Author's Note 1.0: You know what I said about naming this chapter after a band's song? Well...it didn't happen. I'll tell you why... Oh and Kishi owns everything.

The trip to Kawagakure's northern border was agonizingly slow. By the time they saw the old medic-nin standing outside the minshuku, Itachi was more than ready to pass out.

After an exasperated "Unbelievable" from Sora, Kisame and Shiori quickly ushered the shinobi into one of the empty rooms and stripped him down to his trousers. Sora quickly went to work, kneeling before him to begin her diagnostic scan. Itachi shuddered as a warm sensation pulsated from his forehead going down.

"I'm checking to see how far the poison has gone," Sora explained to him, her voice sounding far and faint to the nearly unconscious young man.

"Hoshikagi, talk to me," she ordered. "What the hell happened? Shiori make yourself useful and get some water from the well outside. The colder the better."

With his eyes closed, Itachi used his ears to try and keep track of what was happening around him. There was the sound of hurried footsteps from what he could only assume as Shiori scrambling to her task. Kisame's garbled voice echoed from afar.

"Since when did you become a klutz, Itachi-kun?" Sora asked almost mockingly.

"It happened after he used the Mangekyo..."

Itachi pursed his lips in frustration. He didn't blame his partner. He knew Sora needed to know every detail there is in order to treat him properly. Unfortunately, he also knew that she was going to be very pissed once she heard that he had been doing the very thing she had begged him not to do.

The Amegakure bounty mission ought to have been straightforward had it not been for the two dozen Ame-nins who showed up unexpectedly just as him and Kisame were leaving. A skirmish ensued which lasted until evening. Sometime during the bloodbath a falcon was released, taking with it an urgent request for backup. Itachi knew that the special ops would be called in once the head jonins found out who they were up against. He had to act fast. And act fast he did.

The Amaterasu he casted caused a chorus of tortured cries followed by the unmistakable stench of burning flesh. The sound of weapons clashing against metal diminished and the amount of chakra signatures surrounding him dwindled from eighteen to four, including Kisame. He had done it. They had won.

And then the pain began. The pain on his bleeding right eye paled in comparison to the hell that was coursing through the rest of him. He couldn't even cry out as a piercing sensation stabbed him over the heart, paralyzing his left arm and making his jaw numb. He had lost the ability to breath and he found himself starved of oxygen, losing consciousness fast. He could hear Kisame from a distance.

"Itachi! Behind you!"

Dark eyes flew open, surveying the small room with its tatami mats and lone sliding door. It seemed to him like he had only nodded off for a few minutes and yet the view of the dark sky from the window clued him that at least some hours had passed. The room was bathed in a green hue and a small whistling sound was emitted by Sora's Mystic Palm Technique. Sighing heavily, Itachi forced his leaden head to turn left towards the source of the warm chakra he sensed.

Shiori's fingers had grown stiff and blue from the iced water she had been working with since that afternoon. As soon as Sora started treating him, she had warned her that Itachi's body was at risk of overheating once she began to collect the poison particles in his bloodstream towards their entry point, the wound on his side. Her task was to counter the medic-nin's jutsu with cold. And she hadn't stopped since. Shiori was surprised to find Itachi looking up at her. His gaze was unfocused, shifting from one spot in the room to another and then back to her.

"Water," he rasped. His throat felt so dry it hurt.

"Sora-san, he's awake!" Shiori exclaimed. She quickly brought a soaked piece of cloth to his lips which he drained eagerly.

"Not for long," Sora replied, looking away from her working space to look at Shiori. "This is going to hurt so bad he wished somebody shoved his sorry ass into a Tsukoyomi. Keep him distracted."

"I heard that," he murmured, alarmed.

Shiori threw her washcloth into a nearby bucket and cupped Itachi's face with both hands, gently wiping strands of wet hair away from his eyes.

"Look at me," she urged him. "Hey."

"You." He narrowed his eyes at her. "...you're still here."

"Why do you always sound so surprised when I do something for you?" Shiori forced herself to smile, ignoring the way her hear hammered anxiously in her chest. "Now stop being so stubborn and do as I say. Look at me."

As soon as his pulse lowered to normal, Sora tugged and let her chakra pull the metalloid poison out from Itachi's wound.

Pain unlike any other that he had experienced erupted from his side and a tortured scream ripped out of his throat.

"Sora-san!" Shiori pleaded.

"Keep him still!" The medic-nin barked. Her task became a lot trickier with her patient trying to wriggle away from her. Sora decided she needed to speed things up and pulled harder.

Just as Itachi thought he was in the worst pain possible, a sharp tug at his side intensified the torture he was already in. This time he couldn't even find it in himself to scream. White exploded in his vision. He was oblivious to everything but the pain. It was all he could hear and touch and feel.

"Itachi stay with me!"

Using all of his remaining strength, he reached out and held on to Shiori. She gasped as Itachi's deathgrip crushed her left wrist. She heard something crunch and could only pray that he didn't break anything. His writhing made it difficult for her to concentrate. More than once she had slipped, making Itachi's pain her pain as well. Those split second glances made her doubt how something so excrutiating could actually be life-saving. No wonder he was more than ready to jump out of his skin.

"Let go of me!" he roared. To Shiori's horror, Itachi's irises began to glow red. The three tomoe on each eye circled around his pupils rapidly before merging with them in the form of a pinwheel. It was the first time she saw the Mangekyo Sharingan up close. To say that she was terrified was the understatement of the century.

"You're...you're..." She couldn't finish her sentence. Unable to cope, she slipped and found herself looking through his eyes.

Despite the agony caused by Sora's ninjutsu, the world around her was a hundred times sharper from Itachi's perspective. She could see everything, every dust particle on the ceiling and every pore on the hands resting on his cheeks. And when he looked up she came face to face with herself, all sweaty brows and messy hair. Her bun had come undone from the struggle and it had fallen into a limp ponytail over her shoulder. Her gray eyes were round and wide while her lips were stuck in an "O". Through the haze, Itachi's consciousness kicked in and realized what was happening. He had unknowingly activated the Mangekyo Sharingan and had paralyzed Shiori with fear because of it. He was also aware that she was reading him. He could see wisps of her chakra leaking out of her body, indicating that she had lost control just as he had lost his own.

'Shiori I know you're here,' he thought. 'I am so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.'

He closed his eyes, turning in to himself. 'Get out of my head.'

Shiori broke out of his consciousness and slammed back into her own as soon as the Sharingan was out of sight. She gasped and worked double time to reel parts of her chakra back inside her.

"For a moment I thought I lost you both," Sora said, her gaze never leaving the poison's entry point. "What happened? I felt a surge of chakra from him."

Shiori blinked away the tears before she replied, "It was the Mangekyo."

There was a long pause as Sora thought frantically for an alternative, another way to make it easier for him. She stole a glance at Itachi. His eyes were squeezed shut and his face was stuck in a grimace, fighting yet another battle alone. This time his greatest weapon became an obstacle that stopped him from getting much-needed help.

"Then he's going to have to wing all by himself-"

"No he won't," Shiori cut her. "Not with this one. Not anymore."

Gray eyes took on the image of steel as she came to her final decision. She pulled her left wrist away from his grip. His hand desperately grasped at thin air before she caught it with hers, locking their fingers together.

"Itachi, I know you can hear me. And I want to tell you that it's okay. You don't have to fight this alone. We're here with you and we are not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. Look at me."

With her right thumb, she rubbed away the lone tear that escaped his scrunched up eyelids.

"Look at me."

"I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't. I know it. And I trust you."

Reluctantly, his eyes fluttered open. The red glare of the Mangekyo was intense and menacing and yet Shiori didn't dare look away. It wasn't that hard for her, for she realized that as much as they looked dangerous, they were also beautiful.

"Sora-san is going to get that shitty poison out of you. It's going to be painful but I'll be with you until it's done. I'll even let you scream my ears off."

"Why?" he asked. His confusion was etched on his face along with the pain. "Why constantly put yourself in harm's way for a demon like me?"

"Because we look out for each other. Because that's what we've been doing even though neither of us want to admit it."

"You're serious about this." It was more a statement than a question.

"Dead serious. Aren't you?"

"Hn."

He smiled then, a smile so wide and genuine that for a moment it felt as though everything was how it should be. Shiori had never been as certain as she was at that moment. She loved him.

Taking advantage of the calm that fell over the two, Sora gave one last tug until the last of the metal droplets leaked out of his skin.

"I got it!" she exclaimed, holding the little globules in front of her with her chakra before proceeding to dump it into the metal basin beside her.

Itachi reacted in a similar way to a jinchuriki whose tailed beast had just been extracted from him. Almost immediately his irises turned to its natural obsidian black. His eyelids fluttered shut and he grew limp. He was out cold. Shiori released the coiled chakra she had struggled to contain by slamming her palms on the tatami mats. It created a six-inch-wide fissure which ran the entire length of the room. Sora was too drained to be surprised. Besides, Kisame was collecting payment for the bounty mission anyway. Once he learns that his partner will be back in business soon, she was sure that he would be more than happy to pay for the damages.

For a moment, Sora and Shiori could only look at each other, both aware of the monumental success they had just witnessed as well as just how close they had come to failing. To losing Itachi prematurely. It was the younger girl who broke the spell. She dragged her entire body to face left so that she was kneeling right in front of the medic-nin. She folded her hands to her lap, pausing as she waited for them to stop shaking before she tilted her upper body downward into a bow.

"Thank you," she said, trying hard to keep her voice steady and failing miserably amidst the tears.

"You stupid girl," Sora murmured, scooping her into a bear hug. The gesture only made her sob more.

"Thank you Sora-san. You did it. You saved him."

"No, we did it. He'll be fine. He just needs to sleep off the chakra exhaustion is all."

Despite her words of reassurance, she couldn't help but cast a worried glance over Shiori's shoulders onto the sleeping young man. She may have prolonged his life by taking the poison out but she knew in her heart that she had not saved him. At this point, she doubted that anything could.

Author's Notes 2.0: IDK WTH happened. This scene was meant to be short, less than 1000 words, and was supposedly just another scene in a chapter. But for some reason it just expanded. The characters and their actions became more detailed and it would be a shame not to write everything down. Penning a delirious Itachi is another pain in the booty because everyone who knows this character is well aware at how incredibly well he keeps it together. It's weird writing him to make it sound like he was a little out of it but not too much because...heck he's Itachi. I love that Sora was in this the whole time. She is a joy to write. Shiori growing balls (metaphorical ones) here is an added bonus. Much like JK Rowling made an effort to make Ginny an equal and worthy match to Harry, I am also making a whole lot of effort to make her believable while pairing well with our favorite Uchiha. Let's admit it, no one is good enough for Itachi but we can sure as hell try.

And...we are already in chapter twenty-something. I've been going easy on driving the Feels Truck throughout the first chapters but at this rate, I think Shio and Itachi's relationship is established well enough to warrant a shift to second gear... I think fluff is unavoidable so we might witness a couple of it soon. Anyways, thank you for everyone who followed, favorited and reviewed. You guys are the reason I keep going with this piece. Hope to hear from you.