Dedicated to BlueQuartzFoxy - HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Hope you like!


"Well, the Intelligence Department certainly fucked this one up."

Well hidden in the boughs of towering evergreens, a three-man ANBU squad was observing the campsite of what was supposed to be a band of plundering thieves. Instead, upon the return of the Hyuuga member from her brief reconnaissance, they learned that it was small army of pillagers from an organized crime ring of exiled ronin and shinobi.

The ANBU who had spoken was crouched just below his female teammate, who was utilizing her kekkei genkai to get a more accurate gauge of what they were up against. His fingers lightly ran the length of Kusanagi's handle.

"Stay your hand," came a low drawl from next to the anxious ANBU.

"I had no intention of jumping in unprepared, Captain," he replied in a slightly amused tone, though the team leader could hear the frustration in the gritting of teeth.

Above them, their female squad member sighed. "My count may not be accurate since they're constantly moving, but I'm already up to twenty-four in just the northern half of the camp."

"Alright, that settles it," the team leader ran his hand lazily over his spiked ponytail. "We withdraw for now with the information that we have, and the Hokage can come up with a more appropriate course of action."

"I'd like to see you try," a dry, crackling voice that none of the team members recognized cut in from the darkness.

Instantly, the three ANBU formed a haphazard ring among the branches to protect their backs and face what was now becoming an enclosing circle of enemies judging by the rustling sounds coming from every direction.

The blue-haired Hyuuga woman was frantically looking back and forth with her Byakugan, trying to determine where the voice had come from. "I hear them, but I don't see anything. No movement, no chakra systems, nothing."

The man to her right activated his own kekkei genkai with a quiet whisper, "Sharingan."

"What do you see, Sasuke?" the taller man inquired.

"Twelve men surrounding us. A thirteenth making his way back to camp."

"But with no hint of chakra?"

"I'd tell you to focus in harder, Hinata, but you're going to need that extra chakra," Sasuke answered.

Then he turned to look at the camp. "...shit."

The Hyuuga looked over her shoulder to see for herself. She could see the camp mobilizing. Then she noticed how the visible energies interacted with something invisible to the Byakugan.

The voice sliced through the darkness again, "Don't bother. You won't see them until they're right in front of you." At that, the owner of the voice, revealed himself in a sliver of moonlight. From his attire and the two blade handles visible from under his elbow, it was apparent that he was one of the ronin, a masterless samurai.

It was then while training her active Byakugan at the man that Hinata realized why she couldn't see anyone, "They have no chakra systems!" She was about to give her eyes an extra burst of strength, but her captain interrupted her.

"One burst, Hinata, just to count how many we're facing. Then reserve what you can for whatever enemy is in front of you."

"Yes, Captain." She concentrated for a moment, pushing her life force into her vision, the veins around her eyes spreading and expanding even further down her cheeks. Out of the darkness, barely contrasting with their background, slowly slinking bodies made their way to them. They moved like nothing she'd ever seen, certainly not like shinobi or samurai. But what alarmed her more was the sheer number of them.

"I estimate sixty just within the immediate thirty yard radius," she announced under her breath.

The Uchiha unsheathed his blade and the tomoe in his red eyes spun lazily, anticipating a battle heavy in hand-to-hand combat with a foe that far outnumbered him. To his right, the captain had his hands in a circle, the tell-tale sign of his strategizing. He straightened to his full height.

"You both need to leave."

"Shikamaru!" the girl cried, while Sasuke merely looked at him through narrowed eyes.

"Hinata, as unmatched as you are in taijutsu, your style still relies on not only your own chakra stores, but being able to disable the enemy's stores as well. We're facing someone immune to your tactics." He turned slightly toward his male teammate. "As for you, your Sharingan won't even begin to cover five dozen individual enemies."

"You're not staying behind," Sasuke stated plainly.

"I am."

"There's no reason for you to."

"To get you both out alive and with your eyes intact. Argue all you want, but we all know who the expendable one is here."

"Captain..." Hinata softly said, before being forced to duck as a sharp projectile flew dangerously close to her temple. The heaviness of the night combined with the enemies' strange chakraless forms left them all but blind, but the movements they managed to catch left them under the impression that they were being toyed with.

It was made apparent that the thrown weapon had been the warning shot, because the three-man team was suddenly engulfed in a wave of clanging weapons and overlapping attacks. The Hyuuga woman was doing well defending herself, modifying her fighting style if only to detract a direct hit, but it was all she could do with the two, four, seven enemies raining attacks on her. The Uchiha had managed to blindly slice at several of the quick-footed foes, but his blade was proving unwieldy in what was fast becoming an intensely close-range battle.

Shikamaru surveyed what was happening around him as four more faceless enemies delivered well-timed blows meant to overwhelm him. He thanked his luck that years of sparring with an Uchiha and a Hyuuga improved his taijutsu to rival Rock Lee, at least on a bad day. Parrying and deflecting, it became clear they were aiming to capture and not kill. Still, it left the option for grievous injury open so long as it wasn't fatal.

As if it was a test of precognizance, he heard a feminine strangled scream and caught a glimpse of Hinata falling to her knees,a gaping wound on her back heavily weeping blood. He made a mad scramble for her, shoving aside any and all obstacles, be they tree branches or bodies, and found an enemy towering over her, positioned to deal the consciousness-killing blow. Someone had made a grab around his ankles, and he took a kick to the gut that knocked the wind out of him and made his vision burst into twinkling behind his lids. Just when he thought he wouldn't make it to the woman in time, Sasuke, his Sharingan's tomoe spinning wildly, jumped into the fray, slicing cleanly through Hinata's assailant's jugular, but it seemed when one enemy was taken out, three more would pop up.

Shikamaru, now assured of his teammate's safety, had resorted to wrestling his opponent off of him by sheer brute strength, throwing the other man over his back while keeping hold of his arm, effectively twisting it out of its socket. Two more were coming at him, and he crouched low, kunai in each hand and allowing them to believe they had the upper hand by simple positioning before spinning around and slicing into the tendons just below their calves.

Sasuke was doing significantly worse now, having to hold onto the Hyuuga woman who could barely watch her teammate's back, and fight off the continuous onslaught. He let out a ragged grunt when several kunai embedded themselves in his shoulder and forearm, disabling his sword hand.

The Nara made use of his renowned quick thinking, seeing they were about to be overpowered by sheer numbers. In a last ditch explosion of his remaining chakra, he spread his shadow into the farthest and darkest corners of their forest battle, gripping every enemy he could sense with the snaking tendrils.

Sasuke, with Hinata groggily leaning on him, spun to find his captain crouched low in his exertion, a web of shadow stretched from below and out in every direction. From his peripheral, he could see the masked opponents trying to break the hold on them with nothing more than their combined strength against a single man's jutsu.

"...get out."

The Uchiha made to start toward his captain, but was stopped in his tracks by a slender shadow thread.

"Get out NOW."

The shadow was released in favor of holding their many assailants. Sasuke made no move to leave, however.

"Take Hinata and get the hell out of here while you still have enough left in you to make the trip back. That's an ORDER, Sasuke."

The raven-haired man swallowed hard. He picked up his now unconscious comrade, her wound bleeding out over his arms, and with a small reluctant nod, let loose a blinding flashbomb and disappeared.

The ANBU captain held on for as long as he could, in the desperate hope that he could give his teammates a good enough window to escape into untrackability. He held his shadow jutsu over the patch of forest until he fell unconscious from his depleted chakra.

After an overnight stop in a cave to dress their wounds and rest for several much-needed hours, the two slowly made their way back to the village, taking three days in their direly drained states. With Hinata immediately carted off to the hospital for her drastic injury, Sasuke was left to recount the failed mission to the Hokage.

Tsunade was most interested in this new kind of enemy that had no chakra to speak of but could fight on the same level as her ANBU, albeit by using overwhelming numbers. Sasuke could hardly give a shit for anything else after leaving Shikamaru to the wolves an agonizing seventy-two hours ago. For all his arguing and reasoning and plain outright yelling, the Hokage felt it was too risky to send out a rescue party for a single person from an enemy they knew next to nothing about. What little energy the Uchiha had left was used to give the Hokage his one-fingered salute, and he finally succumbed to the exhaustion after slamming the door behind him.

A long line of cool wetness trailed along her back, soothing and stinging at the same time. Hinata blearily opened her eyes, her vision fuzzy and oversensitive. After a few moments, the sleep cleared away and she saw Sasuke sleeping in the hospital bed next to her. Then she noticed that she was lying on her stomach, and someone was running a wet cloth slowly up and down her back. She turned her head to find Sakura squeezing the towel over a large bowl of water. She coughed a little to inform her caretaker that she was awake, and it was all she could do not to wail in pain when her pink-haired friend dived face first into the injured woman's shoulder for a hug.

"S-sakura, I'm okay," she reassured her friend, feeling awkward that she wasn't in a position to return the embrace.

"Sure, now you are! You slept for seven days straight!" Sakura exclaimed, eyes watering but still smiling nonetheless. Her smile waned as she pulled away, and she added, "You almost didn't make it."

The petite Hyuuga girl only smiled back, "I suppose it got pretty close out there." Indeed, they were too close to death then, she recalled. With mention of her team, she was reminded of their captain. She looked past Sakura and saw that the third bed in the room was empty. She and Sasuke were the only occupants. This realization made her frown slightly, but didn't cause her to worry. If she remembered correctly, he was in the best shape of all of them before she blacked out.

"Where's Shikamaru?"

Sakura's lips pressed into a solemn thin line, eyes looking away from the Hyuuga's all-seeing pale ones.

"He didn't come back with you."

Hinata choked mid-breath, then turned her head away. Sakura continued to clean the young woman's wound around hitching breaths and quiet sniffles, and quietly left afterward.

When Sasuke woke several hours later, the girl in the bed next to him was wide awake, tears silently flowing and soaking into her pillow while she stared unfocused out the window.

"Hinata."

Her eyes flickered to the Uchiha, and she took in a shuddering breath. "Sasuke! How are you feeling?" Her voice was slightly muffled from her pillow.

"I'm sorry."

This only served to break the dam and release a fresh wave of tears from Hinata. "It's not your fault," she mumbled around hiccups. She knew that even though he was sitting stonefaced and silent, he was taking it much harder than she was. It was something she and Shikamaru learned to accept when the three of them started living together, a direct result of his tragic childhood, tunnel-visioned teenage years, the inevitable loss of his clan's honor and identity. Failure was an entirely different beast to Sasuke.

Shikamaru, did you even think how Sasuke would take it if you sacrificed yourself?, she thought to herself, not bitterly, but still depressed.

"I think he's alive," Sasuke said out of the blue.

"...what?"

Dark eyes trained out the window. "They weren't aiming to kill us out there. I think they wanted to take us alive."

Hinata was a little hard pressed to believe that, with a gash from her nape to the small of her back preventing her from laying comfortably in bed.

"Their strength in numbers and their method of attack, they could have killed us within minutes," Sasuke explained. "If they didn't want him dead, then they've already screwed themselves over by giving Shikamaru enough time to come up with a way to escape them."

He sounded sure of himself, but the way his jaw clenched while keeping his eyes carefully away from hers told her he was still worried. Still, the confidence he had in the Nara was steadfast.

In the dead of night, Sasuke was leaning on the kitchen counter, sipping a cup of tea in the hopes of settling his nightmare-racked mind. It was bad enough that he was plagued with his brother's visions with his inherited eyes, but now he was having dreams recounting the night he and Hinata left Shikamaru behind, and it tore him up even more. It was only made worse by the fact that Hinata cried herself to sleep nearly every night since they returned three weeks ago. She did her best to hide it, but he could smell the saltiness in the pillows. He began to fume irrationally in his sleep deprivation

His hazy mind was instantly alert at the sound of syncopated thumps approaching from outside their apartment door. From the rear hallway, he heard the Hyuuga girl sprint to the front room where Sasuke was now waiting with his weapons pouch already open. Except, her Byakugan was active and she had the biggest smile he'd ever seen on her, especially in the last few weeks.

Now knowing exactly who it was opening their door, he tossed his weapons pouch aside, but still stomped up to their visitor in an angry huff, arm cocked back ready the right hook of his life.

Shikamaru heard the commotion in his apartment well before he opened the front door. And unsurprisingly, Sasuke was going to greet him in the only way he knew how after thinking him dead – by punching his lights out. Even in his exhausted and battered state, he let Sasuke come at him, and at the last second caught his fist just inches from his head. The two men stared eye to eye for long tense moments, one with dulled brown eyes with a hint of amusement, the other boiling in its blackness, which suddenly cooled when the taller suddenly pulled him into a suffocating hug. Hinata, who had been watching the interesting exchange between her two men with a small smile, finally approached, and upon being welcomed into their embrace, both she and Sasuke pulled Shikamaru's face to their lips and kissed every inch they could cover, from his heavily drooping eyelids to his somewhat scruffy chin.

After chuckling at their affection, he asked that he at least be allowed to accept their attentions while sitting down.

"You lazy bastard," the raven haired man sniped, though he was pulling the Nara's stiff arm over his shoulders to assist him to their bedroom. Hinata busied herself preparing a midnight meal for their returned captain. She heard the bath running and Sasuke instructing Shikamaru to lift his arms to remove his shirt, and Shikamaru's pained grunts as he was helped out of his clothes.

"You troublesome lot, I could've just crashed on the couch."

"Shut up and get in the bath."

"I can do it myself-"

"Like you'd ever turn down an offer to be bathed."

Author's Note:

Wheeee, more ShikaHinaSasu! This idea came about from reading a ShikaHinaSasu fic in which it was implied that Shikamaru was the one who took the heaviest hits, if only to protect the other two. Which is fitting, seeing as how he's the 'knight' of the trio. The Knight in Shining Hitai-ate, protecting the dark prince and sunny princess. So this is my gift to BlueQuartzFoxy, who shares my love for this threesome. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHICA!