“How much further?” Ryouma panted.

Raidou eyed the distant cloud-bank. It didn’t look any closer. When he craned his head, the shore they’d left was still visible.

“Less than there was fifteen minutes ago,” he said.

“I hope you get seaweed in your briefs,” Ryouma said coldly.

Raidou managed to avoid snorting seawater. Genma made a rasping sound of amusement, but Kimiko ducked her head as if their humor was poison. Genma asked her, carefully, “Am I keeping you warm enough, Kimiko-san?”

Her eyes were the cold blue of sharp diamonds and dead seas. “Just keep Sango warm enough. Can we get going?”

They re-cast the jutsu, adjusted the ropes, and submerged again. The second stretch went without incident. A few shadows loomed close, but Kakashi — and once, Ryouma — drove them away. Out of the lava tubes and reefs, they were at least free of ambush hunters and small, hard to see predators. The sharks were dangerous, but they were easy to spot.

The third and fourth surfacings brought the cloud-bank no closer. Fire rasped in Raidou’s lungs, but his fingers and toes were growing steadily numb. High color burned over Ryouma’s sharp cheekbones. Genma, increasingly quiet, just tipped his head back in the open air and breathed out heat. Kimiko’s sharp teeth chattered.

Sango’s tiny fist wobbled through the air and bounced off Genma’s nose. He blinked and looked down at her cross-eyed. Her next attempt ended with her fingers clenched in his hair, tugging his head sideways.

It took Kimiko’s irritable assistance to free him, but in the middle of the open ocean, Genma looked down at the tiny, grabby, improbable reason they were all here, and resolve chased some of the weariness from his face. He smoothed a hand over the fine, dark hair plastered to her forehead, and cast the air-bubble jutsu once again. Raidou and Ryouma added their own chakra, making it big enough.

They dove. They swam.

Surfaced, breathed. Dove, swam.

Incrementally, the clouds crawled closer. Kakashi blinded a shark and hacked some kind of weird, flat sea-snake in two. Raidou and Ryouma pulled, pulled, pulled. Kimiko stopped kicking. Her toes were almost the same color as her daughter’s. The next time they surfaced, Genma made her wrap her legs around his waist and cupped his hands over her feet. The next time they dived, he stopped kicking too.

Blood in the water. Something with teeth. A flash of steel, and it was gone. Raidou breathed his own breath again and again, until the air was warm and tasted like metal. Swam with burning shoulders. Kicked with cramping feet. Cursed Kiri and its vindictive, salt-infested geography.

Kakashi killed something else. Ryouma kept pace with stubborn, dogged determination.

And then, miraculously, there was sand under Raidou’s feet.

He kicked to the surface, took a wave in the face and tumbled back underwater. The rope snapped tight around his chest. Ryouma floundered in his peripheral vision, battered by surf. Raidou grabbed him by the wrist, hauled them both back to Genma, and managed to get everyone surfaced between the roaring waves. They staggered, half-crawling, onto the shore, and collapsed at the surfline. The sun beat down on Raidou’s back like a welcome hammer.

Kimiko was coughing, sawing through ropes to get to her baby. Sango gave a thin cry. Ryouma groaned, relief and exhaustion twined into one low sound. Genma just breathed, panting at Raidou’s shoulder.

“Hound?” Raidou grated.

“Here.” A shadow collapsed on its face on Raidou’s other side, knife still clutched in one scale-scraped hand. It gasped, “Lieutenant alive?”

Raidou rolled himself over and shoved wet hair out of Genma’s flushed face. Glazed eyes tracked him, just about. “We’re here,” Raidou said. “Cut the jutsu, Shiranui.”

One beat, two. Genma blinked slowly, closed his eyes, and let out a breath like a man putting the world down. The rusty pulse of chakra under his skin went out, and slowly, slowly, the unnatural heat began to bleed away. Genma shivered. Raidou wrapped an arm around him, chafing his lean shoulders, and thought, I’m never moving again.

He said, “We need to get off the beach.”