"Going in there killing is likely to get us killed sooner rather'n later," Ryouma said mildly. He shoved his mask to the side of his head, rubbed his sweaty glove over his sweatier cheeks, and poured half his canteen over his head. Didn't much help the whole wet and dripping bit, but at least he didn't feel quite so much like his face was on fire.

And compared to yesterday, they'd been taking it slow.

"I like plans," he added, gulping down a quarter of the remaining water in his canteen before he capped it again. "And maps. Maps are awesome. And I betcha Intel was thinking of something when they were generous enough to give us two." The pretty little watercolor had gotten them here; it was the swiftly penciled blueprint's turn, now. Some Intel agent had sat almost where they were standing, maybe, and sketched out the details of the fortress for the Hunters who would follow him. He'd even included the nightingale floor, which Ryouma almost wished he could try out for the sheer fun of it.

"Lookit," he said, crouching to spread the drawings out on the new spring grass. "Here's the front gate; here's the handy little back gate; fortunately we're ninja so we don't need either of 'em. But it's pretty useful to know that if you come over the wall, you go in this door and down this hall, and a couple turns and a staircase and a hallway later..."

He squinted at the neat kanji labeling the little square. "You're in someone's room, at any rate. Damn, he shoulda just stuck with the pictures. But here--" he tapped a row of characters marching down the side of the page--"I'm pretty sure this's the guard schedule. It's times, at any rate, which makes sense."

Katsuko's mask had tipped to stare at him, now, instead of the blueprint.

"I got better things to learn in my Academy days than kanji," Ryouma said airily. "Like, if you plot a route ahead of time, and go in at the right time, you're a lot more likely to run into your target instead of his personal army. And if we find him first, he doesn't get to run out his handy little back gate. See?"

Wrenching her mind from killing-mode back into thinking-mode was hard enough. Trying to understand what Ryouma was trying to say was even harder. The plan, she got. Blueprints, blah blah, wait for an opportune time to strike, blah blah...Ryouma was good at the whole tactics thing.

Not so the whole reading thing, but...

He was really illiterate? Katsuko wrinkled her brow, but crouched down beside him and placed a finger on the bedroom Ryouma had pointed out before. "Masahiko's aide lives here, and one of the doors in his room opens onto Masahiko's suite."

She lifted her finger and traced the kanji running down the side of the page. "And you're right, this is the guards' schedule. They change every three hours."

Ryouma's eyes were narrowed in concentration as he stared down at the blueprints. Katsuko took her hand off the paper and wrapped her hands around her knees, rocking back onto her heels. "It also says that Masahiko retires to bed around midnight and rises at dawn pretty regularly."

"So twilight on either side'd be the best time to hit," Ryouma said, sketching an imaginary line over the wall and up the stairs. "Get 'em while the light's bad, people're thinking about dinner or wishing they were back in bed, and nobody's quite sure what anybody else's doing. Dawn'd be the best time for maximum confusion, but it'll be easier to lose pursuit if we hit after sunset. We'd better head towards Lightning Country afterwards and then double back, just in case." He glanced up at the noon sun. "Damn, I hate waiting."

At least they still had some blanks to fill in, along with the time they'd have to fill up. Ryouma stretched out on his stomach in the thin new grass, pillowed his chin on his fists, and invited, "Now's your chance. Tell me what I'm sayin' wrong, or what you think'd make it more right. Or, hell, gimme a new plan entirely, if you wanna do the reading and the thinking." He grinned up sunnily at her.

This mission was going to be pretty damn awesome. A pretty partner who did all the reading without kicking up any sort of fuss at all; a straight-forward assassination with no need for undercover guises or play-acting; an A-rank mission with nothing at stake but death or glory. Or money, which came out about the same.

"Doing the reading and the thinking?" Katsuko asked with good-humored indignation. "I'm sorry, I don't think I could handle all that mental multi-tasking. The pressure would be too much."

She relaxed her arms and folded her legs into a cross-legged sitting position, looking down at Ryouma's face. He grinned up at her, everything about his body language and tone saying he was relaxed and cheerful. It wasn't a reaction she'd expect from most shinobi right before a heavy-combat mission.

She was starting to realize that Ryouma was not like most shinobi. It was a thought she filed away to think about sometime after the mission, when bloodlust and Masahiko's bounty weren't taking up her attention.

"I'd say strike at sunset," Katsuko said thoughtfully, turning to gaze down at the fortress. "People get afraid, when night falls. Superstition and horror tales and all that. Makes them fearful, especially when they're stuck alone with nothing else around for miles. Scared of their own shadows."

Her belt pouch rustled as she took out a packet of explosion tags. "You've got a good plan. With my clones putting these notes on the other side of the fortress, we can go in and take Masahiko out. I'll make a distraction afterwards so that the explosions knock out a large part of the structural support and hits most of the guard barracks. We won't have to worry about pursuit at all."

"Say that after you've spent three months on the run in north-eastern Lightning Country," Ryouma said, teasing a young blade of grass out of its sheath. He nibbled on the white end. "You always worry about pursuit. But that sounds like we won't have to worry as much."

With six hours to go, a rough attack plan already sketched out, and nothing to do but wait till sunset, it was hard to worry at all.

The time passed easily. They took turns napping while the other kept watch; they split a light meal of energy bars and water. They watched the fortress, critiquing the soldiers' drill, checking the guards' routines against the times the Intel agent had supplied. Ryouma stretched out and warmed up with his kata; Katsuko sharpened her swords until the honed blades could split a hair. As twilight fell and the guard on the eastern parapet turned to pace his way northward, they left their hiding place and chased the lengthening shadows down to the fortress. Seventy-five steps for the guard; half a mile for the ninja. They dropped flat in a dimple of land when he turned to patrol the other way, and ran on when he turned back again. Before the first stars had begun to spring out against the velvet sky, they were beneath the fortress wall.

Ryouma palmed a soldier-pill from the bottle in his hip-pouch and slipped it under his mask. "You doin' good?" he murmured to his partner. She was a live wire, practically vibrating with tension, breathing faster than their run should have required. "Only usually I'm the reckless one. And next to you, I'm feelin' pretty damn zen."

"Earthquakes are zen compared to me, right now," Katsuko snorted, and ran her fingers over the hilt of her mother's katana for probably the fifteenth time in the last five minutes. The guard on the eastern parapet was almost on top of them; she could feel him, making eddies in the air with the swing of his armor and the smell of freshly oiled steel. Just a couple of feet more...just a couple and--

Oh, fuck it.

Katsuko dug her toes and fingers into some chinks in the stone and nearly flew up the wall on adrenaline and muscle strength alone, unable to trust her chakra to not give her away. Her head pounded in time with her heart as she reached the very top and swung herself up and over. The guard glanced over his shoulder as she drew her kodachi but it was already much, much too late for him to shout for help.

One gloved hand clapped over his mouth as she came up behind him and yanked his head back, exposing the soft, vulnerable flesh of his throat. He jerked once as she sliced her kodachi neatly across his neck, nearly decapitating him with the force of her attack.

Cloth rustled softly behind her and Katsuko glanced back as she hauled the body towards the parapet railing. Ryouma was looking around, alert for unseen enemies and surprises. After she dumped the guard's corpse over the edge, neat as a maid emptying a chamber pot out the window, she turned to him and signed, All clear?

Some hand-signals were easier than others. Ryouma jerked a thumbs-up and turned it sideways at the squat, square tower dominating the fortress's nearest corner. According to the blueprints Intel had provided and Katsuko had interpreted, Masahiko and his closest aides kept their offices and bedrooms in this tower, leaving the remaining three for supplies, barracks, and more sentries. Assuming he hadn't decided to move into the grain stores, he should be easy enough to find.

Of course, Ryouma had probably just jinxed their mission by thinking that. He bared his teeth at whatever was watching and launched into the seals for a henge'd kage bunshin. He hadn't got much of a look at the dead guard's face before blood masked it, but in the dark and at a distance no one would be looking for detail, anyway. If they got close enough to see his bunshin had a straight nose where the guard had a crooked one, they were too close.

"Watch our backs," he told the clone softly, and slipped off into the gathering dusk.

He shaped more seals as he went, gathering chakra at a low roil. Greenish darkness hazed his hands. The heavy wooden door at the end of the wall opened inward; he nudged it with his toe, and a thin trickle of yellow light spilled out. "Yousuke?" someone asked. "Somethin' wrong? Your shift's not over yet--"

For a flicker of a second, Ryouma considered releasing the Nikutai Tokasu, weaving a henge, and trying to pull it off. But there were far too many ways that could go wrong--and he was better at killing than lying, anyway.

If they were quick enough, maybe they wouldn't even set off any alarms.

His first kick smashed the door back into the wall, half-crushing the man who'd been standing behind it. Ryouma slammed one blackened fist into his face before he could let out a scream, and spun to meet the man lurching up from the poker-table and reaching for a knife. Then Katsuko was in the guard-chamber with him, and the sweet tang of blood mingled with the heavy reek of rot.

Only one man managed half a scream before Ryouma dissolved his voicebox and Katsuko's sword slid between his ribs. Four corpses in as many seconds. Ryouma caught his first breath since he'd kicked the door down.

"We're good," he said, and went to check the inner door.

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"No, we're awesome," Katsuko corrected. She eased the last guard's body down to the floor, rifling through his pockets for any cool-looking useful items. Shrugging when she couldn't find anything, she withdrew her hands and glanced at the man's face--or what was left of it.

Ryouma hadn't been joking when he'd said the Nikutai Tokasu was a rot jutsu. The man's throat and jaw were completely decayed, putrid black sludge leaking all over his chest. He smelled like the corpses left to moulder for weeks on the battlefield. Katsuko backed away, resisting the urge to put her hand over the nose-holes of her mask, and got to her feet.

Her partner was peering through the inner door that led into the fortress's passageways, the muscles of his back and shoulders taut with adrenaline and anticipation. She slunk up behind him and tapped him on the back, fingers flickering in scout-sign when he turned to look at her. All clear?

More guards, Ryouma replied with a shake of his head, come check noise.

Damn it. This had to be quick if they didn't want Masahiko's whole damn army coming down on their heads. Although that would be kind of fun.

After a moment, she signed back at him, We attack. Kill them quiet.

It was a reckless plan, but it would buy them the time they needed to get closer to Masahiko's quarters. If it succeeded.

Well, she hadn't made it into ANBU by running away from danger.

Ryouma nodded at her and gave her another thumbs-up (she could almost feel him grin behind his mask) and slipped into the inner passageway, his hands flickering inky green. Katsuko hefted her blood-slick blades and ran after him.

Right, left--they turned and nearly ran over the small group of five guards who were coming around the corner, torches held high. "Shinobi!" one of them squeaked in surprise, and that was all any of them had time to say.

Katsuko took the one who'd talked, sliding around the clumsy thrust of his spear and cleaving his head neatly in two with an overhead strike. He sagged onto her, body still twitching, and she spun and pushed him onto the blades of two of his comrades as they advanced. They staggered backwards under the weight and she sprang forward and up, kodachi and katana blurring. Two heads, eyes and mouths wide with surprise and terror, fell towards the ground. Katsuko cursed and threw herself forward, leaving her katana buried in the guards' bodies. She managed to catch one head with her free hand and speared the other with her kodachi before they could hit the ground and make noise.

There was an odd gurgling sound and Katsuko looked around to see Ryouma pinning the remaining two guards to the wall, one inky green hand wrapped around each neck. Katsuko turned away as she saw the brown-black dappling of rot creep up each terrified man's face and laid the heads down, gently, on the ground.

Ryouma looked at her once the rot jutsu had done its job, dark eyes almost invisible behind the Ram mask. Katsuko started to scout-sign--

And a loud, braying sound, like the wail of a thousand pained hunting dogs, shattered the silence in the corridor. "Intruders!" someone bellowed from up on the wall, and the call was taken up and repeated throughout the fortress until it seemed like the walls of the corridor themselves were crying the alarm. The headless bodies piled up against each other swayed and collapsed to the ground with a clatter of armor.

She stared at Ryouma. Ryouma stared back.

Fuck.

Katsuko snatched her katana up and started to run.

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So much for stealthy. Ryouma shook black slime off his hands, eased the ruined corpses down onto the floor, and followed at Katsuko's heels. At a turn in the passageway, where the corridor connected to a wider hall, he passed her. He'd probably survive a sword in the back, if he had to stop fast, but she wouldn't have a chance against the touch of putrid chakra.

The fortress guards didn't, either. They met the next pair at the top of the narrow spiraling stair that led, according to the blueprints, down to Masahiko's quarters. The difference in height, as the guards raced up the steps, was just enough that Ryouma could slap the first man in the face and leave oozing black ruin behind. Katsuko's sword slid under his arm to slice the second guard nearly in half. Both bodies tumbled down the stairs, tripping the men who came dashing up after them. One of the new arrivals nearly gutted himself on his own sword. They barely needed Ryouma and Katsuko's help to finish them off, but the sprawling corpses choked the narrow stone curve, and left the stairs slippery with blood and rot.

Ryouma lit his feet with chakra and took to the wall, and Katsuko followed. He could feel her at his back, brimming with chakra like a forestfire, breathing like a woman ready to laugh. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to turn and kiss her, too, but that could wait for when they weren't racing sideways down a spiraling staircase toward the sound of more men beginning the climb. He hadn't had a mission like this--death and glory and nothing else that mattered--for longer than he cared to remember, and he wasn't sure he'd ever had a mission partner like her.

Maybe Misao...

Thought drowned in a welter of blood as they met the next band of guards, almost at the foot of the stairs. Katsuko spun into her dance of steel and death, and Ryouma's mouth stretched in a fierce, fixed grin. This was easy. This was almost fun. The quarters were too cramped for the guards' long swords; Katsuko was relying almost exclusively on her shorter kodachi now, and Ryouma could duck in and out of reach as the enclosing walls and struggling bodies hampered the guards' swing. He left a blackened handprint on one man's cheek, spun to block a strike with the side of his palm against the inside of another man's elbow, and barely felt the glancing blow against his hip as Katsuko took down the man who'd just tried to gut him.

Something slithered down his legs. He spared one half-glance--but it was his belt huddling blood-spattered around his feet, not his guts. He kicked it aside and dodged under the next swinging sword, sacrificing a narrow slice on his shoulder for the satisfaction of his palm grounding in the unprotected flesh under his victim's arm. They were already halfway down the hallway he'd seen on the blueprints; that door on the right would open into Masahiko's aide's bedroom, and beyond that were the quarters of the target himself...

The door exploded outwards in a hurricane of lightning and wind and fury. Former Cloud-nin, Ryouma remembered abruptly, in the after-shock. The man he'd just hit--the man whose sword was still red with Ryouma's blood--sank slowly to the floor, his mouth open in surprise. The rot hadn't killed him yet; the arm-length splinter impaling his back did it first. Cloud-nin. I should've--.

He barely even saw the white light gathering at the fingertips of the tall man framed in the doorway before lightning arced. Hands still haloed with the gangrenous glow of the Nikutai Tokasu lifted far, far too late to form the seals for a counter-jutsu. The lightning jutsu smashed him into the wall, and he lost breath, and light, and time.

What the...?

Katsuko started and flung her arm up at the blast of light, shielding her eyes. Pieces of the exploding door pelted her like rain; she coughed at the smoke and slitted her eyes open in time to see the tall silhouette shoot white lightning at Ryouma and send him flying. Her limbs seemed rooted to the spot as she heard the solid thud of his body hitting the wall.

Time slowed down.

"Ry--!" She couldn't even get his full name out before the tall Cloud-nin--Masahiko--was there, leaving blurry afterimages in the air as his hands shot toward her throat.

So fast.

Trapped between oh shit no Ryouma and oh shit no Masahiko, Katsuko nearly froze. Her body acted for her, slamming her kodachi between them so that the Cloud-nin's crackling hands glanced off the habaki of the blade, just below the hilt. The force of that deflected blow rattled in her teeth and shook her to the bones.

Animal instinct--terror survival have to move--made her shove a knee between them and use the leverage to kick away, bringing her swords up in a guard as she skidded to a halt.

Masahiko looked at her with pale, cruel eyes and chuckled, a scornful sound that pierced right through the haze of terror and woke something raw and roiling and ugly in her. "You've got a lot of nerve, ANBU. Coming right into the heart of the castle to try and kill me--"

He sent another blast of lightning at her, a white-hot scream of energy that, when she dodged it, left a smoking hole in the wall. Rolling back to her feet, Katsuko crouched down low and started to circle around him.

"--but it was a nice try," Masahiko continued as if he hadn't just tried to blast her out of existence, spreading his arms out wide in a beckoning gesture. The leer on his face made it clear he wasn't inviting her to come and attack him. "Now why don't you put those little toys down, darling girl, you've already had fun with my soldiers. Be nice, and I might find a...use...for you." His eyes traveled over her body in the skintight uniform, predatory and appreciative.

Son of a--

Behind the mask, Katsuko's lips peeled back from her teeth. Rage boiled in her veins, just under the surface, nearly blurring her vision.

She was going to kill this bastard slow.

Masahiko kept on talking as if he hadn't just signed his own death warrant. "It was a stroke of luck that I took your partner out first, I suppose. Now I can take my time--"

He staggered back as her killing intent hit him full in the face, a rising tidal wave of bloodlust that caught him off-guard long enough for her to get nice and close.

Her first hit caught across the shoulder, laying flesh open to the bone. He managed to block her second strike with his arm guard but she simply reversed her blow, slamming the butt of her kodachi into his chin in an uppercut. Something crunched and he made a strangled sound--she'd shattered his jaw.

Good. Maybe he'd shut up, now.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him starting up the lightning jutsu; she flipped her katana up and stabbed him in the stomach. She almost screamed in frustration as the blade was deflected by hidden armor, but managed to make the best of a bad situation and twisted the hilt to slice across unprotected skin and bone underneath the armpit.

Masahiko grunted and threw his hand up; Katsuko sneered and got ready to block. One-trick pony, this guy. If she could manage to block it she'd be--

Lightning shot out of his hands, heading not for her, but for the limp, unconscious form of--

Ryouma.

She wasn't even aware that she'd lunged, just twisted her chakra up into her blades and met the jutsu head-on, putting herself between Masahiko and her partner. The flare of energy blinded her; she couldn't tell where Masahiko was or--

Something hit her from the side, a crackling energy different from the last jutsu but still just as crushing. Katsuko's swords spun out of her hands as she soared through the air, doubled over the fist Masahiko had buried in her gut.

Dimly, she was aware that the wall was rushing up behind her. Reflex took over; she grabbed the twisted mass of her chakra and shoved it, all of it, into her back and the air behind her. Had to make a cushion, something to soften the impact--

Air rushed out of her lungs as she hit the wall, hard.

Light, then

dark, then

silence.

Light seared Ryouma's eyes when his lids first parted; he clamped them tight again and tried breathing instead. That was even worse. Something at the point of his right shoulder burst into flames at the first gentle movement of inflating lungs. He managed to slit his eyes open enough to find that he was not, in fact, on fire; but it looked like he had been. An ugly, oozing burn pitted the hollow just below where his collarbone met his shoulder-socket. The flame-resistant cloth of his shirt had blistered away from the wound, and the buckle of his armor shoulder-strap had fused to the chest-plate.

Lightning, he remembered dimly. Cloud-nin. Lightning jutsu.

Katsuko.

His aching skull tapped gently against the stone wall as he tipped his head back, trying to scan the ruined corridor. His vision was dotted and seared with purple spots and white flares, but when he blinked hard it cleared a little. The body of the splinter-skewered guard lay very close, his head turned to face Ryouma, blood leaking out of his mouth to mingle with the rotted flesh sloughing off his shoulder. Beyond him, a small knot of the surviving guards had gathered around a tall, broad-shouldered man in a bloody silk robe over lacquered armor. One of the men seemed to be trying to tend to his master's wounds, but was waved impatiently away. The tall man--Masahiko--and the rest of his soldiers seemed focused on a small, crumpled heap at their feet. One man lifted his drawn sword, as if to strike.

Masahiko didn't bother ordering him to stand down. Blood-drops spattered through the air as he slammed the man into the wall, against the cracked brickwork where something had already struck hard enough to shatter stone. Someone else said disgustedly, "Don't be a fool, Shuuichi. The bitch wounded Masahiko-dono. She can't die nearly that easy."

Ryouma's lips curled back from his teeth. She's not dying at all.

He wasn't sure if he could make it to his feet, or even to his knees; he didn't bother trying. His hands moved all right, at least, even if they were weaker and shakier than they should have been. Ox, Hare, Bird, Boar. Masahiko was barely ten feet away, easily within range. Hare, Monkey, Dog, Ram. The chakra didn't come easily; his pathways felt as if they'd been seared by the same lightning strike that had fried his shoulder. Probably they had, as the jutsu-driven electricity surged through his body. But it came, drop by drop, thread by thread, building like a storm. Horse, Monkey, Dragon, Ox...

Masahiko's booted foot connected solidly with Katsuko's ribs. Her slight body smashed against the wall and rolled back. Someone laughed. Masahiko, his bruise-darkened face tight with pain and fury, drew his foot back again.

Snake.

Chakra roiled, feral, furious, black with killer intent. Masahiko felt it, too late. He turned, but Ryouma was already straightening his left arm, gripping his elbow with his weakened right hand. "Naizou Tokasu no Jutsu, you bastard," he said.

The bolt of chakra took Masahiko straight in the chest. He lurched a step backward with the force of it. Someone yelled; someone else reached out to steady him. He dropped between their hands, vomiting liquid globs of half-dissolved organs. He was dead before he hit the floor.

One of the men threw up. Another, white-faced, took a step toward Ryouma. Shaking, chakra-drained, blurry-eyed, Ryouma still managed to grin at him. "You volunteerin' for next?"

Only one of the guards even hesitated before he ran.

Which left Ryouma, the corpses...and Katsuko. He tried pushing himself to his feet, and his left elbow buckled twice before he managed it. Limping, swearing at every step, he made his way to Katsuko. She was curled against the wall in a pool of what looked alarmingly like her own blood; there were red smears on the wall, too, where she'd hit. But Masahiko and his men had wanted her to die slowly, which meant--

Her eyes were open, in the shadows of her mask. Ryouma stopped, tilting a little, and grinned crazily down at her. "You've gotta admit that was impressive, right?"

"Nrrrgggh," Katsuko managed, and grinned up at him. "Totally...awesome."

Shooting a glance at Masahiko's rotting form, she added, "But you shoulda...let me knock him around a bit...first."

Too much. Her throat burned. Overtaxed lungs seized and jarred her bruised ribs as she coughed, triggering a blinding pain that left her curled around herself. Oh fuck oh fuck she couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't move--

She scrabbled weakly at her chakra, a drowning man clutching at a life preserver; Ryouma shifted and kneeled down beside her. One leg settled warm beside her own; his hand brushed at her hair. Startled, she went still and felt him fumble his first two fingers onto the pressure point between her neck and ear. Chakra, cool and comforting and not hers, flowed into her pathways. Her lungs shuddered open all at once, almost bursting as oxygen slammed into her airways.

Katsuko blinked her eyes open and fumbled her hand onto Ryouma's arm, noting with detached amusement that she couldn't even close her fingers around his wrist, and squeezed it once in wordless thanks.

They stayed like that until her heart stopped jackhammering in her ears, long enough for her to determine that she could still move all her fingers and toes and for her to tentatively feel for his chakra.

Kami.

How did Ryouma even have enough left to give her a jolt? Her energy nearly swamped his, her swollen chakra almost eclipsing the guttering ashes he had left in his system. Her eyes skittered towards his waist, looking for the equipment belt that usually held soldier pills, but it had been torn off in the fight. The long gash at his hip where a blade had sliced off the belt ties was still bleeding.

Damn it all to hells. Because of her chakra, she didn't carry soldier pills with her on missions--if she ever got to the point where even her inexhaustible reserves needed replenishing, it would be when she was dead or as good as.

They still needed to burn the fortress--her clones had set themselves up and were waiting for her signal--and make their escape, and she doubted her partner would even be able to stand up the way he was now. He needed energy, and fast.

A surge of worry and a large amount of determination let her push herself up on one hand, bringing her level with, well...Ryouma's chin.

Good enough.

He grinned weakly at her as she tugged his mask off, dropping the stylized ram's head like so much trash. She traced the contours of his face, searching for signs of chakra exhaustion.

"You're okay," she said. It was a question and reassurance, all in one.

Ryouma gave a half-shrug and quickly stilled it. "I'll live." The grin grew stronger. "Better'n them."

The rat mask came off with a little more difficulty, since she couldn't see the ties, but she breathed easier when the barrier of cold white porcelain was gone.

If he asked questions later, she could always say she'd hit her head.

"Chakra jolt," she gave a crooked little smirk, raising an eyebrow. "Just returning the favor."

She cupped a hand around the back of his neck to bring their mouths together, just a hard press of dry, chapped lips, and opened her chakra to him.

Chakra hit him like the deadly wave of a dam breaking, surging through parched streambeds, breaking down the riverbanks. His charred pathways fried all over again. He was drowning, burning, sloshing full of too much energy that wasn't his and couldn't figure out where to go--

His slick fingers knotted in her hair, painfully tight. A little of the bright-burning foreign chakra rerouted itself. Maybe his body, scorched by twelve years of molding chakra--and surviving the occasional soldier-pill overdose--knew how to deal with this, too, as long as he didn't mess it up by thinking about burning up.

If he was going to roast alive from the inside out, he might as well get something out of it.

She tasted like blood. Maybe that was him; he must've bitten his tongue when he'd slammed into the wall. The faint flavor of char was probably him, too. Sparks danced across his tongue, sizzling edges of a river of chakra; he thought abruptly of Kakashi. But her mouth tasted of ginger candy, sharp and spicy, with a tingle like caffeine, and he could feel her grinning against him. She hadn't quite laughed in battle, but she laughed when he kissed her, and she kissed him back.

Kakashi kissed like a drowning man, but Katsuko kissed like a girl thoroughly enjoying herself, like a girl promising nothing and looking forward to everything. She matched him step for step, and she took the lead when he paused to offer it. Relief rumbled deep in his chest, mingled with surprise and delight and an unexpected, reckless joy.

He'd killed the bad guy, saved the girl, kissed the girl. Everything else would fall into place.

He bent his head, heedless of the pain in his shoulder or the firestorm in his coils, and deepened the kiss.

Yes.

Ryouma smelled like clean sweat and burning things, so here and now and alive that Katsuko's heart stuttered in her chest. She rose to her knees, slinging her other hand over his shoulder, and purred like a contented hunting cat. He tasted like copper and char, with the faintest hint of lightning to round out the flavor palette.

Chakra raced between them, a crackle of energy transferred every time their teeth clashed and their tongues tangled together. It was like being in the eye of the lightning storm, breathtaking and powerful and oh-so-slightly dangerous.

Katsuko laughed, gleeful and mischievous, and licked her way into Ryouma's smiling mouth.

Her hands stroked along his back, familiarizing herself with the bumps of his spine and the raised scar tissue along his shoulders. There was a buzzing in her veins; she felt dizzy, intoxicated.

She didn't know how long they would have stayed like that, lost in each other's scent and taste, but eventually she found enough presence of mind to direct the flow of her chakra into Ryouma's system. Her energy stirred, sluggish as molten lava, and grudgingly went where she willed, racing into parched pathways. When her partner's system threatened to overflow, she cut off their connection with the brutal control honed from years of working with cold-eyed Hyuuga. The shock and loss almost knocked her backwards with the force of it; it was a feeling so close to pain that she keened.

Ryouma gasped and rocked back on his heels, steadying himself with a hand on the floor. He met her eyes distractedly, his gaze turned inward as she felt him resettle his chakra. Katsuko stared back, flummoxed to the utmost by her reaction to the kiss chakra transfusion.

"Uh," she started, then trailed off. Abruptly, she decided that this was really, really too awkward to talk about and twisted her chakra in the signal for her clones.

In the distance, something very large and probably very important exploded.

Katsuko staggered to her feet, scooping up her mask. She stared down at him, wide-eyed and breathing in short, staccato bursts. Her lips still tingled with the memory of his mouth on hers.

After a moment, she chanced a hesitant, "We should get out of here."

Because--right--there was still a mission to complete, after all.

"Sure," Ryouma said muzzily, without moving. His vision had cleared a little more, but there were still weird purple streaks in the corners, and the wall looked like it was tilting. No, that was him tilting. He planted his other hand in a sticky patch on the floor; it took him a moment to realize it was blood. Katsuko's blood.

But the multitude of oozing scratches clustered over her bare shoulders and upper arms looked shallow enough, even if they were bleeding more than he liked. A cutting-wind jutsu, maybe? She moved stiffly as she picked among the bodies to find her weapons, careful of her bruised torso, but the practiced eye diagnosed a cracked rib, not a gut-wound.

She hadn't kissed like a dying woman, either.

Ryouma grinned with a tiny resurgence of that unexpected delight. "Bet we can find someplace more...private," he said. "Slip into somethin' more comfortable." Or nothing at all. They both needed baths more than they needed sex, but--

Well, why not sex? She was smart and pretty and funny, with a sharp wit and a sleek body. He liked her, and she seemed to think he wasn't a total loss. She'd kissed him like she wanted more.

And the one time he'd broken his rule, after Misao--well, the three times, locked in the safety of that hotel room--nothing had gone wrong. Kakashi hadn't asked for any promises. They weren't in anything like a relationship. No strings, right?

Right.

He scrabbled for his discarded mask, molded a little of that familiar-foreign chakra, and lurched to his feet. The world tilted around him again, and his chakra swirled crazily within, but he didn't fall over. He did feel a little like throwing up. He thought of ginger, and swallowed the bile down.

"If you can find my utility belt, there should be painkillers in the kit in the right-hand pouch. We prolly both need 'em."

Painkillers, escape, baths, and sex. His world was looking brighter by the moment.

Katsuko paused, then looked sloooowwwwly over her shoulder at Ryouma. She stared at him for a few seconds.

"Well," she drawled at last. "It's good to know you're feeling better."

He grinned and winked.

Rolling her eyes, she turned away and kicked a corpse over. Its face had been rotted away and it stank of decay, but underneath it she found her kodachi. Impatiently rooting through the carnage, she located her katana a few feet from where she'd hit the wall and slid both her blades back into their sheathes.

People were shouting outside. Far away, she could hear the roar and hiss of a water-jutsu being applied to the fires her explosion tags had started. Armor clattered and echoed in the stairwell as reinforcements arrived.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of something long, black, and narrow. Shoving another corpse out of the way, she found Ryouma's hacked-off, bloodied, but otherwise unharmed utility belt. Popping open the correct pouch, she dug out two painkillers and swallowed them dry before tossing the whole thing back to Ryouma.

Not even two floors below them, a door slammed open.

"Time to go," she told her partner, and slid her mask back into place. She took to the walls and he followed.

The guards in the corridor flinched as Katsuko and Ryouma blew past them like a strong wind, unable to react as the two ninja darted for the landing door. Ryouma lagged a few paces behind her, still struggling with the influx of foreign chakra into his system. Katsuko drew her blades and tugged on her chakra, calling on her clones.

The copies surrounded them as they burst out into the chaotic night, forming a protective ring around her and her partner. Cold evening air shocked lungs used to the staleness of the fortress corridor, and Katsuko coughed as they cleared the courtyard and reached the outer walls.

She looked back, just once. The fortress was in ruins; the whole side opposite Masahiko's chambers was little more than a smoking, blackened crater in the ground. Corpses littered the former barracks, twisted and smoking. Firefighting crews ran to and fro, frantically trying to put out the stubborn, chakra-fueled inferno.

Katsuko grinned savagely and followed Ryouma over the outer wall.

This time, she let him set the pace. Ryouma was grimly, silently grateful. Sure, he had plenty of chakra to waste running, but it still wasn't sure it belonged to him; it still burned through his abused pathways,
and he had too little chakra of his own to assimilate it completely. This was probably the time when he was supposed to sit down and meditate until everything was in proper harmony and his zen was centered or whatever--but with a big flaming beacon lighting up the sky at his back, Ryouma didn't feel much like sitting down.

(Actually, he felt a lot like falling down, but that could wait.)

The shallow gash on his hip oozed sluggishly, stubbornly; the white-edged purple streaks came and went, along with his depth perception. His shoulder never actually stopped hurting, but somewhere around the second mile the painkillers kicked in and forced it back to a dull ache he could almost ignore.

They weren't heading for Lightning Country. Not even the best battle plans survived first contact with the enemy--and Ryouma was perfectly willing to acknowledge his weren't the best. Weakened and wounded as he and Katsuko were, and with the surviving guards left behind to identify them, their best chance lay in running like hell until they reached friendly territory.

Or until he fell over. Whichever.