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His world had ended.
Every breath brought in only dust, the smell of stone clogging his sensitive nose. There should have been something else. Anything else. The burn from explosions, or the smear of ash. Instead there was only the dried rot of a corpse long dead.
He inched backwards, paws moving uncertainly. His whine echoed off the rocks, bouncing back before it had time to go anywhere. He moved forward, one slow step at a time, until his nose met stone. He quartered the tiny room, eventually returning to where he'd started.
Trapped. And alone.
His keening whine went nowhere. He dug at the rock until his paws bled, talons broken. He bit at it, mashing his teeth into stone, cutting his lips. And he remembered, very clearly, watching Tsume die.
This was where he'd remain. This was what he deserved.
Canines couldn't cry. He tipped his head back and howled, the sound ripped right from his soul. It ricocheted around the tiny pocket, nearly deafening. He howled again, multi-toned and agonized. And again. And again.
Pain, horror, fear, everything crashed inside him, the instinctive panic of knowing he couldn't survive alone, the agony of watching Tsume fall--
He reached for their chakra link automatically, seeking comfort, forgetting she was dead and it was gone and even as he started to howl again at the knowledge--
Her chakra whispered down his pathways, soothing and constant, drawing his back in a forever-cycle.
Kuromaru's howl cut off. He picked his feet up, put them down, stared into the darkness not even his wolf-eyes could see through.
Dead. Gone. He'd seen her fall.
Her chakra murmured to him, tugged at his centers. Flowed back down pathways that melded from human to beast.
He whined. He'd seen--
And again her power came, following lines set down when they were both still cubs. He keened softly and lay down, resting his muzzle on his paws. His mind sunk into the familiar, the safe; the energy they shared. It twisted around him, through him, sliding down veins no scalpel could cut. He closed his eyes and followed them, tracing the paths, smoothing out quirks and scars, strengthening the lines. Building chakra, spinning it faster. The more he focused, the more it was real. The more it was real, the more his memory faded.
Not cut down.
He pulled on her chakra. She gave it up, traded for his own.
Gone around a corner. Saw Genma, lying on the ground.
He sped it faster, and she answered his need.
Raidou nearby, muscles slack.
It sleeked through lines and bodies, hers to his and back again, brighter as he focused.
Tsume behind him, a quick intake of breath and when he turned she slid to the ground, boneless.
Brighter until it was the only real thing that existed.
The man ahead of him, looking pale, looking thin. Snarling in a weak imitation of a predator. "Fall."
Until the chakra lines were all he cared about, and the rest of the world melted away. Until he could follow them out of the haze that clouded his mind. Until all the other images were gone.
And then he opened his eyes, and knew what he'd see. Genma, lying on the ground. Raidou nearby, muscles slack. Tsume behind him, seemingly boneless.
It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds from when he'd gone down, no matter how long it seemed. The ninja, however, was nowhere to be found.
Kuromaru rose slowly to his feet, a growl growing in his chest. And then the scent of terror hit him. It lifted his hackles, bared his teeth. It was too powerful to come from just one person.
He whipped around, realizing with a whine it came from all of his temporary pack, though he didn't know why. Didn't know why they were down. Had to get them up. Had to get them up now.
He streaked to Tsume, recognizing the look of a genjutsu in the instant before he crouched, nudging her mask aside to lick her face. He'd go after the ninja, then--if you killed the jutsu maker, the jutsu died, too, right? He'd--
He couldn't. Not against a genjutsu. This one he'd fought off; he couldn't have a dead familiar and yet feel her chakra patterns. But he was canny enough to know that anything else would pull him under and keep him there.
A howl tried to rise up in his throat; he bit it down. Wherever the ninja had gone, he probably wasn't far. Kuromaru licked at Tsume again, nipped at her skin hard enough to draw blood, but got no response. They were weak against genjutsu; he knew that. She wasn’t coming out of it. He could smell her fear.
Someone else, then. Pain could knock a person out of it, sometimes. He glanced at the two men, weighing them in an instant.
He didn't trust Raidou. He bolted for Genma, faintly hearing the rattle of someone moving things. The way the tunnels warped, it was impossible to tell how far away the man was. He might have hours to wake Genma before the missing nin came back and knocked him under again. Or he might have seconds.
Kuromaru didn't give it much thought; he dove for the man's leg and sunk his teeth through cloth and skin. Blood flooded his mouth. He didn't break the bone.
One minute Genma was lying in a pitch dark, stone-walled cell that stank of blood and death, curled up over the body of his best friend.
His best friend who shouldn't have died like that.
His best friend he was glad had died like that, a hero still fighting, not broken.
Genma was lying in the dark, listening to his own desperate breaths burble through lungs full of blood, wondering if he might manage to join Raidou before the Iwa ninja came back to heal his body and break it all over again interrogating him. He lay weeping silent tears that fell on Raidou's lifeless body.
"Rai" he whispered, too heartsick to try to rise.
The next he was bellowing in pain as something sharp tore into his thigh, reaching for weapons that came easily to hand, striking back at... at...
He sat up, sweat-soaked and shaking, staring at the dimly lit hall. There was light. There was light and Kuromaru was there, hunched and defensive, jaws dripping blood. Raidou lay on his side, masked-face turned away. Tsume was slumped over her own knees with her head turned towards him. Her mask was knocked askew so he could see her red-tattooed cheek, but not her eyes. The only blood spilled seemed to be his own.
Genma held a kunai in his left hand, his right bristled with senbon. His leg throbbed and bled, soaking invisibly into black pants, leaving red-black smears on the dusty earthen floor when he moved.
Kuromaru had bitten him. Kuromaru, who bristled with black fur making him look twice his side, whose bared fangs were still stained red.
"What the hell is going on?" he whispered, keeping his eyes riveted on the dog. He pulled himself into a crouch, feeling rough, cold stone at his back. Sidling towards Raidou. Moving to put himself between the dog and his fallen partner. Where were the Iwa ninja? How was there no blood? Why could he sense Raidou's chakra when the man was dead?
Kuromaru prowled slowly backward, shoulders rolling under the heavy rise of his fur. "Genjutsu," he growled softly. His head dropped, ears flicking to catch every breath and every step. "Because Tsume's not dead." So it had to be a genjutsu, didn't it? Making you see things that weren't real?
He slid toward his human familiar, a circular dance as Genma slid toward his own mate. Kuromaru nudged at Tsume again, but it only over balanced her. She slid along the cave wall that had been helping to brace her up, and he caught her seconds before her head cracked against rock, jaws tight on her armor straps. Kuromaru laid her down and whined softly, licking her face once, twice, and looking back up at Genma.
His ears slicked back against his head. "Can you fix it? You can, right?" His lips lifted off his teeth, showing gums that were black and pink. "Or we could just kill him." His head ducked, muzzle dropping toward the stone. "Gotta hurry. He'll be coming back."
Genjutsu. It was a possibility. A certainty when Genma got Raidou's mask off and felt his friend's breath hot and moist against his palm. Raidou's head not parted from his body, his armour not drenched in his blood. "Rai," he tried, knowing it wouldn't work. Not even his fingers grazing across the rippled flesh of Raidou's scarred cheek drew so much as a sigh.
Genjutsu. And a powerful one. One that had knocked all three of them out. Why not the dog? "He didn't get you?" he asked, and checked Raidou's pulse in his neck, feeling under the physical throb of blood in veins for chakra. It was there, bound and tight, flowing back into itself in an unhealthy cycle that only a violently complex genjutsu could produce.
He focused, drawing energy in, forming seals learned early in his training. His own chakra bloomed bright and amber yellow, limning his hands. "Kai." He pressed one hand to Raidou's forehead, the other to his chest.
Raidou didn't wake up, but he stirred, gasping in a breath and twitching away from Genma's hands. Genma put them back to Raidou's neck, breathing a tiny prayer of gratitude for what he felt: the chakra dam was broken, normal flow restored. Now he just needed to wake up.
"Why didn't he get you?" he demanded, still suspicious. His leg burned where Kuromaru's teeth had torn the flesh. And a lingering echo of the illusion, of a memory he couldn't be sure of, told him Kuromaru wasn't to be trusted.
Raidou barely had a moment to wrap his mind around the idea of genjustu before Genma hammered himself in the leg with a kunai hilt, and Tsume scrambled off the floor, chakra lashing in a way that blotted out the sunshine-yellow, and ran. He stared at her disappearing back, hand snapping towards his own kunai, and watched Kuromaru chase after her. They were gone in the time between one blink and the next.
Genma wasn't.
Raidou glanced at him, and felt the solid weight of a kunai in his own hand. Solid enough to feel real. But watching Genma die twice had felt real, too. Being fourteen and losing half his face while kids had screamed themselves silent had felt more than real.
But genjutsu always felt real. That was sort of the point.
He slapped his hands together, palm to palm with metal between them, and tried to get his focus back. "Kai." Chakra rippled. Nothing changed. Tsume was still gone, Genma was still there.
The jounin wasn't.
Raidou glanced up the tunnel, eyes narrowing. If this was reality, they'd been making a lot of noise. If Kimura was smart--and he had to be, to catch all four of them off guard--he wouldn't leave them tied down with only a genjutsu. Not for long. They weren't dead yet--they weren't--which meant Kimura wanted them for something.
Fear was a good way to break people.
Raidou ground his teeth together, muscles clenching from jawline all the way down his shoulders and spine. His grip on the kunai tightened. "Where's Kimura?" He looked at Genma, and let rage bleed the fear away. "I'm with you. Where's he?"
"That way," Genma said, and gestured deeper into the gloom. He looked back the way Tsume had fled, taking a few halting steps in that direction, then straightened, snapping around coil-tight towards Raidou. "Genjutsu and Inuzuka don't mix. And this thing.... Whatever his doujutsu is, he makes genjutsu that don't break easy. I've broken it on myself twice and it keeps coming back at the edges, like a nightmare you can't quite wake up from, even though you know it's just a dream."
He was breathing fast and hard, heart racing, making the fragile clots forming on his leg break and spilling warmth out to soak into the fabric of his pants. "You just... whatever you saw, whatever I saw, it wasn't real. He's ahead of us, and the Inuzuka are behind us. I don't like to leave them, but I think we have to. We have to kill this prick before he does it to us again."
He just hoped that whatever terror was still gripping Tsume's mind didn't turn her into an enemy as well. But maybe if the caster was dead the hold of his genjutsu would break.
"We made enough noise just now he has to know something's up. I say we make this a direct, deadly force attack. You good with that?" Genma tested his weight on his leg. It held, but he couldn't quite suppress the limp. It would have to do, though. Speed was critical. He started rehearsing the seals for his deadliest metal jutsu in his mind. In an old mine like this, at least there was plenty of raw material to work with.
She hadn't gotten far. Around the corner, flinging herself into a depression in the rock, armed with chakra and a blade, tossing tetsubishi to the ground, fumbling for wire and listening to her breath rattle in the dark.
"Tsume."
She flinched back, debating running again. She'd have to make a stand somewhere. They'd catch her. They'd--
Kuromaru.
"Tsume. It was a genjutsu." There was enough light from the other tunnel to make out the barest outline of his shape.
She was dressed. She wasn't bleeding. No missing nin corpse. Her breath shuddered out. "You didn't come." It was half cry, half accusation.
With one leap he was over the tiny bits of metal strewn across the rock, pressing up against her. "Then you know it was a genjutsu. I will always come."
She knelt slowly, hands buried in his fur, face following. She wasn't bleeding. No pain. No blood-smell.
No corpse.
"They--they--" She couldn't say it. Not out loud, not even to Kuromaru. "When did the genjutsu start?"
"Some of the cave was real. But the other cave wasn't real."
It made no sense. Tsume closed her eyes and decided to puzzle it out later. It would take time, and thought, and she had neither.
She had a ninja to kill.
Back there. With Raidou and Genma.
The image rose, pain with it, and she tensed and knotted her hands in Kuromaru's fur. She couldn't go back there. What if it wasn't a genjutsu? What if her familiar was wrong? But of course it was. She wasn't bleeding.
But she remembered it.
A whimper escaped.
Kuromaru's rough tongue swept over her face, into her hair. "You stay here. You stay here, and be safe. Listen. You can stay here?"
She nodded, once.
"Stay here. If you don't feel safe, I'll come back for you. But it was a genjutsu. I won't let it come back."
She didn't point out that he couldn't stop an illusion. She was too shaken, too wrapped in her own fear.
Genma and Raidou--
No. Genjutsu.
She remembered it.
No. Genjutsu.
And then Kuromaru was gone, leaping silently over the tetsubishi, vanishing around the corner.
Tsume curled into her rocky depression, trying to walk through the scent pathways, to mark why this was different from what she remembered. Things every Inuzuka child learned, to guard against confusing genjutsu and reality.
And Kuromaru raced like a liquid shadow down the lit corridor, slinking up behind his human compatriots. His lips lifted off two rows of sharp teeth, showing mottled pink gums. A single canine was still edged with blood. "Can we kill him now?" The words weren't even a growl.
Raidou glanced down at the dog big enough to be a man, and drew a second kunai. "Yes," he said shortly, his own voice picking up the growl Kuromaru's had lost. He looked down the tunnel, hearing the echo of sounds that might have meant nothing, but probably meant something a whole lot worse. Then he looked back at Genma.
A genjutsu that hung around after it'd been broken. Something that Genma and Kuromaru both had gotten free of, while he and Tsume had been trapped. Though a glance at the wounds bitten into Genma's thigh suggested how he'd managed to escape.
So Kuromaru was the strong link. Tsume was gone. Genma was hurt.
Not good odds.
Kunai cut a duel pattern in the air as Raidou spun them, thinking with movement. Genma was the leader, but he was also the medic. He stood a better chance of being able to break the genjustu then either Raidou or Tsume did--wherever she was--but he was also hurt. And he was Genma, he was needed. Raidou couldn't lose him twice.
The sounds got louder.
He looked at his best friend, unmasked face to unmasked face, and didn't have time to smile. "Stay here. Let us go in first. If he traps us again, you can break us out. If he doesn't, it doesn't matter either way." He could see the protest forming on Genma's face, the argument already shaping his mouth. "No time," snapped Raidou, a little sharper than he meant. "Just trust me?"
He was running up the tunnel, Kuromaru at his heels, before he could get an answer.
"Trust you? Dammit!" Genma snapped his mask in place over his face and raced after his companions. "Get your damn mask on, idiot!" he snarled, doubting Raidou would hear him. He didn't dare risk a shout, and his leg hindered him, twitching and shivering unstably every time he landed on it, sending fireballs of pain coursing through it. Fucking genjutsu. At least the hurt would keep him focused. In reality he'd had his leg bitten by a dog; the other hurts--the hands and feet and flayed open chest and crushed collarbone--that was illusion.
Illusion that kept making him gasp for breath.
The corridor branched, and he could hear Raidou and Kuromaru to the right. Already out of sight, curse Kuromaru for disabling him. He needed to be able to run. Normally he was faster than Raidou. If Kimura got them again, if he got them and had them immobilized by genjutsu, he could take off their heads before Genma could even get there.
Raidou's head falling to one side, neck sliced obliquely, arterial spray fountaining up...
Another jolting step; a leg nearly giving way; crashing into a rough earthen wall.
Genjutsu. It was genjutsu. The dog bite was real. Raidou was alive and up ahead, and needed backup.
Genma swore, channeled chakra into his injured leg, and put on a burst of speed.
There was nothing gentle about the genjutsu this time. Nothing subtle. Fear slammed up and under Raidou's ribcage, bringing with it a cavalcade of images that ripped through his head. He was four, holding his father's broken mask. Ten, facing down the man trying to take his place. Fourteen, face ripped away on a battlefield. Seventeen, standing over his mother's empty grave. Nineteen, trying to explain to three young brothers why their father wasn't coming home. Twenty-four, and threatening to break his best friend's hands.
Then, a familiar voice, "Kai!", and everything fell apart.
Raidou jolted back, hands slamming up, and smashed spine-first into a heavy barrel. His chest heaved, breath coming far too fast as pain lanced a real-world feeling through him. Honest bruises didn't quite wipe away the old agony of skin melting away. Touch bled into his unscarred shoulder, jerking his attention sideways. An ANBU's mask loomed in the shadows. A broken-healed hand clasped over the join of muscle and bone that made up his bare shoulder.
Genma. That was Genma.
The reek of scorched meat filled the air. Burning flesh. Raidou slapped a hand over his unmasked face, hiding the left side. The fresh memory of old pain welled up, twisting his mouth into a horrified line. His hands were empty, kunai gone. Kimura was--
On the floor, guts ripped free. Kuromaru crouched over him, hackles raised, intestines dripping from his blood-smeared mouth. Raidou swallowed hard as the stink of fresh corpse tried to pull him right back to the battlefield. Metal laced over Kimura's face, the flesh an angry, seared red around the silver. It turned black as he watched.
Raidou looked away, bile surging up to coat the inside of his mouth. He swallowed hard again and choked, "Genma?"
"It's me. Hang in there, Rai, it's me." Genma pushed himself to his knees, hissing another curse as the bitten leg shivered and protested, bleeding afresh and growing stiffer by the second. Raidou looked ill, sweating and swallowing, and pale even in the half-light cast from the bare-bulbed fixtures strung along the tunnel walls. The reek in the room of burned flesh, ozone from Genma's jutsu, and the overpowering latrine-stench of Kimura's ripped apart bowels was enough to turn any man's stomach, really. Especially if you combined it with the sickening sounds of Kuromaru--Genma glanced over his shoulder and confirmed that the dog was in fact, doing what it sounded like--Kuromaru eating the dead man's innards.
"For fuck's sake do you have to do that?" Genma asked, and felt a little sick himself. Kuromaru had looked every bit the feral descendant of wolf demons, with pink-brown intestines stretching from his jaws to the ripped-apart belly of the corpse he was desecrating. Blood spilled over the floor in purple-black pools, and viscera looped out of the body, bruised and torn. No wonder Raidou was struggling not to be sick.
Plus there was the jutsu. The genjutsu Kimura had cast with his eyes. Eyes Genma had a box prepared for, to carry them back to Konoha, so medical ninja could analyze the doujutsu. And Kuromaru was eating the corpse...
"Leave his head alone!" Genma commanded, turning back to the dog. "Don't touch anything above his heart. I've got to preserve the eyes, and I don't want any damage to the chakra paths." Although possibly sealing the nose and mouth shut with molten silver was cutting it a little close. But he'd been careful to keep the jutsu from touching the eyes. And the bastard had deserved it.
"Rai," he said again, turning back to his friend. Genma pushed his own mask off, exposing a sweat-streaked, tense face; giving Raidou something more familiar to focus on than the austere white and red of his ANBU mask. "Rai, you okay? You need me to do anything?" He pulled out a small green jar and unscrewed the lid, releasing a pungent scent of eucalyptus and menthol into the air. It was a trick any ninja who spent time dismembering corpses knew--something to get the stench of death out of your head. He dipped a finger in the goo in the jar and smeared it on his upper lip, then held the jar for Raidou. "Come on, use some of this. It'll help you stop feeling like puking, and the only guy we're worried about still being able to find us is the reason we need this stuff in the first place."
Kuromaru finished spitting out loops of intestine--the guy had been living on ration bars and unripe berries--and gave Genma a dry look. It was lost on the man's back, hunched over Raidou. "I'm barely going above the gut," he said with great disdain. He forgave the human for yelling; everyone got a little crazy when their mates were down.
He nosed at the body, checking to be sure it really was dead, and then picked his way clear of the bloody, mutilated corpse. Prey he would eat, human or otherwise--but this hadn't been about hunting. This was about making sure this man paid in fear and pain for what he'd done to Tsume.
The smell of eucalyptus hit the air, obliterating everything else. He growled softly and couldn't quite hold back a sneeze, muttering under his breath about idiot humans and their delicate sensibilities. Considering how scent-blind they all were, he couldn't understand why they'd complain about the smell of death. He caught much more than they did, and it didn't turn his stomach.
Of more concern to him, now that the man was no longer a threat, was the fact that he couldn't smell Tsume. Then he caught the faintest sound of a half-step, and peered quickly into the shadow-wrought hall that led to this chamber.
She stood just outside the glow cast by one of the bulbs, her face white except for the two blood-red stripes down her cheeks. Her pupils were still dilated, black slashes in otherwise colorless eyes, shadowed by hair. She was pale, every step forward accompanied by a careful slide sideways; a dog ready to run at the slightest hint of something wrong.
Kuromaru stepped out into the corridor, sneezing again to clear the eucalyptus smell from his nose and taking a whiff of the cleaner air before the smell came out here, too, and killed everything.
The fear-scent rose as she stared at the tableau, and he turned to look. The missing nin's dead body, Genma and Raidou just in sight, various weapons littering the floor. He didn't see anything to be worried about, but her eyes were moving faster, face weaving back and forth to try and catch any sort of smell under the awful eucalyptus.
Kuromaru slid up to her, lowering his head to lick at her palm. Her hand lifted, fingers burying in his thick fur. "He's dead, now," he growled, hackles--still slightly lifted--rising higher. "Genma's going to eat his eyes."
He felt her twitch, but wasn't sure why. "What's wrong with Raidou?"
He had to think about that, had to trace back his memories because so little made sense. "Genjutsu," he guessed finally. "Genma's gonna fix him."
She twitched again, and he felt nails formed from chakra dig into his fur. Chakra up and down her arms, giving her claws, fangs, strength and speed. Even though the man was dead. Kuromaru whined, aware something was still wrong.
"Genma?" Tsume called, her voice barely carrying. "What's wrong with Raidou?" She didn't step any closer to the room.
Tsume's voice. Genma snapped his head around, catching sight of the other agent in the dim arch of the tunnel beyond the storeroom door. She had a hand on Kuromaru's head, protruding fangs in what was almost a snarl, and a tension about her that said she was prepared to flee in an instant. Or attack. "It's genjutsu," Genma said, in as even a tone as he could manage. "Same as what got you. Genjutsu, but we killed the caster. Kimura had a doujutsu that let him cast some kind of complex genjutsu that doesn't break easily."
He prayed she was able to understand that much. That the jutsu had broken enough on her that she was able to recognize the truth. Because when she'd woken before she'd clearly been afraid of them. Afraid of him. At least this time she seemed to know his name. "It's just genjutsu, I think. I don't see any obvious injuries. How about you, are you hurt?"
She couldn't smell him over the eucalyptus. She lifted her chin, weaving back and forth, trying to catch deception or stress or blood or anything and unable to do so. Her sinuses burned from the smell. She blinked back tears, and sneezed explosively. "No. I'm not hurt." Except for phantom pain that came and went with the memories--
smell of arousal, a hand on her thigh
--and those would fade. If she had to bury herself in the here and now and dive into Pack mentality, they would fade.
Seeing Genma and Raidou with the body in the corner didn't help. It was just like it had been.
Except it hadn't been at all. She curled her fingers, grounding herself in the feel of pelt. "What needs to be done?" She could function. It was her job. As long as she could keep Kuromaru between them, she could do almost anything.
They were being smelly again. Kuromaru sighed and slid himself around a pit suddenly illuminated by cast-off light, feeling oddly exposed. He closed his over-sensitive eyes to slits and rounded the corner, catching sight of the two--no, three, but the other just smelled like a fainter Raidou--men coming down the tunnel.
"Tsume's clearing the area." He glanced at Genma's leg and his ears swiveled against his head. "Watch out up ahead. Stick close to the walls. Couple'a traps that didn't detonate. I think I got 'em all--sent a clone in--but we should still be careful. If you just follow my tail you'll stay safe."
Of course, they were both looking a little unsteady--he discounted the faint-smelling Raidou as a clone, and therefore expendable--and he didn't quite trust their wobbly two legs not to fall right out from underneath them at the best of times. His ears flattened back farther and he looked at Genma, the more unstable of the two, to offer reluctantly, "You need a lift?"
Kuromaru's offer did what even Raidou's teasing couldn't: it focused Genma on the immediate here and now with a laser intensity. "I'm fine," he snapped. "I don't need to be carried out like some casualty."
He'd been carried out of the prison. Carried nearly-unconscious on the back of Arakaki Mizuno, the brother of ANBU's current director and a senior ANBU himself. He remembered the sudden swarm of ANBU into the cell, remembered the woman frozen in horror in the corner, and the other two, masked and armoured, stepping over the bodies of the freshly-dead Stone ninja to get to him, shackled to a table with bloodied, broken hands held in place for the next blow. One that never came, because Mizuno and his team finally arrived, too late to save Seijuro, but in time for him. He remembered watching Mizuno shove his mask back to look at him with soulful, nearly black eyes under heavy brows. Remembered the older man putting a hand on his shoulder and telling him, "Hang on a little longer, son. We're getting you out now."
This was different.
This was a mission, not a prison. He was walking out of it on his own feet, even if he had to limp. Even if he had to lean on Raidou and his clone. Because this wasn't that place, and Kimura was dead so the genjutsu was broken. Raidou hesitated at his side, and Genma leaned against him. "Not you. You... can help. My leg's a little unsteady. But I don't need to be carried."
It wasn't easy for a canine to roll its eyes, but Kuromaru managed it, mostly with a twist of his head to indicate what he was doing. Mates. "Then if you two are done bonding," the disgust in his tone was evident, "can we please go?" He paused to glare at Genma once more. "And if you slow us down, I'm going to be very unhappy." He didn't care that it was his bite that caused the slowing, or that Genma was officially the team leader. He only really cared that Tsume smelled like half rotten peaches and he wanted to get her back to safety.
Preferably before anyone else scented the fear-weakness and tried to do something. He gave Raidou a long, hard look, then turned and slid down the wall of the corridor, keeping well clear of the few traps that were left.
Raidou braced an automatic hand around Genma's waist, and stared after the dog. "...huh," he said finally. He glanced at Genma. "Y'know, I've never been a fan of fur as a fashion. But he's making me want to get a new coat in a hurry. Possibly a hat."
Genma was doing a little of the same with his refusal to be carried, but at least Raidou was pretty sure he knew where that was coming from. Besides, fashioning a Genma-coat from his friend would sort of defeat the whole purpose of back up.
He snorted, banishing the train of thought, and strengthened his chakra link with the clone. White light bloomed strong and bright in the dark. "C'mon, lover boy. Better catch up before dog-boss gets mouthy again."
"Yeah," Genma agreed, and sent chakra into his leg to ease the swelling away from torn muscle and get it working again. No slowing down, no stumbling, no holding them up. Tsume was out there and not alright. Raidou was barely holding it together. Genma himself was limping and shaking and wanting to cast a dispel every five seconds for a genjutsu that was already broken, leaning on his friend because he needed to, much as he hated to admit it. The faster they got out of the mine and into daylight, the better chances they all would have.
He stared into the dark ahead of them, at the rough walls cast into sharp shadow by the clone's light. He raised bloody hands in front of him, but stopped short of making the seals to create another clone to take the lead. An expendable body to set off any of those traps Kuromaru had warned about, without dispensing with the light behind them would be prudent but expensive. He wanted a clone, but husbanding their remaining chakra was becoming critical. Fighting that genjutsu had drained all of them, Raidou was using more than he should to maintain the one clone and its light, and the metal jutsu Genma'd cast was taxing under the best of circumstances.
"OK, as soon as we get past the trapped section, we run." Genma frowned when Raidou fixed him with a blank stare. "Don't give me that look, I can run. It's hardly more than a scratch," he said dismissively.
Thank your gods, Raidou thought to himself, relieved. He didn't say it this time. Instead he muttered "Good dog," to Kuromaru, and unzipped the belt pouch containing his medi-kit. A moment's search turned up a clean white roll of bandage. He picked out some antiseptic with it and held them within easy reach of his partner. Open palms. The last thing they needed was Genma freaking out from an unwary touch to his hands.
"Glad to have you back, fearless," he said, dropping his voice. It scraped low on a baritone, almost out of earshot for anyone but himself and Genma. If wolf ears picked it up, they'd be wise to say nothing. He glanced at Tsume while Genma tended to himself. "Will you be joining us in people-skin? Or do you plan to stay on four legs?"
Tsume's ears pricked up before flattening back unhappily again. She didn't slink away this time, but remained sitting beside the large mound of earth. "I can run faster like this." It was only partially true; she couldn't run fast enough to make much difference except in a sprint after prey. But she wasn't ready to change back. Not with Kuromaru's movements hampered and Raidou just standing there.
His smell still rankled against her senses, piercing like a broken dogwhistle. The genjutsu was fading, but her sense of wariness wasn't.
She didn't trust him. A fuzzy memory swirled to the surface; darkness and lust, blood and pain and the howl of a--
That hadn't happened.
Her tension peaked and sapped as Kuromaru's growl reached her, highly offended. "I am not a dog. And you--" he shifted carefully to look back at Genma without moving too much. "--You can hang onto my scruff. Fur pulls out once we start moving, but holding onto my skin won't hurt." He wasn't a horse, he was a predator; loose skin meant a rider would slide more. He'd rather not drop Genma because the guy was trying to be nice.
Genma managed to get the new bandage on without getting off Kuromaru's back. He pulled the whitish elasticized strips even tighter than his previous bandage, almost making a tourniquet out of it, because when he pulled the old bandage away and cut through the ruined cloth of his trousers to expose the wound, he was alarmed at the way fresh bright blood welled up in regular waves, confirming his theory of bleeding from some minor artery within the torn muscle. It was a bigger, more severe bite than he'd expected, bruised nearly black around deeply torn punctures. He might not have wanted to be carried home from this mission, but looking at the injury in the full light above ground, he finally had to agree that there was no way he was running the two days it would take them to get home.
He even accepted the tablets Raidou handed him without protest, swallowing down soldier, blood, and pain pills with a gulp of water from his friend's canteen. Raidou popped a pill into his own mouth--soldier pill, undoubtedly--with another small sip of water, and started to move out. Genma stopped him and insisted he drink more, but that was all he allowed before wolf, man and dog with his burden set off at a pace that defied their exhaustion.
It was galling to ride. More galling to find time slipping away, his vision defocusing and going grey at the edges. The effects of the hypothermia jutsu from the previous night and his chakra-depletion on top of the new injury finally caught up to him, and he settled into a sort of trance for hours, riding Kuromaru's loping gate with an uneasy grace that came from a highly trained sense of balance working against a deeply exhausted body and psyche. It was much later when they finally came to a halt, and that because his grip on Kuromaru had finally given way. He felt himself start to fall, felt the dog stop, and Raidou's hands on his back. Genma blinked and pushed himself upright again. He had no sense of how much time had passed other than to note that the sun, once bright and high, was now a memory below the horizon, dusting the sky a pale mauve.
After a while Raidou settled into a rhythm. His gait shifted, stance widening out until he fell into the familiar ground-eating lope that long-distance runners and decent ninja knew intimately. Tsume ran ahead, weaving in front of them as she scouted the path with all her senses; back-tracking them home. Kuromaru and Genma ran in the middle, the huge black dog pounded out a steady pace that never wavered. Raidou brought up the rear, obliterating their physical trail as he did so. There was nothing he could do about scent, but wiping away tracks was something even a genin could manage.
They broke for a rest every few hours, stopping just long enough for Raidou to catch his breath--the only one that needed to, both Inuzuka seemed tireless--before they carried on. It was only when the sun was nearly gone that Genma lost his balance for the first time, bringing them to their first unplanned halt.
Raidou steadied him and noticed the waxen sheen to his friend's face with a hidden internal twist. He pressed a bottle of water into Genma's hands, waiting for him to drink, and then pulled out the coil of rope he'd threatened Genma with before. "Nothing personal, lover boy. But I'd hate to see you eat some literal dust."
He dropped a wide loop around Genma's waist, ignoring his slurred protest, and pulled it tight, fitting it snugly against his armour. The rest wound around the front of Kuromaru's broad chest in two more loops before Raidou lashed it back, tying the end to Genma's new rope-belt. He tested the knots, aware the set-up was rough, and was satisfied Genma would stay in place. "Good enough," he murmured. "You can probably sleep if you need to. You won't fall off."
He stepped back and whistled quietly to Tsume, letting her know they could run again.
From: ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lululy
2010-08-25 01:30 am (UTC)
jordan retro 1 | (Link)
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