Notes: I’m behind on the manga, meaning I’ve probably gone AU by now from the canon Naruto-verse. So if I’m using dead characters or I’m ignoring some new uber-move someone’s invented, forgive me. In the meantime, I’ve invented a few of my own. And if anyone has any heartburn about the way Tenten handles an injured man in this chapter, recall that whenever Lee is KO’d in a fight, Tenten’s response is to violently shake him until he wakes up. And when Neji is passed out, she shoves a serving spoon of godawful spicy food halfway down his throat and tells him to pull himself together. So – Tenten, a gentle, tender, sympathetic nurse? Not bloody likely.

Goals: To write character development, a good Big Battle, and at least one good plot twist.

Warnings: Violence. Cursing. Chaos. Death.

Chapter 16

Repercussions, Revelations, and Replications

It wasn’t that he’d been avoiding her, Shino thought. Both he and Tenten had been stationed at the Leaf base in Masaru’s domain, a medium-sized camp intended to give the Leaf a closer base of operations as they began the large-scale hunt of Masaru’s hired shinobi. It was not a large camp, only a few shacks and a series of tents set up to shelter and support about three dozen shinobi. The only reason he hadn’t run into her yet was that they had differing schedules. She had pulled the day sweeps, and he had been assigned night sweeps.

So the fact that they had not spoken at all in over a week, since that day at the Hokage’s office, was…coincidental.

All the same, for the first time since he’d known Tenten, he felt a twist of discontent when she appeared at his side in the mess tent. “Hey, long time no see,” Tenten smiled almost tentatively at him, and he felt again the uncomfortable distance their last conversation seemed to have built between them. “I’m off early tonight,” she went on, “Mind if I join you?” She nodded to the tray of food in her hands.

Shino shrugged, and led the way outside the tent to sit outside. Most shinobi tended to eat outside the tent, since inside was small, crowded, and smelled strongly of the undercooked (or in some cases, burnt) field rations. Shino sat on a nearby stump, and Tenten plopped herself down near his feet, wrinkling her nose at the non-descript green stuff on her tray that was probably some sort of vegetable once. “I wonder what this is supposed to be,” she mused out loud, poking at the brown lump next to the green substance. “Meat? Nutritional supplement? Failed experiments in woodcarving?” She glanced up at him through her eyelashes, but looked away quickly when her feeble attempt at humor received no response.

“So…” she started again, picking up a forkful of the green stuff and eyeing it. “I saw Kiba today.”

“Hm,” he grunted, and saw her frown at his discouraging response.

“We were talking about the sweep,” she tried again, cautiously. Shino felt a little guilty, knowing that he was behaving poorly. But he made no move to encourage the conversation, just the same. “He was telling me,” Tenten went on determinedly, her voice carefully casual, “how you guys might have found some evidence of Taneda in the area.”

Ah, Shino thought, a little resentfully. So that was why she had come over to talk. She wanted more information on the Taneda. It made sense, she probably felt some responsibility for that clan’s involvement in this entire situation with Masaru. “Yes,” he said shortly.

Tenten looked at him for a moment with a neutral expression, then turned back to her tray, picking at it dispiritedly. Shino considered getting up and leaving, as she had so abruptly left him last week – but that was childish and unworthy. Besides, there was no reason to keep the information from her, and…and if it was so important to her, he would not withhold it out of spite. “We believe Masaru might be developing a large army of shinobi,” he said at last, struggling to keep his voice impassive. “He might even have a base of his own around here, perhaps the beginnings of a new Hidden Village, full of shinobi beholden to him.”

Tenten’s eyebrows shot up. “Great,” she replied, putting her fork back down and sighing. “Well, if we can find it before it gets established, it shouldn’t be too hard to deal with, right?”

Shino studied her as she rubbed a hand across her face tiredly, noting that even after several days of roughing it in the camp, she was still neat and presentable. And even with her shoulders slumped in fatigue, she still held herself with grace. She was lovely, and it hurt him a little to admit it. He had told himself once that it didn’t matter if she loved him, that he was content with simply being her friend if that was what she wished. And for a time, that had perhaps been true.

It was not true now. Shino was unaccustomed to wanting things that he honestly did not believe he could have, and he found that he sincerely disliked the sensation. It was in his nature to view anything that seemed unobtainable as merely blocked by obstacles, and he was usually skilled in working his way around said obstacles. Now here was something – someone - he wanted a great deal, wanted strongly enough that it was almost a physical ache. But if there was one thing her reaction outside the Hokage’s office had taught him, it was that she did not want him. He would not chase one who did not wish to be caught, and he would certainly never force someone like himself on any woman.

So friends they would remain, assuming he could get around this sudden bitterness before it drove her away.

“I haven’t seen Hinata around,” she said, cutting into his thoughts. “Is she out here?”

“The downside of her clan’s recognition,” Shino answered, “is the severe increase in their demands on her time.”

“Don’t tell me,” Tenten grinned a little slyly. “They’ve got her penned up in that “Temporary Mission Command Center” in the Hokage’s office learning to run this operation from afar?” Shino nodded, and Tenten laughed. “You know, I should have guessed that. No wonder so many Hyuuga are being used as the go-between messengers and stuff. That’s where Neji is right now,” she jerked her head over her shoulder in the general direction of Konoha. “He was sent to bring a status report to the command center. I guess that’s probably where Uzumaki is, too. Haven’t seen him around here.”

In the silence that followed, Tenten poked at her food with her fork again. Shino suddenly recognized the act for what it was – a nervous fidget. She struggled to act and speak as nonchalantly as ever, but she was unsettled. The way she kept flicking her eyes to him, biting her lip, and then deliberately looking away was another sign – she was probably thinking about that twice-damned rumor, thinking about how unpleasant it was to be associated so intimately with him –

Shino cut that train of thought off immediately as he registered a handful of kikkai emerging from the skin of his chest. He curtly ordered them back into the hive, flinching only slightly when one of them chose to burrow straight through the scar tissue over his heart. It did him no good to dwell on the rejection, he told himself. And it certainly wasn’t helping to dispel the tension between Tenten and himself.

He looked down at her, trying to think of something to say that would not seem…cold. But before he could think of anything, Tenten was on her feet, arms outstretched towards him and two heavy, spiked chains whirling in her hands. His bugs surged up instantly in warning, and Shino had just enough time to throw up a shield around both of them as the tent nearest them exploded.

Tenten’s face tightened as she exchanged the chains for fistfuls of glittering shuriken. “The radio transmitter!” She yelled to Shino over the eruption of screams and battle cries. Shino dropped the kikkai shield, noting that the smoking hole in the dirt was indeed exactly where the hub of their communications network had been. The radio in his ear buzzed and died a moment later, confirming it. Behind him, Tenten yelled “Gai-sensei!” with a note of faint panic in her voice, and he felt her leap away from him and towards the bellowing mass of flying enemy shinobi several feet away.

But before he could turn to follow, a lanky, pasty-faced shinobi with close-cropped grey hair appeared before him, brandishing a kunai and lunging for his throat. Shino knocked the man back with a whip of kikkai, slicing the body neatly in half. He turned to a second opponent, and saw…a lanky, pasty-faced shinobi with close cropped grey hair, brandishing a kunai and lunging for his throat. Shino slashed this one in half as well, and then had to dodge as three lanky, pasty-faced shinobi appeared behind him – what was this? Siblings? No – too many, as he leaped high into the nearby trees and scanned the area, still dodging kunai, he saw almost twenty identical men attacking. Clones, then. Except they had not vanished in a puff of smoke when he killed them – he had specifically seen the spray of blood and the greasy, dangling entrails of a dead body. Clones did not bleed. As he watched, he saw a Leaf shinobi cut the arm from one of the clones, and as the arm sailed through the air, it changed. The bloody end of it seemed to bubble and expand, bursting out and taking the shape of a body, and then another fully formed shinobi, identical to the original, landed neatly.

A replicator, Shino realized. He had read about such things – this enemy had done something to his body that allowed him to regenerate entirely new bodies from severed parts of the old body – yes, even directly from his spilled blood, Shino realized as he saw two new pasty-faced men blossom from a puddle of blood underneath his branch. The two new replicas turned their identical faces to him and launched themselves up, knives outstretched.

Two whirling streaks of white shot past him and slammed into the replicas at the same time, sending body parts flying. Kiba and Akamaru landed beneath Shino, and Kiba yelled up, “C’mon, Bug Face, shake a leg! There’s plenty for everyone!” He crouched, moving back into his Dual Piercing Fang stance.

“Don’t!” Shino leaped down and grabbed his shoulder, throwing up a wave of kikkai to block an incoming replica. “If you cut them, they multiply.”

“Clones?”

“No. Real bodies. We’ll be outnumbered in minutes if we keep cutting them.”

Kiba’s face turned into a snarl of frustration. “So what the hell do we do then?”

“Kill them without bloodshed,” Shino said, stretching out a hand and sending a swirl of bugs between a handful of replicas and two young chunnin.

“This is seriously messed up!” Kiba yelled, swiping at a replica and slapping it into a tree. Blood poured from the replica’s broken nose, and a moment later another replica was already fully formed and charging back at them. Akamaru leaped at it and landed heavily on its chest, snapping the bones in its ribcage with a series of audible cracks. “They ain’t too smart, though,” Kiba snarled, knocking another replica’s kunai away. “They just keep attacking the same way.”

“Hive mind,” Shino grunted. “The original body can’t control this many perfectly, so he’s just giving general orders to his drones. It’s like ants. Kill the queen, kill the hive.”

“Which one’s the queen?” Kiba snarled and dug his thick fingernails into one of the copied faces, crushing the skull underneath with savage efficiency. “What does it smell like?”

Shino shot a churning swarm of kikkai at two more of the replicas, smashing them against the ground without breaking their skin. “Probably like these, but stronger.”

“Akamaru!” Kiba bellowed, accidentally ripping the face from another replica he was trying to crush. A dozen more of the grayish, impassive-faced replicas bloomed from the spraying blood, and Kiba cursed passionately. “Akamaru, find the real one! Find the one that smells strongest!”

The nin-dog howled, partly in response and partly in frustrated rage as he tried to stop from tearing a replica’s arm off and created three more copies anyway.

This was futile, Shino thought coldly, draining one replica with some of his kikkai as the rest of the swarm smashed and crushed their way through a dozen more. He couldn’t drain them as fast as they could replicate, and Kiba and Akamaru were not skilled in bloodless combat. They were too good at tearing, slashing, and disembowelment. The handful of Leaf shinobi currently in the camp who specialized in bloodless combat (like the Hyuuga or the Yamanaka) were overwhelmed by the sheer mass of enemy shinobi.

A few feet away, Akamaru was still churning his way through a score of the grey replicas, slamming his large body into them in an attempt to kill them without slashing them with his teeth or claws. He didn’t have time to scent for the queen, Shino thought dispassionately. Assuming he could pick out a “strong” smelling one from a horde of creatures that smelled just like it. Hm. And it was unlikely that anyone else in the camp had identified this creature as a hive-mind replicator, or if they had, knew how to find the source. Every few seconds, more of these body-clones were created, and another Leaf was injured or brought down. There was only one option left, really.

Almost as soon as he thought it, he heard a familiar voice shouting in the melee around him. “Hot Wash!” Morino Ibiki’s scarred face flashed in Shino’s peripheral vision for a moment as the ANBU steamrolled through the crush of fighting replicas and Leaf. “Hot Wash! Follow procedure! Hot Wash!” Then he was gone, but others took up the cry, yelling the warning to their fellow Leaf. So Shino had been correct. The only thing left to do was abandon the camp, and ‘wash’ away anything left behind that might be of use to the overtaking enemy. Every Leaf base set up in foreign territory had someone assigned to be the “Hot Wash,” someone who could perform a powerful last-ditch maneuver designed to turn a defeat into a pseudo-victory. A good Hot Wash would destroy many of the enemy even as they overwhelmed the Leaf camp. As an added bonus, it would also destroy any Leaf bodies left behind, thus preventing rival shinobi from learning village secrets.

Of course, it would also destroy any living Leaf shinobi who didn’t get out of the way in time.

“Hot Wash!” Kiba howled. “Shino, we gotta get outta here, now!”

“That will be difficult,” Shino replied, and turned his head to the east. He saw Kiba’s face tense as he sniffed the air and caught a whiff of what Shino’s kikkai had already picked up.

“Oh fuckin’ shitbricks,” Kiba cursed. “Shino, there’s a metric ass-ton of these things headed our way!”

Shino grunted, knocking several of the grey-faced replicas back with a quick swirl of his kikkai sphere-shield.

“We may not have time to get outta camp before the Hot Wash if that horde of douchebags hits us first!” Kiba snarled.

“We must fight our way to the trees,” Shino yelled over the screams – several of the shinobi closer to the edges had already engaged the incoming horde. “Nara is to the south – he and Akimichi are crushing them in large amounts.”

“Safety in bulk!” Kiba donned his favorite madman-in-a-battle grin. “Sounds great! Let’s go!”

Shino shot out an arm to pull him aside, but too late; one of the replicas reached out and scored a long swipe with its jagged nails down Kiba’s exposed back. The dog-nin howled in pain and rage, turning to swipe back with his own claws.

“Kiba! South!” Shino yelled at him, shielding him from another incoming replica as he tried to get his enraged teammate focused and moving. “The horde is nearly here!”

“You got a plan?” Kiba bellowed over the noise, eyes wide with pain and fury.

“Go south. Kill as many as you can. Don’t die.” Shino shouted back.

“Good plan!” Kiba roared, and then they were overwhelmed.

She was surrounded by bounding shapes, the scattered Leaf shinobi flitting through the trees around her as they fled from their former camp. “Who’s got the Wash?” Tenten heard someone yell as he shot by.

“Hatake Kakashi,” someone else yelled back, and Tenten could almost feel Gai’s instant reaction.

“My eternal rival!” He boomed, face a mask of dramatic horror. “He is going to perform the difficult and dangerous Hot Wash instead of me! Well, I am sure his performance will be beautiful and amazing, though it pains me to admit that I have lost this round to him.” Just as quickly as the horror came, it morphed into what Neji called his ‘Madman On A Mission’ look, his eyes afire and his teeth agleam. “But I will not lose again! Next time I will perform a jutsu to save my comrades that is twice as impressive!”

“What’s he going to do?” Tenten asked, as they finally came to a halt on a high branch. Gai waved a hand back towards the abandoned camp.

“I believe he calls it ‘Bolt from Heaven,’” Gai said, sounding thrilled. “A truly cool name, curse him!” He added happily. In the distance, Tenten saw a dark form with a shock of white hair leaping from the foliage and into the air. The sky seemed to darken around Kakashi, and snapping bands of hissing, crackling white lashed out from his arms. Even from this far away, Tenten could feel the strange tension in her body that told her the jounin was amassing an incredible charge around his body. Suddenly, he clapped his hands together, and Tenten felt the faintest tug of energy, as if the world were being sucked in towards the distant shinobi.

“Shield your eyes,” Gai ordered. Tenten had just enough time to throw up a hand as the crackling light gathered around Kakashi’s distant form in a tight, compacted ball of raw power, and then lanced down on the deserted camp below like the leveling hand of a wrathful god. Even through her arm and tightly shut eyelids, the light was so bright it made her flinch. A series of wild snapping sounds - like giant bones shattering under pressure - filled the air. Trees and rocks, Tenten realized; the lightening was flash-burning the trees and devastating the rocks in the camp ground, shattering the great tree trunks and boulder formations into so many matchsticks and pebbles. A moment later, the blast wave from the explosion swept through the forest and slammed into her. She was knocked to her knees, unable to see and hear anything but the roar of a suddenly mad world.

Oh gods, she thought wildly, reduced to kneeling in the forest with her arms over her head like a child. I hope no Leaf was still in the camp when he did that. I hope all our people got out. But communications had been in such a shambles, people fighting their little isolated battles all over the place with hardly any attention for what was going on elsewhere in the camp, and some of them could be such idiots about running from battle…no, Lee got out, she told herself, recognizing the slightly hysterical edge her thoughts were gaining. He isn’t stupid, he knows what a Hot Wash means, he knows there’s no point in dying to protect something if there’s nothing left to protect. And Gai was next to her and Neji was on a message run back to Konoha and Shino…

He got out, she repeated to herself fiercely as the roar of the world dimmed and faded and she could stand again. He’s definitely not stupid. He probably realized what was going to happen before they even called it. No way he got caught in that.

“Ah, that jutsu is indeed truly beautiful! Come, Tenten,” Gai’s voice cut through the ringing in her ears. “We must render all aid to our friends.” Tenten blinked the last spots from her eyes and followed Gai’s gesture. Several more shapes were emerging from the trees around them, most of them either limping or carrying other shapes on their backs and shoulders. These must have been the last to escape, the injured or delayed Leaf shinobi who had only just cleared the Hot Wash. She saw a couple of ragged chunin from the Hokage’s office staggering towards the new camp, supporting one another like old men. She saw a little red headed kunoichi dragging a battered boy that she vaguely recognized as the Third Hokage’s grandson, the loud one who emulated Uzumaki Naruto. And behind them, carrying no less than four unconscious bodies slung over his shoulders and arms – Tenten felt some of the tension in her chest uncoil, and she launched herself forward to help Lee with his burden.

“I knew you would be alright,” he told her, making a valiant effort to smile reassuringly at her despite his battered face and the blood all over his green jumpsuit. “You are far too clever and strong to be harmed by even such a number of enemies.”

“Likewise,” she attempted to return the smile, but it faded as she took in his appearance. “How much of that is yours?” she demanded pointing to the liberal splatters of blood on his clothes and skin.

“Not much,” he responded, shifting his grip on one of the four he held. “This one is in a bad way.” Tenten looked at the man, a skinny jounin with little round glasses and a face that she vaguely remembered from her Academy days. “Sensei!” The redheaded girl gasped from further up the path, looking up from her fallen teammate.

“Come, Lee!” Gai boomed from a few feet away, where he had already picked up four more of the more heavily injured shinobi. “We must move with great speed to the medic tent! We cannot allow our friends’ to suffer the loss of their young and effervescent lives!”

“Yes, Gai-sensei!” Lee shouted back, swooping down and snagging the boy – Konohamaru, Tenten remembered now – from his redheaded teammate. “I will carry them all to the medic tents and see them cared for before another drop of blood falls!”

Tenten put a brief hand on the younger kuniochi’s shoulder, who turned a white face to her. “My other teammate,” she stuttered. “I don’t know where he went in the battle.”

“The camp’s up there,” Tenten said gently. “There should be a check-in station set up. Go tell whoever has the clipboard your name and what you know about the whereabouts of all your teammates. If your other teammate has shown up already, they’ll tell you where he is.”

The redhead nodded distractedly, watching Lee disappear in the trees ahead with half her team on his back. “We…we just got made chunin last week,” she said suddenly, and then bit her lip. “I gotta go.”

“Good luck,” Tenten called after her. “Look for the ANBU marker in camp, that’s where the check-in usually…” her voice trailed off as she caught sight of four more shapes emerging from the trees. The three human shapes slumped together were not immediately familiar, but the fourth, trailing slowly behind them with a limping gait, was very recognizable. “Akamaru!” She called, striding towards them. “Kiba! Shi - ” She stopped again as the three upright figures became clear, and she saw not the whole of Team Eight, but Kiba only, slung between Shikamaru and Chouji. The Inuzuka looked terrible, his entire torso covered with makeshift field bandages and dark streaks of blood painted all down his sides and arms. Shikamaru had a bandage around one hand, and Chouji was thinner than Tenten had seen him look since childhood.

Tenten looked at the battered, unconscious Kiba, then at the whining, limping Akamaru. The last time she’d seen either of them had been a quick glimpse right before the Hot Wash had been ordered, and they’d been with -

“Shino,” Tenten said, her voice tight. “Where is Shino?”

Shikamaru grunted, but it was Chouji who raised sad eyes to hers. “He said he'd stay,” the big ninja told her gently. “To give us time to get away with Kiba.”

Tenten felt her lungs constrict painfully, and she took a vital moment to force herself to breathe. Then, without a word, she was gone.

Shino made a snap assessment as he moved through the blighted trees. Three broken ribs. Multi-fractured left forearm, dislocated left shoulder, strained left ankle. Head contusion, possible mild concussion. Deep knife slash across the abs, still bleeding heavily. Low chakra reserves, a sizable portion of kikkai dead or damaged. Slightly disoriented from pain, blood loss, and exhaustion.

And the enemy? Many of the replicas had been destroyed in the Hot Wash, but now teams of regular shinobi were moving in. Three had picked up his bloody trail around the edges of the devastated camp – make that two, he thought grimly as his remaining kikkai devoured the weakest enemy nin's chakra. Two more left, both with minor injuries at best, still relatively fresh in the fight, and circling in around him. He lacked the chakra to fight them, and the myriad of intense pains throughout his body made it too difficult to focus his will and disperse his own chakra signature. He could not fight. He could not hide. He was rapidly losing the ability to run.

They got away, he told himself. He landed a little heavily on his left foot, and the pain that shot up his entire left side knocked him to his knees. He was pleased that his fellow Leaf shinobi got away. Kiba and Akamaru were in as good hands as he could have placed them. They were safe. He repeated it to himself again, using it as a shield against the encroaching darkness. He was dying, but they were safe.

She hadn’t been there, in the end when the world went white. He’d swept for her, as wide an area as his kikkai could encompass in the few seconds before the Bolt from Heaven had struck. He’d sacrificed a large amount of kikkai to do that sweep too, more than was practical given his injuries and fact that he was now trapped behind enemy lines. And he should have been devoting his energy to getting further away from the camp and the Hot Wash, instead of hanging around just outside the main blast zone. But he had done it without hesitation because he had to know that she was not trapped or unconscious somewhere in the wreckage, left to die in the Hot Wash by careless others. The kikkai hadn’t sensed her. She must have gotten away. She must be safe.

She must.

“Oh,” said a strange voice. “There you are.”

Two shapes dropped from the trees on either side. Shino reached out a hand (bloody, paler than normal, shaking, only a few kikkai emerging when there should already be a swarm) and clutched a tree root, pulling himself up to his feet. Then he deliberately let go, balancing on his good leg. Shino took a shallow breath (too deep would stretch his cracked ribs, possibly cause him to black out), and nodded. “Come.”

They came. Shino formed the swarm into as tight a shield as he could, concentrating around his face and chest. The female reached into her pouch, pulled out something glittering and poisonous. The male raised a fist suddenly as solid as granite.

Something heavy blurred past Shino's cheek, blew right past the hasty shield the female threw up, and slammed into her. Shino had just enough time to note the leaf pattern etched on the steel of the mace now buried in the female's head. The enemy kunoichi had a vague expression of shock on the remaining half of her face. Then the mace detonated, and the headless body dropped into a messy pile.

But she should have been safe, Shino thought, and his kikkai buzzed in confusion, irritation, and fear. She should have been safe.

She hit the ground in front of him, two deadly curved blades poised delicately in her hands. “Run,” she said. “Run, and I will not hunt you. Fight, and I will kill you.” The remaining enemy shinobi looked from the dead woman’s body to the dark glitter in the living woman's eyes. Then he looked at the bloody, mud stained man behind her, arms alive with a chittering cloud of black.

He bowed his head briefly. “He's yours,” he whispered, “but there will be more.”

In a puff of smoke, the enemy ninja was gone. Shino’s rescuer turned to look at him, her face pale but calm. The blades vanished from her hands, back into the scrolls or thin air – he wasn’t sure, it was too hard to track her graceful movements with his eyes alone and the hive-link was…currently inadequate. The pain was so great that the kikkai were having trouble connecting properly with his senses.

It was possible that he was in a great deal more trouble than he thought.

"Shino,” Tenten whispered in his ear, warm arms encircling his waist to support him. He felt her body press against his chest, felt her lips brush his cheek briefly as she whispered his name again and said, “If you die on me before I have the chance to kick your ass, I will never forgive you.”

Yes, he thought blurrily. A great deal of trouble indeed.

He couldn’t stop the grunt of pain when they landed a little too hard on the tree branch, and Tenten immediately stopped leaping and turned to look him over with a critical eye. “Where’s the worst of it?” she asked.

He shook his head marginally. “No time for evaluation,” he said in a strained voice. “We must go.”

“We’re not going anywhere until I’m sure that I’m not killing you every time we move,” she retorted. “Give me the full status report.”

His jaw was already set grimly against the waves of nausea and pain every slight motion caused him, but he felt his lips thin in irritation. There was no time for this. The enemy nin had been correct; there would be more unfriendly shinobi in this area, searching for them both. He would hold on a little more; the Leaf would establish a new safe zone in a relatively easy distance, as per procedure. They just had to make it through a few more miles of what was now hostile territory, and then he could pass out and let his body and the kikkai heal what damage they could. Tenten reached for the zipper of his overjacket, but he pushed her hand away. “No time,” he ground out again.

He felt her body tense up against his side. “I am not your teammates,” she growled. “I can't see your injuries, or smell them, or whatever. Either you show me,” she reached for the coat again, and Shino could not move fast enough to push her away. But she merely clutched the collar, pulling it down to glower at his face. “Either you show me,” she repeated, “or you talk to me. Pick.”

“There’s a road up ahead,” he told her, enunciating his words more elaborately than usual in an attempt to remain coherent. “There will be civilians on the road, non-players. The enemy will not break the rules of contract against non-play-” his throat tightened and something in his chest jerked painfully. He bent his head, hacking several dead kikkai onto the branch. Damn, the hive had taken severe damage if even the queen-guards were starting to die. “I’ll be relatively safe for a time,” he continued when his airway was clear again. “You can go on ahead, get help - ”

“You know they wouldn’t let me come back for you,” she replied angrily. “Not when the enemy will probably be overrunning this entire area soon. And rules of contract? Seriously? You think these guys are concerned with rules of contract? For all we know, they aren’t under contract at all, they’re Masaru’s brainwashed loyalist followers! Ugh, what is your problem!” She shook her head in sheer frustration. “You’re one of the smartest people I know and lately you’ve been so stupid about…about…everything!”

She really was quite beautiful, Shino thought. And she hardly seemed to notice the splatter of dead bugs and bile at her feet. A remarkable woman. She didn’t deserve to die out here, not when she had a good chance of making it to safety on her own and only a small one if she insisted on hauling his broken body around. “If you left me,” Shino began again, discomfited by the ugly rasp in his voice but determined to win this argument. She could be so stubborn, but she understood cold hard statistics.

“Stop. Talking.” Tenten bit out fiercely.

He should have stopped perhaps, but he was near giddy now with pain and blood loss. Words seemed somehow to help focus the pain, shepherd it. “You are being,” he managed, “irrational.” Tenten said nothing in response, but somehow Shino could not seem to keep silent. What a strange serendipity, he thought, that our roles are so reversed. “Why?” he continued. “Because you are allowing your emotions to affect your judgment. You are not assessing this scenario accurately.”

And this was why silence was always the better option. At his words, Tenten threw off his arm, took a step to the side, and slapped a hand across his dislocated shoulder. Pain blinded and deafened him momentarily, long enough for the hive-link to kick in. Through their multi-eyes, he could see her tense muscles, hear her grinding jaw, and even smell the specific chemical makeup of her sweat, all of which indicated that the woman before him was just barely restraining a towering rage.

“On the contrary,” she said, and even without the kikkai he could hear the utter fury in her voice. “We are in a war zone, we are being hunted by an unknown number of powerful enemies, we are potentially cut off from our allies, I am exhausted, and you,” she leaned forward, raised a hand towards his shoulder again, and Shino flinched slightly, anticipating another blow. “You, thanks to a sudden attack of utter idiocy, are seriously injured. Yes, Aburame Shino, I think I have a very complete grasp of the situation at hand. But I am not, repeat, NOT going to leave you here to die. So unless you’ve got some helpful advice on how to get back to safety, kindly shut the hell up and let me get on with it.”

With a sharp tug, she pulled his overjacket’s zipper down and pushed the heavy material aside, her hands going immediately to the large bloodstain seeping down his left side. Then she was pulling away the underjacket, exposing the bloody mesh and skin beneath. Shino stared at her face, proud of the professional way she reacted to the ugly, gaping wound in his shoulder and chest. Several kikkai were spilling out along with the blood, leaving crazed little trails of red as they crawled across the unbroken skin. Tenten pulled out a first aid kit and started to swab down the edges of the biggest wound with an antiseptic. Shino hissed, but she didn’t stop.

“My reactions were slow,” he said after a moment, distracting himself from the pain. She flicked her eyes at him, but he saw that she was still too angry to respond. “In the camp. I didn’t sense the enemy approaching until I saw you moving.” he clarified. “Why not? I was distracted.”

“Brace yourself,” she murmured, gripping his dislocated arm and gently maneuvering it into position.

“What was distracting me so much that I missed a dangerous swarm of enemy shinobi?” She snapped his arm back into the socket with a deft twist, and his head swam for a long, painful moment. When his blurry vision cleared again, he saw her face only inches away, her dark eyes finally raised to meet his. She looked calmer, but worried, too. “You,” he said quietly.

And he was unsurprised to see the fury splash back across her face. “What?” She all but shouted, though her hands mercifully stayed steady as she held him upright. “Oh, Shino, you…you…you complete ass. You selfish, stupid moronic man!” She seemed prepared to go on, but one word had caught his attention, and he felt himself frowning despite the pain from the cut on his face.

“Selfish,” he repeated.

“Yes, selfish,” she shot back. “I cannot believe you stayed behind like that! Didn’t you hear the call? You know what a Hot Wash means! Why didn’t you get your butt out of there like a sensible person? How could you get yourself hurt so bad? You’re better than that!”

“I did what was…necessary,” Shino grunted, and was now too tired and upset to care that the kikkai were seething and buzzing with his agitation. “I protected my teammates and –“

“At the cost of your life!” She cut him off, voice rising. “You almost died a few minutes ago – those guys were going to kill you! You were practically throwing your life away, Shino!” She blinked, and he thought for a moment that he saw a tear streak down her face. But it mixed quickly with the streaks of dirt and blood on her cheeks, and it was probably only sweat anyway. “Did you even think for a second what that looks like to everyone else? Shit, Shino, didn’t you care what we would think about you dying like that?”

“Are you telling me I should live my life according to what others think?” he rasped, attempting to push away from her grip in anger but only managing to overbalance himself. He hissed again as she lunged to catch him and her shoulder caught him in the chest.

“I’m telling you, idiot” she growled fiercely in his ear, “that you ought to care about the feelings of the people who love you!”

Distantly, Shino felt the seething kikkai go still. “The people who love me,” he repeated hoarsely.

“You’re not the only one who gets hurt when you do something like this,” she replied against the bloody fabric of his jacket in a voice almost as rough as his own. He felt her draw in breath to say more, but then the world went black.

The explosion broke the branch they had been standing on, and Tenten curled herself to protect the unconscious Shino with her own body, even when his awkward weight smashed her into the ground with a jarring thump. All the breath whooshed out of her lungs, and she gasped for air even as she scrambled madly for her scrolls. There, to the left! Three dark shapes, coming fast! She struggled to gather enough chakra to summon something, but she was so damn tired and Shino’s blood was soaking into her shirt now and, God, he was dying –

Something came whistling out of the shadows and slammed into the three incoming enemy shinobi, exploding in a cloud of black smoke. Three bodies dropped to the ground nearby, and as the black cloud cleared, Tenten saw a tall, heavy-set shape walking towards her. The man was lowering his right arm, which Tenten could see was still smoking gently.

The stranger walked over to her and stood above her, looking down at where she lay entangled around Shino’s battered body. “I know you,” he said in a heavy, northern accent. “You are the woman they call Tenten, of the Village of the Hidden Leaf.”

Tenten stared at him, knowing suddenly that she had seen that face, or one like it before. “I don’t …know you,” she replied at last, still struggling to regain her breath.

“I am certain that you do,” the stranger said gravely, “though we have not met. I believe,” he hesitated, and a dark look crossed his face. “I believe that you knew my son.”

She gaped at him. Oh no, a little voice in her mind said softly. Oh no, oh no.

She had seen that face before - younger, thinner, smoother.

“Taneda,” she murmured.

The man nodded. “I am Taneda Jun,” he said. “Known to some as the Black Flash Cannon.”

Tenten closed her eyes. I could throw an exploding kunai at him, she thought desperately. And while he’s distracted, create two clones to look like me and Shino while we run. It wouldn’t give us much of an edge, but it might at least prevent immediate death…

“I am not going to kill you,” the man said, almost gently. “Please do not attempt to attack. It might kill your friend.”

“What...do you….want?” she forced, trying subtly to readjust Shino’s weight so that she could spring to her feet and run without jarring him too badly.

“We can escort you safely to your new encampment,” the Black Flash Cannon told her. “The Leaf have not had time nor means to conceal it well enough from us, though they have diverted the larger force of the Replicator. You can get a medic to look at your man here, hopefully before he dies.”

Tenten swallowed, and tried vainly to control her heavy breathing. At her side, Shino’s chest was rising slower, and his breathing was rasping less, which scared her more than she would admit. She looked the bulky man in his eyes and saw only cold calculation. “And what do you …want of me in return?” she grit out between breaths.

“You will take me to the woman who rules your village, and make sure that I reach her unharmed.”

Tenten almost spit at him. “I won’t sell my Hokage…or my village …to you.”

“He is fading fast,” the Taneda leader began, nodding to Shino, but Tenten snarled at him contemptuously, cutting him off.

“And he’d sooner die …than see me betray… all that we both love.”

“You misunderstand,” Taneda told her. “I do not wish to kill your leader. I wish to speak with her. I saw that attack on your camp. It seems that both your people and mine have been…” he paused, looking over at the dark corpses of the shinobi she had thought were his own. “Mistaken,” he said at last. “For example, am I to understand that you are not, in fact, the allies and hired swords of the tyrant and murderer, Masaru?”

Tenten felt her muscles clench. “What? No! He’s the enemy…he’s the enemy who’s been …killing people! You’re the ones who - ” She froze, Taneda’s expression cutting through her anger like ice. Through her dry, cracking lips, she barely managed to whisper, “You’re not …working for him …either… are you?”

“You see now?” Taneda Jun murmured. “Your leader and I have much to discuss.” He reached down a rough, scarred hand to grab Shino’s bloody arm. “If you help me gain passage to your Hokage, Tenten of the Leaf, I will help you save this man’s life.”

**

“Clear the way! Wounded coming through! You there, move!”

“ –meone tell me where in all the hells did those bastards come from? I swear there were hundreds of the dirty - ”

“ – all had the same face! Every time you killed one, a dozen more sprang up just like - ”
”Oh God, Brother! Please, someone, my brother - ”

“ – got separated from my team. Has anyone seen - ”

“Medic! Medic! Shit, where are all the fuckin’ medics? We got bleeders over here - ”

“Sai, where the hell are you, you damn ink-faced jerkwad! Sai!”

“ – ANBU station! All chunin-level shinobi to report to their area leader in the center of camp immediately! All designated teams to reassemble and report your status to the ANBU station! All chunin level shinobi –”

“I swear to all the gods ever known, Shino…if you die like this, I will never, ever forgive you.”

**