry.
"I got her, don't worry," he said, cradling her small form. "You know, she's really light for a seven year old."
"Are you insane!" Jun screamed at him, ignoring the unconscious girl in his arms as she took liberal swings at him. He dodged them easily since she was uncustomarily angry, and her focus was way off. "You jumped out of a window!"
"So did she, but I don't see you yelling at her," Haiyu pouted, dodging another couple of wide swings.
"Is she alright?" Naori ran up to them, trying to dodge past the flailing Jun to inspect the child in Haiyu's possession.
"She's unconscious," he gave her a brief overlook, ducking Jun's punches again and handing the Uchiha girl off to the medic. "I don't know how much blood she's lost, but she's got absolutely NO chakra left."
"I thought as much," she sighed. "Jun, I need you to extract these glass shards—some of them are very fine."
"I…!" Jun glared at Haiyu breathlessly. He held up his hands in self-defense, giving her a weak grin.
"You can hit me all you want later, just help the kid," he said.
"Run faster!"
His ragged breaths burned on the way down, whistling loudly as he sucked them in hungrily, feeding his deprived body. The adrenaline was making him light-headed. His heart was screaming deafeningly in his chest. The presence on his back was nearly unbearable; it was agonizing, the excess weight was holding him down, as if he were running through molasses. He didn't know if his heart, his lungs, or his legs were going to give out first. Maybe they'd all go at the same time—
"Dammit, Sasuke, fucking move!"
Naruto was behind him and they were running like Hell was chasing after them. But the snow was melting and rushing past their calves in half-melted rivers, freezing their muscles, making it slippery, impossible to run fast. And that fucking weight! It was murder!
"Just a little farther…!" Naruto gasped between panting lungfuls of air.
They cleared the forest, bursting out from the nest of dead trees and skid-run-sliding down the embankment and toward the still-frozen river's edge. He used his downhill momentum to bound over it cleanly, then used that landing to fall into another aching, agonizing run.
"We're almost out of range!" he screamed back, not knowing if Naruto had heard him because the roar of the fire behind them was incredibly and impossibly loud. It sounded alive, like a fire demon destroying everything it touched. Fire demon…
Fire demon. Demon fox. The Kyuubi! And then, Oh my god…
He turned. He was alone. The weight on his back was trying to force him to his knees, to submit, to surrender. Way back, above the skeletons of the burning trees, the Kyuubi Kitsune roared and spewed fire and waved its flaming tails. One giant, roving, blood red eye landed on him and everything in his body turned into slush. He finally fell down, dropping his charge. His hands lay palm-up atop his thighs in a gesture of hopeless surrender. His teeth clicked together—not from cold but from pure terror—his own eyes stared into that one beady red one and saw the chaotic flames reflected in its glassy surface. The demon lifted its snout into the black, smoke-filled sky and shrieked its pleasure.
At the exact same moment, Sasuke began to scream.
"DADDY! DADDY!"
Hinata nearly fell out of the bed. Her sleep had been light and fitful, laced with worry. The sound of her son's terrified cries shook her awake and she tumbled out of bed, stumbling into a limping run because nothing worked correctly yet and headed for her son's room next door. There was an intern rushing in through the open doorway: where's Sakura-san? She got to the open doorway and stopped, looking on dumbfounded as her brain tried to process all the information her senses were feeding her all at once. Her son was on his hospital bed, whipping his entire body back and forth as his little arms clawed feverishly at the air, as if fending off something. There were two nurses attempting to hold him down to the bed, and one of them commanded the newly-arrived intern to get a hold of his kicking legs for christ's sake and help hold him down! In the once-empty bed beside his, her daughter was lying there not asleep but actually unconscious, long, red-stained bandages tightly wrapped along the entire length of her arms and her abdomen from her ribcage to her hips. She too was fidgeting, though not as much as her brother, her face marred in suffering as she shook her head endlessly back and forth and murmured something that sounded like "no, please no, not him, no, please..." A doctor and three other nurses were tending to her, and all of them were shouting observations and commands back and forth to one another as they darted back and forth between the two beds.
"I need you doctor!"
"I don't understand what happened! It was all of a sudden--"
"Hold his legs, I said!"
"Watch the IV! Make sure he doesn't yank it out of his arm."
"What is going ON here!" Hinata yelled over everyone. The doctor looked up at her outburst and addressed her testily.
"Can I help you?" he frowned.
"These are my children!" she cried. "Tell me what's happened!"
"Uchiha-san," he looked at the chart in his hand and pushed his wire-framed glasses up along the bridge of his nose. "Your son had some kind of mental relapse all of a sudden," he shrugged. "One of the nurses discovered it as she was making her rounds. Your daughter was brought in only a little while ago with injuries to her arms and lower torso," he glanced up at her, then back down at the chart. "It appears she was signed in by a Mako Naori. And your son's doctor, Haruno Sakura, is absolutely nowhere to be found." He sighed, as if this were the most troublesome thing in the world to him right now. "I have my own workload--I don't have time to be covering for her patients."
Hinata looked from her thrashing son and then to her unconscious daughter, back and forth, her white eyes peppered with red snatches of bloodshot veins. Then she marched through the chaotic room straight to the doctor with the glasses and the chart and grabbed him roughly about the collar of his white coat.
"You listen to me," she announced, deep anger undertoning her voice. "These are my children. They are my whole life. You will not stand around in here and do nothing to help them in any way, shape, or form." She tightened her grip, pulling his shocked face down to her eye level. "And if you talk to me like that, or talk about them in such an unprofessional way ever again, I will have you fired faster than you can say 'diagnosis'. Do you understand me?"
"Y-yes," he stared at her, shocked. Hinata threw him aside and went to Haku's bed, watching desperately as the intern was kicked in the jaw for what she thought was the fifth time, the IV almost completely yanked free of his vein (as it was, it was already leaving a deep purple bruise in the hollow of his elbow), one of the nurses holding him cursed under her breath, and Haku himself twitched and flung his arms and legs and clawed at the air again, screaming.
"NO! NO! DADDY! RUN AWAY! YOU CAN'T WIN--RUN AWAY!"
She turned to face Hana's bed. The same worry in her brother's voice lined the little girl's face. Her eyes moved rapidly back and forth beneath her bruise-colored eyelids. Her lips were pale--blood loss and shock--and she was trembling violently from head to toe. "No, please," she whispered hoarsely. "Not Daddy, no... Run, Daddy, please run...!"
Were they having the exact same dream? Sasuke, she thought suddenly, I know you told me what to do when the time came, but...you need to come home, because if you don't, your children will be devastated for the rest of their lives. She knew that both her children loved her very much. But there was something about the attention their father gave them that made him the center of their small world, and she couldn't help but envy him this, even now as she was with them and he was in another country facing his own death. She couldn't help herself. Her vision blurred as her tears welled up, and suddenly a warm hand clamped on her shoulder and turned her around, pulling her into an equally warm embrace.
"I came as fast as I could," Inuzuka Kiba murmured in her ear, kissing her temple gently with trembling lips. "I'm here."
"I'm so glad you're here," she sobbed, dropping her forehead onto his chest and clenching her arms tight around his shoulders. "I don't know what to do!"
"You'll figure it out--you're a smart girl," he said to her, a playful grin trying to tweak up one corner of his mouth. She laughed slightly through her tears and closed her eyes, taking his warmth into her and converting it into her strength.
"Thank you," she whispered.
Uchiha Sasuke was having a multitude of bad feelings. They were swirling around tightly in his chest, dredging up the worst possible scenarios his anxious mind could come up with. He tried his hardest to put them all aside and concentrate solely on their infiltration plan, but he just couldn't do that anymore. Every time he tried to regain his composure, another frightening image would slam into his head and leave him shuddering. Uzumaki Naruto (however much of him was present) seemed either not to notice or not to care. His pointed ears were tilted forward, listening to the sounds coming from inside the fort. His slightly-elongated nose quivered, taking in the smells of the guards and the watchmen and the location of the Raikage and marking them slowly and carefully. The red chakra tail swished back and forth, making an arc in the snow he crouched upon as his red eyes focused intently on the single entrance, watching members of the Heaven's Guard slip in and out of their fortress.
"There's a lower floor," Kyuubi Naruto rumbled quietly, sniffing again. "That's where they're holding her--a prison cell, most likely."
"How are we going to get in?" Sasuke frowned, trying to ignore the chills he got whenever he heard Naruto's voice laced with intense disgust (and some slight insanity). "You're not exactly in the best form for a stealth infiltration."
Kyuubi Naruto scoffed, a thick, gagging noise that sounded almost like he had sneezed. "I'm the distraction, you idiot." Sasuke didn't like the insult coming from this Naruto. He kept his opinion to himself, though. "You're the one who's going to go in there and rescue the Raikage with all the confusion."
"If you're going to use kagebunshin," Sasuke said instead, "how will I find you so we can escape?"
"The real me will find you," it tapped the side of his nose. "Don't worry--I'll be back to normal soon, so you won't feel so uneasy anymore." The haunting red eyes turned on him, and its mouth curved into a wicked, fanged grin. "It's distracting, isn't it?"
"I'm fine," Sasuke shrugged, pretending that the malicious aura wasn't bothering him one bit. But the Kyuubi knew. It rose to its full height (definitely taller now) and loomed over the other man, the hungry-looking grin widening ever so slightly.
"Tell me the truth, Sasuke," it spoke to him in Naruto's voice. How much of this is you? he wondered fleetingly. "Do you hate me in this form?"
"You're not yourself," he avoided the question.
"That's not what I asked you," it tisked at him, waggling a finger mockingly. "Come on Sasuke-kun, tell me the truth."
"You're still you, somewhere underneath there," he leaned back unconsciously, away from the figure closing the distance between them. "So, no, I don't hate you. I could never hate you, you know that." He glared into the red eyes. "Stop asking me stupid questions, Naruto."
"Sorry about that," the grin it wore plainly stated that it wasn't sorry at all. It was enjoying itself. "Come on, then. Let's go rescue her."
Sasuke couldn't take very much more of this. "Fine," he pulled his stylized raven mask down over his eyes, concealing his face. His eyes blurred then focused intensely. The fiery aura beside him made him flinch involuntarily. "How many were you planning on making?"
"I think the more-appropriate question," the Kyuubi Naruto grinned sickeningly back at the Uchiha, "is how many can I make?"