Debris from their collapsing shelter threatened to bury Genma. He worked a blind translocation, aiming up, away, towards the wind-whipped treetops, hoping to catch a limb before he fell. His face slammed against rough bark, and only then did he remember his mask. Lost. At least he'd gotten his gloves and guards back on. Scrambling for a grip, he felt a tingle of electricity shiver through the entire tree trunk, through his body: his fingers clenched, toes curled, hair rose like an angry cat's.

He shoved off hard from the wet bark, not caring how far or badly he fell. Anything would be preferable to being roasted from the inside by a hundred-million volts.

The flash blinded him, wrapped in thunder so loud he felt more than heard it, and the tree exploded, splitting down the middle with a sound like a woman's scream.

He landed on his back, the air forced from his lungs by the impact so that for a second he lay unmoving, breathing impossible, vision reduced to the halo of that lightning bolt burned into his retinas. When he gasped in at last, vision clearing, he found a ninja racing towards him, blade held high to strike the decisive blow.

Genma translocated blind again. This time he collided with stone, a bone-jarring, disorienting jolt as he materialized against a former wall of their shelter.

"Rina!" There was no sign of her. And the lightning was gathering again, zigzagging down towards him as if the enemy ninja were controlling the strikes.

Maybe, he thought, with sick terror, they were.

The bolt blasted a crater in the earth where Genma had been, but he was safely away. Back up in the trees again.

Rina pressed her back to a tree trunk, then threw herself behind it as the ground beneath her heaved up a projectile expulsion of rocks, shaking the bark with shuddering drumbeat impacts. She ducked away, spinning off two immaterial clones paired with quick genjutsu splashes in the mud, trying to buy some time.

This wasn't good. She couldn't hide underground, she'd drown in seconds. And somehow, these Kumo-nin--she didn't even know how many there were, they just faded in and out like specters--had been able to track them even through the unnatural fury of the storm. It shouldn't be possible--how had they gotten past her seal so easily?

The best conclusion she could come to, though she didn't like the implications, was that they'd been out there since before she'd put it up. Waiting.

Rina gasped in a breath, then wrenched her dregs of chakra into shape as three lightning bolts crashed down with incandescent fury, leaving two puffs of smoke from her clones--and one blackened log. Already flinging herself away to the next tree, she felt a twist of satisfaction as, behind her, she felt the tag on the log ignite.

The next leap stopped her short; there was a shape leaning against a branch, silhouetted against the sky in a flash of angry light. White hair in a shock of verticality stood out against stark black skin and gleaming yellow eyes. Pearly teeth glittered in a fierce, joyful grin.

Shit.

As electricity whipped the air into tingling anticipation, and Rina gathered her chakra around her again, she grasped at the thought: two can play the explosion game.

A blast shook the ground, swayed the branches where Genma hid. A score of meters to Genma's right, yellow-edged, fire-lit smoke mushroomed up in what he had to hope was one of Rina's detonating seals. Another bolt of lightning rent the sky, illuminating shadows, tearing limbs from trees, and the icy rain turned to hail again. He raced towards the dying fireball, flickering through translocations with more precision now.

There! There in the trees, a silhouette: a dark, demon-like woman with jagged marks on her ebony cheeks, lit by another flicker of lightning that crashed perilously close to a running figure. The woman in the trees weaved her hands together, and called up another answer from the clouds.

Bloodline limit, it had to be. A ninjutsu evolved in Lightning Country's chaotic weather, its deadly storms. A ninjutsu to harness the power of the tempest. If no one from Konoha had catalogued it before, he'd be shocked. Perhaps in a land with fewer storms, it just wasn't as much of a threat.

Not that it mattered. What mattered was grounding those bolts away from Rina. For that, Genma had jutsu of his own. Dangerous jutsu, desperate jutsu, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and he and Rina were hopelessly outmatched. He called up his own chakra, a blend of the still-screaming tide of soldier pill chakra, and life energy from his very core, and formed a metal jutsu.

Metal was everywhere. Traces from the enemy ninja's weapons. Rina's weapons. The kunai at his own side. Copper from the very earth itself. He drew it into the jutsu, atom by atom, reformed it, and sent the whole molten ball spinning at the lightning-casting ninja just as she unleashed the storm's fury once more.

The lightning sought ground with unerring precision, earthing itself in the conductive target. The Kumo woman was lifted into the air, thrown back ten meters trailing smoke, and lay unmoving. In the dying flashes of lightning, Genma could see a copper-plated sheen obliterating the woman's face.

A cloud of billowing steam rose up where molten metal impacted waterlogged earth. The storm's fury immediately lessened, now spreading its ire impartially across the landscape rather than focusing in a knot of rage wherever they happened to be standing. Darting from shadow to shadow, tracing the path of the gleaming and deadly projectile back towards its source, Rina cast about among the trees for Genma.

There, behind that boulder! But a barrage of glittering needles proved the lie, biting deep into her shoulder and left hip, glancing off the thick material of her vest. With a wince, she pulled them out and sent them back, following an instant later with four kunai and four everpresent tags, fluttering and white. She could just make out an outlined shape, camouflaged against the angles of the rock, trapped inside the circle of her explosives.

The tags didn't go off. Rina's lips curved into an adrenaline-charged grin, and she held tight to a fifth sheet of inked paper.

With a shudder, the ground beneath her began to convulse, forcing her to leap and cling to a hanging tree branch with one hand, clenching the tag between her teeth. Changing the branch's contact point to her feet, she pressed her fingers into seals, whipping the falling rain and hail into a barrage of needle-point splinters of ice aimed at the hunched shape on the rock.

The other ninja would be wondering when her explosives were going to go off, she knew. If the fuse had failed, or if it was just a bluff. She didn't really care what he thought--so long as he stayed within her circle for just a few extra moments.

With a jolt of chakra to aching feet, she shoved herself off the branch moments before a towering mud cyclone ripped it from the trunk, roaring and gathering pine needles and debris as it chased her in her scramble towards the source of Genma's jutsu. Ten meters, twenty meters--crouch, leap, duck--thirty meters, forty...

As she reached the end of its range, Rina shoved the few last sluggish curls of her chakra into the final strip of inked seal paper.

Four simultaneous explosions split the darkness behind her, and the tornado of churning earth collapsed, lifeless, to the ground. Pillars of flame lent a red cast to the downpour, and Rina used the light to look for Genma.

By the time the echoes of the explosion had died, Genma had his sights on Rina. The collapsing-building sound of the earth jutsu that had been chasing her was a good clue. The only problem was getting to her. He started to run, but the earth heaved up under his feet. Violent spasms shook trees down, opened cracks in the soil, tossed boulders into the air as if they were pebbles. It was as if the earth itself were suffering an epileptic fit.

A stone nearly as large as the Heroes' Monument came hurtling out of the darkness, smashing a log to splinters in Genma's place, when Genma kawarimi'd away. Another shower of stones came flying, smaller fragments, but in mass just as deadly. He dodged again.

When a silver blade came slicing at him from his left, shaving an inch off his swinging hair and biting a shallow slice along his neck before gouging a deep furrow in his hastily flung up arm guard, he made his decision: time to cut and run.

"Rina!" He raced towards the place he was sure she had to be, where that mud twister had torn through the forest like a giant harvester's scythe.

The thrashing earth threw him off his feet again, and a wind jutsu caught him around the waist and flung him like a terrier flinging a rat. He landed in a tortured heap, one arm under him, one leg splayed at a hip-straining angle. Dazed but not knocked out, he groaned and gasped for breath, rolling onto his back. Lightning flickered again, and he heard a woman's screaming voice above the roar of the storm, above the roar of his own blood in his ears.

Rina was bending over him, shrieking his name. His eyes snapped to focus on her face, then he wrapped his arms around her, worked a translocation seal behind her back, and transported the two of them two kilometers away.

They landed in the same position they'd started in, Genma on his back, Rina toppling onto him, in an ice cold mountain stream.

Rina flailed, holding on to a full breath only through instinct. The disorientation of the forced translocation--always worse when someone else carried you along--mingled with the dizzying crush of frigid water, spinning her equilibrium into a confused whirl of darkness and sound.

Her left arm impacted something--Genma--and she kept her fingers loosely curled against the fabric until she felt him convulse and turn, angling towards the light. Twisting behind him, she propelled herself upwards with a splash and a gasp of chill air, just barely managing to clamber up on the rushing surface of the water with the faint threads of residual chakra she had left.

Here, the pounding rage of the tempest had subsided into the merest misty drizzle, though the air still hung thick and heavy with moisture. The trees pressed close around with sheltering, unblemished limbs, and only the tumbling murmur of the stream marred the motionless silence.

"Thanks," Rina breathed in a shaky exhale, hands and knees awkwardly splayed on the water's surface. Taking stock, she debated whether she had enough chakra to support her tentative buoyancy if she stood.

Genma clambered to his knees, shivering and coughing. He spat a mouthful of stream water, nodded a thanks to Rina, and reached a hand out to steady her. "You're okay?" He could feel how low her chakra had dipped, how shaky she was. A glance at the trees told him nothing helpful. The storm still rumbled close by, and a heavy mist-like fog was settling in around them, shading the early evening twilight into ghostly ash. It made Rina's pale face look frighteningly grey.

"Can you make it over there if I help?" he asked, shrugging one arm under hers and lifting. He tipped his chin towards the edge of the stream, a bend in the bank where the pallid branches of a dead tree, stripped of bark on its trip downstream, rose like bones from a graveyard.

She nodded warily, and let him take her weight, but only long enough to traverse the rough surface of the rushing water. As soon as her sandal touched sand, she tried to lurch away.

"Hang on," Genma told her. He kept a hold of her wrist, slung over his own much taller shoulder. "You're not steady." Neither was he. But he was steadier than she was. He could count on his own chakra, still strong, still buoyed by the chakra pill he'd taken during their oh-so-abbreviated rest. She probably needed another one. Definitely needed another one. And they needed to get out of there.

He snaked aching fingers into his medkit and produced the vial of soldier pills, handing one to her. "Take this. And then hold on to me," he instructed. "We're not nearly far enough away from those bastards."

The second chakra pill unfurled in an acid rush, a slow, seeping ache spreading under Rina's skin. With her remaining chakra at a dangerously low ebb, it hit her unbuffered and full-on; she breathed through the burn, and kept moving.

Her arm across Genma's wounded shoulder must have hurt, but he didn't say anything, so she let him suffer in silence. "You know where we are?" she asked instead, looking around, but overhanging branches blocked most of the sky, and the stars were still shrouded in fading evening light. From the moss on the trees and the burnished glow of the mist, all she could tell was that they were headed west.

Testing her feet, she found them steady, and shifted her weight back onto her own center in preparation for the long journey. They still needed to loop around and lose the enemy, if that was even possible on this foreign, unfamiliar terrain. Genma certainly couldn't carry her the whole way. Not when he'd practically carried her this far, already.

They'd take a wide circle, and maybe another translocation if either of them had the chakra for it, to hit their final path from an angle the Kumo-nin wouldn't expect. Memorized maps could pinpoint their location once they hit some landmarks, or the night sky once it was fully revealed. And then--

Then, they were headed home.

"No, I meant really hold on to me," Genma said with a shake of the head. "I'm going to translocate us again a couple more times, so we break the trail up as much as possible."

Rina nodded slowly, looking like she doubted even that silent acquiescence. Genma could feel her eyes raking over his body, lingering on injuries in a way that made him aware of pain he'd been ignoring. She stepped closer and leaned against him, wrapping slim arms in soaked sleeves around his waist. Genma's panting breaths came out of synchrony with her own winded huffing. "You sure you have the chakra for this so soon?" she asked. Her eyes fell on his hands, gloved again, and already half crooked into the Ram seal.

Genma turned his head to answer her, and she looked up, eyes meeting his, then down, with a shake of her hair. "Of course you're sure."

"Yeah," Genma grinned at her: a cocky, confident smile because there was a part of him that thrived on this kind of excitement. "That's what this uniform means, right?" It meant making hard choices like the one that had doomed her partner. It meant a masked visage and a reputation as a baby killer with no morals. It meant having the talent, the training, and the judgment to get into a heavily fortified and trapped bunker, rescue a cornered comrade, fight their way back out, keep her on her feet, keep himself on his feet, and get home.

He dropped one elbow against her shoulder in something not quite an embrace, then called up his chakra and cast the jutsu. They touched down in a clearing several kilometers away. Genma looked at Rina's pale, sweaty face, then up at the surrounding woods. Still too many hiding places, and too much danger of pursuit. Another flicker-flood of chakra, and another several kilometers, and they were finally in territory Genma felt safe enough stopping in. He bent over, hands on knees, and sucked in heaving lungfuls of damp evening air tinged with the scent of decayed leaves and the coming fall.

The canopy of faint, dappled light spun above her; Rina leaned against a mossy tree trunk until the disorientation passed and her stomach settled. No hint of foreign sound or chakra presence disturbed the encircling branches, and visibility was clear to at least past projectile range. "You all right, there?" she asked, just companionably this time. She wasn't worried. He could take care of himself.

He was already straightening up, so she pushed off the roughened bark. "Where to, partner?" At this point, one corner of moist, misty forest looked the same to her as any other, but she suspected that he was more familiar with the terrain and knew where they were. The pull towards Konoha twisted like an ache in her chest, and she put off thinking about the debriefing report that awaited her there.

Home. Sleep. Family. Home.

The rest could wait until later.

"If we go southwest we should hit Tiger Road," Genma said, raising a hand to point towards a clearing where they could see remnant mauve tinging the horizon above the just-set-sun. When Rina gave him a blank look, he shrugged. "It's a supply line from the Third War. Runs pretty much parallel to the main roads once you get into Fire Country, but it's protected, and trapped all to hell and back up here where there was more enemy action. I had a bunch of missions up here when I was a chuunin."

Rina nodded and followed Genma's gaze, as if she could see the hidden road from here. Looking towards home. Her eyes held exhaustion and longing and something else painfully forlorn.

There was another chuunin they were leaving behind.

Miles back up that trail, hours dead if he was lucky, in the hands of the same Kumo ninja Genma and Rina had just fled if he wasn't, was Tanaka Shouji, Rina's mission partner. They had nothing to bring back to his family but Genma's word that he'd done what he could.

Genma felt the other Konoha ninja's dog tags, nothing-at-all steel and a slick of dried blood, heavy in his pocket. Yushiro, his memory whispered in the gasping breath of the dying chuunin, the dead jounin's name was Yushiro.

"Come on," Genma said, resting one broad, gloved palm on Rina's slim shoulder. His swollen, aching knuckles looked oddly strong to him in their black gloves, curling against the faded olive canvas of her flack vest. "There's a safe house about an hour's run from here. We can send a message to Konoha from there."

Genma's hand against her shoulder was solid enough to draw comfort from, and Rina resisted the urge to cover it with her own. Instead she nodded and smiled with as much ease as she could muster, briefly stretching out watery muscles already supple from running, and drawing deep on the throbbing pulse of chemical chakra that kept her upright. Her control, at least, was still good.

She waited for Genma to push off into a steady, ground-eating lope, then followed, measuring steps by the numb complaints of aching, cold-reddened feet.

They ran in silence, the meager remnants of twilight quickly swallowed by encompassing dark. Rina stopped only once, to meter out precious threads of chakra into a minor jutsu breathing warmth into her chilled, clumsy limbs. Genma waited patiently for her to finish, then resumed his pace. Urgency still drove them on, the feeling that the tranquil stillness around them could be shattered at any moment. The carpet of pine needles depressed beneath them, releasing a pungent scent, and the stars crawled across the sky.

When Genma raised a moonlight-limned hand, Rina was almost too startled to stop, expecting her trance to be interrupted by the glint of metal and sharp violence rather than by this gentle halt. Skidding on silent feet, she followed his gaze to the gnarled trunk of a stunted tree, stout branches spreading gamely amid the thickening forest around them.

It was one of the newer safe houses, built after the war, hidden in the leaves as only a Konohagakure way point could be. Genma looked at the trunk, trying to make sure he was indeed at the right place. One tree looked much like the others in the moonlight, but this one--yes there was the subtle spiral whorl where bark had been scored and chakra-healed. He pressed one gloved palm to it, feeling the flowing energy beneath the rough wood, then stepped back, called up his chakra, and cast the jutsu to unmask the concealed tree house. As his own life force mixed with the sealed chakra in the tree, steps appeared in the bark, carved into the living wood. Above them in the dark canopy, shadows coalesced into solidity, revealing a hidden building.

"Can you climb?" Genma asked, pointing up. "Once we're inside, I'll trigger the concealment jutsu again, so we'll be hidden."

Rina nodded, too exhausted to do more than pant wearily, looking up at the vertical distance as if it spanned miles.

"I'll be right behind you," Genma reassured. "Even if you slip." He could feel her eyes on him for a moment, and glanced down at a soiled, stained, battle-scored uniform, at dried blood smeared over his tattoo, and his own shaking, sweat-soaked body. "Just don't fall," he added with a wry smile.

He wished he could promise a hot bath at the top of that climb, but beds, water, and maybe something more to eat than just rat bars was the best he could offer. Actually, beds sounded mighty damn fine.

She gave him another unfathomable look, weary to her core. He wondered if it was worth the risk to give her another soldier pill, but with only ten meters between them and rest, he couldn't bring himself to do that. "Go ahead," he said instead, propelling her towards the tree with one hand. "If we're lucky there's a pot I can boil water for tea in, up at the top. The door is sealed with a standard trigram. Wait for me before you try to open it."

She rolled her eyes at him over that, and he suddenly remembered who he was talking to: seal specialist, right. Then she started climbing. Slowly, painfully, with none of the fleet grace a well-rested shinobi would have put into the motions. He followed close behind, sticking aching hands and burning feet to the tree with ebbing chakra that didn't want to flow through unruly, scar-twisted channels. At the top, she stopped to look down as he climbed up behind her. He caught up, fitting his body close to hers with an intimacy that didn't belong to the moment, reaching past her to disable the trap on the door.

"Okay, push," he said, as chakra flowed away and seals dissolved. And then they were in, Rina hauling herself up into a roll and resting on a spotless pine-boarded floor, Genma pulling himself after her, slamming the trap door down and reactivating seals and concealing jutsu.

One more step. One more step, he told himself, and struck a match to light a little oil lamp. It cast a warm orange glow over the tidy space. The tree house still smelled of fresh-sawn wood. There were three beds, a camp stove, and several shut cupboards marked with their contents: food, clothing, medical supplies.

Genma lay on the floor, heaved a huge sigh, and curled his hands in close to himself, trying to rub the ache away. "Okay. That was fun. Next time let's just go for coffee."

"Works for me," Rina returned weakly, tilting her head upside down to peer at Genma sprawled behind her. Her shoulderblades protested at the movement and she flopped back, feeling her burning muscles stretch out and melt into the smooth boards like butter. "After all this, I think the coffee's my treat from now until... oh, sometime mid next century," she informed the vaulted ceiling with a grin.

The floor was about as comfortable as any bed she'd ever been in--and she'd been in a fair few--but muted rattlings from Genma's general direction spurred her to join him in reluctant motion. Ignoring the sharp stinging in her scored thigh for the moment, she pushed herself up and began to rifle through densely stocked shelves, collaborating with Genma in a brief and weary search for a teapot.

It turned out, there actually was a teapot, along with some entirely decent Kumo leaf and a handful of better than average ration bars. Patching themselves up came first, of course, using the hot water to cleanse wounds caked thick with grime and pine needles. But after that, with anesthetic cream smoothing down the sharp edges of her aches and a cup of fragrant, blissfully hot tea cupped between her twined fingers, she almost felt like she could breathe again.

"The seals on these bunkers are good, right?" She murmured the question into the curling steam of her cup, darting her eyes up to glance at Genma. She knew they were, had even set up some of them herself in the tree-bound hideouts around Fire Country. And every sore inch of abraded flesh was telling her that she didn't need to go back outside to check. But the shock of waking up to chill metal shearing through her protections still seared under her skin like the breaking of a trust, and she had to ask. Somehow, she thought it would help if she heard it from him.

"They're good," Genma agreed. He swallowed his tea, grateful beyond measure for the warmth and perfume of it, then looked up at Rina again. Her eyes were on him, hunted and dark-circled with fatigue. His answer, he decided, hadn't been nearly what she was looking for.

"Really. They're solid." He smiled. "No one can even see the bunker, because there's a concealment jutsu. Even if they did know they should be looking here, trying to deactivate the concealer without the proper chakra key will trigger defensive traps, too, and send up a distress signal. And even if they managed to reveal the bunker -- well it's not really a bunker, I guess, because we're way above ground instead of under it, but you know what I mean -- even then they'd have to get past the door seals. You know how strong a trigram is. It's standard to Konoha, sure, but they change those things up every six months or so, right?"

She nodded, still looking unconvinced. He put his teacup down and slid carefully closer to her, feeling every cut and bruise and pulled muscle and aching tendon, and what he was beginning to suspect was a cracked rib or two. By the way she'd been moving, she was just as beaten up. Just as eager for the painkillers they'd downed with their tea and ration bars to kick in.

"Come here," he beckoned, and climbed gingerly onto one of the cots. He pushed pillows up against the wall, and himself against them, stretching dirt-smeared legs over rough green blankets. "Come on. Here. You can bring my tea." He held out his arms, one towards her, the other encircling the empty space on the cot he intended for her to fill.

Rina stared at him for a moment, teacup held motionless in her hands, attempting to school her features into something resembling arch self-sufficiency, teasing. Something that said she didn't need this.

Her composure cracked and she looked away, careful fingers wrapping slowly around the handle of Genma's mismatched mug, one by one by one.

Neither cup spilled as she carried them over, settling in stiffly next to Genma in the space he had cleared for her. She took a pointed sip of his tea, defiantly, before handing it over. He accepted it without a word, settling it lightly on the blankets next to him, and tightened his other arm around her.

Something in her chest convulsed, curling her in against a sudden, tearing ache. As soon as she felt it, she tried to push it down, push away, but Genma pulled her in closer. Safety, I'm safe now, I'm safe--

After a long moment of delayed, trembling reaction, she turned her head down and away, against his proffered shoulder, and let herself shake.

Genma tightened his fingers against Rina's arm, shifting onto his hip just a little more. Her head was against his injured left shoulder by his design: better to leave his right hand free. He trusted the seals and the protection of their hideout but... But her shakes were no over-reaction. He held her, ignoring the burn in his shoulder just as she ignored the dampness of the bandage and the hard buckle of his armoured vest under her cheek, and wrapped her fear in his courage. Let her shake for both of them. He could feel his own shudders, barely suppressed, in every breath.

After a long interval he took a deeper breath and tried to look at her. His left cheek was swelling, his eye blackening, and he had to turn his head. Even so her face was hidden to him. She was curled into a tight, trembling ball, arms against her chest, tension in every muscle. Genma reached over with his right hand, circled her left wrist with raw-boned fingers, then gently pulled, drawing her arm around him.

"Rina." Just her name, in a slightly hoarse whisper. He wondered if she was crying. He pressed a dry kiss to the crown of her head. Sweaty, messy, dirty hair. He kissed her again. "Rina."

He tried very hard not to think about what might have happened if he hadn't been on that trail, on that aborted courier mission, when Rina's partner Shouji had stumbled into view and begged help from an unexpected ANBU ally with his dying breaths.

The simple sound of her name, roughened and unbroken from Genma's cracked lips, shattered down Rina's spine from bowed shoulders through to white-knuckled fingertips. Safety, it told her, and his gentle kiss repeated. As safe as she could be, here and now. Held and protected, sheltered and unequivocally known, the last fragments of tight-wound terror released their clenching grip on Rina's chest. With a few last spasms of shuddering limbs too chilled and overworked to loosen without complaint, she uncurled into Genma's threadbare but welcome embrace.

A soft rainfall pattered against the leaves outside, the sound muted by the swathes of enveloping chakra that shielded them from view. Genma's armor was uncomfortably angular against her bruised ribs, and his bandages scraped against the abraded skin on her cheek, but she wouldn't have moved for anything.

Eventually, despite reddened dry eyes and a heart still tripping in a relentless beat, Rina began to slip down into uneasy sleep.

Genma lay still, aware of how grimy he was in his muddy, sooty, blood-spattered uniform, and how clean the bedsheets he rested on were. It was an abstract kind of awareness, compounded with a sensation of aching heaviness in every limb that came from pure exhaustion, and discordant notes of pain flaring through strained and overused chakra channels, stretched tendons, bruised muscles, damaged skin. The only sensations that held his attention were the weight of the woman curled against his chest, the rise and fall of his own breath under her head, and the slowing beat of his heart as adrenaline finally ebbed away.

He lay still even when one leg began to tingle with pins and needles and his injured shoulder started to groan, because Rina had finally relaxed, with her pale eyes shut and her features softened into something altogether vulnerable and delicate. He shifted as gently as he could when cold and discomfort became insistent, but only enough to ease the pressure on his shoulder, enough to draw a rough wool blanket up over the pair of them. When Rina stirred in response, he patted her shoulder, murmuring nonsense sounds at her as if she were a small child. She tightened one hand around the shoulder strap of his vest, holding on like she might fall if she let go — or he might — then relaxed again.

The rain came a little harder now, but it was a natural rain, steady and gentle, plodding against the wooden roof and walls of their safe house with a music that lulled Genma. Gentle wind rocked the branches around them, barely disturbing their perch. Somewhere out there in the rain, under Genma's foil blanket, Shouji was probably dead. In a sacrificial bunker scoured from the inside by Rina's apocalyptic fireball, Yushiro lay dead. More Kumo ninja than Genma had counted lay dead, and others gravely wounded.

At a north-eastern Konoha outpost, or maybe along one of Fire Country's roads, the rat Genma had summoned when he'd left Shouji to his fate was delivering Genma's message: Mission AB-445C3 aborted. Agents down. Agents captured. Attempting extraction. Send backup.

In a little while, when they'd rested, when he'd recovered some natural chakra, he'd summon another rat and send another message: One rescued. One deceased. One unknown. Two with minor injuries. Their coordinates.

In a little while.

He was sorry to Shouji. Sorry he'd had to make the choice he did. He had a shockingly clear memory of the chuunin's pale, sweaty face. Of a rugged jaw with a small, well-healed scar on the chin, and a crooked front tooth. Of Shouji's failing chakra, and the certainty both men had shared about Shouji's chances, even if Genma had had a hospital to take him to.

Looking down at Rina, feeling her warmth against his side, her breath lifting his arm around her shoulder, he had only one thought: It had been the right choice.