The next two weeks passed in the blink of an eye.
Things happened, some notable and worth commenting on.
==========
"...Sakura? Is that you?" Still laid up in the futon, Kakashi looked at me with a single bloodshot eye. Then around, chakra infusion still in progress as his brows furrowed. "I thought I was supposed to meet the people that mattered to me when I died." His brow furrowed more. "At least my arm doesn't hurt anymore."
That's right.
It didn't. And, as I'd thought, it had been an easy fix - less than a minute's work had been needed.
I'd nearly died; we'd all nearly died over less than two seconds of work.
…Hah… Calm. Calm.
I'm calm.
"I'm glad to know, in the end, that my teacher cared so much for his students." I gave him a warm, bright smile in response… I knew what he'd meant. And I was still forcing it down (for now). But this was funny. And his response was understandable. But primarily funny, and I was feeling mean. "Why would your arm hurt, sensei?"
We both knew why.
His brows unfurrowed, very real fear in his eye as I squeezed that arm.
He knew what I could do from this position.
I knew what I could do from this position.
It was delicious.
"You haven't been avoiding medical professionals who could do something about that, have you?"
"...Is this hell?" He wheezed.
"It could be."
"KAKASHI, MY RIVAL!" Without warning, other than the polite opening of the door and the energetic 'feel' of his chakra, Gai arrived. And my fun was over. "WE MEET AGAIN!"
It was a truly shocking yet heartwarming turn of events.
A real, non-hostile friendship between two men in the wild.
Shocking. And rare.
After a long look at Gai, directly shifting from his terror-filled gaze at me, Kakashi rolled his head back over to look at the ceiling with a sigh. "What I get for killing people for a living, I guess... And for letting you die. Sorry, Sakura."
Beautiful.
==========
It took several minutes to convince Kakashi that he wasn't dead. And that I wasn't dead and a hallucination, which took somewhat longer.
Again, that was understandable. People that had been cut in half didn't tend to recover. Not even ninja.
Unless they were Naruto. Or some century-year-old monster with an incomprehensibly stupid and unnecessarily violent philosophy that needed to be foisted off on everyone else. Then all bets were off… Whatever.
That wasn't important at the moment, even if I would be slipping a long overdue mental health and combat readiness analysis recommendation into the paperwork later.
Other things happened during those two weeks, of course.
Still worthy of comment, even if not as notable.
==========
Sasuke, feet flat on the surface of the river, stared.
I, feet flat on the surface of the ground, waved.
Sasuke, eyes turning the red of the sharingan, continued to stare.
Not having assured himself that I was here and up and not just something out of his imagination as the real me was still laid in bed, Naruto continued to stick to my side like an especially stubborn barnacle.
His feet were also flat on his respective surface. That being something I'd been quite insistent about, having dragged him out of the house because he'd refused to let go of me, with me not finding it enough of a reason to stop me from getting some fresh air.
Or to find Sasuke, who'd just fallen through the water while still staring, having lost concentration as he lost himself committing me to memory and was now floundering.
In less than a foot of water.
"...You need more practice." Helpful observation given, I nodded.
Naruto just pointed and laughed, not at all helpful.
At the moment.
Until I grabbed him, his hold on me turned back on him before I threw him in with Sasuke.
They would deny it, but they worked better together than they did alone… Or they learned better against each other. It was the same thing, honestly. And they just needed a little help to see it.
"Chop chop."
I was helpful, was I not?
==========
The next several hours from that point on had been spent with them trying to drown each other. Or trying to beat each other to be the first to achieve water walking competence. Or both.
The whole ordeal had gotten sort of muddled, and quickly… Both positions had been interchangeable for those hours. The semi-serious murder attempts, leftovers from past lives where those attempts had been more serious, no doubt, had produced results.
Surprising results. Surprising in a way that I should have expected, in hindsight.
Fear for one's life did that sort of thing, I supposed… I would know. And when it came to forceful drownings and defending against such, I'd put them at the level of a jonin.
Impressive. Those rolls and grapple breaks had been inspired.
Water walking was going to take a while longer, but I had hopes they'd get to it eventually. As a last-minute power-up, perhaps? As part of an inspirational moment for children everywhere, about the value of spite and teenage orneriness when it came to progress in your chosen path in life?
And friendship, if you turned your head the right way? About 320 degrees.
While drunk.
…
Either way, that was over with. For now. It wasn't something I had to worry about currently. And, so, I wouldn't. There was no point to it.
Command wouldn't be interested in the finer points of that, I think.
Back to drafting my mission report.
More important things had happened, of the sort I had been unable to witness with my own eyes.
A shame, really. I'd been looking forward to working out some well-placed hysterical aggression…but that was the way of things when you were recovering from near-lethal physical trauma.
You didn't get to participate.
You had to rely on descriptions. Stories. Embellishment and the well-hidden, but still clearly present, emotional and mental issues of a fellow child soldier tinting the lens.
…A fellow child soldier that had just stumbled across a very large fortune and hadn't hesitated to take advantage of it; second-hand reports weren't the best, but the analysts preferred to know if what we'd heard was similar to what they'd been told.
Eh hem.
Gai and his team had gone to attack Gato's compound while I'd been recovering from surgery, only to find Gato's employees in the middle of looting the place and Gato dead. Dead and stewing in his own filth with a hole in his forehead.
Right between the eyes. Or so I'd been told.
If he'd reacted to Zabuza's and Haku's weakness as he had in the original timeline (with mindless aggression), which I had no reason to doubt would be the case here, I could see why Haku would have reacted the way he did.
That being murder.
Assuming it was Haku that had killed him, of course… Admittedly, it could have been Tenten. She had the motive (looting everything in sight, from the paintings to the nails) and the means (senbon of the right size to have made the hole in Gato's skull, a through and through), but I didn't think it was her.
Her bitching about the state of the carpet the former owner had been face-down in as she tried to scrub the stain out without tearing the material hadn't been the self-accusing type…and, even if it had been, her passing on some of the loot she'd picked up had given her enough leeway for me to deny that had been the case.
As had our longstanding friendship.
But mostly the loot that she'd been nice enough to share.
Sasuke still looked at his new gold-plated vase as if he wasn't sure whether he wanted to sell it or throw it into the distance. That was how tacky it was. How utterly desperate it was to compete with the simpler dynastic treasures Sasuke saw daily in his home; that disgust made it all worth it.
The boy needed to expand his range of expressions, which was a strong step forward. Forward and away from the singular 'Naruto is pissing me off' that was his habit.
One day, someone that wasn't an impressionable and emotionally stunted teenage girl would be able to mistake him for an entire person. This, I promised.
…
I'd promised. And now I had to figure out how to pull it off. Damn it.
Well. Never mind that. Back to what was important.
Eh hem.
…We never did see Zabuza and Haku again. Not my team. Not Tenten's. And with their employer dead, however that had come about, I didn't think we would. Not today. Not next week. Very likely, possibly, not ever.
What I'd done to Zabuza was permanently crippling, even by my standards. And what I'd done to Haku was, while manageable with the correct treatment and professional help, not something an amateur medic could manage on their own. Bones, especially finger bones, were fiddly things. Let alone what else I'd done to him, deadening his arm up to the shoulder, making it unusable and, well…dangerous to have. For him, that is.
An inability to feel pain was not a strength. That he'd used that same arm to block several maiming hits did not give me much hope that he'd be able to keep it.
It was a problem that would solve itself, I think. One way or another.
Either they retired, or they died. Those were their only options. Shockingly, mednin of even middling quality outside of Konoha were difficult to find. For rogue nin, it was even harder. And…
…
And this was no longer my problem. This was going into my report unless Kakashi decided otherwise, and my part in this matter was done. It was now up to my superiors how this would play out once my team, and I had left.
Which we had. Left, that is. Two weeks had passed, and it was time to go home.
It should have taken longer, I was sure. But it hadn't. And that was fine.
The bridge was done, Naruto having sent a hundred or so clones to help construction along. Tenten, between her obsessive cleaning and repairs of her new acquisitions, had described to us in excruciating detail how she and her team had dealt with the local bandit problem: with ruthless brutality and clinical detachment. At least, that's how she described it when she wasn't showing distaste over an especially maltreated piece of equipment.
Out of sight. Out of mind…and she had the right of it. The job was the job. Agonizing over what had been done, over what could have been done, was useless; it was better to focus on what you enjoyed. On what was relevant. On and or.
Another line in my report. It was all relative. What mattered and what didn't matter.
Relative.
And I was sure that, if I ever needed any of this, I could just come back to it as necessary.
If.
I doubted it. Wave country and the people involved had never been important to the greater narrative once its time was over. But we'd see.
There was no urgency. And it wasn't as if I'd forget any of it.
Whatever.
As my team and I jumped through the trees on our way home, Gai's team having gone ahead of us by several days, I tried not to yawn. We'd woken up early that morning. Early, and for no other reason than because Kakashi felt like it for once, feeling anxious without his multi-hour visits to the memorial stone.
Not that he'd said that, but I wasn't blind. The disappointment had positively oozed from his every pore when Naruto and, surprisingly, Sasuke had insisted on staying a little longer.
For the party.
The party where the townsfolk had taken turns kicking Gato's wrapped-up corpse, cursing his name and ancestry, ignoring and outright profaning just about every possible funeral rite there was before they'd thrown him onto a bonfire and lit him up.
That party.
There had been cake (from Gato's personal stocks) and fun for the entire family, homegrown; Sasuke and Naruto had been quiet since we'd left, thoughtful and uneasy, and, I had to say, it was an interesting change of pace.
Something I could get used to.
Quiet thoughtfulness. Not the uneasy part. Uneasiness with these two had to be carefully applied and managed. Used as an impetus for a specific goal or as a correction. Otherwise, they'd do whatever came into their heads first.
And, possibly, what came next would become a formative event. Something that they based the rest of their lives on and around and talked about whenever they were in a fight over opposing ideals and traumatic childhoods.
"That wasn't how I imagined it would go," Naruto said, "I know they hated the guy, but-" He put both hands up in a formless, helplessly confused gesture as we all continued to run towards Konoha. "He was already dead."
Dangerous things, those formative events.
"Hate doesn't end when someone dies, Naruto." Sasuke's expression was dark as that nugget of wisdom left his lips. "It gets stronger."
…Very dangerous. The red flags were waving high.
That Naruto was left looking for something to say, finding nothing, said it all.
And something had to be done about this before it was too late.
Reaching for my pack from over my shoulder, a swipe along the paper within had my response. Or, not so much response, as something that would shut these two up before this got any worse. "Who wants some cake?"
I didn't wait for a yes or a no. I just waited for them to open their mouths.
"No than-"
"I'm not-"
They did.
"HUR!"
"HACK!"
And I did what I had to do.
==========
The smile on Ino's face felt like it had just turned to ice.
It was stuck there. Frozen in place like like rest of her was, midbreath, her grip on her cup tightening as her lungs began to burn.
"Yeah. I know. That's how I felt when I got there." Tenten, the awkward smile she'd been wearing dying a quick death as Ino fought to remember how to breathe, turned her cup between her hands. "That whole mission was fubar."
Sakura had been right?
Her bad feeling had been right?
"B-back up. Wait a minute." Ino remembered how to breathe, around the same time as she forgot how to give a shit about what other people felt. "You arrived at the scene, and…?"
Glossed over what had happened next, leaving Sakura out of it. That's what she'd done. And Ino didn't need to be as smart as her best friend to figure out that that had been on purpose.
And what that might mean when Tenten had described the mission as fubar.
Tenten didn't answer at first. She pursed her lips and continued to turn her cup, stalling for time and words, and ratcheting up the tension to levels unbearable. "Sakura - didn't come out of it unhurt."
Ino's hold on her cup tightened again, the heat of its contents threatening to burn her through the ceramic as she held on. "Is that so?"
"...It is so." Tenten lifted her cup to her mouth, tipping it back and drinking every last drop before putting it down with a sigh. Her expression tightened into a grimace, bracing herself for her next words. "Sakura got cut in half."
Ino's cup imploded.
Tea ran over the edge of Ino's table freely; rivers; waterfalls of tea and porcelain shards splashed and shattered on the hardwood floor below as Ino stood up from her chair hard enough to throw it to the ground with a loud crack.
The dark brown tea was mixed with red as Ino dropped what remained of her cup, the pain of her sliced-up fingers coming from somewhere far away as Tenten flinched back, barely avoiding the grab at her collar as Ino jumped across the table; that Ino fell short in her haste, sliding along the table top and in the remnants of her drink that wasn't on the floor, didn't stop her pushing forward that last half of an inch to bloody Tenten's top with a snarl.
She had to have misheard.
She had to have fucking misheard.
"What," the blonde rasped, absolutely furious to a degree she'd never imagined was possible as Tenten backpedaled, further out of reach. Just in time to avoid Ino using the table as a fulcrum to do a full spin, the squeak of wet wood on her bandages as Tenten dodged Ino's feet was loud enough to drown out the other girl's gasp and swear. "What?"
There was no way. There was no fucking way that Sakura had been... No. No. No way.
Fuck that. That didn't happen.
And fuck Tenten.
Why was Ino only hearing about this now!?
"Look, Ino. I know I should have told you all of this earlier. That's my bad. And I'm sorry." Tenten, hands up as sweat ran down her face, continued to back away as Ino hopped off the table, bare feet touching down soundlessly on the floor... And whatever she saw on Ino's face at that moment added an octave to her voice and some speed to her cadence. "But the info I wanted to share with you was too sensitive for a letter, and I didn't know how to say this-"
"Sakura got into a fight with an A-rank nin and his apprentice," Ino hissed as she lowered her center of gravity, shifting onto the balls of her feet. "She got cut in half during it, and you didn't tell me for almost a week?"
When Ino had invited her into her home, Tenten having surprised her by knocking at her front door, that had been the last thing she'd expected to hear.
That, and how Sakura had been experimenting on her own bones and organs; and how Tenten had expected her to know Sakura had been experimenting on her own bones and organs.
Ino had not known about that and, if there was anything that had pushed Ino over the edge… That was the only option. There was no other.
Sakura hadn't been cut in half. That was just hyperbole. She hadn't almost died. That was all bullshit.
Sakura was Sakura.
And Ino wouldn't hear anything else until she heard it from the horse's mouth.
A spot of color filled Tenten's cheeks while the rest of her stayed pale and clammy, eyes flicking about and taking note of the doors and windows and which ones she might be able to reach before Ino shoved the other girl's weapon scroll up her ass and popped the seal… None of them, if Ino had her way. "...I bought a house?"
…Was that an excuse?
Was that a-
Ino's jaw cracked as her mouth opened wide without her input, the furious scream that had wanted to come out cracking and dying…as she deflated, mindless anger and indignation draining out of her as if someone had just opened a tap.
What was the point?
What would shooting the messenger get her?
…What would Sakura say if she knew about this?
Tenten stumbled, her attempt at a strafing dodge clumsily aborted as the blonde cooled down without warning… Around the same time that Ino realized her hands hurt.
Her hands really, really hurt.
…It was surprising how much they hurt, now that the adrenaline was beginning to wear off and the red haze over her vision had gone away.
The blonde held them up in front of her face and winced as blood sluggishly flowed down her palms and onto her wrist, and there it was. The click. "... That was my favorite cup."
Her absolute favorite.
It hadn't been her favorite for any actual reason. It had just been normal, unpainted porcelain. It had been scratched up. Scuffed, with a tiny crack on the rim from the one time she'd dropped it when she was nine.
But it had been her favorite.
Her face twisted, a spike of pain running down her arms as she forced her fingers to move in familiar patterns. The blue glow appearing as she knew it would as Tenten helped her sit in a chair was a relief.
Learning how to use the Mystical Palm had taken her nearly two months. Two months of pain and sweat and a long-lasting stiffness that Ino swore she could still feel, even if it had passed over half a year ago… She'd never done anything that hard before. That finicky.
That nerve-wracking as yet another fish became charcoal under her hands… By default, that whole ordeal might as well have been tailor-made to infuriate her.
But she'd refused to let Sakura be the only one who knew how to do it. She'd refused. That Sakura was the one that had shown her how to do it and had held her hand through the entire process in the first place didn't change anything for her.
Ino still felt relief whenever she saw that blue glow. Relief and pride, from knowing that she'd done it, learned a jutsu that her father had told her, outright, that the people he knew about that could use it too and at her level could be counted on both hands and a foot.
Ino had understood why that was immediately and accepted it, while her dad had run outside to gloat about how amazing she was to his friends.
They'd all gone out for dinner that day, her father's treat, in celebration for what she'd done… And after eating a fifth of the buffet, Sakura had nearly gotten them thrown out of the restaurant.
Sakura had been so happy for her, and-
…She was fine. Sakura was fine.
If Sakura hadn't been fine, Tenten wouldn't have taken this long to say something.
Everything was fine.
Right?
"Sorry." Ino rubbed her hands together with a sigh, blood drying and flaking away as the cuts sealed up and vanished. "Sorry." Ino licked her lips as a quaver entered her voice. She hated it but couldn't help herself as the words poured out. "I - overreacted. Sorry. Just… S-She's okay, right? Sakura is okay?"
Ino needed to hear it. She already knew the answer, she'd already gone over it with herself, but she needed to hear it.
"... She's fine."
==========
"There's nothing quite like home, is there?" I asked aloud. Aloud and around my mouthful of cake. Chocolate. Still rich. Still moist. As fresh as when I'd cut it from the greater, gigantic mass (big enough to feed an entire village) and forced it into the life-changing invention of the storage scroll. "We were there. Then we were back again." I swallowed my current mouthful, then took another bite; still good~. "You appreciate the things that matter to you better after some time apart, don't you?"
I did.
And if anyone could agree with me, it was the people I was traveling with. My team. My people; some of the most important individuals in my life (and everyone else's) for the next decade and, if all went well, the next three.
They knew what it was to miss something. Or to miss the idea of something, a sad but common state of affairs in our profession… I didn't mind that no one answered me. Much.
I understood.
If we weren't calmly walking towards the gate, doing the equivalent of holding our hands up in front of the security so that we wouldn't get lit up by fire dragons, Kakashi would have been impatiently tapping his foot where he stood. He'd have crossed his arms. Pouted, maybe.
He was distracted. And so were the boys, both steadily working through the celebratory 'shut up and enjoy the day' cake that I'd forced on them while giving me wary looks.
I forgave them for their silence in these trying times. And I partially followed my own advice, enjoying the day and what was to come for once without worry; the walls of Konoha, looming ever higher as we walked past the civilian queue to the checkpoint, comforted me.
They were very impressive.
Unable to hold up against any actual threat, as they'd prove multiple times, and soon, but very impressive.
Another bite, this one mournful, and the last of my cake slice vanished, leaving me to lick my fingers clean and remind myself to check on Naruto's dietary habits as a familiar chakra signature rapidly approached my location.
Very rapidly.
…Had Ino learned the shunshin?
As a hundred and eighteen pounds of blonde slammed into me with full intent to bowl me over, there and back again, my question was answered in the affirmative; distantly, I was aware of the rest of my team reacting around me, but that was of lesser concern.
My arms were already around her, holding her just as tightly as she was holding me. Partly for the sake of keeping her from hurting herself. Partly from what I felt as I reached out, her chakra screaming at me how much she needed this.
How much she needed me.
Cloying grief. Fading worry. Fear mixed with the purest relief and joy. What I felt whenever I was with her.
Love.
I hit the ground with a solid thump, bottom first, and Ino followed along to fall into my lap and mold herself against my body in one smooth movement.
Her hands felt clammy as they touched me, her body feverishly warm as she traced whatever parts of me she could reach, with me returning the favor without hesitation or shame; she held my cheeks between her hands in short order, my breath beginning to run short as teal-green eyes met mine, wet and wide. "You smell like chocolate."
"...If you want a taste…?"
She did.
Ino hungrily mashed her lips against mine, her tongue slipping into my mouth with zero resistance.
She most certainly did.