They ran, a boost of adrenaline from Kurenai's frantic tone helping them find previously-untapped energy reserves.
Except, they had been running on their last legs for the better part of the day, and Hinata knew that the adrenaline would quickly run out, and once it did, they would really be in trouble.
Unfortunately – or fortunately – they never got to that stage.
After about five minutes of breakneck, desperate running, a sudden whooshing sound had Hinata turning around, only to find a massive wave of water chasing after them, too quick to outrun.
"Watch ou-!" She called, pushing more chakra into her feet, but just as she made to leap up, the wave caught up to her, sweeping her up mid-leap.
Hinata had a sudden, suspended moment of complete disorientation, not having any idea what was up and what was down. She gasped, an unconscious response brought on by the fear and disorientation having caught up to her, and ended up breathing in a mouthful of water.
She coughed, breathing in even more water in her desperate struggle for oxygen, then the wave slammed her into a tree, her back colliding with the trunk full-force, knocking the little breath she'd managed to win out of her.
She coughed again as the water slowly dispersed, her ribs aching with every desperate breath she drew, and summoned chakra to her hands and feet to try and claw her way onto the top of the surface and orient herself.
"What the hell?" Kiba wheezed from somewhere off to her right, and she could hear him coughing too, his voice hoarse. "Did one of them dump a whole river on us or somethin'?"
"It's Hoshigaki Kisame." Hinata managed breathlessly, trying to decide whether the chakra drain and headache were worth activating her Byakugan again to orient herself better. They were almost in the Land of Fire so the forest was denser, and Hinata's chakra-sense still wasn't good enough to locate her teammates without sight. "He's called the Tailless Tailed Beast."
"So he did dump a river on us." Kiba snorted, reading between the lines, but there was no humour in his words.
"Well now," a voice spoke, far too close to them for comfort, and Hinata jumped, startled, whipping her head around to find Hoshigaki and Sasuke's brother about ten metres away from her, though Kurenai had positioned herself between the missing-nin and the rest of Hinata's team, a final, desperate barrier between her genin and certain death.
"It's not often I get recognised first, 'specially not by a Leaf brat." The Kiri-nin mused, sounding almost amused. Hinata pulled herself to a standing position, not comforted by the state of her coils nor how unsteady she felt on her feet. "Just for that, I'm almost tempted to let you go so you can keep spreadin' my tales."
Hinata heard Shino's kikaichu buzz warningly in response to the words and Kiba growled, but she was more concerned by how they were all going to make it out of this altercation alive.
Those were two S-Rank missing-nin, and her team was two genin, a ninken puppy, her, and a genjutsu-specialising jounin.
When none of her team replied to the obvious taunt, the Kiri-nin sighed, as if disappointed, and his eyes turned to Kurenai, the light in them assessing.
"But it's even rarer that Itachi-san personally recognises someone." He added even as his companion remained silent at his side, wide-brimmed straw hat still on. "So, who're you, kunoichi?"
Kurenai, instead of answering the Kiri-nin, seemed to speak directly to the Uchiha when she said: "Please. We don't want any trouble. We just wanted to rest in Hidden Valleys, but we can be on our way."
Hinata could feel Kiba's surprise at Kurenai's unusually demure tone, but Hinata could understand their sensei's approach. Charging in head-first was not a favourable approach to their team for this fight. If the conflict could be avoided before it had the chance to become a conflict, Hinata would do anything to avoid it, particularly considering their already banged-up state.
Even if it meant pleading with missing-nin.
Wordlessly, Hinata activated her Byakugan, feeling the vice around her temples tighten almost immediately, but it was briefly overshadowed by the relief she felt at finally spotting Shino some three metres behind her.
Kisame would be the hardest to survive, and was probably the worst Akatsuki member match for her team. He had too much chakra for them to so much as make a dent in his reserves, even if all four of them bled themselves dry.
She'd known he was a chakra monster even before she activated her dojutsu, but now she had it confirmed by the way his chakra, even when mostly stifled, was almost blinding to her Byakugan.
There was only one thing that they could do against such massive reserves.
Taking a deep breath, Hinata shifted carefully, moving away from the trunk with tiny steps and shuffling slowly backwards, keeping her gaze forward, trained on even the smallest of movements from their opponents.
The Kiri-nin laughed at Kurenai's words, the sound cruelly amused, though his attention seemed focused on their sensei, much to Hinata's advantage and relief.
"Unfortunately for you, Leaf-nin, we're headed to Leaf, and we can't afford to have you running off and blabbing of our arrival." Hoshigaki chortled, even as he hefted his sword and grinned at Kurenai, all sharp teeth and bloodlust so thick Hinata felt like she would choke on it.
She pushed through it, taking another couple of tiny steps towards Shino until she could stretch her hand out and grab his wrist, letting the wide sleeve of his jacket hide her fingers.
"So regardless of whether you want trouble or not, trouble's found ya." The Kiri-nin concluded.
"Itachi-kun." Kurenai urged the Uchiha more directly, and in any other situation, Hinata would've glanced at their sensei for the overly familiar address.
She hadn't been aware there was history there.
As it was, she used the moment's shock from the swordsman and let her pointer finger flicker lightly over Shino's pulse, the only method of communication she could afford to risk.
Absorb chakra?
She felt Shino tense beneath her touch, but she wasn't sure whether it was from her question or from Kurenai's earnest, somewhat desperate, "They're kids. Please."
Hinata was keeping her gaze forward so she caught the moment something complicated passed over the swordsman's face, a shadow and a flicker of what might have, in another situation, been guilt or regret, before it was gone just as quickly.
"Yeah, well." he huffed, clearly answering for Itachi, and Hinata felt Shino's responding flutter of sword? against the top of her hand, and stifled the relieved sigh that wanted to escape her at the fact that Shino had caught on. "It's your Village's fault for putting kids on frontlines. I thought Leaf's s'posed to be better than that."
Taking advantage of the fact that the swordsman's attention was still firmly on Kurenai, Hinata tapped her finger over Shino's wrist again: no; body. Steal chakra.
Shino nodded, and she squeezed his wrist once for courage, then removed her hand.
At Hoshigaki's words, Kurenai snorted, visibly surprising the man, and, if Hinata was reading them well, her teammates as well.
"That's just propaganda." Kurenai dismissed, the words bitter and weighted, and another shadowed look passed briefly through the swordsman's eyes.
"On that, kunoichi, we agree." He replied, then he was suddenly in front of Hinata and Shino, swinging his sword in an arc that would've flattened them both.
Hinata had been tense and half-waiting for an attack since the wave that had swept them off their feet, so she pushed Shino to the side and flickered in her quickest Shunshin of the day, appearing two metres to the left of her previous position, but well out of the sword's range.
"Fang over Fang!" she heard Kiba call, the Inuzuka seemingly having been comparably ready for an attack, and a split-second later, twin bullets were heading for Hoshigaki, making the swordsman laugh even as he swung his sword and knocked one of the bullets off-course, sending Kiba – no, Akamaru, the transformation breaking when the dog got hit – into a nearby tree.
Wondering whether joining the fray would be more of an advantage or a distraction, Hinata gathered chakra in her right hand and flickered to Hoshigaki's side when he swung his sword again, striking out with her hand, intent on his main chakra coils.
But the man was unexpectedly agile for his size and bulk and he twisted out of the way, reversing the grip on his sword to bring it crashing down on Hinata, but she flickered again, appearing barely a meter to his left, trying to jab her fingers into his side this time.
She could hear, just barely, the buzz of Shino's kikaichu when Hoshigaki's sleeve swept too close to her face for comfort, the man's elbow just barely missing her nose as she flickered again, thanking the stars for Kiba when her teammate zoomed at Hoshikagi again right as the man swung his sword wide, clearly trying to flatten her.
Shino was suddenly beside her, swarms of bugs emerging from his sleeves and heading for Hoshigaki from the side Kiba wasn't covering, the colony so dense it seemed to block out light.
Hoshigaki swung his sword wide, and Hinata heard Kiba whimper where he must've gotten hit, and some of the kikaichu dropped to the ground, hit by whatever was in the Kiri-nin's sword, but the vast majority reached their target, settling on every visible patch of the swordsman's skin and crawling beneath fabric as well to join the rest of their fray.
"Fuckin- enough of this!" the Kiri-nin cursed, flickering through four seals, then the water that had mostly sunk into the ground rose up in a grotesque, three-headed dragon, each of the heads intent on Hinata and her teammates. "I don't like killing kids, but I'm makin' exception."
Before she gathered the presence of mind to get out of the way, Hinata was momentarily struck speechless by the fact that the Kiri-nin had reduced a technique she knew contained forty-four signs to four and modified it, all seemingly on the fly.
She had known, from Neji's account, that her cousin had considered the clone of Hoshigaki, the one they had later found out contained only thirty percent of the chakra of the original, to be the strongest and most challenging shinobi Neji had ever had to fight.
It was not an opinion she had ever wanted to prove for herself. Chunin Team Gai, with Neji and Gai at jounin, had barely survived the clone whose only purpose had been to delay them.
Hinata's genin team, barely six months post-Academy, was currently facing the man's full form, Uchiha Itachi in tow, and they were clearly considered an annoyance to be dealt with.
(Not for the first time, Hinata wondered whether she hadn't doomed them all by revealing her ability and changing the course of their missions.)
Then, she was flickering away from the trajectory of the head aiming for her, one leap, two, three, five, until she was between Kurenai and Itachi, at which point she flashed through the signs for the only Earth jutsu she'd ever learned, taken straight from the Rokudaime's arsenal, not that she'd used it in this life yet, and dropped underground.
She felt the impact of the dragon's head hit the ground, felt the dirt around her grow heavier and colder as the water seeped into it, then she shuffled away from where she could still see Itachi and Kurenai with her Byakugan and pushed herself above-ground.
Before she could gather her wits and try to figure out whether her interruption had helped Kurenai or only distracted her, and before she could go back to make sure Kiba and Shino didn't end up flattened by the Kiri-nin's sword, her Byakugan caught Itachi's flash-step to get closer to Kurenai and felt the minute increase of chakra in the pathways leading to his eyes.
No.
If Kurenai got caught in the Tsukiyomi, they would all die.
Not thinking much of what she was signing up for, only knowing that her team needed Kurenai awake and fighting, Hinata forced her chakra not into the Shunshin, but the kawarimi.
She blinked, reorienting herself, and found herself staring straight into Uchiha Itachi's bloody Mangekyo.
"That was foolish." A voice commented as Hinata opened her 'eyes'.
The world she found herself in was so far from the one she had been wrenched from that she briefly wondered if she still had her Byakugan on, but no.
This is an illusion. She told herself, taking in the blood-red skies and monochrome world, then focused on the projection of Itachi in the mindscape of the Tsukiyomi. A potent one, but an illusion nonetheless.
"Maybe." She agreed quietly, trying to test the strength of the bonds keeping her nailed to the cross and wincing as she felt it rip the flesh of her wrists and ankles.
This is an illusion. The pain isn't real. It's your expectation of pain that's making it hurt.
"You won't win just because you saved your teacher a few seconds." Itachi spoke again, cutting through her thoughts like a knife, unforgiving in his sharpness, all the while coming closer to her. "I can trap multiple people in the Tsukiyomi at the same time."
"The goal isn't to w-win, Uchiha-san." Hinata replied quietly, stumbling over the word as he suddenly stabbed her in the abdomen with the tanto he was holding.
It wasn't something she was particularly happy to admit, but she was more than aware that her team wasn't taking on the duty of the Twenty Platoons four years early. They weren't going to try and capture Hoshigaki or Itachi, nor would their goal even be to eliminate them. No, Hinata knew that all four of them were thinking of one thing, and one thing only when it came to this fight.
Whether by the fact that he was in her mindscape or because she had learned how to interpret Neji's expressions, she could feel Itachi's confusion at her words. The pain of him stabbing her again, this time through her chest, likely piercing her lung, was excruciating. Still-
This is an illusion.
She could still breathe. It hurt, the area around the stab wound was burning, her abdomen was also screaming at the less-than-gentle way in which Itachi had removed the sword, but her lung wasn't filling with blood and she wasn't struggling to breathe.
So she smiled when Itachi ripped out the sword and stabbed her again, this time in the thigh, aware that, if this had been in the real world, she'd have passed out already from shock alone.
This is an illusion.
"The goal is to survive." She informed him, quieter still, but Itachi's projection didn't react beyond the momentary hesitation before ripping the sword out and stabbing her through the liver.
"You will be dead weight once the seventy-two hours here are up." He declared, voice cold and detached as he ripped out his sword again. "The Tsukiyomi has broken shinobi older and stronger than you. Your sacrifice will mean nothing."
This is an illusion.
As her body screamed for her to get out, Hinata tried to remember Kurenai's advice for dealing with invocative genjutsu. She remembered an explanation of how the brain was tied to the chakra network and needed chakra to survive just as much as it needed oxygen.
More importantly, she remembered the advice that a big enough disturbance in the victim's chakra coils could disrupt most illusions.
Hinata took a deep breath and let it out slowly, taking strength from the fact that she could, despite what her injuries would have usually indicated, then focused on collecting her remaining chakra in her core.
This is an illusion, she reminded herself again when Itachi stabbed through her foot, and she felt herself bite through her tongue at the pain.
There was no blood in her mouth.
This is an illusion.
Her lungs still allowed her to draw in breath and her thought process wasn't affected by blood loss. Those two factors worked against the realness of Itachi's illusion even more than the monochromatic nature of Tsukiyomi's landscape.
"What are you doing?" Itachi demanded, something sharper in his voice now, a change to the bland detachment, and Hinata wondered how much this projection of him understood what she was trying to do.
"This is a genjutsu." She told him when he stabbed her again, but she was concentrating on her chakra so much that she couldn't even pinpoint where he'd stabbed her, though she felt the imagined pain of the stab wound keenly. "It's in my mind. It's not real."
"The fact that it's in your mind does not make it any less real." Itachi refuted, and Hinata almost wanted to open her eyes and look at him, because that seemed like a panicked-Shino answer rather than something she'd expect from a missing-nin of Uchiha Itachi's calibre.
She knew, of course, that the teen before her wasn't as guilty as Konoha painted him out to be.
She remembered the post-Massacre murmurs that had plagued the Hyuuga Compound for days after Itachi'd defection in her first life, but she'd been too young and ignorant to understand them at the time. But, combined with Sasuke's warmongering before the Fourth War and the Godaime's quiet shame when Itachi had been posthumously exonerated, Hinata had realised that there had been more to Itachi's story than she'd been aware of.
Still, knowing that Itachi wasn't entirely guilty did not mean that it was any easier to disconnect from the pain when Itachi stabbed her again, through her hand this time, nor to convince herself not to feel fear when he met her eyes.
This is an illusion. She reminded herself again, the mantra verging on desperate even as she kept taking deep, measured breaths, more to centre herself than because she needed to breathe on this plane.
"The Infinite Tsukiyomi felt real." She managed, feeling the toll of the dozen or so stab wounds catch up to her. Her belief that this world wasn't real was strengthened by the fact that she was still conscious, unlike how she would have been had this been happening out-there. "This feels like any other genjutsu, Uchiha-san, and that means it relies on will."
"And you believe my will to be lacking?" Itachi's projection asked archly, ripping out the sword from her hand, though no blood sprayed from the wound.
This is an illusion.
Hinata took a gamble.
"Yes."
Even as she whispered the word, she found that there was no doubt in her heart about the truth to her words. She kept winding the chakra she'd gathered within herself into an ever-tighter ball while she met Itachi's eyes again.
"I do."
As if in response to her claim, the crimson sky above them cracked, black nothingness extending through the cracks. Feeling a stirring of hope that she had been right, Hinata focused on the chakra she'd been gathering in her coils and cut off its access to her brain.
Itachi's projection had stopped stabbing her in favour of contemplating the crack in the sky, but as the ground he was standing on split as well, likely in response to Hinata's desperation play, he turned back to her.
"You'll kill yourself." He observed, something…different in his voice now, but Hinata was too focused on fighting back against the instinct that demanded she release her chakra to properly analyse it.
The rip in the sky stretched lower, joining with the gouge in the ground, forming one enormous tear in the illusion, and, with a sound like a thunderclap, the cross Hinata was nailed to broke as well, the nails disappearing, letting her drop to the ground unscathed.
At the same time as her feet touched the ground, Hinata released her chakra with a breathless gasp, culminating in the most potent kai she'd ever pulled off.
The Tsukiyomi world shook, shuddered, then shattered.
Shino hated feeling helpless.
The first time he'd felt so helpless that even crying did not help had been when his mother had died, on a mission he hadn't been allowed to know about, with teammates who weren't allowed to talk about it with him. He'd been 'too young' then, not even an Academy student yet, so all he'd had to go off of was the fact that his mother came back home in a body scroll handed to his father by her masked teammates, and that his father's kikaichu had been incandescent with rage and grief for days afterwards.
The second time had been with Torune, when his cousin –brother by then, at least in Shino's eyes – had volunteered to go with the Councilman in his stead, never to be seen again. Shino dreamt, occasionally, that he could feel Torune next to him, always in his weakest moments, when he was sick or injured or unconscious, but he knew those were just dreams. He hasn't seen hide nor hair of his cousin since he was taken away when Shino was seven; he knew Torune was as lost to him as his mother.
When he joined the Academy, he tried to actively avoid ever feeling like that again, and simply did not allow himself to care about his classmates. It wasn't too hard considering he was too 'weird' or 'quiet' for most of his peers' tastes anyway.
And then, his strategy of not-caring was proven to have been for naught when he got assigned his team. And he got shown just how much he had failed to not-care on his team's third C-Rank.
But Shino tried to learn from that mission, branched out from just his Clan's techniques, covered his blind spots by working on his taijutsu and broadening his range of techniques, patched up his faults with what he hoped came across as the same dogged determination that Hinata exhibited rather than the desperation it felt like.
He wouldn't say he felt confident, but at least he didn't feel lacking.
And for what?
Faced with the Kiri missing-nin blessed with more chakra than he'd ever seen a single person wield, and a sword that stole a good quarter of Kiba's remaining chakra in one bite and ripped apart Kiba's thigh when the Inuzuka had been a moment too slow in getting out of its range, Shino was right back where he'd started.
Helpless.
Kurenai-sensei was keeping the Uchiha busy, and Hinata was flitting between her battle and the Kiri-nin, but even to Shino's eyes she was slower, taking longer to reorient herself with every Shunshin.
Shino focused back on the swordsman, wondering whether the situation was dire enough to justify a desperate play with Torune's rinkaichu. His kikaichu had been stuck on the Kiri-nin since before the fighting began, yet there was almost no difference in the man's chakra level; worse yet, Shino's kikaichu were dying, glutted by the man's chakra, faster than they could actually leach it from him enough for results to show or transfer it back to Shino. And all the while, the swordsman was throwing around high-level, high-destruction ninjutsu like it was nothing.
Tailless Tailed Beast, Hinata had called him. Shino hadn't understood what could've justified the moniker when she'd said it, but he certainly understood now, even if he wished he didn't.
His attention was pulled from the swordsman when Kurenai screamed, and he glanced at her battle with the Uchiha to find the man holding Hinata by the throat, her feet dangling off the ground.
"You're good with that fighting style." The Uchiha commented, and even the Kiri-nin was watching him from the corner of his eye, seeming almost surprised by his partner's behaviour. "But what your teacher neglected to tell you was that she learned that style from my cousin. And you are not on his level yet, Hyuuga-chan."
And Shino watched as the Uchiha swung his arm and threw Hinata into a nearby tree, her head colliding with the trunk with a wet thud, and Shino wrenched his attention to the swordsman, trying to move his thoughts away from worst-case scenarios.
As if the thud of Hinata's skull hitting the tree was the gong to spur him into action, the swordsman turned back to him and Kiba with renewed viciousness, and Shino had a split-second to decide that, yes, the situation was indeed dire enough.
He'd been breeding Torune's rinkaichu with his beetles since his cousin had been taken. The week before Graduation, he'd finally created a colony with the same toxic effects as Torune's, yet ones that he could host in his body without dying of their poison.
He'd had almost a month to get used to them, to learn how to call on them as if they were his own, then asked to be infused with them before his team's first C-Rank.
The poisoning he had suffered on their doomed third C-Rank had been because the part of Torune's colony he hosted in his body had gotten crushed when he'd taken the beating from the taijutsu-specialising Iwa-nin.
It had nearly killed him.
And now, as he took off his glove and wondered how he'd get close enough to the swordsman to infect him with Torune's poison without getting flattened, he was glad that Torune's memory would hopefully be what gave his team a fighting chance.
"Kiba," he rasped, taking off his other glove and stashing both carefully in his pocket, wiping the blood from his brow before it could dribble into his eye, "get me an opening. And, whatever you do, don't touch me."
Kiba was panting, bleeding, and limping, the entire left side of his pants soaked in blood. Akamaru, too, was barely moving, and Shino saw Kiba glance at the ninken, but whatever he'd seen on Shino's face seemed to be enough for him to nod without asking any questions, throw one more worried glance at Akamaru, then shoot off to do as asked.
All four of them were on their last legs, while the Kiri-nin was unscathed, and the Uchiha didn't have so much as a hair out of place.
If there was ever a time for desperate plays, it was now.
Kurenai knew why Hinata had done what she had.
She hated it, hated that Hinata felt like she had to do it, but she could understand the reason.
What she didn't understand was how the girl had gotten up almost immediately after slumping down, even after Kurenai felt the genjutsu take.
She had heard enough horror stories about Uchiha dojutsu, and whatever monster evolution of it Itachi had acquired after defecting, to know that Hinata should not have been able to simply shrug it off.
And yet.
Then, she had no more time to think because she was once again engaging Itachi, trying to keep the teen away from her students after he'd held Hinata by the throat and thrown her like a ragdoll, and she had the sinking realisation that the gentle boy she'd once known was well and truly gone.
"What the fuck-?!"
Hearing that exclamation was rarely good on a battlefield, much less when it came from a man nicknamed the Tailless Tailed Beast before his age had reached double-digits.
Borrowing a move she'd seen Gai perform countless times, Kurenai spun around until she could kick at Itachi's ankles, then, when the teen stumbled and Shunshined away, she turned to see what had prompted Hoshigaki to cry out as he had.
She found a purple mass quickly spreading over the swordsman's arm, destroying both sleeve and flesh as it went. It was barely at the elbow so far, but Kurenai could see the rotting, burned flesh the mass of insects was leaving in its wake.
Unfortunately, she also saw the moment Hoshigaki realised what it meant for him, and witnessed the flash of rage and panic in his eyes, right as his gaze fell on Shino.
No.
The man swung his sword, one handed now, but more than strong enough to be able to heft the weapon around regardless of the handicap, his gaze furious and intent on the Aburame.
No .
Kurenai didn't think; pulling the same move Hinata had pulled minutes previous, she substituted herself with Shino, knowing she was too far away and too low on chakra to do anything else.
She caught the momentary flash of surprise in the swordsman's eyes when his target changed, but at that point, it was too late to redirect his momentum.
Kurenai saw the sword, saw the spray of blood as it connected with her side, then she saw no more.
Hinata's scream caught in her throat.
Before Kurenai's body even hit the ground, Hinata was in motion, flash-stepping to sensei's side and catching the woman, her hands becoming immediately drenched with blood as they slid through the mess of cloth and ripped flesh in their search for purchase. Then, she was flash-stepping away, towards Kiba, not even caring that she'd turned her back on two S-Rank shinobi.
"Kiba," she rasped, not even sure what she was asking for, but knowing that, out of all of them, Kiba had the most chance of fixing the missing part of Kurenai's side, "please."
She was peripherally aware of Hoshigaki cursing as he used a dagger to saw through his upper arm, likely to prevent whatever Shino had done from spreading to the rest of his body, but she was more focused on Kiba and Kurenai.
"Fuckin'- I'm goin' to kill these brats, give me a sec, Itachi-san." The man raged, but he was still focused on his arm. "Damnit. Think Kakuzu can reattach it?"
"You'll have to ask." The Uchiha replied, stoic even in the face of his partner's injury, but Hinata's eyes were glued to the way Kiba's hands were shaking as he tried to cut away Kurenai's shirt so he could get at her ruined side.
Or, the missing, jagged space where her side used to be.
"Let's go, Kisame. They're in no shape to chase after us, and killing a Leaf team will have more Leaf-nin up in Akatsuki's business." The Uchiha ordered, and Hinata heard the quiet poof of something being sealed away and the Hoshigaki grunting something vaguely affirmative.
"I don't like leaving enemies alive behind me, Itachi-san." The Hoshigaki grouched, and Hinata felt another wave of KI emanate from the man.
"You consider three injured genin to be your enemies?" Shino asked, and Hinata jerked her head around to stare disbelievingly at her teammate, unable to believe that Shino was goading their enemies.
"Brat." The swordsman spat, and Shino suddenly flew past Hinata, smacking into a nearby rock arm-first, and Hinata was close enough to hear the snap of bone as well as Shino's muffled scream of pain. "You have some nerve."
"Let's go." The Uchiha repeated, and Hinata watched him turn away, dismissing her team as a threat.
Letting them live.
She watched as the swordsman huffed, hefted his sword, and, miraculously, followed after his partner.
"Oh, thank god." Kiba whimpered beside her, and Hinata turned back to him just in time to see his hands finally light up green. A flickering, faltering green, but green nonetheless.
Unfortunately, she also caught sight of the full extent of Kurenai's injury, and her breath caught.
"Yeah." Kiba agreed, sounding breathless and a little dazed. "I'm not gonna be able to fix it all. I barely got the stupid fish to stop floppin' around, haven't even started on internal injuries."
"You have the best chance out of all of us to make a difference for sensei." Shino replied, his voice tight with pain, and Hinata nodded in agreement.
"C-can I help?" she asked quietly, worried by the visible tremble in Kiba's hands as he tried to knit together the hole in Kurenai's side.
"You don't even have enough chakra to keep your Byakugan on." Kiba dismissed, and Hinata blinked, only just realising that he was right. "Go help Shino set his arm if you wanna help."
Somewhat chastised, Hinata went to do as told, trying to avoid thinking about the complete stillness of Kurenai's body. Kiba wouldn't be trying to heal her if she wasn't still alive; they would be fine.
They would.
Wordlessly, she dug in her backpack for her bandages and offered some to Shino, along with a protein bar and her water bottle. She made sure to grab a bar for herself as well, because she hadn't even noticed her Byakugan switching off, and she knew that, unlike the Sharingan, her dojutsu wasn't particularly chakra-intensive.
The fact that she didn't even notice she'd gotten so low on chakra as to not be able to sustain the Byakugan anymore would've been a lot more alarming in any other circumstances.
As it was, she simply ate her protein bar then set about splinting Shino's arm with the branch he'd found. Chiselling down the sides of the branch so it would be at least somewhat flat made her aware of just how much her own hands were shaking.
And then, when Shino's arm was more or less splinted and Hinata had eaten her bar and drank some water, Kiba suddenly swayed and slumped against Kurenai's limp thigh, the green at his fingers flickering then dying out completely.
Hinata was on her feet and by Kiba's side in seconds, falling to her knees next to him and frantically checking for his pulse. She found it, but it was weak, too barely-there for the amount of adrenaline and cortisol that should've still been coursing through Kiba's veins-!
"Byakugan!" she called, praying that the chakra boost her protein bar and some rest had granted her would be enough chakra to keep her Byakugan on long enough to locate what could've made Kiba so weak.
What she saw once she rode out the wave of agony activating her dojutsu brought on was almost worse than Kurenai's wound: Kiba's chakra coils were nearly entirely empty, only the barest flicker of blue still wrapped around his heart and brain, but even that was fading fast.
"No, no, no-" she whispered, turning Kiba over so she could reach his abdomen, not sure whether she had enough chakra to even attempt a chakra transfer but knowing she was going to try one regardless.
Not for the first time, she cursed the fact that, unless their Clan made their own ones, genin weren't allowed to buy and use the standard-issue soldier pills.
"What's the matter? What happened?" Shino demanded, stumbling to his feet as well, but Hinata waved for him to stay away while as she placed her other hand over Kiba's fifth gate.
She tried to take deep breaths to focus, but her ribs screamed, reminding her viciously of the fact that she'd been thrown into a tree twice over the course of the fight and almost certainly broke some ribs. Once she stopped heaving and no longer felt like crying, she took a slow, shallower breath and tried to and match her chakra frequency to that of Kiba's to ease the transfer as much as possible.
"He depleted his chakra." She told Shino quietly as she blocked out everything but Kiba's chakra wavelength. "I'm fixing it."
Hinata took a final, steadying breath, then slowly pushed half of her recovered chakra into Kiba's core. This time, with fewer things requiring her immediate attention, she felt the chakra loss keenly, but she also knew they couldn't linger no matter how much she currently wanted to curl up into a ball and cry.
"Can you carry sensei?" she asked Shino, her voice only shaking a little as she gestured to Kurenai's prone form. The wound in the woman's side wasn't fully healed, still bleeding sluggishly, but Hinata had neither the blood replenishing pills nor the chakra control in this life to do anything about that. "We need to head for the Village."
"Hidden Valleys?" Shino checked, and with one of his glasses' lenses cracked, Hinata could clearly see the way his eyebrows furrowed at the idea.
"No." Hinata shook her head, wincing at the pain in her neck and the wave of nausea that overcame her at the sudden motion. "K-Konoha."
"We're days away." Shino pointed out, and Hinata hummed even as she cautiously bent down to try and heft Kiba onto her back. "And chakra exhausted."
"I know. And I don't know enough about our non-aggression treaties with Hidden Valleys to say what's a good choice right now." She admitted and glanced at Shino when she straightened, trying not to let her panic show on her face. "But I know I'll feel better once we're in the Land of Fire."
Shino studied her for a few seconds, what she could see of his face lined with exhaustion, pain, and worry, then, finally, he nodded. "Can you help me get sensei on my back?"
Wordlessly, Hinata obliged, then, with a final sweep of her Byakugan to make sure they hadn't garnered any watchers when they'd been stationary, she deactivated her dojutsu and set off in the direction of Konoha, Shino falling into step beside her.
Suddenly ,there was a quiet shuffle next to them before Akamaru emerged from a nearby shrub, dirty and bloody and limping but alive. Hinata sighed with relief and bent down as much as she could without dropping Kiba or aggravating her ribs, scooping the ninken onto her shoulders and letting it curl up in the gap between her shoulder and Kiba's neck.
Then, they were off.
She lost count of how long they'd been walking, not able to spare the energy to run, weighed down with their teammates as they were, when Shino suddenly stilled, gesturing for her to stop as well.
"Enemies." He rasped, his voice hoarse, the side of his jacket stained with Kurenai's blood. They'd ran out of water some time ago and Hinata did not know the terrain enough to risk separating in search of a stream, nor could she really spare the chakra for a Water jutsu just then. "Hundred metres ahead. Group of four."
Wordlessly, Hinata activated her Byakugan, the pounding in her temples almost knocking her off her feet with the pain, but once it passed, she swept the area Shino had indicated, trying to get an idea of their opponents.
"Genin team." She decided, locating three smaller signatures and one jounin-sized. "Not Leaf."
"Strategy?" Shino asked, an unsteady note in his voice, and Hinata glanced at him assessingly, Hoshigaki's words echoing in her mind: I don't like to leave enemies alive behind me.
Her stomach churned at the thought, but she knew they could not afford another fight.
"Surprise attack." She replied, and saw Shino flinch at the words. "I-I'll do it. But I might need your kikaichu for- after."
It spoke to how exhausted the both of them were that Shino didn't argue, and Hinata didn't try to explain the sudden blankness in her voice.
She palmed a kunai instead and focused on her chakra coils, suppressing them as much as possible. Then, she untied her headband and stashed it in her pocket, before she slowly lowered Kiba and Akamaru to the ground, stretching out her back as she straightened and loosening her muscles as much as she could.
When she could not delay the move any longer, she let the Shunshin take her, covering half the distance between her and Shino and the unknown genin team in one leap. With her Byakugan, she could tell that they seemed to be settling in for the night, laying out bedrolls and stringing up hammocks and throwing up environmental genjutsu to hide their presence.
Unfortunately for them, genjutsu didn't fool her eyes, nor Shino's bugs.
Normally, she would have avoided confrontation at all cost, but with the state her and Shino were in, they would not be able to sneak around the camp without getting noticed by the jounin.
And that, they could simply not afford.
The genin team had to go.
With that thought in mind, Hinata let the battle-calm she hadn't felt since their third C-Rank settle in her bones, easing her worry and guilt at what she was about to do, then went through the seals for a henge, picking a no-name Grass kunoichi she remembered from the War, then flickered the last fifty metres that separated her from the campsite.
She landed right behind the jounin, the hand holding onto her kunai with a white-knuckled grip already in motion, heading for the man's throat. And right in time, too, because the man was mid-turn when she landed, his sword half-drawn, having apparently sensed her somehow, but Hinata was a split-second faster. Her kunai stabbed into the side of the man's throat, piercing into his trachea but not through because she didn't manage to shove her knife in deep enough before the jounin bent backwards, using his superior height to get out of her range. She let the kunai go and instead jabbed her palm directly into his chakra core, manually opening his sixth chakra gate, then followed with another strike to his heart.
If he didn't go into cardiac arrest, bleed out, or asphyxiate from the wound to his throat, he'd leak chakra until he had none left and die anyway.
Then, as she debated between leaving the jounin or making sure he stayed down, she felt a sudden, sharp pain across her back. Jerking around, she realised that one of the genin had thrown a volley of shuriken at her when she'd attacked their sensei, and she'd been too focused on getting the jounin out of the picture to notice the attack, much less dodge.
But, as she turned around and let her Byakugan flicker out, having handled the worst threat, she finally took in the Kiri insignia across the genin's headbands. They seemed to be younger than her team, the oldest maybe ten-years-old at most, but all three were baring their teeth at her, looking scared but ready for a fight despite having been caught when their guard had been down.
"I don't want to kill you." Hinata told them quietly, half of her attention still on their dying teacher, not fully trusting that the jounin would actually stay down, even if he'd gone down easily enough. "Please don't make me."
"You killed our sensei!" The oldest one hissed, sword drawn and looking like she was almost angling for the fight. Hinata winced, realising that her words didn't exactly line up with her actions, but they were still true. "That's hardly benevolent."
"Go back to your Village." Hinata urged, even as she assessed their surroundings and the state of her chakra, knowing that, if it did come to a fight, she could still claw the upper hand, even without calling for Shino. Genin were, after all, generally bad when it came to recognising genjutsu. "Please."
With an angry scream, the oldest of the three Kiri genin ran at her, sword raised, and Hinata almost wanted to sigh. Instead, she struck out with a Vacuum Palm, knocking the girl back into her other teammate, then flashed through the seals for the first combat-specific illusion Kurenai had taught her.
"Magen: Jubaku Satsu." She murmured, giving the 'ghost' of the illusion a second to settle around the genin. She drew another kunai and stepped closer, focusing to make sure the illusion made it look like she was melting out of the tree above the genin, then her eyes happened to fall on the youngest of the three, and her knife stilled inches from the girl's throat.
The girl was still trapped in the illusion, but Hinata's gaze caught on her brown hair and her eyes, which, wide and scared as they currently were, were almost as pale as Hanabi's.
Suddenly, Hinata felt sick for an entirely different reason than her earlier nausea.
To be ANBU was to have ice in one's blood, to make decisions and sacrifices that were otherwise avoided at all cost. If Hinata had been wearing her mask just then, she wouldn't have hesitated.
(She would have hated herself afterwards all the same, but she wouldn't have hesitated.)
But she wasn't ANBU, not here, not yet. Here, she was a genin, and as such, could afford to doubt, to hesitate, to lower her blade.
Because, well. Was she really about to kill children her sister's age, all for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was she really so far gone?
As if that thought had been a bucket of cold water over her head, Hinata dropped her kunai and turned on her heel, flashing back to Shino's side and trying to keep her stomach from rioting.
She needed four Shunshin trips to cover the distance that had only taken two the first time, her chakra all but spent. When she finally came to a stop, she let her henge drop and fell to her knees, dropping her forehead to the ground and fighting the urge to cover her head with her arms and cry.
"Hinata?" Shino asked, startled, his kikaichu buzzing agitatedly around them. "Is it done?"
"The j-jounin's dead." She reported breathlessly, knotting her fingers into her bangs and pulling harshly, trying to ground herself. "The genin are under genjutsu, but they're alive."
"Do you want me to…?" Shino trailed off, but Hinata shook her head – as much as she could with her hands still in her hair – and made a disagreeing sound.
"N-not a threat." She managed through gasping breaths, only belatedly realising that she was hyperventilating. Her ribs hurt, her scalp hurt, her back hurt- she wanted Kurenai to be awake, to tell them what to do. Or she wanted her old body back, with her old reach, and one in which it wasn't as easy to throw her around and hurt her. One in which her teammates weren't literal children, but her peers. One in which she was rarely called on to make the important decisions.
She bust have stayed silent for a moment too long because Shino took off, likely to direct his bugs at the jounin's body, and Hinata took the few seconds his absence granted her to try and get her breathing under control.
Only, once she wasn't drowning out all other sound with her desperate gasps, she realised that Akamaru was whining, a constant, high, panicked sound as he nosed at Kiba's throat. Hinata raised her head and shuffled over to Kiba's side, gently pushing the ninken aside to be able to get to his partner's neck. She didn't find any obvious injury that could've had Akamaru so panicked, but when she went to press her fingers over Kiba's pulse-point, her heart dropped.
Kiba's pulse was gone.
Hinata scrabbled at Kiba's shirt, not even caring as she tore the material and ripped one of her nails up when it caught on a zip; as soon as she had Kiba's chest bare, she started on the emergency CPR Kurenai had had them learn in both of her timelines, trying to keep the panic at bay enough to accurately count her compressions and the seconds Kiba spent without a pulse. When she got to thirty compressions, she bent down over Kiba's face, pinched his nose, and breathed into his mouth, once, twice, checking all the while to make sure his chest rose with each breath, then went back to the compressions.
Kiba's heart still wasn't picking up.
"What-?!" Shino had apparently returned, but Hinata didn't have the time for an explanation.
"Take over." She ordered, running through the signs for the localised Lightning jutsu Sakura had taught her once, though she wasn't channelling chakra yet. She knew she didn't have enough even for such a small-scale jutsu; she'd barely had enough chakra for the Shunshin, and that took almost nothing from her.
"I'm going to need some of your chakra." She told Shino, trying to summon the medic voice Sakura had mastered during the war but missing by a mile.
"I don't know how to do transfers." Shino shot back before bending over to breathe into Kiba's mouth.
"That's fine." Hinata dismissed, letting him finish the set before she replaced his hands with her right one, fingers spread in five points over Kiba's heart. "Put your hand on mine and channel chakra."
"I'll burn you." Shino warned, but did as asked.
"That's fine." Hinata repeated, then closed her eyes.
She ran through the seals, one handed this time, and slowly drew the chakra she'd need from Shino's hand into hers. She could feel the strangeness of it, could feel the foreign wavelength cause burns on her skin as she drew it into her coils, but she blocked out the pain in favour of tracking the foreign chakra as it cycled through her arm, into her main reserves, then back again, before it settled. She repeated the process two more times, counting seconds all the while, then breathed out and pushed Shino's hand away.
Finally, she channelled the chakra she'd leached from Shino and ran through the seals properly this time, letting her fingers light up with isolated bursts of controlled lightning. Then, one hand over the pulse point in Kiba's throat, the other hand in position over Kiba's heart, she let her fingers drop onto his chest.
Kiba's back bowed, his whole body jerking under her touch, but when his back hit the grass again and Hinata scrambled to find his pulse point, she finally felt his pulse, weak and thready but there.
Two hundred and fourteen seconds.
From the moment she realised he didn't have a pulse to the moment it came back. Just over three and a half minutes, and even then, Akamaru could have been whining longer, but she hadn't realised because she'd been having a breakdown.
Kiba might end up with permanent brain damage because she couldn't deal with a C-Rank mission.
Falling from her knees onto her bum, she crawled until she could sag against a nearby tree and finally gave into the urge to cry.
"We need a code." Shino murmured an indeterminable amount of time later, his gaze unfocused as he stared off into the treeline, having pocketed his glasses sometime during their mad dash towards the Village.
"What?" Hinata asked wearily, rubbing the last of the tears from her eyes and trying to gather together enough energy to push herself to her feet.
"A code. For our team. The Uchiha recognised sensei after you called her name."
Hinata blinked, absorbing that.
After a few seconds, she could visualise the exact moment Shino was referring to. Whatever reply she was going to give turned into ash on her tongue when it fully hit her that Shino was right.
By not knowing the connection between the Uchiha and their sensei and calling Kurenai's name to get the woman's attention, she'd inadvertently doomed them all.
Hinata felt as if her blood had turned to ice, her heart skipping a beat then picking up double-time. She couldn't deal with that just then.
She tried to tell Shino that they needed to get a move-on, that they'd lingered too long, that the Kiri genin nearby were genin but could still break out of the genjutsu if given enough time to figure it out. But her tongue felt like lead and her heartbeat picked up when she opened her mouth to speak, panic wrapping its claws around her lungs until she felt like she couldn't breathe.
Instead, she wordlessly rearranged Kiba until she could pick him up in a princess carry, her back still smarting from the shuriken the Kiri genin had thrown at her, and gestured at the forest stretching out endlessly before them.
She had to put Kiba down and help Shino heft Kurenai onto his back, having forgotten about Shino's broken arm in her daze, but once they were both ready, Hinata cradled Kiba to her chest, her fingers finding the pulse-point on his wrist almost of their own accord while Akamaru found a spot on Kiba's stomach.
They set off, an uneasy silence falling between them, and Hinata prayed that they would not encounter any more complications.
(They didn't. Not in the form of enemy-nin, at least. But Hinata had to use her Lightning jutsu two more times, and she couldn't help but wonder whether she wasn't simply prolonging the inevitable after the third time Kiba's heart gave out on him.)
((Her fault.))
Shikaku wouldn't say that he was having a good day.
His good days entailed staying home, spending time with his wife, maybe playing shogi or Go with Shikamaru, potentially going for a beer with Inoichi and Chouza. His good days entailed rest.
His good days usually didn't entail being responsible for the entire Village because he got saddled with the position of acting kage. They rarely entailed having to tally up losses and argue with the Elders against promoting the Academy's graduating class half a year early to make up for the chunk of the chunin forces lost to Orochimaru's invasion. And they never entailed having to tell his son and his son's sensei that, actually, the official grace period for MIA genin teams had officially run out a week ago, and so the chances of Team Eight ever coming back were slim to none.
He was in the middle of an informal debrief with the acting Chunin Commander when his not-so-good day turned a little less horrid.
"Shikaku-sama, sir!" a Genin Corps runner burst through the door, getting a stern glare from the acting Chunin Commander, though it wasn't anywhere near what Shikaku knew Iwashi could dish out. They were all exhausted though, so perhaps it was to be expected that the man wasn't as much of a hardass as Shikaku knew he could be. "Yuuhi's team is back!"
It took Shikaku a moment to place the name, but when he did, he got to his feet, sending Iwashi a briefly apologetic look.
Yuuhi Kurenai's team. Asuma's friend's team. Inoichi's kouhai's team. Shikamaru's friend's team.
The genin team that had been MIA for almost two months on a mission that should've taken two, maybe three weeks max.
Them coming back in any state that wasn't a body bag was a miracle.
"Where are they? Missions' office?" Shikaku demanded, throwing his jounin vest on and tying his hair back up as he headed for the door.
The genin messenger grimaced, looking almost apologetic. "Uh, the hospital, sir."
Shikaku's hopes plummeted as quickly as they had risen. "Alive?"
"More or less."
That was never a good answer in Shikaku's experience, but he couldn't exactly refuse to attend the debrief. Especially if it meant that the Elders would get to the kids before him.
Giving himself one final check to make sure he was presentable, he sighed.
"Lead the way."