Ginta was already crawling out of the tent. It was all he could do not to kick Pakkun on the way past. “What were you even thinking?” he snarled, shivering in the dawn air. “The one thing we don’t have is time to fuck around.”

Pakkun’s expressive brows knit and his mouth started to open.

“Don’t even— There’s nothing you can say. Save it,” Ginta snapped. He lurched out to the firepit, stumbling and cursing with every aching step, and started scooping cooled stones and ash into a pile. An earth jutsu took care of burying the debris, and a quick and careful sweep of wind leveled the muddy earth. He picked up a handful of pebbles and scattered them over the freshly cleared area, leaving behind no evidence that a camp fire had ever existed.

The rain had passed, leaving a hoary bloom of frost clinging to every dried blade of grass. Ice glazed the puddles that had gathered in low spots. Ginta shivered and drew his cloak tighter around himself. He gulped a hasty mouthful of water from his canteen before he slapped his ANBU mask on his face and turned to find Kakashi had stowed the tent and was shooting venomous looks in his direction.

“Your leg,” Kakashi said grimly.

“Chakra.” Ginta tipped his mask up and dry-chewed a soldier pill, shuddering at the taste and already sending his energy spiraling into his sore leg. The black powder burst of chemically-enhanced energy chased after it, burning like acid where it hit abused flesh. Ginta danced from one foot to the other, trying to force limberness and warmth.

While Kakashi continued to glare doubt, Ginta gave their campsite a sharp look. They’d left no visible trace. Had Ryouma done the same? Had he ever even camped here at all?

“Is there any chance of a scent to pick up, or did the rain destroy it?” he asked, and knew as the words left his mouth it was a stupid question. Three weeks of rain and snow, frost and sun, had stripped any scent of Ryouma that might have once been here more cleanly than a mudslide denuding a forest hill.

Kakashi inhaled deeply, spreading his arms wide in what was almost a tai-chi pose, then straightened and shook his head. “It’s gone.” His voice was rough.

For a wild moment, Ginta had hope. “You caught his scent here last night?”

Kakashi turned a blank, bleak face towards Ginta. “No.”

Hope died.

Ginta couldn’t meet Kakashi’s eyes.

Kakashi turned away, too, unfurling a scroll. In moments a huge bull mastiff stood next to his master, dwarfing Pakkun and making even Kakashi and Ginta seem small.

“Ride. You’re not walking, let alone running,” Kakashi said, still sounding one tightly-controlled step away from something terrifying.

“Fine.” Ginta didn’t argue. There was no point to it and... At least Kakashi wasn’t proposing leaving him behind. “Baiji, right?” he asked. The mastiff’s head lifted, alert with recognition. Ginta limped over, pressed his palms into coarse fur, and vaulted onto the dog’s back. “We should keep heading northeast.”

To the border between Coal Country and Snow Country, and then straight across Snow until they hit the edge of Lightning, where Ryouma had failed to meet his contact.

Kakashi nodded once.

A whistle and a slap to the haunch set Baiji moving at a graceful lope, body stretching out long and smooth. Ginta grabbed his collar to hold on, head whipping around when Kakashi didn’t instantly follow. Pakkun made to go after the pair, but Kakashi caught him by the scruff, hoisting him off the ground.

“Did you take Ginta’s watch?” he asked flatly.

Pakkun’s teeth bared in an awkward grimace, like a human trying to smile. It was one of the many weird quirks that marked Kakashi’s summons as not-quite-dog. “You needed to sleep,” he said. “You both did.”

With great effort, Kakashi didn’t shake him. “That wasn’t your choice.”

“But--”

“It wasn’t your choice,” Kakashi snapped, tightening his grip in Pakkun’s fur until the pug winced. “This is your only chance, Pakkun. You listen to me in the field, or I don’t summon you again. It’s that simple.”

A stifled whine slipped from Pakkun’s throat. “I’ve been with you all your life,” he said.

“Then you should know better,” Kakashi said, and dropped him back to the frozen ground; Pakkun landed with a stumble.

Kakashi swept one last look over the camp, making sure every trace of their presence had been wiped clean, then took off after Ginta. Pakkun watched him for a moment, ears flat and tail down, something softer than a whine still twisting in his heavy chest.

He sighed.

Then he followed.

It took seven hours to cross Coal Country and move deep into the unforgiving mountains of Snow Country. In seven hours they’d had nothing to go on but a gut sense of what track any smart ninja would choose, Kakashi’s belief that Ryouma would have taken the most direct path that conditions allowed, and Ginta’s recollection of trails he’d used when running missions in this part of the world. Trails that Ryouma would have been intimately familiar with, from his long sojourns in Snow Country.

Seven hard-run hours, with no translocations lest they miss some tiny but critical clue. And no breaks, because though there was no sign of pursuit yet, it had to be coming.

Keeping his balance on the loose-skinned back of the huge dog was tiring in an entirely different way from running, especially after a couple of near-falls had Ginta continuously channelling chakra to his legs, wrapped around the dog’s wide-sprung rib cage, to keep his seat.

Baiji was panting, chest heaving, footfalls slipping on the icy trail. Pakkun had given up trying to run once they reached deep snow: he rode with Ginta. Kakashi was starting to waver, pushing himself beyond his limits in a way that set Ginta’s teeth on edge. And Ginta was starting to feel the strain as he burned chakra to keep himself on the dog, to sense for any hint of others around them, and to hide their passage through unfriendly territory.

Seven hours and the only thing they had to show for it, finally, was exhaustion and a funeral bell confirmation of the previous search teams’ findings: it was as if Ryouma had simply vanished from the earth.

“Kakashi, stop,” Ginta said at last.

Kakashi twitched a glance up at him, shook his head, and kept running.

“Stop,” Ginta demanded again. He flickered through a translocation, abandoning his mount and putting himself in Kakashi’s path, forcing the other man to halt or run him over.

Kakashi slid to a stop, trembling in snow up to his knees, and glowered murder at Ginta.

“Stop and eat something. Take a break. Take a soldier pill.” Tightening his jaw against a pain he didn’t know how to name, Ginta stared Kakashi down. “If you run yourself into the ground like this, he’d never forgive you.”

In the snow-bound silence, Kakashi’s breath spilled into the air like blood from a sliced jugular.

“You manipulative bastard,” he rasped.

“Are you going to stop?” Ginta’s voice was stripped-down flat, unbothered by the accusation. He knew it was true; he obviously didn’t care.

It was a good ninja trait.

“Ten minutes,” Kakashi said, and looked away from Ginta’s lightning-blue eyes to brace his hands on his knees, fighting for air. Now that he had stopped, his whole body had very definite ideas about staying that way. His lungs felt raw, rasped inside by ice and hard breathing.

Ginta shoved his ANBU mask up, revealing a black cloth mask that he hooked down. Underneath it, his skin was white-blue where it wasn’t flushed red. “We know he didn’t make it to Yukihana,” he said. “There’s a place up here — Dainichi Nyouraiji —it's a derelict temple that we had a safehouse in. It's where Ryouma was based." He gestured, pointing east. "We should go there. The search teams might not have checked it.”

It was a slim hope; if Ryouma was at this temple, he’d been there for three weeks without making it to Yukihana.

But it was a hope.

“Okay,” Kakashi said, and sank down to his knees in the snow. It came up to his thighs -- almost to his hips -- but there was nothing else to sit on. A fumble of cold hands in his belt produced a double-dose of soldier pills, a half-frozen canteen, and a ration bar. He flipped his ANBU mask up and his cloth mask down to take them all.

Ginta’s mouth went flat and white. Kakashi looked up at him, and couldn’t bring himself to care.

“You, too,” he said, after a moment. “Soldier pill. Ration bar. Ryouma’d be just as pissed at you.”

“Maybe,” Ginta said wearily. But probably not. That bridge was burned, that way forever barred. If Ryouma was even still alive...

He joined Kakashi in the snow, sinking to his knees just deeply enough for the not-quite-healed right leg to crack through with new pain. At least, hip-deep in the drifts, he was icing it.

He pulled out his own supplies — med kit, canteen, ration bar — and counted soldier pills remaining in his pill container. He felt as if the cold had slowed not just his joints but his thoughts as well, as he stared numbly at the open case, remembering his last words with Ryouma.

I know you got the same damn lecture on chakra pill safety that I did when I was a rookie. Did you see how bad Kakashi looked when we got back? Do you think this is some kind of joke? Kakashi barely woke up from that, from doing to himself what it looks a hell of a lot like you're trying to do to yourself. And he at least had a reason for it. If this is some sick -- I don't know -- competitive thing...

And his conversation with Pakkun.

I think Kakashi’s trying to kill himself without actually holding a blade to his own throat.

Chakra pill overdoses and stupid heroics. Pointless sacrifice.

You gotta figure it out, Ryouma. Or I am gonna be standing there in black, with Kakashi next to me, while they retire your mask.

Maybe all three of their masks would be retired, all three of their names fresh-carved into glossy black stone.

We’re soldiers. Soldiers die.

Baiji pulled Ginta’s focus back to the present, wading through the snow to press his warm bulk against Ginta’s back for a moment, then closing the distance between the two men and trying to shield them both with his body.

Ginta swallowed the pill, then looked up at Kakashi. “That’s two for me today so far. Two yesterday. How many are you on? Was your clotting factor back to normal before we left?”

Kakashi shrugged, like he didn’t know and couldn’t care less.

Ginta stared a hole through Kakashi. “Whatever else happens, we’re making it home from this. I’m not making the same damn mistake again.”

There was probably an insult in there somewhere.

Kakashi flicked a tired glance over the snow-drenched landscape. There were no place markers: just ice and fang-shaped rocks and a wide, white sky. Four points on a compass and two half-dead ninja stuck in the middle.

“Hate to break it to you,” he grated. “But you’re about three-hundred miles too late.”

“Bullshit,” Ginta snapped, eyes sparking bright blue. “Whatever mistakes I’m making, they’re goddamned new ones. Same goes for you.”

He sounded defiant, but Kakashi could smell fear blooming, like acid and regret. Like being caught out stone-cold alone with a teammate on the edge, two dogs not built for snow, and no sign of a trail.

(three weeks)

And here was Kakashi, running yet another rescue mission. Except this time he was doing it without orders, a roadmap, or any idea what he was going to do with Ryouma if he ever got the chance to drag the man home.

If he was making new mistakes, they were damn similar to his old ones.

He hauled himself off his knees, feeling the red burn of stiffening muscles, and staggered into his best approximation of upright. Soldier-pill energy was like a hot punch of chemicals directly to the brain; he could feel his heart rate picking up, his thoughts coming clearer. It wasn’t a second wind, but it might be a ninth one.

He pulled both masks back into place.

“Time to get back on the dog.” Ginta was still on his knees; Kakashi held out a hand to him. “How far to this temple?”

“Thirty miles, give or take,” Ginta answered. He grasped Kakashi’s forearm and wrenched himself to his feet, not letting go until he was sure of his footing. “There’s a trail up from the village Ryouma’s mission was supposed to take him to, but there’s another way there from here. He’d have known it. If he got in trouble up here—” He cut himself off with a sharp. “If I got in trouble up here, I’d head for the bunker, not the village.”

Kakashi tipped his head at an angle that said there was a frown on his doubly masked face. “Why would Intel miss that?”

“It’s decommissioned.” Ginta stretched out, twisting his shoulders, reaching for handfuls of nothing. Turning to look at the grey and white peaks that marked the border between Snow Country and Lightning. “It was a spy operation to keep an eye on the big Kumo outpost at Kodenwa. On my last mission up here last summer, it got compromised. Ryouma told me they shut it down after that, that’s why he came back to Konoha.”

“Where you ran into a Kumo nin and his naginata. You told me.” Kakashi turned to look in the same direction. “You’d still think they would have checked it,” he murmured, almost to himself. Then his spine straightened, and he turned back, meeting Ginta’s eyes through his mask. He looked taller and broader-shouldered. Reinvigorated. “Hurry up, Jackass. Get on the dog.”

Hopeful, Ginta told himself, was better than hopeless. False hope could get you through at least one level of hell. And maybe, if there was any justice in the world, Kakashi’s hopes — his own hopes — would prove founded.

Climbing back on Baiji’s high back, he settled in for more running. “There’s been too much recent snow up here for me to see anything like a trail, but this is the way he’d have gone. They ran the supply line through here, and I’m pretty sure it was never discovered. Kumo found the outpost from the other side, not this one.”

Kakashi just nodded, while Pakkun, still on Baiji’s back, curled close to Ginta’s stomach, shivering in the cold. Kakashi jerked his chin to the northeast.

“Yeah, north-northeast,” Ginta confirmed. “When we get close there’s a binding field I’ll need to disperse if it’s still there, that hides the temple, and then I have a key to get us inside.” He could see Kakashi’s posture shift, ready for another breakneck run.

“Pace yourself. It’s shit terrain, mostly uphill, and the higher we go, the more ice there’s gonna be.”

That got a curt nod, and then Kakashi was a blur of black and white, racing over the snow. Baiji bunched up and leapt, catching up to his master and leaving huge broken holes in the snow’s crust.

Fuck covering their trail. The scent on the wind said more snow was on its way — any trace of their passing would be as obliterated as Ryouma’s, probably by nightfall, certainly by morning.

“It’s jackass,” Ginta said quietly, hunched over Pakkun, watching Kakashi. Wondering which would be worse, finding Ryouma — finding his corpse, the evil whisper of pragmatism insisted — or not finding him. Somehow the joke just wasn’t funny anymore.

The last part of a run was always the hardest, especially when the landscape went vertical.

The scenery stayed reasonably flat for the first twenty miles, slowly grading up in a gentle incline. It was only in the last five miles that they hit the foothills of Mount Nikkō-Shirane, and things got complicated.

It was fortunate that Baiji could chakra-walk.

In summer, Kakashi suspected this trail would only be mildly difficult. But the unseasonably cold weather brought sheer ice, wind-stripped rock, and no vegetation. Occasionally he saw the blasted trunks of trees that might survive until summer took a hold, but mostly it was snow hiding sharp edges.

The wind cut into flesh like a scythe.

When Kakashi chanced a glance at Ginta and Baiji, there was almost nothing to see. Ginta was wrapped in his ANBU cloak with the hood drawn down and his head bowed, shoulders hunched, gloved hands clenched around Baji’s collar. Pakkun was completely hidden from view in his lap; Kakashi hoped they were helping each other to stay warm.

Baiji was still going strong, despite the gouts of white saliva foaming around his panting jaws. He wasn’t built for this weather; he was a fighter, designed for battlefields. But he wouldn’t falter until Kakashi did.

Kakashi was starting to feel very much like faltering.

The knife-thin path cut up the mountainside in sharp zig-zags, doubling back and forth on itself in increasingly steeper trails. Kakashi kept his feet limned with chakra, walking on snow just as often as rock. He slipped once, when Baiji lurched on a patch of jagged ice and yelped, but he was too cold to care much about skinned knees. Too cold to bleed, even.

Hallway up the mountain, in the V-neck of two crags, Ginta’s head pulled up and he shouted a halt. Baiji flopped down instantly on the first flat surface, and Kakashi knelt down to check the state of his paws. Cold, but not raw. Good.

“Here?” he rasped, as Ginta slid off the massive dog’s back. “Are you sure?”

There wasn’t anything here.

“It’s sealed. I told you, remember?” Ginta shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot as stiff muscles and jolted bones adjusted to standing. “I’d tell you to look with your Sharingan, but don’t waste chakra. I know where the seal is and how to break it.”

He crooked his fingers into the tight knots of the Dragon seal, flicking through into Ox, then Horse, then Rat, and flooding chakra into his cupped palms. It took the same deep concentration that breaking an individual genjutsu took, but more energy, more finesse. He bent over and slapped both hands through the snow, flat onto the hidden rocks beneath their feet. For a moment there was no change, and then the terrain shifted as a few huge pine trunks, shrouded in mist, materialized around them.

Ginta sagged with relief. “Okay, so this wasn’t fucked with. If Kumo’d found it, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.” He peered through the fog, then pointed sharply to the left. “I was a little off. See? See there? There’s a mostly burned-down building and the foundations of another. Behind there is a little shrine.”

Kakashi shoved his ANBU mask aside, inhaling deeply and checking everything over, alert and focused. Then his shoulders dropped slightly and he turned back to look at Ginta. "You mentioned a key?"

“It’s a token. A coin.” Ginta pulled a trio of dull silver coins from his belt pouch. “We go like we’re praying at the shrine, and put these in the offering box. I don’t even know why I kept mine, but when I realized we were going to have to come up here, I grabbed it.”

He didn’t wait for Kakashi to answer, and he didn’t climb back on the dog, but started limping towards the buildings. When they got close Ginta could see signs that someone had been here since he last saw the place. The stone Buddha that sat guarding the door had newer gouges where some angry Kumo ninja must have hammered at it, trying to get it to reveal its secrets. Newer, but not altogether new. There was no sign that anyone had been here within the last six months.

“Ryouma still had his tokens, too. He showed me his, actually, when he told me they’d closed this post down. Said it was a souvenir.”

For Ginta, the feeling that came from tossing the coins into the collection box was a neon jumble of hope and dread, and regret. Team Badass was long gone.

There was never, especially for a ninja, any going back.

The Buddha’s face slid aside, revealing a dark gap. A gap that should have been filled with Ryouma’s or Daisuke’s or Arata’s grinning face.

Of course there was no one there to greet them.

Ginta chewed his lip behind his cloth mask, then went up to the Buddha, reached into the hole where his face should have been, and pushed chakra into a mechanism he could feel but not see. There was a click and a slow groan of moving wood and stone, and the whole statue shook, as a door at its base opened.

No sound came out. No light. No warmth. Only stale, damp air that smelled of mildew and disuse. “I guess we should go in,” Ginta said, glancing up to Kakashi for confirmation.

The hundred yard stare of a man preparing to face staggering disappointment met him.

Ryouma’s scent wasn’t here.

There was no scent here, beyond stone and mold and the edge of lightning long burned out. Dead seals, old chakra. Nothing living.

It had been a faint hope, Kakashi told himself.

There were still more places to check. The village. The other trails. Beyond the boarder of Lightning, where the Kumo-nin that had flayed Ryouma’s dragon came from. (Intel had tortured Shiki to death, but Kumo could be stupid enough to start a war over one ninja.)

(They wouldn’t be.)

Kakashi gritted his teeth. There were still options.

“Yeah,” he said, when Ginta tilted his masked head questioningly. “Is there room for the dogs? It’s too cold for them out here.”

“In the main room, definitely,” Ginta said. “I don’t know if this place still has any lights, though.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Kakashi held up one gloved hand, calling five bright points of chakra to his fingertips. It cut hard shadows against the snow.

Ginta raked his ANBU mask aside, trading bright monkey colours for flat black cloth and horrified, furious eyes. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded. “Don’t waste your chakra.”

Kakashi narrowed his visible eye. “This nannying habit of yours is getting old, Sakamoto. Knock it off.”

Ginta inhaled deeply, scent flaring with restrained temper, and slipped a hand back into his belt-pouch. He withdrew a glo-stick and snapped it into sickly green life.

Pointedly, he handed it to Kakashi.

“Smartass,” said Kakashi, after a beat. He let the chakra in his hand die and whistled the dogs, taking the glo-stick. Baji scraped himself up with a groan, limping forward. Pakkun was still riding on his shoulders, hunched small against the wind.

“Boss?” said Pakkun quietly.

“We’ll take a break here,” Kakashi said, nodding at the yawning door. “Rest up a few hours, then head on to the village.”

Baiji huffed weary agreement and shouldered carefully past Ginta, pausing briefly to nose through Ginta’s bright hair before he disappeared into the dark. Kakashi followed him, leaving Ginta to seal up the Buddha behind them.

The main room was almost exactly as Ginta remembered it. A communal table, a battered couch, a pair of posters on the wall — one of a busty, leggy, blonde model wearing little more than a tiger-striped scarf around her hips, and one in black and white, of a broad-shouldered, muscle-ripped man, wearing nothing but a come-hither grin and a glistening of sweat. The fact that the photo was cropped just below his navel was the only thing that saved it from indecency. In the green phosphor glow of the light sticks it just looked sad.

“Ryouma and Hiroyuki put up the woman,” Ginta said, going to stand next to Kakashi and his dogs. “And Arata put up the man. He said it was an oppressive work environment or something like that, if there wasn’t some eye-candy for him.” He stared at the posters a moment more, then turned away. “I heard both of them are stationed at another border post now.”

Kakashi quirked the faintest ghost of a smile at the posters and trailed his hand over the table. There was a news magazine there, nine months out of date, and Arata’s old sliding blocks puzzle. Kakashi picked it up but didn’t try to work it before he turned towards the hall leading to sleeping quarters.

Ginta hesitated, studying the door to the kitchen, then turned wearily and followed Kakashi. He wished they hadn’t come here. It was like walking into a mausoleum, though only one of the former occupants was feared dead. The most important former occupant.

“Everyone shared quarters,” he said quietly when he caught up. Kakashi was standing at the door to the residents’ bunks, probably navigating by scent. The door across from it led to the transient bunks, where Ginta and his mission partners, and any other ninja passing through this station had slept.

The room still held a pair of bunk beds, stripped of bedding. The lower mattress on the left — the one that had been Hiroyuki’s — was stained dark rust brown where someone had bled copiously. For a dizzyingly egotistic moment, Ginta remembered his last mission here and wondered if it was his own blood.

Probably.

That was the mission that had led to this bunker being shut down, after all.

Kakashi was still as a rooted sapling, inhaling scents Ginta couldn’t begin to perceive, with his head turned towards the same bed, eyes focused on the upper bunk. Ryouma’s bunk.

“That was his bed, yeah,” Ginta said, slipping past him. “Looks like they mostly cleaned the place out, though.”

Moving into the room, he found only a torn and crumpled gossip rag stuffed between the mattress and springs on the top right bunk. He pulled it out and stared the empty-eyed smile of the actress on the cover. “This was Daisuke’s. He was the youngest of Ryouma’s team. Everyone teased him.”

And why was he telling Kakashi any of this? The room felt oppressive.

“We should check out the other room. There’s not much left here.”

“Go ahead,” Kakashi murmured. “I’ll catch up.”

Ginta’s face was lit glo-stick green when he pulled his copy-cat mask down, making his cheekbones sharp and his eyes dark. He gave Kakashi a long, searching look.

“Okay,” he said finally, and left without another word.

Even in his absence, the full-colour ribbon of his living scent swept through the room like incense in a temple. Bright and busy and drowning everything else out. Kakashi inhaled deeply, trying to keep hold of smothered subtleties. Dust and stale air, paper, mud, a wrench of old copper-crimson from the stain on the lower mattress (GintaGintaGinta), the old lightning-burn of long gone chakra ...

And Ryouma.

Sunwarmed forests and salty skin, blackened steel and a lick of thunder. Soap and rot. Hair gel. The dark, sweet curl of too-strong, over-sugared coffee.

Kakashi fought the urge to climb up onto the top bunk and press his face into the mattress. Ryouma wasn’t here. The scent was months old.

When Ginta’s hand touched his shoulder, he almost jumped out of his skin.

“There’s nothing,” said Ginta, hastily pulling his hand back. Something like an apology flicked over his face, there and gone, leaving careful neutrality behind. “Kitchen’s empty. We should eat, though.”

“Seconded,” said Pakkun, finally piping up from near the main doorway, where he stood beneath Baiji’s shadowy bulk. Baiji rumbled weary agreement. The bunker was only marginally warmer than outside; there was still ice clotted in the mastiff’s fur and chunked heavily between the pads of his paws. Kakashi needed to take care of that.

"I can heat some water and make tea,” said Ginta, heading back into the main room. Kakashi followed him. “And rice. I’ve got a scroll with rice and dried mushrooms, so I could make us porridge."

Kakashi shrugged one aching, non-committal shoulder. “I’ll light the fire.”

“Keep it small,” Ginta advised. “The ventilation’s probably not great.”

Both dogs made quiet, delirious noises over the prospect of heat; if his mind hadn’t been locked so firmly elsewhere, Kakashi might have joined them. But mostly he just wanted to eat, sleep, and get moving again.

Ginta dropped down onto the battered couch, stripping off his soaked gloves and rummaging in his armour. Baiji and Pakkun flopped down in the centre of the room, where a dusty oval carpet offered scant insulation from the chilly floor. Kakashi settled cross-legged next to them on the concrete, also peeling his gloves off, and called up his chakra. He laced his fingers through awkward, sore-jointed seals -- monkey, horse, double ox, reverse dragon, snake -- to make the jutsu for a small, smokeless fire that would burn without wood...

And everything went very wrong.

Ginta was turned away from Kakashi and the dogs when the first sharp shock of unleashed chakra burst from the very walls around them in response to Kakashi’s jutsu. In the time-dilated moment that accompanied the adrenaline surge, Ginta saw fire billow down the concrete walls like a waterfall, a slow-motion cascade of death. He shouted a warning, and even that sounded slow to his own ears. Lightning crackled through the flames, making every hair stand on end, filling the room with the fresh tang of ozone. It lanced down from the ceiling near the passage to the exit like deadly prison bars, and as soon as one leader touched ground another shot off, getting closer with every strike.

Heat from the chakra-fueled flames made the concrete pop and crack, rapidly turning the small room into a killing furnace. Almost without thinking, Ginta called up chakra of his own and cast a water jutsu, condensing moisture from the snow-laden air into a skin of water, forming a bubble around himself, Kakashi, and the dogs.

The lightning struck it, finding direction now, and a target in Ginta’s jutsu. There was a blinding flash and roar, the water vaporized in an instant, and a second bolt jagged straight for Ginta, then forked and diverted around the Konoha ninja. Ginta backed up, catching sight in his peripheral vision of Kakashi directing the electric flow down into the ground.

“We have to—” Ginta started, but the ground under him heaved and buckled, and then the walls and ceiling fractured into jagged slabs, crashing down. Baiji yelped, and Kakashi fell, as a chunk of masonry smashed into his skull from his blind side.

The cave-in was progressing from the entrance. Ginta vaulted backwards over his fallen comrade, poured another burst of water over them both, and grabbed one unresisting arm. He hauled hard, dragging Kakashi through flame and into the passageway to the sleeping quarters, as another chakra-made earthquake rattled more ceiling down.

“Get out of there!” Ginta shouted into the dust-choked darkness, and hoped the dogs would obey. A long fissure tore through the hall’s ceiling, as a tremendous gust of heated air blasted into them. Something huge and heavy slammed into Ginta, knocking him into the wall and a broken slab of falling ceiling, smashing his face against shattered concrete and twisted rebar.

He reeled back, heard a whine, and grabbed onto Baiji’s collar as the mastiff forced both men further up the passage. Ginta tightened his grip on Kakashi, hoping against logic that the man was still alive, and fell through the last door, the one to the toilets and showers, just as the corridor walls shuddered and collapsed.

He fell to the tiled floor, sick and dizzy, with his heart racing and his throat choked with dust, and pulled Kakashi down atop himself. There was a whine, deep and anxious, as Baiji moved to stand over them, and a sharp cough from near his ear.

“Kid, are you okay?”

“Pakkun?” Ginta whispered.

The hideous rumbling from outside died away, as the trap jutsu spent themselves. And then an eerie red light glowed from the mirror above the sinks. Lettering. Ginta sat slowly up, staring as the words materialized:

Dear Kumo Ninja,

Thanks for a great time, hope you die slowly.

Love, Team Bad-Ass.

Ginta shivered, pulled Kakashi’s head into his lap, checked for a pulse — thank gods there was a pulse — and felt his whole body shake with something that wasn’t nearly a laugh.

Pakkun crawled out from under Baiji’s heavy bulk, wincing. In the nothing-light, the letters on the wall stood out like a scream in a morgue, glowing dried-blood red.

It was creepy as all hell and twice as ironic, and if they ever found Ryouma, Pakkun was going to chew both his ears off.

“Hell,” he said.

Ginta made a quiet rasping sound, like the edge of a dead laugh. Pakkun gave him an alarmed look. Ginta’s face was a sheet of blood; it poured from his obviously broken nose, gleaming wet across his teeth and chin and throat, all over the front of his armour. Like a waterfall in red.

Sprawled across his lap, Kakashi looked like a dead doll. The side of his head was matted sticky-black. When Ginta breathed out, misty droplets of blood spattered across Kakashi’s still, masked face.

“Aw, hell,” said Pakkun, as his eyes adjusted to the dark and the picture in front of him didn’t get any better. He pulled himself over to Ginta, feeling like every inch of his body had been pummelled with bricks. “Is he breathing?”

“Yeah. Breathing. Bleeding.” Ginta’s breath caught, like he’d jarred his mouth painfully. He reeled weirdly, shaky and off-balance, but caught himself and slid one hand beneath Kakashi’s neck. Steadying. Careful. The other hand pressed right against Kakashi’s head wound, all dirty fingers and fresh blood and serious infection risk, and Pakkun barked before he had words.

Ginta startled badly. Kakashi didn’t.

“Bandages, glitterbug!” Pakkun said. “Antiseptic! And -- and you should really do something about your face before you pass out.”

“My face?” Above the wreck of blood, Ginta’s eyes were blank. He looked down at Kakashi. “I... have bandages.” One hand fumbled for his belt.

He was in shock, Pakkun realized. Ginta was in shock, Kakashi was unconscious, the roof had fallen in, and the only conscious person with opposable thumbs wasn’t operating on all six cylinders.

“Ginta,” Pakkun said. “Look at me.”

Ginta’s eyes flicked up, black in the red seal-light, then back down to Kakashi. His hands were shaking. His chest hitching unevenly. Pakkun suddenly felt very old.

“Right here, Ginta,” he said again, making himself be calm. “Focus on me for a second.”

Reluctantly, Ginta glanced up. His hand was still yanking through his belt, but stalling at buckles and zippers. “What?” he demanded. “I need to find a bandage.”

“You’re bleeding,” Pakkun said. “Your nose is broken. Your cheek isn’t looking too great, either.”

“Yeah. So’s he.” Which didn’t make a great deal of sense, but Pakkun caught the gist. Ginta finally managed to unearth a white roll of bandage and clamped it against Kakashi’s head. “He’s gonna wake up, right?” Ginta asked, sounding tight-jawed and scared and about twelve years old. “Can you smell it?”

Mostly, Pakkun could smell blood and lightning. But he pressed his nose against the hinge of Kakashi’s jaw anyway, where the mask helped catch scent.

“He’ll wake up,” Pakkun said, ignoring the coil of copper and snuffed-out pain tangling in his sinuses, underlaid with the flat, leaden scent that always came with unconsciousness. Like peace. He looked up at Ginta’s frantic, shock-hazed eyes, and tried to be reassuring. “He always does.”

In the dying light from the glowing kanji, in the settling dust, with his own heartbeat loud in his ears, Ginta looked down at Kakashi’s unresponsive face and knew Pakkun was lying. He took a moist, blood-saturated breath, blew it out, and shifted his hand so that the bandage pressed more firmly against the gaping wound on Kakashi’s scalp. Already he could feel the swelling underneath, and the bandage saturating like a sponge.

Pakkun was lying, because the truth was too horrifying to face.

Ginta took another breath and tried to get his head clear. Not a single thought came easy, and training, usually so deeply embedded it was nearly instinct, seemed to have fled.

Distantly, he was aware that he was shaking. That his breaths rasped and burbled and his head rang with pain. Distantly, he was aware of the red sting of a laceration across his cheek, and the shard-sharp ache of a broken nose. Of the way his jaw felt unstable and wrong every time he parted his lips, and sent something like a toothache radiating up into his right eye.

And Kakashi’s head was bleeding. Kakashi wasn’t moving.

He had to think.

What did you do for a head injury?

It was really hard to think.

A sharp yap from Pakkun brought Ginta’s eyes to the pug again.

“Ginta, get a grip, kid. Don’t phase out on me here.”

“What?”

“You’re really not all right, are you?” Pakkun sounded more like he was talking to himself than to Ginta.

All right. He needed to be all right.

“I...” Ginta felt along the knobs of Kakashi’s spine, talking to hear himself say it. “I don’t think his neck’s broken.” His fingers probed at the head wound, feeling for the telltale shift of bone. “If his skull’s cracked, I can’t tell...” He shifted the bandages, pressed them down again, and started winding gauze around Kakashi’s head in a clumsy turban, trying to keep the pressure tight.

Stop the bleeding.

He’d seen that chunk of concrete crack against Kakashi’s head.

What did you do for a head injury?

“Ginta!”

Ginta startled, looking down to see the bandaging done, Kakashi frighteningly still, and the end of the gauze trembling in his shaking fingers. He tried to take a breath, and couldn’t get air through his smashed nose. There was blood everywhere. Dying red light.

He looked up at Pakkun. “I don’t know what to do.”

That was obvious.

And frightening. Ginta was an ANBU: one of the Hokage’s personal bodyguards. He wasn’t supposed to fall apart.

“Well, you better damn sure figure it out,” Pakkun snarled. He shoved himself into Ginta’s lap, jabbing two paws of hot, sharp chakra against the kid’s chest. “Kakashi’s kept you alive before. He almost died keeping you alive. I know you haven’t forgotten; you’ve still got the busted leg to prove it. So think, you numbskull, and do what he did.”

Ginta’s scent lashed around like a changing tide -- bittersweet fruit and seething panic -- then it caught and steadied. Found a fixed point. He drew a raw breath and nodded shakily.

“Warmth,” he said, and Pakkun could have kissed him. “He needs to be warm. And his head needs to stop bleeding.”

Pakkun nodded emphatically. Ginta touched the bandage wrapped around Kakashi’s head, fingers finding the clumsy knots like he couldn’t remember tying them, then he dug through his belt again. Hopefully for a foil blanket, but Pakkun would really take anything right now.

“And I need to take him home,” Ginta whispered.

“Best plan you’ve ever had, kid,” Pakkun said, and butted his forehead gently against Ginta’s blood-soaked armour. Then he slid back down and nosed worriedly along Kakashi’s jaw, feeling the heavy weight of no one here right now in the way Kakashi’s head rocked slightly when Pakkun nudged it. No muscle tension. No reaction.

Behind Ginta’s shoulder, Baiji whined.

Ginta’s fingers closed over the crinkly pouch containing his emergency blanket at last, and he had to let go of Kakashi’s neck to open it. When Kakashi’s head lolled to one side, Ginta braced it with a hastily shifted knee. Kakashi looked like a corpse, freshly killed, in the fading, flickering light of the dying message from Team Bad-Ass. Pale, bloodied, loose-jointed in a way that suggested no control would ever return to those long limbs.

For the space of a blood-scented breath, Ginta could only see death. Then Baiji whined again, and Pakkun’s sharp claws pressed against Ginta’s arm.

“Kid? Are you gonna keep it together here, or am I going to have to bite you?”

“I’m gonna... I’m gonna take him home,” Ginta answered, thick tongued. He could taste blood now, and identify the ringing sensation ricocheting around his head as pain. “Gotta get out of here.”

Every thought took an eternity to formulate.

One thing at a time.

He spread the blanket over Kakashi and slipped his arms around Kakashi’s chest, hauling dead weight into his lap, then scooted back until he felt Baiji’s warm bulk at his back. Kakashi’s bandaged head fell against Ginta’s shoulder, picking up fresh blood from his armour.

“Is Baiji okay? Are you okay?” Ginta asked, fixing Pakkun with the sharpest look he could muster.

“I’ve had better days,” Pakkun snorted. He whined something at Baiji, who responded with a low, eerie sound. “Baiji’s fine. Just some bruises.”

“Okay. Get in my lap next to Kakashi. Make sure you’re touching me. I’m gonna translocate us out of here.” His arms were still around Kakashi’s chest when he pressed his hands together into the first Ram seal for a multi-party translocation. He pulled on chakra reserves that didn’t want to come, shaped the jutsu, extended his chakra sense to encompass two dogs and one other man — a man whose heart he could still feel beating, whose chakra he could still feel responding to his own — and focused on energizing the last, critical seal.

Immediately, bright, blinding light flared. Bright, blinding light and a soul-crushing agony in his injured face as chakra rebounded. The ground lurched and shuddered with none of the smooth finesse of moving through the spaces between seconds. Pipes in the walls groaned, ceramic tiles cracked, and the rubble around them shifted and collapsed. Ginta just managed to jerk Kakashi back, away from the heavy thud of concrete on concrete, as the space they were trapped in compressed down to little more than a crypt.

He choked on the dust, and could hear both dogs coughing.

Kakashi didn’t respond at all.

Plastered against Ginta’s inner thigh, half-crushed beneath Kakashi’s shoulder, Pakkun kept his eyes clamped shut until the rumbling stone settled back down. His nose was choked with dust. When he dared a look around, nothing but dark met his eyes: the seals had finally gone out.

Baiji whimpered faintly. Alarmed, Pakkun scrambled out of his hidey-hole and growled a query. What? What’s wrong?

The response he got wasn’t so much words as a mental picture wrapped up in canine vocal cords, delivered on a strained whine. The roof’s on my back.

Don’t drop it! Pakkun shot back.

Ginta coughed wetly. “Okay,” he said, sounding shaky. “No translocating.”

No kidding, Pakkun didn’t say. Team Bad-Ass had been misnamed. Team Pain-In-The-Ass would have been better. Who booby-trapped an abandoned bunker just in case some poor ninja bastard wandered in? Gods.

“What about other jutsu?” Pakkun asked. “Is it just translocations, or is it everything?”

“I don’t know.” Ginta’s voice rasped and caught; he coughed again. “If I try and it does that again...”

“We’ll call that Plan B,” Pakkun said hastily. He turned blind eyes in Baiji’s direction, towards the sound of grating stone. How’re you doing?

Baiji grunted. Using chakra. The seals aren’t biting me.

“Okay,” said Pakkun to Ginta, “I have good news and bad news.” He waited a beat for Ginta to respond, trying to parse out what the current level of the kid’s shock was, but Ginta said nothing. There was a brush of sound, like a hand moving over stone: Ginta feeling the roof, maybe.

“Baiji’s holding the ceiling up,” Pakkun said. “Part of it, anyway. That’s the bad news. Good news: he’s doing it with chakra. So maybe it’s just translocating that’ll set the trap off--”

He paused suddenly, head twitching to one side, and flicked an ear.

“What?” demanded Ginta. His voice cracked, wound too tight.

“Air,” Pakkun said. “Shush a sec. Something’s changed.” He turned in a tight circle, feeling Ginta’s tension pressing close and Kakashi’s nothingnothingnothing and Baiji’s heavily muscled support, and--

There.

An air current.

Pakkun surged forward, following his nose, and hit a long broken seam in the wall. A handspan wide, a handspan deep, but big enough to squeeze through. Big enough for him, anyway. Especially if he could use chakra.

How long can you hold out? he asked Baiji.

The big mastiff shifted, dragged a huffing breath, and moved in a way that made the ceiling crunch up hard. Pakkun felt the spreading network of a chakra grid seeping up into the stone; a formless, instinctual jutsu, made without seals, cementing the stone together. Dog chakra. Baiji was using it to hold the roof in place.

Do that again, Pakkun said.

Baiji did, forcing the ceiling to glue together like a man whacking dirt flat with a trowel. I can hold it, he said. I think I can. Help coming?

Let’s hope, said Pakkun. He twisted back on himself, seeking Ginta in the darkness. It wasn’t hard; he just had to track the scent of blood, and that barely took three steps.

“I think I’ve found a gap,” he said. “That last shake moved everything about. It’s big enough for me, maybe, and there’s air coming in. I’m gonna try getting out. The village is close; there’ll be people there that can help. Can you keep it together--”

He paused, re-thought, and stretched up on his hind legs until his front paws found Ginta’s shoulder. Until his nose could touch a blood-soaked cheek.

“You will keep it together until I get back. Okay? Because Kakashi’s gonna wake up soon, and he’s gonna need someone sane around.”

“I’m fine, I’ll be fine,” Ginta said, knowing he was lying. Knowing that Pakkun, who would scent the lie, would accept it anyway, because there wasn’t a choice, Pakkun had made that clear.

Pakkun’s breath was hot against Ginta’s torn cheek. “Good,” the pug said, with an underlying threat of dire consequences should Ginta not be. Then he was gone, claws clicking over the broken tiles. The sound stopped as Pakkun turned back, sniffing one last time, and then the soft scraping as he pushed through the crevice in the rubble he’d discovered.

Ginta took a breath, shifted Kakashi’s weight, and reached up with a hesitant hand to touch his own face. It was slick and sticky with blood, and swollen, stinging. He felt gingerly along the edges of a raw laceration on his right cheek, shuddering at the grating of something that shouldn’t be moving under his touch. His nose was still pouring blood over his lip and down the back of his throat in a nauseating surge. He swallowed and tried to figure out how to pinch it shut without making it worse, giving up the effort after only a moment when it made him light headed.

“Baiji, you’re okay, right?” he asked into the darkness. A soft whuff of a reply came from the dog.

“Kakashi? Genius?”

There was no answer.

Ginta pulled Kakashi closer, pressing his bloody fingertips against the masked angle of Kakashi’s jaw to feel the pulse again. His arm around Kakashi’s chest lifted by the expansion of ribs with every breath.

Alive.

He reached up and pinched Kakashi’s earlobe hard, hoping for a twitch, a gasp, for any response at all. There was none.

“If you die here, Ryouma will kick your ass. I will too. And you don’t get to die just because you think he’s dead. Especially if you think he’s dead. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to fucking die right now.” Raspy words, broken and blocked through a fractured face, barely echoing in their tiny sepulcher.

The cold dark made the air heavy.

Baiji whined.

Ginta choked on a blood-clotted cough.

Kakashi didn’t do anything at all.