Me: I do not own Naruto!

Last time:

Halfway gone into the ground, skin peeling off his face, Orochimaru said, "I gave him a going away present," and was gone.

Leaving her with one unconscious teammate, one teammate in dreadful pain, and the most cruel helplessness searing through her veins.

Shelter

Sasuke wouldn't stop screaming.

"UHHH!" He clutched at his head, dark eyes wide with pain and terror. "GAAH!"

Cursing fluidly underneath her breath, Kasumi swiftly dismissed Orochimaru from her thoughts. He had gotten what he wanted; he wasn't going to come back and deal with puny genin like them. Weaving her fingers with his, she let him grip her hands, although his hold was so tight her bones screamed in protest.

"Sssh." She soothed, drawing him into her arms. He went willingly, a testament to his current condition, leaning heavily on her. "Ssh, Sasuke-san, it's okay. It's going to be okay." A blatant lie, but one he needed.

"GAAAH!" He muffled his scream in the fabric of her shirt, his head lying on her shoulder. "AAHH!"

Kasumi inhaled shakily, tilting her head to peer at the mark that had formed on Sasuke's neck. She recognized it as a mitsudomoe, the three tomoe eerily similar to the Sharingan. Orochimaru had bit Sasuke here... so what had he done?

"... a going away present."

Sasuke cried out involuntarily against her neck, and, automatically, she began to run her fingers through his dark hair, whispering, "Hush. It'll be okay, Sasuke-san. It'll be okay, it'll be okay. Hush now, Sasuke-san. Everything will be okay, I promise."

She didn't think he was actually comprehending her words at the moment, the pain in his mind a giant white noise that blocked out everything else, but he seemed to find some comfort in her words, and so she continued to murmur nonsense, rocking back and forth gently.

In time, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, Sasuke quieted down, eventually falling unconscious. Sighing, Kasumi closed her eyes briefly, feeling them sting. Beneath the veneer of calm she had constructed hastily beat an accusation: This is your fault. Your fault, your fault.

Kasumi pushed that voice away; there were so many other things to worry about. Rising to her feet and supporting Sasuke's body weight against herself, she threw a glance at her other teammate and sighed. Naruto remained unconscious, stretched out on the tree branch she had left him on.

The kunoichi paused for a second, deliberating with herself. She couldn't carry both of her teammates to safety. But... her chakra was already so low... She sighed, shoulders falling momentarily. There wasn't a choice, not really.

Carefully maneuvering Sasuke back onto the ground, Kasumi leapt onto the dwindling-but-still-present lagoon underneath her, doing her best to ignore the pain that crashed through her system. She staggered, almost went down to her knees as the force of the agony took her breath away.

Definitely a broken rib or two, she thought. Unsurprising, considering the kick Orochimaru had so kindly decided to give to her before beating the crap out of her teammates. Hissing out a shaky breath, she forced herself to get to her feet. This was a new technique, one that Onii-san had taught her only a week ago, but it was her best option.

Forming her fingers into the tiger hand-seal, she chanted, "Water Clone Technique," and watched as a replica of herself rose from the water, brown eyes staring into her own serenely. It was like looking into a mirror, but now wasn't the time.

Kasumi nodded at her clone, she knew what to do. The clone nodded back and darted off to retrieve Naruto while she made her way to Sasuke. Hefting him onto her back, she began to jump through the trees, following a gut instinct that was most likely far more than simply instinct, her clone not far behind her.

Northeast, two minutes. A turn to the right, eighty degrees, and ten more minutes. Roots and trees.

Kasumi didn't know where she was going or where she was going to stay, but she trusted that she would know it when she saw it. As for the physical discomfort radiating from her abdomen and sending black spots into her vision... Sasuke doubtlessly had it worse.

She had no right to place her own wants above what he needed.

Guilt

A fever, she judged, a hand on Sasuke's forehead. Not quite lethal, but dangerous if not treated. Kasumi settled back on her haunches, grabbing a spare shirt. Tearing it into strips, she soaked a rag with cool water from a canteen in her backpack and placed it on Sasuke's forehead.

There wasn't much else she could do. While Sakura had done her best to cover everything that they might encounter in the Chunin Exams, Kasumi's skill with medical ninjutsu was nowhere near advanced enough to lower a fever, much less something that was probably a side effect of whatever mark Orochimaru had inflicted.

Biting her lip, Kasumi shifted so she could examine Naruto. Her blonde teammate had been far more physically injured than Sasuke, no doubt a result of the Snake Sannin's strange interest in the Uchiha. But even as she gently poked at his purple bruises and fractured bones, she could see them mending before her eyes. The Kyubi's doing, she assumed.

Which only left herself. Pressing her lips tightly together, Kasumi pressed lightly down on her abdomen and restrained a hiss of pain, darkness stealing across her mind. Fighting it back, she maneuvered herself into a more comfortable position. This was going to hurt.

Flipping through the seals for the Mythical Palm Technique, she found two fractured ribs and one broken. Well... damn. Pouring chakra to her fingers that manifested as a faint green glow, she managed to partially repair the broken rib and speed up the healing for the others.

Kasumi was frighteningly low on chakra, but even if she had been at full strength, she didn't think she would have been able to completely heal herself. Sakura might have been, but chakra control aside, the rosette had a talent for medical ninjutsu that Kasumi didn't mind admiring.

Maybe she would have known what to do about Sasuke's condition. Sakura had taught Kasumi about poison, but it had been a fifteen minute session, and, in any case, this didn't look like poison at all.

It felt like something felt far worse.

A flicker of pain caught her attention and Kasumi glanced down to see that she was digging her fingernails into her palm. She set her jaw and retrieved a roll of bandages, slowly, and with much teeth gritting and panting, wrapping it around her ribs.

That done, she pushed herself to her feet and busied herself with creating several complicated, deadly, highly overboard traps around their little hideout. Being teammates with Uzuamki Naruto had its perks, one of that which was picking up on how to create efficient, hidden, and innovative traps.

Kasumi wasn't anywhere near as imaginative or creative as Naruto, but her traps happened to be much more lethal than his. Because Naruto wasn't anywhere near as ruthless or pragmatic as Kasumi, a trait that came in handy in situations like these.

Because flares of red, red, red danced in her mind and she knew this wasn't over.

That task done, she slide down at the base of a massive root and finally let the strict control she had maintained over herself fall away. It was over, it was done, they was nothing else she could do. Kasumi buried her face in her hands, sobs wracking her body and tears streaming down her cheeks.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. And that was promptly followed by, This is my fault, my fault, this is all my fault.

She had known that something was going to happen. She should have torn up her registration paper as soon as she had gotten it. She should have known to stay away from these thrice-damned Exams that second she saw Gaara of the Desert and the death on his hands.

She should have left, left and dragged her team with her when she first laid eyes on Kabuto. She should have fled at the First Exam, where there was Morino Ibiki and the Chunin and the safety of Konoha around her.

She should have told Onii-san that something was wrong, that something bad was going to happen, that danger!danger!danger! screamed near constantly inside her mind those few days before the start of the Exams. She should have told Kakashi-sensei to keep them far, far away from this place!

Kasumi had known.

She cried and cried as the sun fell down from the insultingly blue sky, blazing a trail of blood red and mocking yellow. Guilt gnawed in her stomach, drew bile up her throat until she could taste it, bitter and corrosive. This was all her fault.

"I'm sorry." Kasumi whispered into the quiet created by her own mistake. "I'm sorry." It was like history was doomed to repeat itself, but then again, that was the reason this had happened in the first place, wasn't it?

Drawing herself up into the fetal position, the girl leaned listlessly against the thick wood and sniffed pitifully. Back before, long before, she had tried to warn her parents. Of the nightmares that stalked her in the darkness, of the bad, bad, bad feelings that choked up her heart.

They had known, too. They had to have known, her strong, perceptive Otou-san, and her beautiful, intelligent Okaa-san. Yuna had been a Fumei, she had to have known. Even if her bloodline had been weaker than her daughter's, even if the warnings had been faint, she had to have known.

But they had done nothing. They had smiled comfortingly at Kasumi when she'd bought the topic up and gave her an ice cream cone and shooed her off to play with her older brothers who had never truly understood. Their Tentaiora had manifested as more of an action sense, much more short-term than Kasumi's.

Kasumi loved her parents, but with the mindset of a young genin, she could look back and see where they had gone wrong. They had wanted to stay in Kiri, despite knowing the consequences. It had been their home, their village since birth. They had been willing to stick their head in the sand and hope it all went away, even as they trained their children for the possibility of the disaster.

Her cries, her pleas, her tears had been wiped away, soothed away, but they hadn't heard her. And eventually, her child's mind had simply decided that it was probably just her and nothing was wrong, and it was okay to ignore the warnings.

They were presumably only a false alarm anyways. And now… and now…

Now, it wasn't.

But then again, it never had been.

"I'm sorry." Kasumi breathed, the taste of salt on her lips. The sobs had faded away into silent tears, shivers that wouldn't stop no matter how hard she tried. "I'm so sorry. This is all my fault."

Should have, would have, could have. There had been so many ways she could have diverted this catastrophe. She gripped her upper arms hard, digging her nails into her flesh until small crescent moons dotted the pale skin.

"I'm sorry." She repeated feebly. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry – " Kasumi cut herself off by biting her bottom lip hard enough that she tasted blood. The rich, coppery tang mixed with the salt of her tears and made her gag.

Staggering out of the shelter of the roots, she threw up on some nearby bushes. Pulling back, she wiped a hand across her mouth and stayed that way - on her knees, head bent, eyes half-open - for a while as the moon rose high into the sky, the Queen of the Starry Night. The cold settled in, a chill that threatened to freeze her bones and stop her heart.

Whimpering softly, Kasumi limped back to her teammates and checked on their conditions. Naruto was utterly healed; he would be fine as soon as he woke up. But Sasuke…

His fever had only risen. Wrestling down the fear that howled that this was because of her, her, only her, and the desperation that begged fix this, fix this, please fix this, Kasumi replaced the cold compress on his forehead and clasped his hand in her own.

Sasuke's hand was sweaty, clammy, boiling hot in comparison to her ice cold. She squeezed lightly, felt her heart drop when she felt no response. Dimly, Kasumi thought that Sasuke would have been disappointed in her breakdown.

He would have kept his cool, would have known what to do. In his own way, Sasuke was a talented leader, an exceptional shinobi. He had certainly done far better against Orochimaru than she had, hadn't he?

Kami-sama, she was pathetic. Kasumi scoffed, cried out for the moment. Moving away, she sat on the ground in a lotus position and meditated. She had started meditating after arriving at Konoha, the therapists informing her that it would go a long way in healing the insult her mind had suffered.

It had worked – to an extent. A very small extent, but she found mediation a sedative exercise nonetheless. Breath in for seven beats, hold for seven beats, breath out for seven beats. Pause and repeat. Again.

Almost unknowingly, rather instinctively, she drew on the smallest coil of amber chakra and spread it throughout her system. Originating directly from her heart, the eighth chakra gate, it wound around her lungs, crept around her battered ribs, awakened her tired limbs; set the world into a new light.

The moon dipped low in the sky, its luminous silver glow dulling as sunrise crept closer. The stars faded from the midnight blue of the sky one by one, tendrils of warm blue stretching out coaxingly in preparation for day. And little by little, her pain, her grief, her regret faded away.

What had Kasumi been so worried about? So upset, so guilty, so burdened by? What was done, was done. A grasshopper lingered on a leaf two trees away, a raccoon scampered fifteen feet away. The tapestry had been woven, the threads dyed, the events set in motion.

She was an intruder, an alien, a spectator. This realm revolved around her and proceeded as it would please. Fumei Kasumi was not meant to interfere; she was meant to watch and see. The factors that made this a world had been set in place long, long ago.

No one could disturb reality. No one… not without consequences.

Shades of rose pink and grass green heralded the arrival of the sun, delicate streaks waving between black and starlight, as if in greeting. The sound of birdsong filled the air as the sun rose from the east, fiery and strong and proud.

Poise and composure back in place, Kasumi was utterly self-possessed, seated at the very edge of the opening of the shelter. A twinkle of alarm pervaded the amber of her peace, and she twitched, the first movement other than the rise and fall of her chest that she had made in hours.

A glow of warning red and she flowed gracefully to her feet, eyes of dark chocolate inscrutable and untouchable. There were no traces of tears, nothing but firm resolve on her face. Methodically, she performed a set of stretches, designed to loosen the muscles and prepare for combat.

Three. Enemies. Approaching. Dangerous. Came the warning, but she was prepared. The amount of amber chakra running through her veins at this point was almost dangerous, threatening to wrench her out of mortality, out of being, but it hadn't happened yet.

At any rate, she needed her Tentaiora right now. It was the only thing keeping her emotions from overwhelming her and she couldn't let herself be overwhelmed. Not now.

Naruto and Sasuke were still out.

Kasumi wouldn't let anyone touch them.

Sound

A squirrel ran across the ground, heading straight towards her. Kasumi leaned against a root of the tree, sharp eyes instantly spotting the tag on its back. How cruel. What had this creature ever done to them? Sighing, she spun a senbon through her fingers and sent it thudding a centimeter in front of the furry mammal.

Squeaking, it ran away and she looked up to see three genin lingering on the outskirts of the clearing. She recognized them from the First Exam - hadn't they been the ones to attack Kabuto? She had absolutely no grudge against them for doing that... but that wouldn't mean she would let them do as they pleased.

"Hehe... up all night?" The one in the middle taunted, face half-wrapped up in bandages. "But it's no longer necessary. Wake up Sasuke-kun. We want to fight him."

If not for the unnatural peace that had settled over her mind like a translucent fog, Kasumi would have sniffed in condensation. Did they really think it was going to be that easy?

"Why?" She questioned while she inwardly checked over her own condition. Her chakra reserves were back up to fifty percent; she hadn't had time to be of much use during the fight with Orochimaru. "I suppose Orochimaru is your master?"

The three sound-nin stiffened, visibly unprepared for that. They exchanged looks, seeming a bit uneasy. Ah, so they hadn't expected her to know?

"Well?" Kasumi pressed. Her physical condition was nowhere near as good as her chakra levels. Doubtless, her fractured and cracked ribs would prove to be a problem. Ditto for the various bruises that stained her pale skin.

"... Hmm... I wonder what that man is thinking..." The mummy-man muttered, confirming her suspicions that this group was the Snake Sannin's subordinates. Not surprising, if she was honest. But... from the sounds of it, just pawns.

Just pawns.

"No matter." His male teammate, the one with the spiky hair spoke up. "It's obvious she knows too much. I'll kill this girl. And I'll also kill this Sasuke guy."

"Confident." Kasumi drawled mockingly. "Or should I say... arrogant?"

He growled, jumping forward and shooting out his arms. A blast exploded from his hands, aimed down towards Kasumi, while mummy-man and the kunoichi leapt off their branch and midair... and right into her trap.

Air. She identified, dodging to the right with a hiss of pain as a senbon left her fingers. It cut through the small trip wire set not far away from her former position. A hail of kunai rained down from the tree above the two sound-nin, black steel glinting in the faint light.

"Damn!" Mummy man's eyes widened as he realized he wouldn't be able to dodge while airborne. He threw a hand up, making a one-handed seal with his other, and an invisible source hit the kunai, diverting them from their paths. The kunoichi helped, throwing out batches of senbon that knocked the projectiles off course.

Not that it mattered. They hadn't noticed a select few of the kunai had explosive seals wrapped around their hilts, disguised among its brethren. Now, the kunai slammed into the ground barely a few feet away from the two shinobi as they hit the ground and exploded.

Round after round after round of explosive tags lit up and did their job, the fire a curtain that obscured the two genin in heat and light, the warmth uncomfortable even from where Kasumi was standing. Since she had been so very anxious before the Exams, she had bought with her a substantial amount of tags and she had used them quite liberally.

"You bitch!" The remaining genin hissed, throwing a stream of pressurized air at her. "Air Slicer!"

Kasumi ducked swiftly underneath, feeling the wind ruffle her hair and pain explode from her chest. She ignored it in favor of forming seals. Tiger. Ox. Dog. Rabbit. Snake. Shuriken to the right. "Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"

"Tch!" He clenched his teeth upon seeing the massive gust now heading towards him. "Air Slicer!" The two wind-based jutsu collided against each other, both vying for dominance.

"Ugh." Kasumi hissed under her breath, pouring in chakra to increase the force of her jutsu.

"Argh!" Her opponent evidently did the same, his concentration utter and absolute on winning this battle of wills... which was why he didn't notice the trap activate. As the small clearing she had chosen for a shelter was quite versatile in its trap-positions, a barrage of senbon came from him from behind.

"Shit!" The sound genin hurled himself in the air and the majority senbon fell on the area he had previously occupied. No matter. He was now fair game. Applying a careful amount of chakra, Kasumi pushed off from the ground and, before he could react, kicked a booted foot into his stomach.

It just so happened that, as part of the week of hell training she had forced her entire team through before the Chunin Exams, her strength had grown considerably and she had the satisfaction of hearing him cough up some blood even as her own ribs protested loudly. Not letting up, she followed up with a direct punch to the solar plexus and sent him crashing to the earth in yet another one of her traps.

The sphere of earth, already wet as was the Forest of Death's way, had quickly become a rather deadly area of quicksand with some water ninjutsu. Now, it grasped hungrily at its prey and by the time the sound genin had regained himself, he was up to his chest in quicksand.

"No!" He shouted, pressing his palms down in preparation for blowing his way out of there. But Kasumi's senbon was already whistling through the air and it buried itself in his throat. He was dead seconds later.

"Resonating Echo Drill!"

She whirled around at the call, but the damage was already done and Kasumi gasped, dropping to her knees as her stomach churned and her mind spun. Mummy-man stood not five feet away from her, heavily burned and injured. But he was still standing and alive, unlike his female teammate who laid on the ground, a smoked corpse.

"... You will pay." He promised her coldly, one eye burning with rage, but Kasumi couldn't answer.

She gasped, coughed, threw up on the ground. The world seemed to be spinning around her, all green and brown and red, and she felt a warm liquid trickle from her ear. The smell of copper filled the air and she recognized it at once.

'He burst my eardrum...' Kasumi thought, dazed. 'This isn't good...' Glancing down at the hands that were the only things keeping her from falling to the ground, she saw that they were shaking. She wasn't entirely sure she could stand up.

Mummy-man was running towards her, she noted with her messed up vision. He was running and he looked furious, his arm held out, the one with the strange metal device. He wanted to kill her.

"Kasumi!"

Oh. Oh, wasn't that Choji? She could have told him not to worry. This genin, he was so focused on her that he hadn't noticed... the glint of ninja wire at ankle height. Or, at least, not until his feet were cut straight off.

"What...?" He glanced down, shocked at the implosion of pain before dropping down into the dirt, head a mere few inches from Kasumi as she pushed herself up. He had barely begun to scream in pain before Kasumi smashed a kunai through a skull.

The clearing was silent. The world was silent.

Kasumi... almost wanted to laugh.

Me: Ah, I'm very sorry for the long absence, but my muse really has gone away. I might return to this story sometime in the future, but for the time being, I'll just post the chapters I've already written.

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me so far! Also, thanks to my incredible beta. Couldn't have done this without her.