"Now, then," Shiki murmured, "Let's not lose our heads. If we're all reasonable, no one has to die." He paused, and added, "No one else."

He watched the boy in front of him, the pupils dilated as genjutsu told the young man's brain that darkness prevailed. Muscles tensed and relaxed, probably too fast for the shinobi to even realize he'd done anything. Genjutsu and Sano's ninjutsu would keep him immobilized as long as they needed.

He was tall, broad shouldered, tanned without his armor and mask. Shiki leaned against a wall and let the silence stretch while Yuuko played with their captive some more, ran her fingers through recently dirty hair. He was crying in the way people did when they were so filled with emotion they couldn't bottle it back anymore, but it escaped anyway. Rage, pain, disgust, horror, guilt. It could be any of those. It didn't matter which. All emotions were useful. It made his eyes red, and his skin shine.

Shiki stirred his tea, sipped, and spoke again. "Your friend. The little bitch with the dog you killed. She's still alive. Would you like to keep her that way? No one else has to die." They'd seen her. Fought her. Heard her speak. It wouldn't be hard to work a likeness into the jutsu.

They were lying. Had to be lying. Two nights ago in the tent Tsume had snarled at the very thought of being trapped. She couldn't be a prisoner; she was free, and savage, and wild as the wind. She'd die first, following Kuromaru into the dark.

Unless they'd caught her the way they'd caught Ryouma, and she was trapped out there somewhere in the black, alone with her loss...

He couldn't kill her again.

"Don't touch her." Ryouma's voice rasped in its gravel depths, shaking with fury and fear. "I'll tear you apart. I'll feed you your own guts. If you hurt her I swear even the ravens'll find nothing left of you--"

He threw his head up, straining against the chair, fighting for his fingers. Not a muscle twitched. The woman's manicured hands ran over his shoulders, dipped down to follow the lines of his collarbones. He twisted his head and bit at her. She slapped his face away, and laughed.

Shiki stirred his tea again, watching green powder rise to the surface and fall away. "Take it easy," he murmured, golden eyes regarding the boy's struggles with a practiced gaze. No one had ever broken Sano's jutsu, but that didn't mean it would never happen.

He watched, and measured. And relaxed. It wasn't going to happen today. Tea rippled as he blew across his mug. The cut along the young man's calf had opened again. Blood trickled down his leg, soaking his boot. It slid over leather, red and shiny, and etched the shape of his heel into the floor.

"We haven't touched her. Not any more than necessary to subdue her. But if you want her to remain untouched, you might consider cooperating. You might not find it so bad. We don't want your village or your friends." Setting his tea down, he walked toward Tousaki. When he was close enough to touch he crouched, hands linked between his knees. He looked up into eyes that couldn't see him and spoke softly, just loud enough to reach the struggling boy. "We just want your jutsu, Tousaki-kun."

"You're lying," Ryouma said. His lips curled back from his teeth, and his eyes glared wildly, uselessly, into the black. "No one could subdue Tsume. She'd eat your damn faces. You killed her dog."

And that was another lie, because Ryouma had killed him, had felt the chakra ripple through his hands and soak into Kuromaru's flesh. The damn jutsu that had left his hands still stinking with Kuromaru's death, with his own guilt, with Tsume's pain--

They wanted his jutsu?

Ryouma spat into the dark. The woman's hand knotted in his hair, and pulled him back. "That's all you'll get from me," he panted, straining against her painful grip. "You don't have Tsume. You just got me. Go ahead and kill me, and you won't even have that."

Shiki looked at the pink circle of spittle between his feet. He pondered his options while Yuuko danced too-sharp nails down the rigid line of the boy's windpipe. One more chance for him, then. One more shot at doing this the easy way.

He looked at the small black case in the corner. If they had to, they would resort to genjutsu. But knowing it was really happening--that they would never again use hands or feet or eyes--often lent an edge of panic to ninja otherwise hardened against such things.

But one more try. One more chance to break for hope rather than pain. He looked at Sano.

The other jounin grimaced around his cigarette. The purple scar twisted it into something monstrous. And then his hands met, seals working, and the genjutsu was cast. Shiki hoped Sano's approximation of the woman was good enough. Good enough was all they needed.

Somewhere in the darkness, a door creaked. Footsteps scuffled; a man swore. Yuuko's fingernails curled against Ryouma's throat, sharp dots of pain pressing against the tender skin. He was holding his breath, he found, and couldn't take another. He smelled sweat, and blood, and rot, but he couldn't tell whose.

"Ungag her," the white-haired man's voice said calmly. Cloth whistled. A woman choked on half a sob, and turned it into a snarl.

"Let me go, you bastards--I'll rip your hearts out--"

Flesh smacked against flesh. Chakra flared; Tsume's grief-thickened voice fell silent.

"Speak politely to Shiki-sama," Yuuko said icily, "or you'll never speak again."

A moment's pause. Heavy breathing; a faint plipping sound, like blood or tears dripping. Yuuko's fingers threaded through Ryouma's hair again and turned his head gently to the right.

"She's standing just there, Tousaki-kun," the woman whispered. "Close enough to touch. If you could. Do you want to touch her, Tousaki-kun?" Her hand slid down his sweat-slicked chest; her breast brushed against his cheek as she leaned forward. Her fingers flirted with the waistband of his pants, and then brushed back upwards to slip into the shallow gash over his belly. He gritted his teeth against the sudden pain. Feet and flesh scuffled within arm's reach of his unmoving right hand, as if Tsume had made a sudden lunge toward him and been caught. Yuuko giggled into his ear.

They must have taken the silencing jutsu off Tsume; her voice broke out in the middle of a word, as if she'd never stopped shouting. "--urderers, damned stinking bitch, get your hands off him--"

Ryouma leaned his head back into Yuuko's other hand and closed his useless eyes. Thank you, he prayed to the gods he'd never believed in. Tsume was dead, or she had escaped. Either way, she was safe. Either way, he couldn't hurt her anymore.

"Liar," he said again, and it cut through the frenzied shouting like a kunai through silk. "You can't play a player. You don't have Tsume, and your genjutsu user's no better'n a first-year genin. Tsume doesn't swear. You can't touch her. And my dead body's all you'll ever get."

Shiki saw the moment Sano dropped the genjutsu. He shook his head and put aside his tea. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Tousaki-kun." His footsteps echoed softly as he walked across the small bunker. The black case grated when he dragged it out of the corner. The clasps snapped open.

He gazed at the instruments within. Small, pointed blades. Vials of liquids. Needles, syringes. Forceps. Pliers. He ran a fingernail over them, and heard the delicate chime. "But I'm afraid your dead body isn't going to be any use to us." He picked up a thin metal tube and let it ring across the others. Each note rang beautiful and clear in the room. Yuuko made a small murmur of enjoyment. Sano looked anywhere but at them.

"You can't teach us your jutsu if you're dead, after all." Shiki picked up a pair of small pliers and eyed the boy's mouth. "But let me know when you're ready to show it. We might even let you go home." It carried the ring of truth. All they wanted was his jutsu.

Shiki's calm voice, echoing in the sudden silence, was the only clue that the genjutsu had ended. Yuuko's hands still cradled the back of Ryouma's skull and played in the wet warmth that trickled down his stomach from the re-opened cut. The darkness didn't change; the dripping blood didn't fade away.

But a few new sounds replaced the illusory Tsume's shouts. Leather grating over concrete. Metal flicked with a fingernail, then rung against more metal. Senbon might make that silvery bell-tone. Kunai probably wouldn't. Opening his eyes made no difference, though he hadn't really hoped it would. They might have blinded him. They might still blind him. He'd tried not to think of it, but with the slightest hint in his thoughts, the possibilities rushed in. Fire. Drowning. Castration. Fingers smashed, eyes punctured, tendons severed, tongue cut out--

He'd watched torture sessions. He'd conducted a few. He knew what they could do to him, and he knew that whatever he thought of, they'd have something worse.

They might break him. He didn't think they could, but probably every man who ever broke had once thought the same. Maybe he should offer to show them the jutsu, strike out at whoever stood nearest, and then kill himself; it would be easy enough, one finger on the throat, one palm slapped over his heart. But he couldn't take the risk that even one more glimpse would be enough to give them the jutsu secret. It wasn't just pride anymore, as it had been with Kakashi months ago; when they were done with him, it wouldn't matter if he was the only Konoha nin who could melt touch with a flesh. He'd have broken, and even if he could still be a ninja, he'd no longer be Konoha's.

Konoha's ninja corps had given him a place to belong, a purpose to serve, when no one else saw anything more than a ragged urchin and an early grave. He was Konoha's, body and soul and jutsu, and he'd never needed the scarlet tattoo on his shoulder to make it so.

He pulled his head away from Yuuko's hand, stared straight ahead with eyes that could not see, and waited for them to begin. He was ANBU, and he'd show them how an ANBU died.

Six hours earlier

Water closed over her head. She tightened her grip in Kuromaru's fur and yanked on their chakra pathways. Rock rained down on them. Something struck her shoulder. Chakra strengthened muscle and bone, like a shield under her skin. She plastered herself over her familiar, all too aware that he wouldn't think to do the same. Right now, he wasn't thinking about anything.

Tsume could feel the pounding of the waterfall and struck toward it, drawing more power down her pathways, making it flash whipcord fast between her and Kuromaru. They still had a predator on their trail, though the fall and the rockslide had hidden them.

It took more chakra to lend her the speed and strength she needed to haul a nearly two hundred pound beast through the river, under the falls, and up. She stuck her hands to moss-covered rocks, gasping for air as she dragged herself out of the water. Muscles flexed. Chakra sang. She pulled her familiar up by any part of him she could grab.

The skin at her temple prickled uncomfortably. She ignored it and yanked harder, until he was vomiting up riverwater, halfway out of the falls. Claws scrabbled for purchase. Muscles bunched and writhed as he struggled up.

His black coat was plastered to his body, relieved only by the swath of meat above one eye. The edges blackened as she watched, sliding into an ooze. It smelled like a kill three weeks old and fur gone rotten. She tried to ignore it, staggering farther from the falls and into the cave behind.

It would be fine. It had to be fine.

Kuromaru lay on his belly and whimpered softly, pupils blown to their fullest with fear and pain.

Blood sleeved her arm. She ignored it. Her temple and ear burned. She ignored that, too.

Somewhere beyond the crashing water, a ninja was still after them. It wouldn't take him long to realize they hadn't surfaced and start looking. Time was limited.

"Kuromaru." He didn't so much as twitch. Tsume's curses were soft and ragged. She pulled out a bandage, wrapping it around her bicep to slow the bleeding where the rock had hit her, tying it off with a quick yank of one hand and teeth. "Kuromaru." It was a little more desperate this time. A little more choked.

Bits of his ear were missing. Flesh turned black. It curled inward and sloughed away, dripping down the outside edge, soaking into his scruff. He whimpered softly.

It was eating him. But it wasn't eating him quickly. Ryouma's jutsu worked fast, didn't it? She should know this. She needed to know this, had spent a day with the man trying to get used to the stench, learning how it worked to distract herself.

The streak of rot above Kuormaru's eye sizzled. More skin turned into sludge. Bone glimmered white underneath. Her hand hovered over the spot, as if she could heal it with a touch. Stop it from spreading.

What had Ryouma said? If she touched it while it was working, it might transfer. Her fingers shook. Was it working? Skin melted off the edge of his ear, but not at the speeds she'd seen before. Slowly. Bit by bit.

The other bit of rot--above his eye--seemed to have halted against his skull, around where a temple would be on a person. Hers throbbed in response. She crouched, studying him. Just the two spots. No more. Nothing eating into his internal organs. Not yet. Not unless it went through his skull, to his brain--

It burned faster the more chakra Ryouma added. She remembered that. When they'd thrown her, Ryouma hadn't had time to cut it before Kuromaru hit, but it didn't seem to be spreading... not quickly. He hadn't added power behind the jutsu.

Maybe she still had time. If he pushed the chakra in, surely he could pull it out.

"Kuromaru," Tsume said, and ignored the shudder in her voice. "I'm going to fix this."

More flesh died at the edge of his ear. Cartilage stood exposed for a moment before slowly reddening, going a deep purple, and dissolving into sludge.

He whimpered. Shuddered.

She felt for her medi-kit. Still safe. Held in a flat case, strapped to her leg. She pulled it out, opening it. Water had gotten in, but everything was wrapped against just that. She shivered, chilled, and eyed the contents.

A few pain pills, specially formulated for Inuzuka. Emergency pain medication, just for something like this. It would knock him out completely.

Gangrene was one of the most painful things a creature could succumb to.

There was one syringe, capped with seals. For a dog who, for whatever reason, wouldn't swallow a pill. She pulled it free.

"C-can't do that," Kuromaru whispered. "You need my chakra."

Tsume hesitated. Most of the Inuzuka jutsu required two partners. Two beings' worth of chakra. Knocking him out would mean she didn't have that--and these ninja had been winning.

But she couldn't leave him like this.

A shadow spilled over the edge of the waterfall. Tsume froze, looking up at it.

The ninja couldn't come in here. He couldn't find Kuromaru.

Chakra spun between her and her familiar, punching through her muscles as she leapt, propelling her out into the river. She yanked on the pathways again, bracing it in her feet as she skid across the top of the water, twisting to face their pursuer.

Pain rippled through her skull, across her ear. She snarled at the suddenness of it, the intensity, and flung herself at the man already making seals.

Two of him split off, moving around to attack. They didn't smell right. She ignored them, flying through basic jutsu, lengthening claws, creating fangs. Chakra spilled into her from Kuromaru. Pain chased it, burning down her ear, across her face. She screamed and channeled agony into the strike.

Faced with an enraged predator, the chuunin did the only thing possible. He died.

Chakra. Chakra-based jutsu. Tsume staggered, shaking, through the waterfall again. She held a hand to her face, yanked it away with a scream when it burned across her skin. Chakra based jutsu. This wasn't rot caused by an infected blow. This was rotting chakra, burning unnaturally through skin and organs. This was chakra that became gangrenous and dead. This was chakra that sped down the link from Kuromaru to herself.

Her ear was rotting away.

She tugged on the pathways, needing enough power to boost her from the water surface to the cave. Even that spilled more down poison into her body.

She couldn't do this alone. She needed to find Ryouma.

Kuromaru keened and clawed at his face. Skin tore under his blunt nails. Rot spilled down into it, spreading faster where it didn't have to break through whole flesh. Tsume knocked his paw away, burying her hand in his scruff. They needed help. She took a breath, bracing for pain, and made more seals. More chakra slid from him to her, and she channeled as much of the infected energy away, pouring it into a clone.

A doppleganger hissed into existence. Its ear was twisted and black, gangrene spreading across its temple with fingers of ebony. She didn't look that bad. She knew she didn't look that bad; she'd sent as much rot as possible to the clone.

It still made her sick.

"Go home. Get help," she snarled, and watched it fling itself away.

She couldn't keep using Kuromaru's chakra. Couldn't keep pulling on the pathways they shared--which was all of them. The clone had just given her an exact idea of what would happen if she did.

The syringe still rested on the cave floor. Kuromaru whimpered. Cried. Began to howl. She picked it up, let chakra seep into the seals. She felt the pain spread. Teeth clamped around the cap and yanked it off. The needle slid through fur and dense skin with one hard jab. He didn't have time to protest again. Unconsciousness claimed him.

She could get back to where they'd been without Inuzuka jutsu. She could track where they'd gone by her own scenting abilities. And then she'd decide what to do.

Ryouma had to come back with her. He was the only way they were going to survive this.

Ryouma's resolution not to make a sound lasted as just long as his second molar did. Enamel and bone shattered with a brain-piercing crack, and the pliers jogged against his lacerated tongue. A sudden rush of salty blood drowned his scream; he choked on blood and fragments of tooth.

A hand cupped his jaw, spearing agony through his skull. "Ready to cooperate yet, Tousaki-kun?"

It hurt too much to spit. He dribbled copper warmth down his chin instead. Shiki sighed, patient, long-suffering, and wiped his hand over Ryouma's bare chest.

"Time for the knives, I think," he said.

When Yuuko's loving hands flayed the third strip of tattooed skin away from his heart and caressed the bleeding wound with salted fingers, Ryouma passed out.

Shiki frowned and reached over for the smelling salts. Unconsciousness was no escape from this--the only escape, Tousaki-kun would have to learn, was by cooperating. He focused for a single bright moment and then wafted the salts under the boy's nose, spiking chakra into it as well.

Dark eyes snapped open, muscles tensing and locking for just a moment. Lungs fought for a hard shudder, leaving him gaping when it didn't come. Shiki waited, knowing that the jounin before him was forced to take shallow breaths by Sano's jutsu, knowing that this sort of waking would demand larger ones. It was entirely possible the boy would pass out again from being unable to breathe.

Amazingly, he managed to stay conscious. Blood ran down the young man's chin, over the edge of his jaw. Yuuko kept playing with it, gliding her nails through it and then dancing them over his throat, his chest, skimming blood from where she'd peeled his flesh away over his pectorals and using it to make pictures and patterns across his shoulders. Shiki hadn't told her to stop. The more distraught Tousaki was, the faster he'd break.

Pulling out teeth probably wasn't going to do it, or it would have already. They could come back to that another time. He put his palm under hands broader than his own, sliding them until callused fingers stretched out. Then, carefully, he laid them on the arms of the chair. He let metal sing as he pulled out a scalpel. "Most parts of the body stop hurting after a time. The neurons wear out. Stop firing. That's not true of fingers, you know." He pressed the edge of the blade against the boy's cuticle, increasing pressure until the skin split and the nail cracked. Then he drew it forward. It wasn't easy. It didn't take one smooth pull. He tugged, released, and tugged again. Blood dripped down the man's hand.

"You can stop this. Any time. It's just a jutsu."

Ryouma couldn't clench his teeth anymore; one missing molar on each side of his jaw stabbed bloody fire that built to an inferno when he tried to set his jaw against the agony in hand and chest. He couldn't catch his breath. Couldn't snarl his defiance. Couldn't stop the tears that bled from his blind eyes, or the little sobbing whimpers that built in his raw throat, or the thrashing jerk of his head as Shiki pulled the fingernail out of its bed.

But he could remember the promise he'd made. Konoha's jutsu. Konoha's man. Konoha's, blood and bone.

His blood wouldn't serve his village now, but his silence still might.

Through the next two nails Tousaki remained silent on the subject of his jutsu. It was too bad. Shiki picked the man's hand up, examining the ruined nailbeds with their bloody, torn skin. He took a gentle breath and blew on them, listening to the boy's voice break over a scream as cool air fired off nerve endings never before exposed to the elements. As skin contracted minutely, ripping the injuries further. He carefully laid the hand back down.

"You can't hold out forever. Everyone has a breaking point. Maybe if help was coming... but there's not. By the time anyone realizes you didn't return successfully, the last traces will have faded. Not even chakra will linger to tell them where you've gone."

Yuuko draped herself over the young man, her lips brushing his ear. "C'mon, Tousaki-kun. We could send you to sleep with a jutsu. You could believe for a little while that your little bitch was alive. And safe. And that you weren't hurting, or caught. You could just believe this was all a bad dream. We could make that happen." Her lips curled in a smile. "Or Shiki can keep ripping out your nails."

He drew the scalpel crosswise, snapping one into four pieces. And then he started at the back, digging the nail out with the point of the blade.

The romantic image of a stoic ANBU suffering in silence had shattered long ago, along with Ryouma's teeth. Dying with dignity lost its meaning; if he were dead anyway, it wouldn't matter how he'd died. He thrashed, and begged, and wept, and screamed until his throat hurt worse than his teeth, and only the rock-salt rubbed into his flayed chest and the ruined nerves throbbing in his naked fingertips hurt worse than those.

But he didn't say I'll tell you. He didn't need dignity, but he couldn't be a traitor. All that he had, Konoha had given him. All that he was, Konoha had made him. Tsume and Kuromaru had died for Shiki's greed, and there was no way under the open sky or down in the deepest pit that Ryouma would let those deaths be trampled underfoot.

So he screamed, and he struggled. And when Shiki dug out the last shred of his fourth nail and paused to let Yuuko's long, elegant fingers dabble in the blood and paint a new pattern over his collarbones, he finally found enough breath for words.

"Maybe you can. Break me. Prob'ly so. I just gotta...hold out. Long enough. So when I break, there'll be nothing to show."

If his mind went, the jutsu would go with it. If agony wore his chakra so low that he slipped into depletion and coma and death, he'd never be able to show them. And if they pushed him far enough, pushed him to the brink, he could step over it, and sink from darkness into Nothingness.

He just had to make sure that they pushed him to that brink before he broke.

Shiki smiled. It had no humor. It was small. It was tight. A thinning of lips hiding teeth. "I think you underestimate how long we can keep you going," he said quietly. "If we break your body, we can torture your mind with illusion. And we won't break your mind."

He pulled a glass vial from the case. Uncapped it. "How would you like to see your comrade's death? Over and over. Face rotting away, like you did to our teammate. Slower, maybe. Ever wonder what your jutsu feels like? That dog you hit. It didn't die right away. Your rot ate through it slowly. Piece by piece." He walked toward the boy. Made his steps distinct and clear.

Tousaki needed breaks between pain, so his body would calm. So it wasn't all one wave of agony. He needed to survive. Needed to feel the different sorts of horror they could accomplish.

Shiki waited, giving the boy time. A few moments of living without torture. A moment of hope, written into human biology, that the pain would ease. A moment of despair, the curse of the human mind, because he knew it wouldn't.

"You are mine, now." Shiki swirled the acid. Watched it rise and touch the lip of the vial. When it settled, he lowered the glass and pressed it against Tousaki's skin. Smeared the barest shine of liquid over the strong flesh across broad shoulders. Watched the flesh turn pink, then red, then twist and blacken away into nothing as the substance sank through the first few layers.

He listened to the screaming as acid ate through nerves, and when that was over, he smiled and let one single drop fall, roll down the breadth of shoulder and bicep, dragging a river of blood and dissolved skin, bits of muscle in its wake.

Into the screams he murmured, "And you're not leaving here, mind or body, until I have what I want."

There had to be a brink. Had to. Because surely the human body wasn't meant to hurt this much; surely there was a way out. When all hell boiled inside your skin, there had to be some way to die.

He passed out, and they revived him again. He tried to snap his neck against the chair back, and Yuuko's hands steadied his head as she murmured sweet promises of pain into his ear. He tried to bite through his tongue, but he couldn't even get his teeth to close. He ripped his voice ragged, and he still heard the smile in Shiki's voice as his torturer smeared acid onto the raw flesh where they'd sliced his skin off.

This was how Kuromaru had felt when Ryouma rotted his life away.

His voice was gone. He screamed anyway.

"Just tell us what we want to know." Very carefully, Shiki put traces of the acid on the raw nailbeds. Not enough to eat in. Just enough to sear the nerves. "It's not hard. You must know these jutsu like your own hands."

He painted more acid over one of the few nails left, and watched it start to eat through. "In a moment you'll feel that," he promised quietly. "And I suppose you won't know your own hands. But you'll still know this jutsu. You've had it forever. I saw it, you know. In the war. You killed my team." He smiled. "You destroyed everything with these hands, but you're going to make it better. You're going to help me build a secret village. It's not hard. You take things. And you keep them. And if you start talking now, you could have a place there."

"Maybe as my pet," Yuuko purred.

Shiki smiled again. "Yes. A prized one, though. One who gave us a very important jutsu. Just start talking, and this will all be over."

He wasn't talking. He was screaming. But he wasn't talking. Shiki dripped acid on the boy's tongue. The mouth snapped closed. He screamed again when the shattered remnants of his teeth cracked together.

"Just start talking."

He wasn't.

Shiki stood, whipped around to face Sano, and demanded, "Give him his vision back. I want him to see it when I take his eyes."

A flash of alien chakra was all the warning they had before a figure pounded through the genjutsu-guarded door. The move was reckless. Foolish. It landed the small, masked ANBU woman right in the middle of them, either burning off unwise amounts of chakra to have withstood that crash, or stunned.

They were Jounin. They didn't hesitate in falling into a defensive formation, guarding their prisoner.

She wasn't stunned, and didn't hesitate in lunging for Sano. Her words were barely more than an animalistic snarl. "Give him back!"

She wouldn't last long against all of them.

For a bare moment, hope beat so wildly in Ryouma's chest that it almost drowned out the clamor from a million ravaged nerves. Color bloomed out of darkness, shapes, movement: a slim figure in ANBU armor, cat-mask painted in red swirls and blood. A white-haired young man with coffee-colored skin, holding a tiny clear vial and smiling. A voluptuous woman with long black hair and a blood-tinged smile, catching up a pair of scalpels from a black leather case. An older man with a scarred face and a burnt-out cigarette, lifting his hands in seals.

They'd decided to try genjutsu again, and this time they were going to make him watch her die.

"Don't touch her!" he screamed, helplessly, hopelessly. They wouldn't end the genjutsu; they wanted him to watch her bleed. They'd do to her what they'd done to him, peel that warm brown skin away from sleek muscles, drip acid in her grinning mouth and her fierce blue eyes. She'd die screaming in front of him, and he would break.

It was a genjutsu. Tsume was dead, and safe; they couldn't hurt her anymore.

He didn't care.

"I'll show you," he begged with the tattered shreds of a ruined voice. "Don't hurt her."

And then he saw Sano die.

The ninja rallied too fast. The scarred man fell, jugular ripped clear from his neck. Then they were attacking, little bits of silver caught in an unnatural wind whipping toward her. She twisted. They cut. Lightning caught up in it, wrapping around her. She screamed and snarled and knew she couldn't keep up. Not without the jutsu she'd spent years training for. Jutsu that she couldn't call on Kuromaru for, not without killing herself.

She'd taken that into account.

Three hard little capsules were tucked into her mouth. She bit into them, dodging weapons for a few more seconds as chakra dissolved into her.

This wasn't a jutsu. Not precisely. It was a summons. It needed a familiar's chakra, and it needed solider pills. She didn't have a familiar. But she did have extra soldier pills.

The chemicals hissed into her pathways, overloading her channels, burning and destroying them. She stopped protecting herself. She twisted through seals instead. A summoning scroll wouldn't help for this. She painted the signs on the walls, on the floor, on any surface she could touch. Painted them in her own blood, shed as the blades found the breaks in her armor and dug into her flesh.

Poured chakra into them.

The Wolf had killed more Inuzuka than He had helped. He didn't like to be summoned. He was at no one's beck and call. He didn't puff into being with a swirl of mist. He burned into their world with a rending of power, with her soul torn out through her pathways, with fire and heat and she didn't care. Tsume screamed as chemical chakra whipped through her fast enough to shred her system raw and bleeding. She snarled and flung herself into alpha mindlessly, forcing the Wolf to listen. Begging Him to help. Calling Him to save her Pack.

He stood larger than Kuromaru, with eyes that would never be dog, but might just be demon. He didn't speak at all, but He called her child and mother and lover, called her prey and called her family. Called her to lead, before He simply killed her.

Around them, the bunker shredded. Wind and weapons tore it apart. Tsume bled. Someone screamed. The air smelled like blood, and not all of it was hers.

She only needed a little more anyway. She only needed to get close enough to paint a few more things.

The dead body was the first one. She brushed bloody fingers over its vest, then staggered away as the black-faced wolf took the distraction she'd given Him, and began to dismember the corpse.

Ozone burned. Lightning shattered down, building a cage. The man dragged Ryouma out of the chair. He took his prisoner and ran into the night as the bolts fell, locking Tsume in. The woman guarded their retreat, eyes flicking from the Wolf to Tsume and back again, secure in the knowledge that they were within, and she was without. She raised her hands and began her seals.

Tsume dove for the lightning bars, shreds of chakra spinning through her charred pathways, lending strength to her legs. Two more steps. One. She flung a hand out at the edge of the cage as the wind jutsu started, glittering with shrapnel. Blood spattered through electricity, and across the woman's feet.

The black-faced wolf looked up from His meal. He lunged, regardless of the unnatural bars. Protected by His bulk, Tsume slipped out with Him.

The kunoichi fought as the Wolf closed. Tsume ignored them. She had one more prey to catch. The Wolf wouldn't kill what she didn't mark, and the dark skinned man was leaving with Kuromaru's only hope for survival. She was not going to let him take Ryouma.

Another soldier pill, another shuddering wrack of pain as it shoved into an overtaxed system. She pushed forward.

They were outrunning her.

Into the forest. Into the shadows and darkness, where it would be harder to track them.

And then the Wolf was there, keeping up, keeping pace, pulling ahead. Tsume dropped to her knees and watched Him go. Ryouma was Pack. She kept that in mind. Ryouma was Pack. She closed her eyes, remembering his smell, his smile in the hospital. Covered in puppies, curled up with her daughter. Ryouma was Pack.

The Wolf wouldn't kill someone she hadn't marked. But sometimes, sometimes, He would save that which was His.

Ryouma was Pack.

When Sano's throat disappeared in a welter of blood, his jutsu disappeared too. The sudden release caught Ryouma totally off-guard. His thrashing head hit the chair back; his right hand dropped into his lap.

The faint pressure of blood-soaked cloth against acid-eaten fingertips was worse than anything else they'd done to him. This time, he couldn't even scream.

He was dimly conscious of a massive chakra flaring, of fire and sulfur and eyes like the heart of the sun. Of the room shredding around him. Of Tsume shrieking in pain and fury. Darkness reached out hungry arms to claim him again as he realized for the first time that Tsume might be real. Might be alive.

For the first time since he'd woken blind with fragments of Kuromaru's melted flesh clinging to his hands, he wanted to live too.

And as Shiki spun and grabbed at him, as pain-weakened muscles refused to fight back, as unconsciousness closed in, he knew he'd lost his chance.

Tsume didn't see the fight. Didn't see the Wolf stop the white-haired shinobi and take Ryouma back. Didn't see the brief struggle, before the man realized he couldn't win.

She just saw great black paws stop in front of her, and large jaws lower Ryouma to the ground.

Ryouma was Pack.

Tsume took a breath through lungs that didn't want to expand, eyes slowly focusing on the body in front of her. Shirtless, maskless, bloody. Unconscious, he looked even younger than he actually was.

How old was he? It didn't matter. He was old enough to be a ninja. Old enough to wear the bloody red swirl of an ANBU tattoo, and the marks of torture that dripped through it. Her gaze twitched, alighting here and there, never for more than a moment at a time. Moonlight painted him in shades of gray. Broad shoulders with lines of ruined skin. A dragon twisting violently across his chest, coils of its body missing where the flesh had been peeled away, exposing the muscle underneath. Chin and jaw were smeared with blood. His fingertips were ruins.

His feet were all right. His legs were whole. He still had his eyes.

She couldn't carry him back. He was nearly a foot taller than she was, likely half again her weight. She was burning out on chakra, dancing on the edge of overdose if she kept taking pills. It would be a kindness to let him remain unconscious, and she couldn't do it.

Breathing an apology, Tsume framed his pain-wrecked face in hands that carried a fine tremble and channeled the last of the chakra from her soldier pills into his skull. She needed him awake.

Pain found him when consciousness did. His back arched up, torn chest heaving as he gasped for breath. Hands on his face, palms cradling his cheeks, fingers slipping up to tangle in his hair...

But those were calluses that snagged on his stubble, not manicured nails. And his searching, seeing eyes found a blood-spattered mask, wild brown hair, slit-pupiled blue eyes glimmering palely in the mask's shadows. She smelled of sweat and rot and wild animal musk. He knew he'd never see anything more beautiful in his life.

"Tsume," he rasped, and nearly blacked out again from the pain of moving his acid-spattered tongue. But she was here, and she needed him, and he fought through the dark mist to give her a bloody smile. "My hero."

Relief twisted through her. It wasn't what made her shake. That was too many soldier pills. They made her hands shiver and her heart pound, her breath come short and fast.

Her ribs felt like they might break, shattered by the hammering of her heart.

Emotions churned through her; relief, worry, fear, the need to fight--

She dragged her focus back. Her palms slid carefully down his neck, her eyes skimming farther with short, sharp leaps down his bloody chest. Her breath came faster, almost painful. Too much chakra.

Too much relief.

Too much panic, about the familiar she'd left unconscious eight hours earlier. It had taken too much time to find their trail. Too much time to track them. Too much time to realize that the scents vanished into rock because of a crotch-rotting genjutsu, and not because she'd missed something after the sun set. Too much time to save Ryouma, and Kuromaru was rotting to death.

Her face throbbed, hidden behind a bone-white mask. Blocking the pain out was getting harder.

Her eyes snapped back up to his. "Can you get up? We have to go. Now." Nearby, the Wolf growled low in His throat. Tsume looked at Him. He wouldn't stay much longer. Not for the run back. But maybe long enough to see them away from here. To make the white-haired shinobi think He was still with them.

She looked back at Ryouma. "We have to go," she repeated quietly.

The urgency driving her voice was far too clear. Maybe Shiki and Yuuko weren't dead; maybe this was their chance to pull out, a world too late. Tsume didn't explain, and Ryouma hurt too much to ask. He flattened his left hand on the ground, trying not to grit his teeth against the pain in his index finger, trying not to scream. At least they'd only mutilated one of the nails on his left hand, and hadn't got around to ruining the rest before Tsume burst in. At least they hadn't blinded or crippled or castrated him, or cut off his fingers or cut out his tongue.

He had a lot to be grateful for. He had a lot to thank Tsume for.

He focused on that, on how he'd killed her dog and she'd saved his life and he owed her that life and anything else that he could give, as he pushed himself up. The palm of his left hand dug into the ground, and his abdominal muscles seared around the gash on his stomach. Somehow he managed to sit upright, to pull his legs under him and to shove himself up to one knee and then to his feet. He wavered, and the torn-open wound in his calf painted blood down his heel, but he stood.

And a black-faced wolf as tall as a horse stood in front of him, lips crinkled back to expose yellowed fangs dripping blood and shreds of flesh. Its eyes burned him like the desert sun.

"I remember you," he croaked. "Thank you." He reached sideways, brushed Tsume's shoulder with the heel of his left hand. "Thank you."

Tsume's jaw locked. The Wolf gave Ryouma a cool, assessing look, and growled low in His throat. She clamped a hand around Ryouma's arm and glared back at the creature, flinging alpha between them and growling back. The threat focused her like nothing else would have.

Hers.

She didn't know how much longer she could hold Him. If she pressed, if He grew angry enough, it didn't matter if you were alpha. He was alpha, too, and He could kill all of them.

He had killed more Inuzuka than He'd saved.

"Don't thank me yet," Tsume rumbled, walking stiff-legged away from the rubble of the bunker, pulling Ryouma along. "Don't look at Him. Don't talk to Him." Her authority was precarious. There was no scroll for the Wolf to destroy, or she thought He would have done so long ago. Their scroll was written in blood, wherever it needed to be--if that need was enough to risk being eaten. If you thought you were strong enough.

A breeze whispered. It brushed over slowly decaying skin and exposed nerves. Tsume shuddered, focus splintering as she fought the urge to claw at her face under her mask, to tear away the rot. Her hair slid over her ear. Her whole body tightened for a moment, stomach threatening to rebel.

It was worse for Kuromaru. She didn't know how long the sedatives would last, or if they'd even be strong enough to keep him under against agony far more powerful than this. Had to get back. She swallowed and looked at Ryouma, trying to see how badly he was hurt. How fast he could go. Her gaze flicked over shoulders and torso, landing and darting away to the next patch of skin before she even registered wounds.

It should have been easy. She'd looked at everything, and somehow saw nothing. She focused, trying to ease her thoughts, calm her body, channel the chemical chakra slower, and assessed him again. Broad swathes of red on his chest. Nails gone. Blood dripping off fingers. Lines of raw skin.

Could he run? She realized she'd seen blood, damage, but not how bad it was. A sense of hurt didn't tell her anything.

"How fast can you go?" Her voice was a croak. His was barely that.

"Dunno." It hurt to move, hurt to breathe, hurt to walk. They hadn't injured any internal organs; it was only his raw chest and ravaged throat that made it so agonizing to draw breath. He was desperately thirsty, but the thought of water washing over his tongue--washing the rest of that acid down his throat--was inescapably vivid. He coughed, bent his head to spit, and only managed to dribble red strings onto his chest.

He could feel the wolf's eyes on his back, burning with an unnatural heat. Could feel its low growl rumbling in the ground, reverberating in his bones. He took another breath and wondered what Tsume had called. How hard she'd pushed. She looked little better than he did, and her hand trembled on his arm.

"Need soldier pills," he managed. "Water--not sure I can drink. Acid on my tongue. Think I can run. Dunno how far. Is he alive?"

She had soldier pills. Any Inuzuka performing clan jutsu B-rank or higher carried double the compliment of a regular ninja.

She'd started with twenty. She had thirteen left. Tsume nearly fumbled the case as she pulled it free, shaking out two. One she gave to Ryouma. The other she palmed. She'd need it soon enough.

Her gaze flicked up, around toward the bunker. The shadows under the trees. She didn't look at the Wolf. What had Ryouma said? Her face burned. Something slid down the edge of her eye, between ceramic and skin. A metallic screech startled her back to the moment.

Her claws scratching at her mask, as if she could peel back her flesh. She curled that hand into a fist, pressing against the cool plating. "Acid. Acid, right." She looked up. He was pale under the blood. Speaking oddly. Acid on his tongue.

He'd asked a question. She glanced around as if she might see Kuromaru there, but he was still under the waterfall. Six hours, if they moved fast. "He's alive." She just didn't know for how long. "We need to go--" Something she needed to think about. Tsume shook her head and stared hard at him.

Acid on his tongue. "Is it still burning? Through?"

One soldier pill wasn't nearly enough, but it helped. He cracked it between two canines and swallowed it whole, with a mouthful of blood and a tingle of burn. Chakra lit his fading pathways; new energy bled a little more strength into his limbs.

Tsume's answer jolted him with a little more. He's alive. We need to go...

Damn right, they needed to go. Because Ryouma would open his own throat before he let Shiki touch him again. And he'd go back to that chair willingly before he let them have Tsume.

He didn't answer her question about acid; he couldn't tell one spot of agony from another anymore, knew they probably couldn't do anything anyway. Instead, he rubbed the back of a red-crusted wrist against his burning eyes and stared hard at the rugged land spreading out around them. Wind-stunted pines, tumbled rocks, scrub growing low in dry reddish soil. A broken mountain range heaved itself up blue-grey in the north-west; clouds piled ominously over it. He blinked hard, made out a familiar shape. The name strangled in his throat. "Mount Rishiri?"

Ryouma had spent three years on the Lightning Country border, in an outpost under Rishiri's jagged shadow. He knew the shape of that snarling outcrop of rock from every approach. They weren't even in Fire Country anymore; they must have crossed the border into one of the neutral countries between Fire and Lightning fifty kilometers ago. How far had Tsume run to find him?

How far would they have to run to safety?

He took one limping step, then another. His calf leaked a little more down his heel, but he wouldn't bleed out from that wound just yet. The horrific mess of his left chest, where Yuuko had sliced off his nipple and peeled away patches of flesh and tattoo, was more of a problem. If infection rooted there, he'd die before they even crossed the border.

But if Shiki found them, they'd die now.

"If I fall," he said, "end it then. Please." He gathered chakra, gathered courage, and lurched into a run.

"You're not going to fall," Tsume growled, springing after him. She didn't even know if the words cleared the edge of her mask. It didn't matter. He wasn't going to fall. Him falling meant Kuromaru would go. Kuromaru going would take her, too.

If Ryouma fell, they all died.

The Wolf ran beside them for nearly a kilometer before she felt it splinter off into a thousand pieces, shattering back into where it had come from. They kept running.

By the second hour Ryouma was laboring, mouth a thin line. The cold and his lack of clothes didn't help. Tsume could barely see past the flashes of white in her right eye, where rot snarled over her temple and pounded a heartbeat throb of pain. She stopped them, pulled out pills and reluctantly--worried about how medication made for Inuzuka would affect Ryouma--gave him one. It wouldn't matter if he could run jutsu, if he didn't make it back because he'd dropped from agony.

An hour after that, they stopped to tend to his chest. Most of their wraps had been used earlier. She'd left her kit under the waterfall, wanting no extra weight to slow her down. Her gloves went to make bandages, and a long strip from her shirt. It was black. Only the scent told her when he bled through.

She kept her mask and armor on.

Running on determination and chemical chakra, they kept going.

It took them seven hours to get back to the waterfall, and she dove headlong down the loose slope that had been destroyed earlier. Dirt skid away under her feet, creating little avalanches father below; she didn't care, reckless in her need to find her familiar. Running through the dark of night to get to him faster.

"This way!" she yelled, and vanished under the sheet of falling silver.

Under the falls, it was black. Tsume snatched up glo-sticks from the kit she'd left and broke them, letting the soft green illumination fill the cave. Kuromaru was awake. He lay in a corner, whimpering softly, face bleeding and blackening where he'd scratched the skin open with one paw. The rot spread very slowly, but it still spread.

Tsume's face burned.

The freezing water pounded Ryouma's hair flat to his skull, drove needles into acid-burns and through makeshift dressings. He curled his maimed fingers loosely against his palms and ducked his head, shielding his chest as best he could. The temptation to tip his head back and let the falling water drown his thirst was nearly unbearable--but he'd already borne too many things he thought he couldn't. He followed Tsume through to a cave where the air sang with cold and wet rocks skidded underfoot, where moss slimed the walls and a great black dog lay whimpering in pain.

The reek of rot clawed at Ryouma's nose. He stopped just inside the cave, shivers chasing each other under torn skin, ruined hands flexing at his sides. Bile mixed with blood at the back of his throat.

"Kuromaru," he whispered. "I thought--I felt--"

He'd felt fur and flesh sizzle beneath his fingers, felt the rounded shape of the skull glide beneath the heel of his wrist. The dog shouldn't have survived even this long. How many hours had he lingered in agony, waiting for Tsume to return?

"I'm sorry," he said. Guilt burned like acid through his chest. Tsume hadn't been fleeing a predator when she'd dragged him out of the bunker and demanded if he could run; she'd been racing against time, against rot, against death itself. She'd brought Ryouma back to undo what he'd done, and all he could do was betray her again.

"Chakra spreads the rot. It can't be stopped."

She was looking at Kuromaru when Ryouma spoke, a hand on his paw keeping him from clawing further at the decaying flesh. At Ryouma's words, she went still. Silent. The cave was filled with Kuromaru's soft whimpers and the crash of water. Crouched, Tsume twisted to look over her shoulder, through the slits in her mask, at the man standing in the glow of night-sticks. She couldn't smell anything over the rot.

Balanced on the pads of her feet, she rose. Her head dipped, shoulders canting, sliding her weight to protect Kuromaru's head. It wasn't alpha that filled her chakra, that filled the cave. It was predator and threat and hunter and nothing left to lose. Her fingers curled slightly, as if they wore claws. The white ANBU mask hid the lift of her lips off her teeth.

She took one step toward Ryouma. And then another. "I suggest," she said in the softest of growls, "that you think of something." A third step had her halfway across the stone. Chemical chakra made her blood sizzle. Burned her pathways. Heightened the predator and balanced her on the verge of a battle. Kept her chakra levels high, but not high enough to keep the energy from sliding in its constant circulation from herself to Kuromaru and back. With every turn around, the likelihood of the rot spreading increased. As long as she didn't actively pull off him, it wasn't too bad.

Running the risk of soldier pill overdose was better.

Kuromaru keened. Nails scrabbled on wet rock.

She took a fourth step. Pale eyes stared through slits in the mask. Her head didn't lift to look at him; her gaze simply shifted up. "I didn't leave you. And I'm not leaving him. And if I have to leave him..." Her mouth twisted, and the words came out more wolf than human. "Then you're staying, too."

Tsume's killing intent focused like a blade, slicing through pride and guilt and grief straight through to a primal fear Ryouma hadn't known he possessed. He'd stopped breathing. His heart pounded against his ribs, louder than the thunder of the waterfall behind him. Shiki's chakra had been sharp-edged but languid, desiring obedience, desiring pain. Tsume's chakra raged, feral as the demon-eyed wolf's, demanding obedience and promising death.

If it would have helped, he'd have given it to her.

But she wanted Kuromaru's life far more than she wanted his death.

Ryouma swallowed blood and pain and fear and impossibilities, and pushed past Tsume to kneel at Kuromaru's side.

The rot carved a blackened swath across the dog's right temple. Necrotic flesh peeled away to bare the bloody curve of bone three centimeters from his eye. On the other side, the alert flag of the left ear crumpled in decay. He'd lost almost half of it already. Black slime dripped into his fur as Ryouma watched.

He could feel the chakra, when he reached out. His own chakra, blue-white energy twisted blackish-green with putrefaction, had begun to eat into the pathways that fed Kuromaru's body, destroying them as it rotted away the surrounding flesh. Fire and Water chakra, hand seals and willpower, had combined to forge a weapon far more lethal than the acid Shiki had painted on his skin and dripped on tongue and nails. Acid burned and dispersed, but the Nikutai Tokasu mingled with the victim's chakra, and it would only die away when there was nothing left for it to eat.

And now that it had flesh and form, there was nothing he could do to pull it apart or call it back.

He'd begged a kunai off Tsume hours and kilometers ago. Lacking the holster his torturers had taken off him, he'd stuck it into his waistband and glued it there with chakra. The cold metal whisper against his skin had been a comfort in hours of grueling run; if Shiki caught up, he could still fight, could still die. He drew it left-handed now, remembering that other kunai he'd drawn this morning, the knowledge that had palsied his hand--The best we can do for him is a kunai to the heart...

Maybe not.

He clamped his maimed right hand over Kuromaru's muzzle, biting down his own agony as he muzzled the dog's, and slashed the kunai down in one sure stroke.

A shudder wracked Kuromaru's body, but he didn't otherwise move. He'd been in too much pain for too long. Unlike a human, who would fight to keep more from happening, he'd given in. Given up. Was surviving simply because he wasn't human, and wouldn't suicide, but he wasn't living, either.

The bright, sweet splash of blood-scent overwhelmed the rot for a moment, and Tsume inhaled. Her stomach twisted. She braced.

She knelt in the dark shadows in front of Kuromaru's head. Her hands pressed down on his muzzle, releasing Ryouma's to work, though she knew that if the canine decided to bite, this wouldn't help. They'd have to lay him out and get him by the throat to stop an attack--but he wasn't attacking now, anyway.

Where his ear had been was bloody pulp, bright red sinking into fur, cartilage white where it erupted from his skull.

It wasn't black. It wasn't slime. Bright red blood. Her hands trembled, and her eyes refocused on his face, on his golden gaze now half-lidded. Her thumbs lay between liquid eyes, fingers draping down either side of his muzzle. Carefully, she soothed with the very tips of her claws.

Putrefaction smeared above his left eye. Bone glimmered through, green in the chemical lights. "You can't amputate his head," she forced out, past a throat that wanted to scream and a chest that wanted to contract, muscles that wanted to lunge at Ryouma, make him stop. She ignored the desire. She wouldn't sign Kuromaru's death warrant herself, simply because what needed to be done hurt.

The skin under her mask throbbed. She felt flesh bloom into pain as rot got another half a centimeter into her hairline. Barely anything, when looked at with the naked eye. Hundreds upon hundreds of nerve endings suddenly screaming. Her arm muscles twitched. She didn't otherwise move.

Ryouma shook his head. His voice failed the first time; he worked coppery saliva into his mouth and tried again, rasping like a raven. "Cauterize. It's not going through the bone--not enough chakra. Taking the easy path down his head. If we can get it before it hits his eye... He'll have a chance."

It might not be much of one. He had no idea if cauterization would destroy chakra as well as gangrene, but he didn't see any other choice. He couldn't be certain of slicing all the diseased tissue away, not unless he carved off half Kuromaru's face, and that would kill him as surely as the jutsu would. But the blackening wound was still not quite as long as Ryouma's thumb, only a centimeter or two wide where Kuromaru's claws hadn't scratched it wider. The blade of a kunai would cover it...

He turned abruptly to Tsume. "Can you do a Katon jutsu? No, dammit, just a regular Katon won't work..." He needed Kakashi here, with his arsenal of a thousand jutsu; surely he knew something that would heat steel red-hot.

Though if he was wishing for people, he might as well wish for a medical ninja and a full back-up team. He wasn't likely to get either one.

"Need another soldier pill," he said. The kunai caught the green glow of the cold-lights and threw it into Kuromaru's hopeless eye. He sliced down and sideways, cutting away infected tissue and flinging it off the blade onto the rocky floor. Two strokes, three, and there was raw red flesh and bloody white bone, but he couldn't be sure.

He took the soldier pill Tsume gave him, crushed it with his canines and swallowed it down. Chakra surged into his exhausted coils. It would be enough; it had to be.

Fire elemental jutsu depended on the Tiger seal for raw power and let the other hand seals shape and control the technique itself. The Serpent seal would narrow a technique's focus, while Ox gave strength and Boar lent fury. Horse to stabilize, and then Tiger again, to release...

Setting the kunai down, he tried the seals. The Boar nearly killed his right hand; he pushed through it. A twist of chakra here, and a loop there to push the power through. It would be crude and unpolished, with a range barely longer than his arm, but it would do.

He turned his back on both the Inuzuka, tucked the kunai between his knees, and ran through the seals once more. Reverse Ox would hurt more, as the second and third fingers of his right hand pressed against the knuckles of his left, but it would channel even more chakra through. He could think of nothing else.

He took a breath that hit his lungs like the red-hot kunai with which he intended to sear Kuromaru's face. Then he wrenched his chakra into shape and through the seals, curled the fingers of his right hand against his lips, picked up the kunai in his left hand, and spat white fire.

The metal screamed. It glowed brick-red, cherry-red, blood-red. When it turned the color of gingko leaves in the fall, he cut off the jutsu and pressed the kunai against the bloody wound.

Rotting meat roasted. Ryouma gagged and turned the blade over.

Tsume grabbed for Kuromaru's scruff just as the blade came within reach. She buried claws in the fur under his ear, digging her nails into his muzzle. Some things, even those lost in pain and hopelessness would fear.

He began to scream when Ryouma pressed the blade down. Forelegs scrabbled, trying to pull back, while the high-pitched ululations of a creature afraid and in agony ricocheted around the cave. Tsume dug her hands in, sticking herself in place with chakra, burning more trying to keep him as still as possible.

"Hold!" she snarled at her familiar, blocking out everything except the need to be obeyed now. The scrabbling eased. The screaming didn't.

When Ryouma finally pulled away, Tsume let go, twisting to yank her mask off and retch. She didn't have time to be sick. Kuromaru was still screaming, back pedaling, the whites around his eyes visible as he slammed himself into a wall he wasn't even aware of and began to claw at his face.

She dragged her mask back into place and leapt on him, wrestling with a beast made of claws and fur and writhing muscle. The smell of urine stung the air, and then she had him, heaving over so they crashed on the hard rock, his body sprawling across her legs.

Blood soaked almost instantly into her pants. The ruined mess of seared flesh stared up at her, black and red but no longer oozing.

He twisted to hide his head between her arm and ribs, whimpering and shaking.

"It's all right. It's okay," she breathed, trembling as hard as he was. His claws splayed on the wet stone, gouging lines into moss, blunt nails digging into the green as his whole body tensed and waited for more pain. He pushed against her, as if crawling inside her might keep him safe--even though she'd been the one to help hold him there while they cauterized him.

Cauterize. Pretty word for burning a creature alive.

Tsume dug her fingers into his scruff, running her other hand up and down his back, his shoulders. "It's okay. You've been very brave. It's okay." She couldn't see. She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision, and ignored the hoarseness in her voice.

With the hand on his scruff she tapped out a code, and almost couldn't look up for the answer. Did you get it all?

If he hadn't... If we can get it before it hits his eye... He'll have a chance.

They'd do it again.

Ryouma tried code-tapping, and nearly threw up when the first finger of his right hand touched his knee. His left hand wasn't much better; he couldn't manipulate the intricacies of a four-finger code to suit a three-fingered hand. Yes and No took only one finger each, but neither was true.

"I don't know," he croaked at last. "Think so." He couldn't sense chakra through the welter of burned flesh and blood; the cauterization had killed too much, destroyed too much, for him to tell whether the remnants of his jutsu still lurked in dying tissue. But he'd cut out most of it, burned out the rest; even if a trace still lingered, he'd bought Kuromaru time.

No. I bought him death.

He couldn't look at Tsume. He turned the fading red blade of the kunai over in his hand, scraped bits of cooked meat off against the gritty stone floor, and held the steel edge in the air over the first joint of his right index finger, a centimeter away from flesh. The abused skin reddened in the heat.

He could still make seals with two-thirds of a finger. It wouldn't infect, if the blade was still hot enough to cauterize. If he was fast enough, it might not even hurt...

It would hurt. He would scream like Kuromaru had screamed, and the reddened blade would rip up from his severed finger and plunge into his ravaged throat, and even that couldn't cleanse the blood-guilt from his hands.

The kunai skittered away and bounced off a stone. He ground the heels of his hands against his aching eyes and failed not to cry.

Tsume leaned over the head of her great black beast, running her nails over his back, deep in his coat, reassuring as best she could. "You've been very brave, Kuromaru," she murmured, turning Ryouma's words over in her mind.

He didn't know.

He thought so.

Thinking so was better than simply not knowing. She couldn't smell much over the putrefaction of rot, the sweet-iron of blood, the sting of urine. She could hear Ryouma's breathing, though, ragged and unsteady. She took a breath and braced against it, looking at him over her shoulder, through the guard of her mask. "We have to go. Can you carry--" She stopped.

Blood dripped down his chest despite the bandages they'd wrapped around his wounds.

"Of course you can't," she murmured through cold lips. She looked back down at Kuromaru, nearly two hundred pounds of him, and petted him again.

She didn't have time for pain, or wishing for things that would impossible. She could carry him, if he were human. A critical gaze swept over the wounds, assessing how skin would twist and warp. Her mouth thinned.

They couldn't stay. They had to move. The white-haired jounin wouldn't give them forever. Tsume licked her lips. "If it hits his eye, how long will he have?" Her voice was wooden.

Kuromaru shuddered and pushed against her.

He caught his breath on a last juddering gasp, rubbed his eyes sharply with his wrists, and tried to think. "Best guess...maybe an hour. Maybe more. It's moving slow. Take a while to eat his optic nerve and hit the brain." He'd thought speaking coldly and calmly, with the terms he'd learned from his pals at the morgue, would help; he'd been wrong. Merely thinking about it churned his stomach. Speaking made him want to find that kunai.

Tsume nodded, face set in hard lines beneath her mask. "I'm going to change him human so I can carry him. And we're going to leave."

An hour. It didn't really give them much time. She doubted a rescue team would find them that quick. But maybe the rot wouldn't twist into his eye like she suspected. Maybe they'd gotten it all, and there was no rot. Maybe an hour would be long enough for Ryouma to think of something else.

With a deep breath she lifted her hands, coiling chakra into the correct shapes within her. Thejuujin bunshin was something even genin occasionally learned. She'd been doing it for years. It took little thought to call up her chakra, pool it, form it through seals, and release it.

It should have taken more thought. Her heart lurched into her throat as she felt the diseased chakra she'd taken from Kuromaru so many hours earlier slide back down their pathways. Chakra spreads the rot, Ryouma had said.

She yanked back, twisting to look down as Kuromaru warped and changed, limbs elongating, torso shrinking. Muzzle pulled back into his face, skin slid over bone structure--

The jutsu sizzled to life, just the tiniest bit. Just on the edge of a wound. Just where it wouldn't have mattered so much, if he hadn't been shifting forms.

She'd been right. The skin slipped down from his skull across to his eye. Rot spilled over brow and eyelid, turning black what had been white, eating into the iris.

Not an hour, when pushed faster with poisoned chakra shared back into his system, with an active jutsu in the same area to feed it.

How long until it sank through the eyeball and into the optic nerve, where it had a straight line to his brain? You couldn't cauterize a brain.

She rolled, twisting around and shoving Kuromaru to the floor, straddling his narrow chest and grabbing the discarded kunai. Her free hand latched around his throat, under the jaw, pushing his head up and forcing it still.

He was screaming in a voice just rougher than hers, his single still-perfect eye staring in pain and panic in a mimic of what she wasn't doing.

"Prep that cauterize jutsu again," she snapped, and dug the rounded handle of the kunai under the eyesocket.

Kuromaru clawed at her arms, her face, nails sliding on ceramic. She pressed into the soft tissue, moving fast enough not to think about what she was doing. She didn't watch as it bulged and came free. She didn't listen to the noise it made, or notice the smell of blood and jelly as she whipped the kunai around, cutting the optic nerve and flinging the pale orb away before the rot touched anything else.

Not his brain. None of the soft tissue in his eyesocket. That was a death sentence.

She didn't listen to the screaming until it stopped. Until his hands went lax and dropped, and Kuromaru fell into unconsciousness. Then she started shaking. The kunai fell. She bent, head resting on the torso under her, and focused on breathing.

He wasn't dead. He wasn't dead.

She wondered if it would be better if he were.

"Cauterize it before he wakes up," she managed, hiding her face behind her mask and against Kuromaru. She trembled. Her fault.

She'd taken his eye. He'd been screaming.

Tsume's breath shuddered out. In. Out. Her voice was strangled. "We have to go."

His fingers hurt worse, this time, when he pushed them through the seals. He didn't care. Couldn't feel it. He hadn't done it right the first time, and Kuromaru had paid for it with his eye.

He wouldn't fail again.

Tsume had used the blunt end of the kunai, the ringed handle. Ryouma wrapped his left hand around the blade and barely noticed the warm wet dripping from his palm. White fire heated the steel handle the color of a bloody sun. He drove it into Kuromaru's empty socket, and breathed burning flesh and blood and pain.

He had to pause to reheat it once, but he didn't stop until the hollow socket was burned clean, until lid and brow were both seared away. Tsume hadn't stopped. She'd done what she had to, when it hurt her as badly as it hurt Kuromaru, when afterwards she couldn't even face what she'd done.

Tsume was unimaginably strong. And Ryouma would have to be, too, if he hoped to survive.

The kunai blade ran red when he finally dropped it again. He flipped it into a patch of wet moss, where it smoked and stank, and flattened his sliced palm against his thigh. The blood soaked into his filthy trousers quickly, and the pain throbbed and flared and faded. He hadn't sliced too deeply; the cuts were mere scratches compared to the rest.

Tsume's masked face was still buried in Kuromaru's armored stomach, her breath still harsh and unsteady. Ryouma touched her shoulder with the blade of his right hand. "I can't bandage him. May be able to carry him."

She took a breath. And then another. Then she dragged herself up, ignoring the gentle pressure of Ryouma's hand, the offer of support. If she took it, if she started leaning now, she'd never stand up again. Not in time to get them home.

She didn't look at the ruin of Kuromaru's face. She didn't have to. It was burned into her memory with the smell of seared flesh. "I'll bandage him. And I should..." her mind twisted away, eyes sliding over the dark ground to the tiny med kit battered to one side.

Knees pressed into wet moss as she shifted, reaching for the kit, dragging it closer. A roll of bandages. She glanced at them, and at Ryouma. There were too many injuries, and not enough of anything. Finally, she wrapped the last of the cloth around Kuromaru's head, unable to see clearly through the way her vision blurred.

Didn't have time for mourning.

She took a breath and looked up, at the waterfall silvering green in the glow from the night sticks. Her voice was rough. She ignored it. "I'm going to check outside. That--that jounin is still alive. It's been long enough..." Her eyes flicked sideways, caught Ryouma's dark gaze and hoped he saw the apology. She'd have killed the jounin if she could, but...

A shaking hand rose, brushing curved nails carefully over a clear space on Ryouma's back, across the heavy muscle padding his ribcage. "I'll be right back. Keep him safe."

And then she was up and gone, through the waterfall where the heavy crash obliterated any trace of screaming, where the liquid washed away all scents of blood and burning.

Not rot. She carried that with her.

Tsume moved in ever widening circles, snapping another soldier pill between her teeth to keep from pulling on Kuromaru's chakra as she sped up. The shaking got worse. She almost couldn't hear for the way her heart slammed against her ribs. She burned through a Shikyaku no Jutsu, mostly for the way it heightened her senses.

She could smell again.

She could smell that jounin.

Tsume fled back to the waterfall, marking wherever he'd stepped, how close he'd gotten. Too close. Entirely too close. They weren't safe.

She slammed through the water, already grabbing for Kuromaru, dragging his limp body near. "We have to go. Now. We--" she stopped, trying to force her brain to think like a shinobi rather than a frightened animal. "That jounin's too close. We need to distract him. We need to get out of here, because it won't be long before he thinks to look under the falls."

For a moment, Ryouma couldn't breathe. The dragon they'd cut off his chest dug its claws through muscle and bone, squeezing all the air out of his lungs. Shiki was close, closing in, looking for him--

And if he found Tsume and Kuromaru, he'd kill them first.

He lurched to his feet, weaving like a master of the Drunken Fist. "You could--I can--"

Clones might distract Shiki, but not for long; they'd puff into smoke when the first shuriken hit, and they'd only have the strength and intelligence their maker could afford to give them. Fighting him would be insanity; trying to stay hold up in this tiny cave would be worse. But Tsume had driven him off once before...
With a wolf whose eyes glowed like the heart of the sun, a black-faced wolf who'd torn Sano's dead body apart, who'd growled threat and death at Ryouma when he dared to thank it. He still wasn't sure what Tsume had called, wasn't sure he wanted to know. Remembered the sound of Tsume's scream as she summoned it, the color of her blood as she marked its prey. How Shiki had grabbed him, and run...

Maybe she didn't have to summon it again.

"Your wolf," he rasped. "The one who got us out. I think I can manage a genjutsu. Drive him off long enough to get us moving."

She braced when he mentioned the Wolf. She couldn't call Him again. Wasn't sure that she could keep Him from turning on them, this time. Wasn't sure she'd survive the summons at all. Three solider pills, and her own chakra to drag Him into this world...

And then Ryouma said genjutsu.

Her mind started working once more. Turned that over with what she knew, what she'd seen. She was nodding even before the words came. "That might work. That could work. He's seen it. Knew it was real. He might not think genjutsu..."

They still wouldn't get far. Not all the way home, that was certain. But they could get farther, a hiding place a little less obvious than under the waterfall. Something a little more defendable. "I can make some clones. Maybe draw him off in another direction." Three clones, two henges. "We'll have to go fast," she said, and looked at Ryouma again.

He was all blood and burns, skin pale under smears of red and blackening bruises. How far could he go? She wasn't sure. He'd already gone farther than anyone had a right to expect of him.

She was going to expect a little bit more.

Even under the smell of blood and rot and pain, she could scent fear. No one reacted well when they were prey. Tsume stepped forward through the steady green glow of the night sticks, to put her hand on Ryouma's elbow. Below the acid burns, above agony that must have been radiating upward from his nails. She caught his black gaze in hers, mostly hidden by a carefully painted cat mask. "We're going to get home. All of us." She put every ounce of conviction she had into her voice, speaking softly and firmly. Willing him to believe her, even if he also believed the white-haired jounin would get exactly what he wanted.

"You do your genjutsu. I'll carry Kuromaru. And we'll get out of here." And they would. If her clone had gotten through, then help was on the way. They just had to hang on.