I should probably put a disclaimer here, but it's too troublesome.

"How the hell did a fourth rate shinobi like four eyes manage to capture a Sannin?" Temari asked stunned, ignoring the dark scowl that formed on Kabuto's face.

Logically, the blonde knew she should be demanding to know what his intentions were in capturing her, whether for ransom, blackmail, political, or Kami forbid he was on to them. But her mind struggled to accept that a woman as strong as Tsunade was overpowered by the scrawny sycophant.

"Would you believe me if I said I was drunk off my ass?" To her credit, the older woman didn't appear embarrassed, as she would have been if she really had been captured because she was inebriated.

But the wind user knew she was lying. "Bullshit." She said bluntly. "Even if for one second I thought you were drunk when you faced him, which is actually extremely likely if you think about, you're the most renowned medic-nin in the world and one of the Sannin. So even if you weren't capable of mopping the floor with while drunk, you could have metabolized all the alcohol in your body in three seconds."

Both medical shinobi stared at her, Tsunade surprised by her knowledge and Kabuto angry that his prisoners were completely ignoring him.

"If you don't stop speaking I'm going to kill the other woman." He hissed.

Temari looked to Tsunade and received a nod as conformation. If she didn't think it would incite the gray haired bastard into following through on his threat, she would have groaned. Taking Shizune would have been much easier than fighting the Sannin one on one. Tsunade's first apprentice was more of a true medic-nin, lacking the combat abilities of her mentor and Sakura.

And as much as Tsunade proclaimed that Konoha was cursed and full of bad memories and that she hated it, the village's Will of Fire burned brightly in her. She would have never abandoned Shizune to whatever fate Kabuto had planned should she not comply with his demands.

It was then that Temari came to admire Naruto and Sakura's determination. She had always thought the pair of them to be just stubborn to the point of stupidity, that all their chasing after Sasuke would be fruitless. But she had seen the change in the arrogant boy during the exams. Naruto had the ability to change people just by speaking to them. He had convinced Tsunade to become the Godaime Hokage in their original timeline.

Seeing Tsunade hold her tongue to protect her apprentice, Temari thought that such determination must run in the blood of every shinobi in Konoha. It erased all doubts in her mind that Naruto would fail this time around too.

She only hoped that her friends found her soon as Kabuto dragged her out of the cell. She may have believed herself to be as tough as nails, but the right torture would break anyone.

Naruto continuously shot concerned glances as his red headed friend as they raced to Temari's last known location.

He could clearly see that Gaara was far beyond tensed. His brow furrowed with worry. He pushed off each tree branch a little harder than the last one as if it would make him move faster.

Temari was the one person had hadn't needed to worry about. It was him that had technically died first, and would have remained that way if not for Chiyo's sacrifice. Gaara had returned to Suna to the news that Kanuro had been fatally poisoned but one of Konoha's shinobi that had come to their aid had saved him. It was his brother he had lost in the war.

Temari had been with him every step of the way the last few months, and if he lost her now it would be like being alone again. Even if he still had Kankuro, it was his sister that came from the future with him, who wasn't afraid to talk to him. At this point he could only talk freely and be himself with Temari and himself, Sakura, and Shikamaru, who were in another village.

Speaking off, Shikamaru was probably the only one of the four of them unworried. Not that they didn't believe Temari couldn't handle herself, but no one walked away from the experience of being captured like it hadn't happened.

Instead the Nara heir was enraged. He could count on both hands the things that he cared for. His team. The so dubbed Konoha twelve. His family. His village. Temari was at the top of the list. And if you thought a Nara was scary when he plotting solid plans of actions for missions, you should see one when something they held dear was threatened.

Shikamaru had been brutal with Hidan after the zombie man had killed his sensei. He was worse when Temari was involved. There had been an incident before the world broke out into war and all the villages were wiped from the map when an idiotic chuunin dared to grope his girlfriend.

The boy, Nameraka Tōka, had swaggered up to Temari while Shikamaru was paying for her favorite snack, sweet chestnuts, from a street vendor, and brazenly pinched her bum and asked if a feisty girl like her wanted to rut with him that night.

Temari had been about to slam her lead tipped fan into his head, not caring that he was a civilian given the situation when Shikamaru intervened.

His shadow snaked along the ground, weaving between the ovals beneath people's feet from the high noon sun, and latched onto Tōka's. The tall muscular dark haired boy was forced to step away from Temari.

Shikamaru raised his right arm, throwing a kunai at the center of the boy's chest, and moved so that Nameraka would mimic him and catch the projectile. Then the Nara had him place the kunai against his own throat.

The boy was shaking in his leather soled boots by this point. And Shikamaru took it one step farther by drawing his own hand across his neck, causing Tōka make a thin slice across his.

The brunette shit his pants when Shikamaru released his hold of his shadow and took a menacing step forward. He ran before Shikamaru could threaten him, calling back over his shoulder how the Kazekage would hear about this.

Clearly the idiot had not known who he was molesting.

Temari had joked that Ibiki would have been salivating at the idea of her boyfriend joining his division. Shikamaru had returned that that little trick didn't work as well on other shinobi as it did on arrogant civilians and that it would be too troublesome to ask the same questions over and over again every day of his life.

Obviously the whole incident went no further. There was no way Gaara was going to rule in favor of the boy stupid enough to make a move on his already involved sister. But the people of Suna learned a healthy amount of respect and fear for the clan that could manipulate shadows. He took great pleasure in imagining his tactical genius strong arming a civilian that had a hundred pounds and half a foot on him with physical force and not just his brains.

Between the Gaara and Shikamaru, Naruto didn't think there would be anything left of whoever dared to take Temari away from them.

"How are we going to find her?"

Shikamaru voiced the question they were all thinking. Not one of the four off them were trackers. Naruto and Sakura knew the basics and could pick up obvious trails and signs. But obvious was the key word. Anyone who managed to kidnap their fifth would be no slouch.

"What about your tracking seal?"

Sakura, who made the suggestion, slammed into Shikamaru's back when the young man stopped moving. He pushed the pinkette away from him, and it was only Gaara's sand that stopped her from falling from the canopy of the trees, and threw himself at Naruto, roughly shaking the blonde's shoulders.

"Can you do it?"

Naruto stammered. "I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?" Shikamaru snarled. "It's your seal!"

Naruto glared at his shinobi, and he instinctively hunched in on himself at Naruto's anger. "Yes, it's my seal. And as I already told you it's designed to let me to know where you are at all times and for you to find me. However, it's not a perfect seal. I don't know if it still functions because it was only meant to be used in the Forest of Death."

Significantly chastised, Shikamaru quietly asked if the blonde could possibly try.

Naruto clapped him on the shoulder, letting him know that he understood Shikamaru was frantic, worried, and panicking and that he wasn't being rude on purpose. Naruto had been just like he was when Gaara was taken by the Akatsuki.

The future Hokage channeled chakra to the seal. Theoretically, the seal should still be usable because he hadn't unwritten it.

All four of them held their breaths, staring intently at the palm of his hand, and cried out when the little human took shape and pointed to a direction northwest of them.

"That's Ishigakure."Gaara commented.

"It makes sense. They wouldn't have had the time to move her far, and Ishigakure is right on Suna's border."

Shikamaru's and Gaara's spirits were raised, now that they could accurately find their wife and sister respectively, and were urging the party to keep moving.

Naturally, the moment they caught a break is when something went drastically wrong.

Sakura touched Naruto's arm, concerned since he had not moved out with them. The other two were already tearing through the tree tops in the direction of the Village Hidden in Stones, but Naruto was standing frozen.

She could only tell that something was wrong by the tightening in the corner of his cerulean eyes. "Naruto?"

"Sasuke knows," he whispered.

The petal haired female felt like the ground had dropped out from under her. "He knows we're from the future? How?"

Naruto shook his head. "Not that. But he knows we're AWAL."

Sakura closed her eyes, imagining that if she couldn't see the despair on her best friend's face than it wasn't true, that they didn't have a catastrophe in the making waiting for them. "How?" she repeated.

"Your clone took a kunai to the shoulder."

She winced. That would do it. She hadn't shown she had the ability to make shadow clones. Sakura could actually only make two at most, but Sasuke would know instantly that something wasn't right when the clone he thought was real disappeared in a puff of smoke.

"And yours?" Sakura knew she wasn't going to like his answer, but she had to know.

"Jumped in front of the claw." He answered morosely.

"We're going to have to tell him."

"I know."

"He's going to hate us."

"I know."

"Or he might not believe us."

"I know."

"But he deserves the truth."

"Not all of it."

"Right," Sakura said softly, "not all of it." It was too soon to tell him about the truth behind his clan's massacre and his brother's act of heroism and loyalty.

"Let's go." He ordered firmly, and Sakura silently leapt after him.

The memories of Naruto's clone haunted him. He had told Sakura that there was nothing they could do about it now. Sasuke and Yamato were all the way in Snow.

Had it just be his henged clone, his clone would have discretely made another to replace Sakura. But both of them had been dispelled.

And Naruto didn't think he'd ever forget the look of shock, pain, and betrayal on Sasuke's face just before his clone popped.

Kami, he prayed that this didn't undo all their work so far.

Sasuke blinked at the place where Sakura had been standing just seconds ago. Not even the cloud of smoke, the tell-tale sign of the Shadow Clone jutsu, remained. The copy of Naruto that had been seized by the retractable claw was similarly gone.

He didn't know where his teammates were, or how Naruto managed to pretend to be Sakura so well, but he was going to find out. Wherever they were, they had abandon their mission, a voice in the back of his head sounded that they had left him behind and Sasuke tried to ignore it. It hurt him beyond words to realize that they weren't here, that they had gone of who knows where without him, that they didn't trust him.

It wasn't like them. When he saw them next he was going to demand answers.

For now, he created two shadow clones, which he could do thanks to copying it from Naruto with his Sharingan, and transformed them to appear like his missing teammates. Luckily for them, Yamato had not witnessed the two clones' deaths.

He didn't know what their reason was, but they wouldn't have used such a deceit if it wasn't necessary. And he wasn't going to do nothing and let them be branded traitors. So Sasuke would finish this mission, and when he got his hands on Naruto and Sakura, they had better have a pretty damn good answer for running off.

Temari didn't know what she was expecting, having never been interrogated or tortured before. But the last thing on the list was for Kakashi Hatake to walk through the door of the room she had been chained in.

She could tell his disguise wasn't a henge, it was too easily detected and disrupted to be a useful infiltration tool. So the silver hair was dyed brown and slicked back with gel, and he had to have had some really superb contacts to mask the Sharingan red and black.

Both his eyes widened upon seeing her.

Temari assumed he must have been expecting Tsunade in her place.

And instead of thinking that all their secrecy might just be blown sky high and that she was screwed, she could only focus on the fact that she was seeing his face without the mask.