A/N: I am happy to announce that Ser Serendipity has agreed to Beta this fic. Thanks to him this chapter reads much, much, much more smoothly. And also, I'm back to normal Italics. Should make my writing less jarring to the eyes.

That's it! Read on and hope you enjoy.

Chapter 12

In simple silence, Kakashi's team walked. It was near dawn and the sky, not yet touched by the sun's rays, cast a dreary, yet somehow refreshing greyscale over the barren wasteland. Ino decided that the promise of coming light was what made the monochrome air so invigorating.

In keeping with her family's business, 'up with the flowers' and all that, and her flawless and never broken diet (except once or twice for barbecue with her team – and only for the sake of bolstering camaraderie), she was used to rising with or even before the sun.

So she was not tired like Shikamaru, who had not seemed to stop yawning since they left camp, nor did she have to hide her drowsiness like Neji: having white eyes did him the terrible disservice of illuminating whatever shadows lay under them, faint as they may be.

It surprised her that Neji was not a naturally early riser; he had always seemed too cool and strong not to be. But she could tell that he was struggling, especially with a freely and loudly yawning Shikamaru right next to him.

Yes. Everyone had their surprises.

'You're funny, Neji-niisan.'

Finding out Neji Hyūga actually had a sense of humour was jaw-dropping. So was hearing the Hokage say that Naruto was Sasuke's guardian.

She said it so casually too, but Ino had her doubts. She had asked Chōji to fill her in about their relationship as much as he could, but, from what little she'd gathered in the office, Sasuke seemed genuinely happy. And Naruto was, well, glowing.

She was not best friends with the blond, but she was sure he had never smiled like that before. That kind of smile could make someone famous throughout the five shinobi nations. She was sure Sakura had somehow seen it, even though she refused to look at him at the time.

She had been silent after the meeting, but before Ino left her to go prepare for the mission she had propped herself up on the pillows of her hospital bed. With her left hand strangling her right, Sakura tried to turn pain into a smile and said,

"If they're happy, I'm happy."

'Who d'you think you're lying to, forehead? You can't even fool a kid with that stupid I'm-gonna-cry-at-any-moment smirk on your face.'

Surprisingly Ino, who always spoke her mind, did not say any of this. She simply nodded and left. The dumb girl was crying before she fully closed the door behind her. And was still crying when Kakashi silently opened that door a few short seconds later.

The thing was, Sakura hadn't been lying. Bubbling in the depths of green eyes trembling with tears was true happiness. She was really happy. Of course she was. Who wouldn't be happy that Sasuke was out of the darkness?

But, it must hurt. After all, if Sakura was not still very much in love with the Uchiha, Ino would take a kunai to her own hair. Again.

While her best friend/bitter rival quietly suffered, Ino herself still did not know what to feel. She had 'loved' Sasuke, sure, but she was not struggling nearly as much as Sakura. She was still more shocked than anything. But, there was one consensus she had come to.

Sasuke was cute. Almost too cute.

Not perfect though. If his speech had matched the age advertised by those pink, fat cheeks of his; that would have been icing on the cake. But Sasuke spoke too maturely, belying his true age. It was a pity, but even that lost cuteness could have been redeemed if only he spoke like true cat-humans were supposed to talk –!

"What is it?"

The three males in their team, Shikamaru in particular, were staring at her.

"Uh, nothing." She tried to brush it off, even knowing that Shikamaru would not let her.

He spoke immediately, all drowsiness fled under the stern line of his brow.

"Ino, in this type of mission, anything that comes to mind could be crucial."

"It's really nothing."

"You can't decide that on your own. Nekobaa is the only link we have to finding out what happened to Sasuke. She probably isn't in Sora-ku anymore, and Akatsuki is likely to be staking out her premises. Every piece of information or suspicion we have going into this situation helps."

"All right, all right!" Ino gesticulated in frustration. "I'm telling you it won't help, but here goes." She took a deep breath, even as her face turned deep pink.

"I was thinking about Sasuke." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "I thought he should talk more like a cat."

"What do you mean?" Though his eyes were steady, she could almost see the movements in his mind, as he searched the vast banks of information in his head to predict or supplement what she was going to say.

Ino sighed, loudly. "Nyā."

Shikamaru, and his mind, froze. The other two simply stared.

"What." It was too flat to be a question. Shikamaru had drawn a blank. Ino never thought that something she said would have made that happen.

Her face darkened to red. "He's part cat right? So, I was thinking that he should say 'nyā' more often. Like, 'you're really funny, nyā,' or 'I love Nyaruto lots, nyā,' or something like that."

The winds around them had been blowing nonstop, but at the end of Ino's words, a particularly loud one whistled as it passed, kicking up swirling dust clouds around them. Ino felt as though nature itself was mocking her.

Shikamaru opened his mouth.

"You know, I thought the same thing. So I asked him about it."

Shikamaru closed his mouth and turned slowly to stare at Kakashi.

"What."

Kakashi only smiled with his one visible eye.

"What'd he say?" Ino asked in pure curiosity.

"He laughed and said he grew out of that phase ages ago," was the cheerful response.

The three teens thought on that. Neji gave up first and walked away, muttering something that sounded like 'absurd' under his breath. Shikamaru followed soon after with a mumbled 'troublesome'.

Ino started to go after them, when something somewhat humorous clunked to place in her brain.

She chuckled. "You know, when he talks like that, it sounds like he came from another world."

That stopped the three cold in their tracks. Kakashi kept walking.

"Save your energy," he said, trying to do the same by stifling a large yawn.

"But," Ino jogged up to him, her eyes sparkling as though she had just found the secret of turning chakra into gold. "Another world. Like, alternate dimensions, those places where Summons come from or something. Those exist, right? So Sasuke-kun could have –"

"Been going on his merry way to avenge his clan and just stumbled into an alternate dimension filled with cat-people?"

Ino blushed; it sounded ridiculous when he said it with that flat sarcasm of his. Now she understood Sakura's complaints. Before she knew it, however, he turned a gentle eye on her.

"You're a bit closer with Summons, but their homes exist in the real world. You can walk to any one of them if you know how to get there but," he tapped his hidden Sharingan, "no amount of walking in the world will take you to the world inside my Kamui." Ino's eyes widened, and she stepped a bit closer to him. Shikamaru smiled slightly; she used to be the same whenever Asuma would expound on shinobi knowledge, though she would never admit to it.

"The Hokage, Jiraiya-sama and I all asked our Summons but nothing's gone amiss in any of their realms. Of course, since there are other creatures like Orochimaru's Manda and Enma the Monkey King, our guys are doing a little digging for us on their end. That's partly why we're going to Nekobaa; besides her connection with the Uchiha, she's also a representative of sorts for the Cat Summons. She can ask if they know anything."

"Oh," Ino was smiling a bit. She now also understood Sakura's praise of the man. "But, alternate dimensions…"

"They're possible, but rare. You can't just stumble into one, and even as a dimension user, you can't enter someone else's dimension. It's an iron rule." Kakashi's eye rolled upward. "Besides, dimensions are used by ninja. Even the greatest and most complex ones, like…" Kakashi paused as he thought of something ridiculous, "A massive desert or a sea of acid. They're nothing more than ninja tools, much less planes to support life."

"Oh…" now Ino sounded dejected. "So then, how d'you explain the stuff Sasuke-kun says? Like how he grew out of saying 'nyā', or in the meeting when he made a big fuss about Iruka-sensei's ears?"

"Remember Sasuke's power when this happened to him. From what I heard, he was probably the level of jōnin." Neji's eyes hardened. "At that point, the only way to tame his power would be to wipe out both his body and mind. Making him believe his form is normal was crucial. If he ever escaped, he would hide from others, thinking their appearance too strange for him to approach them. Though, going by how close he's gotten to Naruto, that part of the plan seemed to be a failure."

"Ooh."

"So save your energy. We are here for answers after all."

Ino smiled and nodded. As she walked a little ahead, the three males shared a look, and frowned.

Kakashi's explanation was full of holes. The fact remained that what had been done to Sasuke was overkill. There was no need to turn him into a cat-human of all things, and a child's mentality was debilitating enough without having him think that everyone should have cat ears.

And even with all the effort, it had been a failure. Sasuke escaped, and somehow found his way into Konoha. No, according to Naruto:

"But then, everything went dark and there was a big WHOOSH and when I woke up I was in this place and I couldn't see or smell Nii-chan anywhere."

Teleportation? How was that reconciled with mutating Sasuke's body and twisting his memories? Why do that just to drop him smack dab in the middle of his home village?

Who? Who was powerful and mad enough to do this?

By the time Kakashi looked up from his futile reverie, they were in front of the abandoned, broken remains of the once bustling city of Sora-ku.

Time for answers.

Kakashi stood perfectly still, his muscles imperceptibly tensing. He was the only living person in the old basement. The walls around him were cracked from years of neglect. Hanging on them were old scrolls, dusty weapons and shelves on which sat heavy black pots that looked more like cauldrons.

On the wall above the only empty bed in the room, half hidden by dusty and faded velvet curtains that must have looked quite elegant back in the day, was an equally faded but massive Uchiha symbol.

This was definitely the right place.

Kakashi sighed and wished he hadn't, as stale, heavy air that reeked of cats clung to his nostrils and the back of his throat.

He coughed, once, and got to work.

As he rifled through drawers, wicker baskets and boxes that were emptied of anything useful, he wondered at the lack of any other presences.

Sora-ku was abandoned, and they only came here hoping, not expecting to find Nekobaa. But they had not found anyone else other than that strange girl who was curled up in one of the buildings. Neji had seen her anyway of course, but even without the Byakugan, her choice of hiding place was poor. Any chūnin would have found her in five minutes.

She was rather good at running though. When they had gotten too close, she bolted. Since they had been silent (quieter than a mouse's breath according to Kakashi's brutal standards), out of her visual range and suppressing their chakra, Kakashi concluded that she was a sensor.

A good one.

The rest of his team was keeping an eye on her. Neji confirmed that her chakra, while plentiful and quite different, was not strong enough to qualify as a member of Akatsuki. The fact that she had run at their approach only proved this further.

She was not Akatsuki. There were no members of Akatsuki here.

That bothered Kakashi.

He knew he should be relieved and counting his blessings, but he was simply wary. He felt like something terrible was going to happen, but he did not know why.

It was no use worrying about it though. He should be focusing on his own investigation. Shikamaru was likely feeling the same thing he was. Having his brain on the problem, as good as the brains of fifty jōnin, was more than enough.

With that, he hefted down one of the large cauldrons on the shelf. It was emptied recently. He tilted it, and some viscous residue of dark potion slunk silently along the bottom.

Kakashi sniffed inside the pot, dipped his finger and collected a drop of residue. He sniffed it, felt it between his fingers and, in a lightning motion that still did not reveal his face, licked it.

Medicine.

He looked at the other pots, six in total. In the drawers, baskets and boxes he had found tatters and rolls of unused cloth but no clothes. All the scrolls he looked through held nothing useful, but by the clean spaces left in the otherwise dusty floor and walls, there should have been more. Quite a few weapons were gone too, entire boxes worth if the dustless patches meant anything.

Nekobaa was alive. She had fled, taking medicine, clothes, scrolls and weapons with her. She knew Akatsuki would be coming after her.

Which meant she knew, to some extent at least, what was going on.

He returned to the round red rug, as faded as the curtains that partially hid the bed. From Sakura's description, this was where she sat most of the time. He crouched, examining it thoroughly.

It was saturated with cat hair. And, faint to the verge of non-existence, the sweet hint of smoke did not escape his nose. If Akatsuki had killed her, they would have done it quickly. Unable to get away, her blood would have spilled all over the rug, drowning the cat hairs and dousing the tickling aroma with the stench of copper. Unless Akatsuki had restored the scene, but why waste time with that?

But, was this definite proof that she was alive? There were other ways to kill her. They could have even caught up to her after she escaped, and done the deed elsewhere. And didn't she have a granddaughter?

Kakashi shook his head. There was not enough here to make any definite conclusions. He made to leave and bring Neji down, perhaps the Byakugan could –

Kakashi froze.

Space was shifting. It was not wind, though a slight breeze did make the sweat on Kakashi's forehead cold.

Space literally twisted and split apart to reveal a black hole. Orange, red and black whirled out of that hole; by the time the man stood whole, Kakashi's Sharingan was on him.

They stood immobile and silent for a full minute. Kakashi slowly took out a kunai. The Masked Uchiha let him.

Kakashi chuckled.

"You know, you're honestly the last person I expected to see here." The man did not move, but Kakashi sensed that his words had thrown him.

"What do you mean," the Akatsuki intoned. "You did not come here expecting Akatsuki?"

The voice that spoke was deep and cold. Frankly, Kakashi preferred it to the high-pitched whine that scratched his eardrums. So he smiled, though the crimson eye glaring at his opponent diminished the effect.

"No, that's not what I meant. I mean I did not expect you here. I thought that you would have seen and disposed of Nekobaa already."

"She left before I could. It seems," he rumbled, looking around, "that she has been gone for a while."

Something was off. The man seemed… not softer but less intense than the way Sakura described him. Calmer.

The feeling that something terrible was going to happen intensified.

"Why didn't you get to her sooner?" Kakashi had to buy himself time, as much as he could.

The Masked Uchiha let him.

"A detour."

"Is Itachi giving you that much trouble?"

A pause. A chuckle. "So that girl remembered. She's better than I thought."

"Why wouldn't she remember?"

Kakashi could hear him blink. "Did you see her, Kakashi? She looked terrible."

She had. Kakashi remembered the racing of his heart when he had found her, sprawled out cold on the ground with Sai's message in her grip. For one horrible moment, he thought she had…

The Uchiha took a step. Fool! Kakashi screamed at himself for letting his thoughts waver even a moment. He gripped his kunai, a jutsu on his tongue before his hands could meet.

The masked man did not make a move. Kakashi swallowed, eyeing him warily. He did not want to initiate the fight if he could avoid it. This guy was an opponent where first moves meant very little, unless they were decisive finishers.

"She's a prize to her village." He continued the conversation as though nothing had happened, and let his empty hand drop. "That still does not explain why you are here, though. I was under the impression that you would be busy chasing after Itachi."

The mask was silent. Kakashi's eyes slowly widened.

"Pain. Konan. Deidara. You. With Kisame and Itachi gone, Akatsuki is pretty short-staffed isn't it?"

"You know that, yet you're asking stupid questions."

"But still," Kakashi ignored the slight, "I thought you would consider it your duty to chase Itachi."

The Uchiha froze. For a moment, he became a mere cut-out of a man, no depth or dimension to him.

"So you figured it out. I realise I was careless in letting you see my eye, but for you to be so sure. You are a prize to your village yourself, Kakashi of the Sharingan."

Kakashi asked a question that had plagued him since his eureka moment.

"Who are you?"

"Uchiha Madara."

He was so calm, so relaxed, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for him to speak and claim that name.

An especially thick trickle of sweat glided down Kakashi's face.

"You look stricken Kakashi." Dry amusement scratched like sand in Kakashi's ears. "Is it that shocking? Did you hold out some hope that an Uchiha actually survived Itachi that night?" Kakashi said nothing. "Well no matter. You are right. As co-Founder of Konoha and leader of my clan, it is my duty to rein in all the remaining Uchiha."

Kakashi's eye was leaden. When he spoke, the dread promise in his voice surprised even him.

"You are not getting Sasuke."

The man laughed. Kakashi stared. Even in a bout of uncontrolled mirth, the man still left no openings for him to escape.

Kakashi was no fool. If he fought the Uchiha here in this closed room, he would get killed. He needed to move outside.

"So that's why you're here then."

The man finally calmed down. "All of that… will come in due time, Kakashi. But I am not here for Sasuke, and I have no interests in demanding you or your team to relinquish him."

How did he know? The rest of his team had hid themselves perfectly. The sensor? She was Akatsuki then.

Now was not the time to think about it.

"I simply came here to collect something."

"What?"

The man raised a gloved hand, pointing to Kakashi's left eye. "That Sharingan."

The unease that had eaten away at him since he entered this godforsaken town finally made sense.

For a moment, Kakashi was hollow.

"I am here for nothing else but your eye, Kakashi," how did someone asking for one of your eyes sound so reasonable? "If you hand it over to me, I will leave immediately."

That was a lie. Why tell him so much then? Why reveal so many things about Akatsuki's position and his own identity?

And more than that…

'He said he had an old cat he needed to see,' spoke a pink-haired girl with pale, papery skin and drips and tubes attached all along both her arms. 'That's a big hint – I'm sure he wouldn't just say that.'

Madara could have guessed that Konoha would come up with visiting Nekobaa eventually. But he could not afford the chance. Or perhaps he was pressed for time, and wanted to push the process along.

Either way, it was insurance. Madara did not know whether Sakura would recall his message or not, but he left it anyway.

Nekobaa has the answer. Come to Sora-ku.

He could even be sure of who would come; Sasuke was obviously out, so there was only one person left in Konoha with a viable Sharingan, and therefore access to Nekobaa's otherwise exclusive list of clientele.

Madara had planned for this meeting all the way back then.

A sick dread, similar to when he left one comrade crushed under a couple of tons of solid rock and ran a lightning-sheathed hand through another's chest, churned in his stomach, urging him to spew it out.

If even the tiniest part of his brain suddenly went delusional and allowed him to show that kind of weakness, Nekobaa's rug would have become so filthy it would need to be burned.

Instead, Kakashi took a deep, steadying and silent inhale. If he made the wrong move here, his eye, Obito's eye, would be lost.

There was no way he would give his friend something like that to laud over him for the rest of their afterlives.

"You probably would leave," Kakashi said carelessly, "After killing me, of course."

"You truly are brilliant Kakashi." He moved again – a single step out of place.

Kakashi was ready this time; his hands flew into seals…

Madara did nothing. Kakashi stopped. That was the second time he initiated movement, only to fail to follow through. Were these feints? No. Opposite action followed feints. But Madara only stood there, heavy silence draped over him like a second cloak.

"Why now?" Kakashi continued. Until he figured out Madara's intent, it was still too dangerous to initiate battle. "Why didn't you take it when we met before?"

"Circumstances… shifted. I need that eye's power."

You…need it? Why –?

It clicked.

Weakness. Illness. Previous damage. Those movements were not intentional steps to mislead him. They were stumbles. Brief periods of unsteadiness on his feet that not even Madara could hold back.

'I need that eye's power.'

What was wrong with him?

"The Kamui?"

"Indeed. It's quite a unique skill."

"I see. I can't hand it over to you though." Kakashi was perfectly pleasant.

"Oh? Why not?" Madara was equally so.

Kakashi smiled. "It's a gift given to me by a departed friend. I'd rather eat my own intestines than hand it over to the likes of you."

Like that, the false warmth vanished, and Madara was lethally cold. It did not bother Kakashi; he was the same.

"Perhaps it has not sunk in, but I am Uchiha Madara. The rights to that eye –"

Kakashi's voice was steel. "The comrade who gave me this eye would never acknowledge you. I could never go to meet him telling him that I simply 'handed his eye over'."

Madara lowered his hand. All his muscles were relaxed, he stood in limp ease, his arms dangling freely and his head cocked. When he spoke, there was an undertone of something venomous.

"Not a comrade, huh? The same could be said of Sasuke."

"In the past perhaps. But as he is now, my friend would have probably fawned all over him with a stupid doting look on his face."

The man was silent for many short seconds. He took a breath and spoke a single word. "True."

Then he moved for real.

Kakashi met him head-on, went right through him, and kept going. He heard the mechanical whirlwind of the man's teleportation jutsu, but did not stop, navigating the dark, stifling halls at top speed as though he had lived there all his life.

He heard the yelling and sensed the utterly ridiculous amount of chakra long before he burst onto the street in the day's new light, just in time to see a white blur go flying past him and through the wall of the building behind him.

The man responsible was huge, even taller than Gai. Kakashi imagined he had a solid build, though it was a moot point under the grey, pointed growths that covered half his body. His arm, also covered in these growths, was shaped like a crude club, promising a devastating punch.

The man looked at Kakashi, yellow irises inside black sclera, and grinned.

"HAHAHAHAHAHA! I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL KILL ALL OF –!"

"Hakke Kūshō!" The gust of Gentle Fist styled air slammed into the giant, repaying him in kind by knocking him into the opposite building. The walls were thin here, falling apart under decades of neglect and erosion from the elements.

Seemed that was a good thing for both sides.

"Neji, you –"

"Kakashi-sensei, behind you!" Kakashi turned, just in time to see an inanely grinning boy with teeth that were too sharp swing a massive butcher's cleaver at his head.

The Shadow Clone was cleanly decapitated, and died in an inglorious puff of smoke. The boy staggered, his momentum thrown, and took a Jūken strike to the chest before he could bring his sword back up.

Neji looked down at the feel of water where there should have been crumpling flesh; the boy's chest was liquid and bubbling beneath his palm, trying to push past his chakra and engulf his hand.

Neji leaped back, opting for another Air Palm, which literally blew his opponent to pieces, or rather, to thousands of tiny water droplets. The drops dug grooves into the dusty street as it rushed to gather together to form a whole body again.

Neji ignored it, leaving it up to the Byakugan to keep track of it, and that speeding tendril of shadow to capture it.

He ran for the giant; even with all that grey armour shielding him, the Sixty-Four Palms should finish him for good. He was their priority right now – a single strike from him ploughed through the Hakkeshō Kaiten like it was pudding. If it was not for his defence, Neji would be out of the fight for good.

Shikamaru's shadow was still holding him, though he struggled mightily. Neji brought his palm up, ready to end it quickly…

"I can't let you do that."

…and spun seamlessly, right into another Kaiten. The Mask, definitely taken by surprise, fell away with more than a few damaged tenketsu.

Hinata-sama had been right.

'When he disappears, he opens a hole into nothing,' she had told him. 'It's white space, absolute emptiness, an anomaly that exists because it's not supposed to exist. Because it's so abnormal, the Byakugan can sense it faster than any other movement. Keep alert, Neji-niisan, and you can see him coming before he gets a chance to do anything. You can catch him before he gets a chance to touch you!'

If Naruto had gone on that mission, she probably would have never noticed that. As hard as she might try, Naruto always distracted her on some level. As long as it was not fatal, Neji did not mind. However, because of Naruto's humiliation by Danzō, she was spurred on to bring him success. Her eyes that day must have seen more than his would in a lifetime.

He smiled to himself, and as his enemy staggered back, Neji fell into position, his arms extended.

The ground glowed green beneath them; the Mask was in range.

"Jūkenpō…" The Uchiha started to disappear, to swirl back into the emptiness. Neji darted forward, finishing the attack's name in a single breath. "Hakke Rokujūyo –!"

"I'LL KILL YA, YA BASTARD!"

Neji had seen him stand up, but when he glimpsed what was growing out of the orange-haired man's flesh, he faltered by a millisecond.

In that time the Mask disappeared completely, and the wild-eyed monster of a man flew forth on chakra pistons jutting out from his back. Neji did not even have time to blink as the man flew right into the range of his Gentle Fist.

'Well, it's what I originally planned anyway,' Neji thought as he charged, his palm alight with chakra, 'Been a while since I did the Hundred Twenty Eight Palms.'

Shikamaru closed his eyes as a great cloud of dust washed over him, the result of the clash between Gentle Fist and… whatever the heck that guy was.

Part of him was glad the guy was gone; he could not hold on to the both of them at once. While one was a bucking, raging bull that pulled and stretched his shadow to its limits, the other was slime, smothering and oozing all over his shadow and trying to seep out wherever it could.

Just trying to get a grip on him was draining.

"Troublesome," he muttered, as a tendril of shadow holding a white kerchief stretched up out of the settling dust and waved to the girl who was waiting for his signal.

She nodded and aimed for the mass of bubbling, spurting water – she had not taken her eyes off of it or the insane one since the fight began.

"Shintenshin no –" And then she saw a space of emptiness open up behind Shikamaru.

As soon as Shikamaru sensed the malevolence behind him, he tried to move, but was too slow.

The gloved hand landed with finality on his shoulder, and he was being pulled, contorted, into an Other-space.

The bottomless darkness was thick enough to weigh on one's skin, and infinite enough to drive a man mad.

But that was fine. That was better than the COLD. A mind covered in darkness was still a mind that could be lost, but a mind subjected to this COLD was frozen and made numb, to shatter into nothing.

A madman was still a man, but this COLD ripped away the intrinsic warmth of blood and soul, and made a man inhuman.

Let me out! Shikamaru screamed and bucked, half of him already inside the COLD. It was already ripping out something from his soul, something he would never get back if it was gone, something like sanity but much, much harder to find again if one lost it –

Abruptly, his absorption into the COLD ended – his Kagemane was negated by then but he was free, and he leaped away as far as he could.

Madara stared at him, his limbs trembling.

Ino.

He had been tricked. And by a mere girl who was barely a shinobi. It was only because her sensing capabilities far outmatched his that he had taken her along with her two much more impressive comrades.

Because she was right on the mark about the Hyūga and Nara, he automatically trusted her about the location of the third member of the team.

A member who was also a sensor, and therefore exceptional at hiding her chakra.

Such an old trick. Weave a lie into the truth to make it all the easier to swallow. He had swallowed it happily.

Whether or not it was the anxiety of retrieving Kakashi's eye – a chore that he should have accomplished ages ago – that allowed him to make such an error was irrelevant now.

Because of his mistake, the Yamanaka was inside his mind.

And he needed her OUT.

She was in, but this guy's mind was a fortress. There were seals and genjutsu defences everywhere she turned: above, below, behind, before her: they all stretched for her with gritty determination to crush and grind her to pulp.

Ino gritted her teeth and dug into one of the white walls, ripping it apart with her bare hands.

She still was not at her father's level where she could break mental defences, but she could make them hurt.

The mind hated pain. Thus, when faced with affliction, its usual reaction was to retreat to those soft, warm memories that brought the most comfort. Shinobi were rarely trained to rid themselves of this automatic defence, as comforting memories usually did not entail life-or-death secrets. Most people would not even think to keep them sealed away.

The Masked Uchiha was one of them.

The white walls retreated, and the space got a little brighter. A cool wind was blowing: its defences were still up, but this mind was at peace.

She could hear laughter in the distance.

'Let's go!'

Who was that? Ino ran forward as more and more layers of darkness peeled back and crumbled under her steady flow of chakra. The blank space squeezed, desperate now to stop her. Ino pushed with a scream and the space retreated.

One had to have incredible mental fortitude or an unbelievably strong consciousness to overwhelm a Yamanaka. Like that 'other' Sakura that still made Ino shiver whenever she thought of her.

Someone calm and composed like the masked Uchiha did not seem the type to have an alter ego like that, though.

The voice grew louder.

'Don't hide your wounds! I'm always watching you know!'

A girl? Who was she talking to?

'I'm gonna become Hokage!'

Who was that? He sounded like Naruto.

'Go for it Obito! Become a cool Hokage and let me see how you save the world! It's a promise okay?'

"Obito?"

And then, in a halo of light, Ino saw a beautiful smile. It was the girl. She could not have been older than Ino was when she took the Chūnin exams the first time. But Ino marvelled at her.

Her eyes were so sincere, and so kind.

'I'll always be watching you.'

"ENOUGH."

The space pushed. She dug into the darkness, trying to find a grip, but there was none to be had. She was catapulted out of the Uchiha's mind, back into her own body atop a long abandoned ramen shop.

The Masked Uchiha followed her, sliding out from the hold of paralysing shadow, a kunai falling into his hand.

She did not have a chance of making it. She only barely sat up before Madara was on top of her, plunging the kunai towards her neck.

The blade was cut in half by the sparking lightning of a thousand birds. Undeterred, Madara reached down and gripped Ino by the throat, taking a knee to the face from Kakashi in order to crush it. Blood spewed out of Ino's mouth, filling the air with the stench of warm metal.

As Shikamaru leaped to her side, Kakashi leaped after Madara – who was knocked back by the kick and falling to the street below – and took the opportunity to run his Raikiri through the man's chest.

He came out the other side, but the passage was… bumpy. Madara was damaged, and it confirmed Kakashi's suspicion.

"You're not Madara," he told the man while skidding to a stop on the dusty ground.

The Uchiha's landing was not nearly as smooth. He stumbled backwards a few steps before coming to a stop. The right side of his mask was shattered from the kick; chips of it fell away, revealing an enraged Sharingan.

"Madara went toe to toe with Hashirama himself; mountains were destroyed in the heat of their battle. He would not wait around, hoping for the chance to lure me out. He would raze the place, kill everyone here, and take my eye by force."

On the roof, Shikamaru held Ino. She was warm… and seriously wounded, too. Of course. Luckily that knee to the face had prevented the man from damaging her trachea, so she could still breathe. She could not speak though, and seemed to be in terrible pain.

On ground level, Neji kept a silent guard on the wild grey man unconscious at his feet, while his palm was levelled at the regenerated water boy. The two shinobi stood still, eyeing each other warily.

Kakashi glanced at the two unknowns. "Friends of yours?"

"New members," the Mask answered casually, "though we were busy, so they did not get a proper initiation."

"You mean those fashion faux pas you call cloaks?" Madara did not answer. Kakashi dug in a little deeper. "Akatsuki must be desperate, if they're willing to hire a couple of kids."

"Itachi himself was a child when we took him."

"And look where he is now. You can't even catch him yet."

"Like I said," his Sharingan spun, "I was busy." Out of the whirlwind of unnatural air came a flurry of giant shuriken. "Besides…"

Madara sped through the shuriken, passing through all of them like a grotesque shadow. Kakashi, with no intangibility to aid him, could only dodge, leaping back in wide arcs to avoid being sliced to ribbons in the cramped street.

Neji moved forward to help him, but was intercepted by the white-haired boy he'd been facing off against. With only a glare between them, they fell back into their brawl.

Kakashi was on his own. But with the Sharingan, the movements of the shuriken were easy enough to predict.

Getting out of their way was not as easy. He threw himself to the side to dodge a point so sharp that it stabbed inches deep into one of the few good walls left and split it in half. With toes barely dusting the ground, he jumped high to avoid the penultimate projectile, which splintered the street under him. In mid-leap, he deflected the last of the shuriken with a kunai desperately sharpened by his Raikiri, and still only barely stopped it from taking his arm off.

Before his feet touched the ground, Madara was in front of him, his fingers curling like claws around his Sharingan.

He flawlessly finished the sentence he began less than ten seconds (it felt like ten minutes) ago.

"… Itachi will die soon enough."

On base instinct, Kakashi activated Kamui. The wretched fingers began disappearing into another dimension.

But then the fingers pulled, and disappeared into the Mask's own 'space'.

And suddenly, as the hand that blocked Kakashi's vision whirled back into safety, the two Sharingan stared at each other, both trying to pull the other in.

Deadlock.

Why? The mask wondered at this, even as he sensed the distortion of something more than air around them. His arm was now cut off at the wrist, but easy enough to reattach. He barely felt any pain as a pale mockery of flesh dripped from the amputated appendage.

Why did he respond with Kamui instead of intangibility? Was it their eyes? Did Kakashi's attack goad his eye to this response?

Brother eyes, Brother Kamui, both trying to gain dominance over the other.

Nature could not allow such a bitter feud.

A window-shattering clang rang throughout the entirety of Sora-ku, carrying with it an invisible shockwave. The water boy's entire body rippled with its force, shards from the few windows above his head falling right through it. The wild man woke up. Neji winced, his Byakugan throbbing. Ino felt the dissonance in her body and retched, her throat tearing in pain. Shikamaru winced, his tendrils of shadow halted and trembling.

The pulling sensation stopped. Both eyes were strained to their limits, they even began to bleed. But neither felt like it was being pulled.

They were simply moving.

Suspended in mid-air by some mockery of the laws of gravity, Kakashi and Madara stared at each other as their respective Sharingan slowly slid out of their sockets.

Unbelievable. Closing a number of Madara's tenketsu had made them equal. He had underestimated the Byakugan.

But he was still…

"Hakke Kūshō!"

Impossible.

He had been trying to become untouchable for the past half-minute, trying to break the… connection between his and Kakashi's eyes.

It was no use. As long as Kamui was active, his body refused to become a ghost.

Neji's attack slammed into his back. He was not pushed forward – the laws of nature were still on a hiatus – but several more of his tenketsu slammed shut.

Reality shook. The gong sang again. Kakashi's Kamui PULLED.

And something… alive… flew out of Madara's eye.

Gravity returned, grabbing Kakashi in an eager embrace. He slammed disgracefully into the ground, watching as the thing – the living thing – flipped endlessly through the air. It was snugly wrapped in a black cloak, and as it flew, a pale arm flopped out.

The water boy was running for it, dragging the massive butcher's cleaver behind him, ignoring Neji and Madara completely. When it became clear that he would not make it, he dropped the sword, Zabuza's sword, and dove at the ground, skidding into an impressive slide for a good ten metres.

If he had not caught it, Kakashi would have hit him.

As the trail of upraised dust settled, the boy stood with the bundle in his arms and a huge grin on his face. Unlike the first time they had met, Kakashi noted how it reached his eyes.

"Jūgo! I got him!" The wild man called Jūgo rose – Neji's jaw dropped – and limped towards him, picking up the boy's sword on the way.

He also ignored his assumed leader, who was still struggling from the backlash of the two Kamuis' paradoxical tug-of-war.

Kakashi was not surprised by Jūgo's swift recovery. Berserkers like him usually had pretty tough armour and lasting endurance. It was quite something that Neji was able to fell him even for that short amount of time. And even if he could walk, he would not be fighting again any time soon.

"Oy!"

He turned to meet a pair of shining purple eyes staring at him.

"Thanks," the sharp-toothed young man shouted clearly over the distance. "We owe you one."

Kakashi's jaw would have dropped had it not been for his mask. It had its uses, after all.

The boy turned to Madara and held up one of his fingers. "Fuck. You."

Then he ran off at top speed, with Jūgo trotting behind him and, unseen by everyone but Neji, the girl he had identified from the very beginning racing to catch up.

It might be worthwhile to interrogate her. But they had a much better subject for interrogation right in front of them.

Neji stepped forward, cracking his knuckles. He placed Sixty Four Strikes into the Masked Uchiha's back, cratering the earth under his body with the impacts, and closing off the rest of his tenketsu. The shadow beneath Madara grew tar black as dark tendrils slowly speared through the man's arms, legs and torso, stitching him neatly to the ground.

One long stretch of shadow connected the lightless pool to Shikamaru's slowly approaching feet. Ino was hanging off his arm, being half-dragged by her teammate.

The Uchiha gave up fighting and closed his eye.

"Well then," Kakashi said, his lazy tone all but returned. "How about we tie you up and take you back to the village, 'Madara'?"

Madara smiled. And disappeared, shimmering out of existence as an Izanagi long programmed into his left eye finally found the right conditions to activate.

He did not reach far. The chakra he had placed in the eye did all it could, but his injuries had been severe. Forcefully opening a few tenketsu took twice as much chakra as shutting them. And that was without reversing whatever it was the Kamuis' Deadlock had done to him.

At the Hyūga's widened Byakugan, the Uchiha could not help but smirk.

"What did you say Madara would do, Kakashi?"

All of his chakra was not accessible. But it was enough.

"Raze this place, was it?"

He slid out of yet another Kagemane attempt and performed a simple seal.

"Katon: Bakufū Ranbu!"

If Kakashi had not taken his cryptic taunts as a warning, they would all be dead. His command to Neji was no more than a half-worded shout but it was enough.

The Hyūga spun and the Kaiten spread, enclosing them in a tight dome of rapidly rotating chakra as the lateral typhoon of fire melted the buildings and the very dust around them.

"That's… ridiculous," Shikamaru muttered. Kakashi agreed. This was the level of Kakuzu's fire and wind combination. No, it was even stronger. Even within the thick walls of the Kaiten, Kakashi could feel the burns forming on his skin.

He could not move – whatever had happened between his eye and Madara's had drained him of all strength.

"Shikamaru." The air was boiling; every inhale was painful. "Use this time to come up with a plan. I cannot move, and after using this much chakra, Neji will not be able to fight –"

"I'm afraid he has no time left, Kakashi."

He came, sliding through the Kaiten's walls even as the firestorm raged outside.

"Give me –" he was almost inside. Only his arm and leg were outside of the Kaiten, where they should have been cooked by his own monstrous jutsu. Kakashi watched him, his Sharingan bleeding anew. There was something he was so close to understanding. "– that eye."

Madara's (newly reattached) hand was outstretched, Kakashi raised his own…

And gave Madara Uchiha a high five.

His hand passed right through. And there was no reason for it.

He knew Kakashi could not stand, his Sharingan would tell him that he had no chakra left, and predict that his weak movement was non-threatening.

"That's it."

Madara's Sharingan, exposed by his shattered mask, widened. Kakashi grinned. There was only one reason 'Madara Uchiha' would take a kick to the face like that.

A weakness. Just what they needed.

"You can become untouchable –"

"But you can't touch things at the same time!" Shikamaru released Ino, who slid with surprising grace to the ground, and put his hands together in a seal.

Neji's chakra created its own light, allowing Shikamaru to create a dozen tendrils of black shadow. They wriggled through Madara like ravenous eels; his heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and brain would have all been skewered in an instant if not for his ability.

"Shadow Stitching, a success. Now I wonder how long you'll last."

Madara made to move back, but jerked. Shikamaru's smirk grew nasty, a wicked showing of teeth.

"The difference?" Nara Shikaku nodded at his son over the Shōgi board. Shikamaru frowned. His dad did not usually try to distract him with frivolous matters during these games, but it was not entirely beneath him. He had gotten astonishingly better after his battle with Akatsuki.

"There is no difference," Shikamaru stated, decisively moving his Lance forward. A straight out charge, Naruto-esque in its boldness.

Shikaku smiled. Shikamaru never appreciated these kinds of moves back then, and thus only treated his Lances as cannon-fodder to protect the more sophisticated Rook and Bishop.

"You're right." Shikaku captured the Lance. Shikamaru gave it a brief glance of appreciation, before sweeping in to capture one of his father's precious Silver Generals. "There is no difference between shadow and darkness."

Shikamaru resisted rolling his eyes. "Why ask then?" he said shortly.

"Because it's one thing for your mind to know that. It's another for your jutsu to know that."

Shikamaru blinked. Shikaku pushed forward with his own Lance, casually capturing the last of his son's Pawns. Shikamaru blinked again. His first rank was now uncomfortably open.

"What do you mean?" he asked only half-interested, trying to find a way out that would protect the King, but wouldn't lose him a General. He'd admit, he still had a childish penchant for them.

Shikaku's eyes twitched, resisting a roll of their own. "I mean the next level."

That made Shikamaru finally look up. "Next level?"

"Yes. The next level in our clan's technique. It's not a new jutsu, like what you've been practicing, but a level-up on all of your old ones." Shikamaru sat still, staring at his father. The board was now ignored by them both.

"Shadow is darkness. Yet think about all the places around us, inside us, where darkness lies yet our shadows cannot reach. That limitation exists, but it does not need to."

"Dad… I don't understand."

Shikaku chuckled. "I don't blame you. I didn't get it either, the first and last time I achieved this. It took me months to put words to it; I haven't even shared it with the clan." Shikamaru's mouth fell open a little. "Some of the greatest ninjutsu of our time comes from ridiculous simplicity. Tsunade-sama's superhuman strength: chakra superfocused to the extreme. The Rasengan: spinning chakra crammed into a ball, extreme shape manipulation and tremendous power.

And us. The Shadow Manipulators. Using our shadows to touch untouchable darkness. I only did it once, when me and my friends were going to die. That state of mind is quite…" a flurried muddle of emotion crossed his face; hatred, sickness, fear. "Unique. I couldn't reproduce it. So I can't teach it to you. All I can do…"

Shikaku checkmated the King. Shikamaru did not even notice. "Is share with you the possibility of a ridiculous extreme. The simplicity of ninjutsu expanded to make our shadows true darkness." Shikaku snatched up his son's King, holding it between forefinger and thumb. Shikamaru stared at the finely painted kanji, swallowing softly, "You will face ridiculous enemies from now on. More ridiculous than those…zombies. When that happens, touch the untouchable darkness my son, and bind it."

"How." Skewered with a dozen wriggling shadows, bound in place even in his intangible state, Madara Uchiha would not dignify the Leaf Chūnin with an actual question. Shikamaru answered anyway.

"There are shadows everywhere on your body you know," Shikamaru said, his as-a-matter-of-fact tone making Ino's skin prickle. She had been the victim of his lectures too many times.

"Under your sleeves, behind your mask, even the hair on your arms makes shadows. Not even you can escape the shadows made by your own body. All I did was attach my shadow to yours and make it stick. Once I found enough of those convenient shadows of yours, making the adjustment was easy."

His smile faded, his eyes turned calculating. "The only way for you to escape now is to teleport."

Ten seconds passed. "You can't. You need to be physical in order to teleport. That's why you can only suck people in when you touch them."

Madara sighed and tilted his head back. "This is gonna suck."

"Wha –"

Blood splashed into Shikamaru's mouth. If he was anything less than a chūnin-too-lazy-to-be-a-jōnin, he would have completely lost his composure and retched, unintentionally dispelling the jutsu. Instead, he just spat repeatedly, even after all the blood was out.

The gore splashed warm and thick all over Kakashi and Ino. The speeds at which Neji spun prevented any blood from clinging to him.

Madara hung limp, staked in all of his major organs by Shikamaru's shadow stitches. Except for Neji, everyone stared, speechless.

And fell to despair when the body rippled out of existence.

The maelstrom of flames was over. Neji slowed to a stop and promptly passed out, utterly exhausted. Kakashi caught him, keeping his head from hitting the ground. Ino crawled to him and put her hands on his chest, giving him her chakra. More blood dribbled over her bottom lip, but she ignored it, just as she did the blood that was drying on her bare skin.

Blood that was not hers.

Shikamaru watched her, before slowly turning to face the Uchiha who was standing silently on the scorched earth. A distinct line now existed, between that which could still be recognised as a town, and the scarred, molten devastation that would later decay into the surrounding wasteland. Even the tallest buildings were barely standing, reduced to steaming, hollowed skeletons.

Only the little patch of ground that Neji had protected with every last drop of his chakra survived: a poor remnant of what the street used to be.

It was hot. Shikamaru was sweating like, well like Lee after his five daily sessions of training. But still, somewhere inside him, he was so impossibly, so damnably cold.

Troublesome.

He shuffled in front of his three incapacitated teammates, kicking up ash. The ground burned; there were patches that were completely melted, and rapidly cooling into glass. The Uchiha seemed to have no trouble standing on one such patch, even though the bottoms of his feet were hissing.

But Shikamaru was still so illogically cold.

Troublesome.

"Your Izanagi," Shikamaru began, glancing around at the hollowed landscape, trying to ignore how irritating the hot, ashy air was to his throat. "Can last a while, can't it?"

Madara began a slow stalk towards them. He did not answer immediately, but when he did, Shikamaru appreciated the irony.

"I did not expect a chūnin to be more troublesome than Kakashi."

"Oh?"

"Your shadows are too clingy," a kunai slid into his hand, "It's suffocating."

"My, my. So you're just going to kill them off? A bit extreme, don't you think?"

Madara tired of their banter. He just lunged, his kunai held straight out before him like a javelin.

Shikamaru ducked at the last moment; undeterred, Madara spun and plunged the kunai toward the back of Ino's neck.

The girl did not even turn around. She just ducked slightly as Kakashi's arm flew over her head.

Caught completely off guard by a man he thought was down for good, Madara's head snapped back as the Jōnin's fist connected with his jaw in a shattering blow. Their enemy staggered back onto the burning scar that was once a dusty street, and into a fresh patch of wriggling shadow stitches.

The shadows' points phased right through him. But then, ever so slowly, Madara began to bleed. Scratches were opening up all over his body.

Shikamaru stared, his eyes widening slightly. This was…

Madara leaped back. Kakashi sped after him, Shikamaru right as his side.

The Uchiha went right, making to intercept the chūnin. The chūnin, who wanted just that, darted even more to the right, moving Madara to his peripheral vision. When the Uchiha was close enough, he flipped out a kunai and stabbed into the air in front of him.

Kakashi's kunai went right through Madara's ghostlike heart and out the other side. Kakashi's body soon followed. And following Kakashi was an especially sharp spear of black shadow, stretching up out of the ground.

The shadow disappeared into Madara's chest and slipped out the other side. There was no sound of flesh being pierced, but a moment later…

Madara screamed; out of pain or surprise the chūnin could not tell. All that mattered was that, in the next moment, the Uchiha was on his knees, clutching his chest.

Shikamaru did not give him a chance to recuperate. Now was the time. Since shadow was his main weapon, Shikamaru never left home without some of its antithesis.

Light.

He always made sure, on missions like this one, to litter the field with his own personal patches of light, in case he should need them. And they were now at the line that separated destruction from developments, just like Shikamaru had planned. A few bombs had survived, just like he had planned.

With a surge of his chakra, they detonated.

In a single moment the sunlight disappeared, replaced by the harsh whiteness of a thousand fluorescent bulbs. Kakashi, Shikamaru, Madara, and the corners of the buildings disappeared in the over-light, becoming nothing more than etchings with scratched outlines.

The only thing that this light could and did illuminate in pristine definition was darkness.

Like the darkness that connected Shikamaru and Kakashi, which the scorched black of the ground had effectively hid.

Like the darkness that made the etched edges of the nearest buildings thicker and more defined: growing them darker until they stretched beyond their boundaries across the white sky and earth to meet with other edges of darkness just like them.

The thin streams of darkness stretched, and grew, and connected until they became a cage.

Shikamaru (and Kakashi) put his hands together in a simple seal. The lightless pool under Kakashi abandoned him and sped for Madara, growing a meter in diameter upon reaching him.

"Ninpou," Shikamaru whispered. The bars of darkness that created their cage throbbed. Madara tried to move, to slide away, but Shikamaru's shadows stuck perfectly now.

"Chikage no Heya."

The shadows stretched from their bars, becoming a sea of spears so numerous that each one was indistinguishable. From the sharpest light to the deepest darkness was a painful transition: even with the contacts he had put on, Shikamaru's eyes still watered as his pupils rapidly dilated.

The spears pierced Madara in silence. They retracted and pierced him again in silence. And repeated the cycle anew. Madara was going to be speared with serial waves of a thousand shadows, each volley of strikes more violent than the last.

After the five hundredth shadow pierced him, there was a squelch and a squirt of blood. Shikamaru gritted his teeth, hanging on as hard as he could.

"He can't escape." Kakashi spoke from the ground; he had slumped to his knees after Shikamaru's shadow left him.

"You sure?"

"Yes. The Izanagi is still in effect, but every time he uses it, his chakra is drastically depleted. His reserves are too low now. And I can see: his body's still shocked from whatever happened between our eyes. The Izanagi didn't – couldn't reverse all of it." Kakashi coughed, and the section of mask in front of his mouth darkened.

"The most he can do is regenerate right back inside this cage."

Before Kakashi said 'cage', Madara let out a scream of pure rage. The blood squelches got louder and more numerous. They weren't stopping. Madara was not regenerating.

It would have been great if they could have brought him in alive. They would have gotten invaluable information from him.

But he was far too dangerous to be left alive.

Shikamaru poured the last of his chakra into the final volley of needles, spearing Madara thoroughly. The timing was perfect; just as the light from the flash bombs faded, just as Madara's Izanagi had finally run out.

The sky was blue again, though for Shikamaru it was hard to see with the white spots throbbing in his eyes.

Madara was on his knees. His coat was soaked through with blood and sticking to his skinny frame. There were holes everywhere; the ruined cloth was barely hanging on to him.

All of his major organs were pierced, or should have been. Shikamaru had definitely felt some of his shadows connect with flesh and blood, along with other things he was not sure he could come up with an explanation for.

There were visible holes in Madara's arms and legs, his stomach, his chest. But somehow, his eye remained intact, and that was all he needed. Reality shifted, though slowly and much less smoothly than it had before. In the adjusting light of Shikamaru's vision, Madara's Sharingan suddenly glowed.

"I'll be back for you." His voice was still so calm, just a little breathless from the pain, blood loss and chakra exhaustion.

Shikamaru shook.

The angry glow turned from him, and the chūnin felt that he could breathe again.

"And I will be back for that eye, Kakashi," he was almost gone, his voice echoed from the emptiness. "It's mine."

He was gone, leaving only small spots of blood which slowly cooked on the still-steaming ground.

Kakashi shuddered. There was something in that voice that almost made the Copy Ninja believe him.

"Shikamaru." Before he dealt with any foreboding premonitions, however, he needed to deal with the horrible burning pain, the wretched sting of hell's fire in his eyeballs.

The lazy genius stiffened at the deceptively sweet tone. He was too smart not to know where he had gone wrong.

"Was that your first time using the Room of a Thousand Shadows?"

"W-well, on the 'thousand' scale yeah. I practiced a smaller version at home."

"I see." He lowered his headband over his Sharingan. "Warn me, next time you're going to do it. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good." A few moments passed. "I hear footsteps."

"That's Neji and Ino. Can't you see –?"

"Oh no, I'm blind."

"A-ah."

"What did you do?" that was Neji, who limped forward with Ino's arm over his shoulders. Ino nodded slowly, also wanting to know.

"I also want to know," Kakashi unknowingly mirrored Ino.

"Kakashi-sensei, your eye…"

"Shikamaru's technique blinded me," he said cheerfully, his eye staring off in a completely opposite direction from where Neji was standing. "I can only see out of the Sharingan, but it needs rest."

"O-oh."

Shikamaru cleared his throat, his ears beet red. "W-well, like I said before, our clothes and bodies make countless shadows all over us that even he could not escape from. I basically stuck my shadows to his shadows so he couldn't escape them. But…"

Shikamaru paused, his jaw working as if he was actually chewing his own words.

Touch the untouchable darkness.

"When I use my techniques, I can somewhat feel what my shadows do. I feel when they've pierced flesh, or when they're holding something. To an extent I can even feel where they are. So when my shadows touched that guy, and he became untouchable, sometimes I felt that my shadows went somewhere else."

"Sometimes?" asked Neji.

"Yeah. I made them as sticky as I could, but I still couldn't get it right. The normal paralysis shadows were perfect, but stitching shadows only clung completely to him some of the time. That's probably why his wounds weren't fatal. I only grazed his organs instead of properly piercing them. And he protected his head perfectly."

"So the shadows that clung to him, you felt as though they went somewhere else?"

"Yeah. Somewhere far away. Dark. And," Shikamaru's body convulsed in one violent shudder, "cold."

"Come to think of it, that thing that flew out of his eye was a living person, wasn't it?"

"Your Byakugan didn't –?"

Neji shook his head slowly, staring at Kakashi. "That… paradox sucked in my eyes' vision. Once I looked, my Byakugan's vision closed in on Kakashi-sensei and the Uchiha, and blocked out everything else."

"It cancelled the Byakugan?" Shikamaru shook his head. He'd figure that out later. "A person was inside his eye. So his eye has some sort of storage seal inside it?"

"No. That's not it." Kakashi's head was bowed, even though his eye swung upwards. Shikamaru winced.

"Rather than a seal, it's more accurate to compare it to my Kamui. I think I've almost got it figured out," he turned to Shikamaru, his eye turned to Neji, "if you just give me more time."

"Sure," Shikamaru would have agreed to anything Kakashi wanted at that point, "Ino, can you do something about his eye?"

Ino slowly shook her head, not wanting to aggravate her injury. She had performed some healing on her throat, but still could not speak. So she silently raised her hand and covered her own eye, then pointed to Kakashi.

"We need to cover it?" She nodded. "That's his only eye." Ino's brow flattened into her signature, 'are you a complete idiot or are you Naruto?' look.

"Nara," Neji filled in the gap for her. "He can't see either way."

No birds would come near Sora-ku for the next few months. It was just as well. Shikamaru did not need nature itself calling him out on his brain-dead moments right now.

So he silently wrapped up Kakashi's remaining eye in bandages.

"Don't worry, I'm sure it's only temporary."

"Yeah," Shikamaru's voice was void of any life. He almost did not trust himself to speak right now.

Ino rolled her eyes and descended to her knees, where she began writing in the warm ashes.

"I-Ino?" She glared shortly at Shikamaru, who immediately shut up, and continued writing.

When she got a good way in, the two who could started reading.

"White walls… Dug my way through… Heard a girl's voice… What is this?"

"Ino went inside that guy's head. I guess this is what she got before he pushed her out."

Shikamaru read it aloud for Kakashi's sake, not noticing the man fall more and more silent beside him. As though to make up for it, his mind screamed as it remembered the pattern of that Masked Uchiha's Mangekyō.

The same pattern as his own. He did not want to see it. He knew what would happen if he acknowledged it. So he had ignored it completely and run away, calling the terrible truth irrelevant.

That was better. He would happily be a coward if that truth would simply cease to be.

But life was never that kind to him.

When Ino wrote the last word, and Shikamaru subsequently spoke it, he only had one question.

"Who's Obito?"

That question would not be answered, or even much thought about, until they were back in Konoha.

When Kakashi finally succumbed to chakra exhaustion and lay crumpled on the ground, hyperventilating wildly while a dark, wet spot spread in his eye bandages, all the teens wanted to do from that point was get him home as quickly as possible.

A/N: G-man thanks for your review. I'm glad you liked Naruto and Sasuke's talk, and Sasuke's switch from revenge to justice. I really went through a lot to make that part believable and flow smoothly, since I didn't want the transition to be 'magical change of heart due to superpowered friendship speech from Naruto'. And yes, even as a (normal) kid I always thought Sasuke was able to grasp some mature concepts for his age. That's probably part of the 'potential' Itachi saw in him. As for Danzo... I'm not sure yet if I'll go any deeper with him, but I am thinking about it. He really is such an interesting character. Thanks for another thoughtful review, I really love reading them.

To all else, thank you for reading my story and sticking with me this far. Favourite, Follow and Review as you're compelled, and I hope to see all of you next time!