For a long moment there was only the storm, thunder speaking far out over the sea and the rain coming down through the dark in a steady roaring weight, drumming on Hinata's plates. Sasuke stood on the dead mutant's skull with the sword resting across his shoulder and looked up at the three of them on the wall.
Hinata read him from where she stood. Even across the full width of the courtyard the chakra coming off him pushed against her senses, grown far past anything the boy in her memory had carried, a deep cold volume with lightning nature crackling through its tone. The cursed mark on his neck had changed too. She remembered a small echo of Orochimaru living in it, a second taste threaded under the first, and now it gave off nothing but Sasuke's own signature, and the question of what had become of the snake sat itself quietly next to all the others. Above him the storm was wrong. The strokes that split the sky everywhere else had been pouring themselves into a single knot of charge gathering directly over his position, feeding it flash by flash, and on her deeper sight she found thin spiritual threads rising off his shoulders and lancing up into the cloud, dozens of them. He was reaching into the storm itself and herding the natural lightning to him.
Along her spine the coiled presence stirred, uncurling toward her attention with a slow hungry warmth.
"Oh. Now this has gotten even more interesting."
Hinata turned her helmet a few degrees and found Naruto beside her. His expression had hardened into something she rarely saw on him, the glowing orange of his eyes fixed on the distant figure, deep in a thought of his own.
"That's him, isn't it." Karin's voice came from low behind them, barely clearing the rain. "That's really Sasuke."
Naruto pulled his gaze off the courtyard and turned his head to Hinata's visor. She gave him a short nod and got one back. "Let's go." He rose out of his crouch. "Karin, stay behind us. Keep your distance, no matter what happens."
The two of them dropped off the wall together, sabatons and sandals striking the flooded stone, and started forward at a slow walk through the rubble, side by side through the rain. They stopped a long stone's throw from the fallen mutant, close enough for voices to carry, far enough that a blade would take time to arrive. Sasuke watched them come with a flat, dismissive stillness, and under it Hinata caught the small quick work of his eyes, a single pass up the full towering height of her armored frame and off it, onto Naruto, weighing the two of them. Then the silence settled in between the three of them, rain striking the stone.
Naruto broke it. "Sasuke." His voice came out calmly, and Hinata could hear what it cost him to keep it there, the heartbeat under it running harder than the words. "It's been two years." The rain filled the pause. "What're you doing all the way out here? In a place like this?"
"I have nothing to talk about with you." Sasuke's voice carried across the courtyard without effort. "Least of all with Konoha. Not after what Konoha did to my clan."
The words landed on all three of them at once. That truth was weeks old, and it had been spreading outward ever since, running through every channel the world had, far enough now to reach even a missing-nin on a drowned island in the southern sea. Behind them Hinata heard Karin's breath catch.
"Did that snake freak tell you that?" Naruto's voice stayed calm, and the calm had gone tight.
Sasuke let the question fall into the rain unanswered. "Word travels, when a village airs out its own rot." As he said it his eyes slid off Naruto and passed over the armored tower of Hinata one more time, taking the measure of her from sabaton to helm crest. "Hyuuga." One flat word, and his gaze was back on Naruto, as though he had been keeping a quiet ledger on Konoha all these years while calling it nothing to him.
Naruto took a step forward. "The ones responsible for it have answered for it, Sasuke. Danzo is d…"
Across Hinata's senses Sasuke's chakra jumped a register, the frequency of it screaming upward, and his eyes flushed red.
"LOOK OUT!" Karin's shout tore down from the wall.
He was already moving. The courtyard between them folded away under a low flat blur, his blade clearing its sheath mid-stride with lightning already wrapped down the length of it, and Hinata met him. Her right arm had become a single great symbiotic blade in the time his sword took to leave its scabbard, cerulean veins alight, her own lightning snarling up the edge, and the two blades came together in front of Naruto with a KRANG that slapped the rain flat around them.
The clash halted there. She stood over him in full battle readiness, towering, her blade bearing down on his, and along the line of contact her biomass drank. The lightning wrapped around his sword thinned, guttered, and went out, drawn down her edge and into her like water into dry cloth, and his red eyes went a fraction wider. Her counterstroke was already turning out of the bind fast, and he read it and broke away instead of meeting it, one hard bound backward across the rubble.
Naruto was there before Sasuke's feet found stone, stepping into the gap between them with the giant iron-studded kanabo already swinging, a flat whistling arc at chest height. The Sharingan read it perfectly. Sasuke was under it with room to spare, and even so something flickered across his face at the sheer mass howling past above him, and then he was inside the swing, blade turning up toward the open line under Naruto's arm. The air around Naruto snapped. A tight sleeve of wind burst off his whole body in one razored rotation, and Sasuke aborted the thrust and cut away backward out of its reach, water sheeting off his heels.
"A kanabo." Sasuke said it the way a man reads a label.
"Yeah." Naruto rolled the club once in his grip and set it back over his shoulder. "You like it?"
They came together again in the same breath. Blade and club met among the rubble in a fast hard rattle, krang, krak, Sasuke flowing around the huge sweeps while Naruto turned every miss into the next swing without a pause, and through all of it Naruto kept talking. "We didn't come here to fight you!" The club took a fallen pillar apart where Sasuke had just been standing. "You think I hauled myself across half the world for this?! We came to talk, ya know!"
Sasuke broke off. He put half the courtyard between them in two bounds, and his hands were already flashing through seals as his gaze went up into the storm. Hinata had begun to close on him, one blink from putting herself in front of him, and she checked mid-step. The spiritual threads off his shoulders shot upward all at once, dozens of fine lines lancing into the boiling dark, and through her fused mind the sky itself changed tone, the knot of charge that had been gathering over his position all this night collapsing inward, condensing into one mass, the clouds above the fortress lighting from within.
"Kirin."
He said it flat, and brought his hand down on their position.
Her accelerated mind watched it come. The mass overhead ripped itself loose from the belly of the storm in the running shape of a dragon, head first, a volume of lightning vast past anything she had ever pulled into herself, and it was falling on all of them at once, her, Naruto, the place where Karin is standing. She moved. Two strides put her on the point where the strike would center, and she opened herself to the sky, wings snapping wide off her shoulder plates, tendrils fanning up from every seam and standing stiff as rods, a raised black lattice offered to the storm.
KRRA-KOOOM
The dragon came down on her and the world went white. The column found her raised lattice and she hauled it in, bending the whole descending mass out of its line and down through the rods of her tendrils into her body, and it passed through everything she was. She felt it in every part of her at once, her teeth, the marrow of her forearms, the roots of her eyes, a river of white fire threading every channel she had, and she drank at it as it went, the old predatory pull in her flesh turning every point the current touched into a mouth. Under her armor the silver lines of the Weave blazed, hard light bleeding out through the seams of her plates, and behind the visor her cerulean eyes climbed toward white.
The volume was wrong. Her body knew how to pull power out of a living thing in a steady stream, mouthful after mouthful, and this was a sea arriving in a single swallow, the pressure of it screaming through her channels faster than she could take it down.
"Steady." Venom was everywhere inside her at once urgently, and seizing whole tracts of the work. "Stand and hold. We are going to handle this."
Tendrils off her calves had already speared down through the flagstones, and the overflow poured along them into the bedrock, the stone around her feet glowing dull orange, running glassy, steam screaming off it in a widening ring. It was too much all the same. The strike kept coming, the dragon still feeding itself down into her out of the sky, and at the peak of the overload something stirred behind her eyes.
A pressure bloomed from somewhere deeper than the Byakugan had ever lived, gathering hard behind her forehead, a weight in a place she had no name for. The silver light of her Weave flashed over into a bright burning cerulean from her heels to her crown, her eyes flaring brighter still, the glow bleeding out through the visor itself, and for the space of one breath the chakra roaring off her carried a tone she could not place in herself at all. It felt wrong inside her own skull. She did not understand it.
"The flow is thinning. Almost through. Keep your…"
The voice stopped mid-word. The coil along her spine went utterly still, and its silence frightened her more than the lightning did, because in all the years they had been one, Venom had never once been confused by anything inside her body.
Across the courtyard the Sharingan caught it. Through the glare and the distance she saw his composure crack, open confusion standing on his face for a single heartbeat before he mastered it and shut it away.
Then the last of the strike ran out of the sky. The column guttered, thinned to threads, and died, and the dark slammed back down over the fortress with the rain still falling through it. Hinata stood in a ring of glassed, steaming stone, stray arcs crawling and snapping across her plates, her frame shivering with the load it was still working down, and the cerulean fire under her skin sank slowly back toward silver. The pressure behind her forehead faded. The moment passed, and no one spoke of it. Across the courtyard Sasuke lowered his blade and, after a long beat, slid it back into its sheath, shk.
Naruto was at her side before the steam cleared, both hands hovering an inch off her forearm plate. "Hinata! Hey, hey. Talk to me. You okay?!"
"I am… fine." The doubled voice came out with a fine stutter riding the resonance. She flexed her right hand, and a stray arc cracked out between the fingers and died. "It is settling."
He held on her visor a moment longer, reading it, and then made himself turn back to the courtyard.
"I met Itachi." He said it into the stillness, level, the rain running off his jaw. "Days ago. Face to face."
The name crossed the courtyard and landed harder than any blow that had been traded in it. Sasuke went completely still.
"Tell me." It came out low. "Everything you know about him. All of it."
Naruto told him. The town in River Country, Itachi waiting for them in the open street, the words about the Akatsuki hunting Orochimaru's trail, the genjutsu, the questions about the conference, the calm that never broke, the way he had simply left. Sasuke's questions started before the telling was half done, every one of them biting down on a detail, the answers only opening more of them, and somewhere in the middle of it Naruto stopped and shook his head.
"This ain't working. Words are too slow, and you're not gonna trust mine anyway." He tapped two fingers against his own temple. "So look for yourself. Use your Sharingan on me. All of it's in here."
"Are you INSANE?!" Karin's voice cracked down from afar. "He tried to take your head off five minutes ago, you do not hand him your mind!"
"Naruto-kun." Hinata's doubled voice came down hard, the resonance under it flat as a blade, her frame still twitching off the last of the storm's load. "No."
"It's my head." He was already walking forward through the rain. "And this is faster. Trust me."
He stopped two paces from Sasuke and met his eyes. The red bloomed back into them, and both of them went still.
The rain struck the two of them and neither moved. Seconds stacked. What ran along the locked line of their gazes carried the conference and everything that had stood up in front of the assembled people there, Danzo's exposure and his death, the Root vaults broken open and everything dragged out of their dark into daylight, the village learning the truth of the massacre and whose order had stood behind it, and at the far end of it a rain-soaked street days old with Itachi standing in the middle of it, everything he had said and shown.
From her position Karin's hands had come up on their own, and on Hinata's fused senses the same reading stood plain, the two signatures in the middle of the courtyard sliding into each other's rhythm until they beat as one shared frequency, Naruto's bright roaring warmth and Sasuke's cold storm-fed depth rising and falling in step.
Then it broke. The two of them swayed apart half a step in the same instant, rain sheeting from their shoulders.
"Is it true?" Sasuke's voice came out low and uneven, the flatness gone out of it for the first time all night. His eyes had bled back to black. "All of it."
"Yeah. All of it." Naruto held his gaze. "Everyone in Konoha who had a hand in what was done to your clan has answered for it, or they're going to. I'm seeing to that myself. You've got my word on it, personally." He let a breath go. "Come back with us, Sasuke. Come home."
The rain filled a long space between them.
"No." Sasuke's voice had leveled again. "I still want my satisfaction. Whatever orders stood behind that night, it was his hands that did the killing, start to finish, every room of the compound. He is going to answer to me for the suffering. All of it."
Naruto's tried to say something. His hands closed and opened at his sides, and for a long silent beat he stood with the rain hammering him, fighting it out with himself behind his face.
"…Alright." The word came out of him slowly. "Alright. Then I want your word too. While you're out there settling it, no one who had no part in the Uchiha business gets harmed by you. Give me that."
"You have my word."
Then Naruto reached into his jacket, and a small scroll came out of a seal in a curl of smoke. "There's one more thing you should have." He held it out flat on his palm. "When we crossed with Itachi, there was a scuffle. A short one. I got a seal onto him in the middle of it, a hidden tracking seal, buried deep enough he won't find it quick. This scroll carries the key to trace it."
"You WHAT?" Karin's voice broke down.
Hinata's visor came around to him. He had sat shoulder to shoulder with her at a campfire hours ago and walked her through that meeting twice over, and this had never once been in it.
Sasuke crossed the distance and took the scroll off his palm, the first time all night the gap between them had closed without a blade in it. He turned it once in his fingers and it went away into his sleeve. Then he lifted his arm and pointed off into the rain, out past the broken wall, at a bearing far south of the channel they had crossed.
"There's another island out there. Far past this one, more remote. Another hidden base under it." His arm came down. "You'll find Orochimaru there."
"What happened with Orochimaru?" Hinata's doubled voice rolled across the courtyard.
Sasuke did not look at her. "He outlived his usefulness." The rain filled the gap where an explanation would have sat. Then, flatter still, "These past weeks I learned he had bent the knee. Before the Akatsuki." A muscle moved along his jaw. "Before the organization where he works." He said all of it without once letting Itachi's name into his mouth.
"One more thing." His hands were already moving. "I cleared another stronghold on this island, north along the ridge. The civilians taken from the fishing village are inside it. Alive." His hands came together once, and the smoke of a reverse summoning burst white around him. The rain beat it flat, and the courtyard where he had stood was empty. Looks like he still had a way to leave this place.
The three of them stood in the rain over the empty courtyard, the thunder still talking to itself far out over the sea. Karin picked her way to them through the rubble, and let out one long breath that shook the whole way out of her. "Okay. Nobody died. Good. Very good."
Neither of them answered her. Along Hinata's spine Venom lay coiled and silent, and had not stirred since the strike, and she let it be. Inside her, under the rain, the pieces settled, the new hand that had been laying its demands across Orochimaru's dying network, the name written small and frightened into the recovered letters, Heaven's Path, and now the word that Orochimaru had knelt to the Akatsuki, all of it drawing together into a single shape. Konoha had suspected for some time that the Akatsuki would try to pull Orochimaru back into their fold, and by everything she had heard tonight, they had managed it. She turned the shape over once behind her eyes and kept it to herself.
She flexed her armored fingers at her side, a last stray arc of the storm cracking out between them and dying in the rain, and turned her visor toward the Naruto.
He had not moved. He was still facing the spot where Sasuke had stood, the rain running off his face, the smoke of the reverse summoning long since beaten flat into the mud. Then his shoulders came down, and he let his breath out through his nose, and turned around with his mouth already opening. "Alright. We should probably get mov…"
The sky went out. Hinata stood a single pace behind him, the armored tower of her filling his whole view, and what little grey the storm clouds had been giving the night died behind the black sweep of her pauldrons and helmet.
"…Hinata-chan." Her name arrived a beat late, the rest of his sentence folding into it, but his feet stayed planted in her shadow, and his eyes went up her frame in one quick pass, sabatons to helm crest, reading the plates for damage. "You good? Everything okay?"
"I am okay." The doubled voice came down at him steadily. "But what you did with Sasuke, Naruto-kun. Opening your mind to his eyes. That was very reckless."
He rubbed the back of his soaked head. "Yeah. It was." There was no argument in it. "But I knew I could handle him in there. And even if somethin' went wrong, I had you and Karin standin' three steps away. No way he pulls anything with the two of you watchin' him."
For a moment the tall frame in front of him gave him nothing at all, the visor a sheet of wet black with the last of the rain crawling down it. Then a breath moved out through the helmet. "Still. It was too risky."
"I'm just so glad nobody got hurt." Karin had come up beside the two of them, hugging her arms against the drizzle.
The visor and Naruto's face both came around to her slowly.
"What?"
Neither of them answered, and she followed their silence out and around herself. The courtyard lay in ruins from breach to broken breach, the bodies of rogues and mutants strewn across the flooded rubble where the night's fighting had dropped them, and the mountainous corpse of the overgrown mutant sprawled thirty paces off, already going soft in the rain, its reek riding the wet air. Karin realized that only now. She pushed her glasses up her nose. "I meant ourselves. Us three. Obviously." She cleared her throat and drove past it. "So what are we going to tell the others? About Sasuke."
"The truth, mostly." Naruto wiped the water off his face. "We ran into Sasuke, we fought him a little more, and once the truth got through his head, he stopped. He told us about the snake freak, and then he reverse summoned himself outta here to go deal with that crazy brother of his."
"You never told us about the seal you placed on Itachi, either," Hinata said.
"Heh." He had the grace to look sheepish. "Wasn't even sure the thing took hold, so I figured there was no point bringin' it up till it mattered."
"And Sakura?" Karin's hands had found her hips. "You know exactly who this lands on hardest. If she hears about Sasuke secondhand, out of some mission report, she is going to…"
"I'm gonna talk to Sakura myself. Personally." Naruto put a hand up. "Before any report gets near her. That one's mine to tell, believe it."
While the two of them went back and forth, the coil along Hinata's spine rose.
"Robbed," Venom rolled up through her in a low growl. "We have been robbed. We had that annoying red-eyed brat. We were sure of it. A little longer and we would have taken him down and dragged him home by the ankle, and instead it ends with talking. The only worthwhile thing in this entire crawling mission was the sharkman, and our primary male partner spoiled even that one at the finish. And now this." Something ran underneath the words that was closer to a growl than a thought. "Our male partner is really eager to ruin our wins!"
Hinata blinked behind her visor. The tone had teeth in it, a raw feral edge she had not heard coming, and under it the turmoil was real, irritation rolling off the coil in slow hot waves she could feel in her own chest. She knew this shifting. She had been marking it for years now, the way Venom's register slid back and forth without warning, a cold and patient scholar taking a jutsu apart into its principles on one day, and on another day this, a fanged thing pacing behind her ribs.
We ended it in better shape than we would have alone, she answered inside. The teamwork is why we are standing here barely scratched. Her gaze had drifted to Naruto, who was in the middle of recounting something to Karin with both arms thrown wide, and Karin was looking up at him like she believed every single word of it. And Sasuke had his way out of that battle from the beginning. We could have emptied ourselves to the floor and still be standing in this courtyard without him.
The coil sat with that for a few long moments.
"…Fine," it allowed at last. "Fine. But we require compensation from our primary male partner. He will feed us. Large amounts of food, and chocolate above all of it. And then he will make dozens of his clones and set every one of them to pleasing every inch of this body of ours. Especially with their tongues."
A single bead of sweat slid down Hinata's temple inside the helmet. It seemed she was not the only one in this body who had been growing that particular kind of fantasy about him.
"So what do we do right now?" Karin's question cut the inner channel off. She was looking back and forth between the two of them. "The night's not exactly finished with us."
Hinata's Byakugan flared behind the visor, the veins blooming at her temples, and her sight went out through the stronghold in one turning sweep, down through the rubble and the tunnels and out along the walls. "There is nothing left alive in this stronghold. The rogues and the mutants here are dead. Whatever survived the night is scattered across the island."
"Then first thing's the civilians." Naruto turned toward the northern breach, toward the ridge where Sasuke's arm had pointed. "We find that stronghold where they got stashed and we keep it away from others." His hands came up into the cross seal, and chakra surged off him in a hot pulse. "Tajū Kage Bunshin no Jutsu! (Multi Shadow Clone Jutsu!)"
The courtyard filled. Clones bloomed out of rolling white smoke in the hundreds, on the rubble, on the walls, on the dead mutant's flank, until orange jackets crowded every level surface the ruin had left. "And after that we're sweepin' this whole island," the original called over the mass of himself. "Every rock, every tunnel, everything still standin'. Let's move!"
The host poured over the walls and into the dark, and the three of them went with it. Karin fell in at Hinata's side as they climbed the northern breach. "And there's still all those people hiding back on the first island," she said, her voice dropping. "Out in those woods, in this weather. From what that village looked like…" Her mouth pulled tight. "Looks like not all of them managed to get away and hide."
They ran the broken curtain wall north, the rain thinning around them at last, and while her body took the shattered stone at speed Hinata let a part of her mind go back down into the white of it, the dragon of lightning pouring out of the sky and through her, and the thing underneath that moment that had not felt like her at all. She reached inward. The coil had settled since the courtyard, its irritation banked down to coals.
When I caught Sasuke's lightning, she asked. You felt it as well. The strange thing.
"We did." The answer came back with none of the sulk left in it, surprisingly serious. "For a moment your body reacted in a way it has never reacted. It took in a volume of energy far past what your channels should accept quickly, as if something dormant in you had stirred and put its hands to the work. Your brainwaves changed their structure. So did the tissue of your eyes. Both lasted less than a breath, and both went back." A pause moved along her spine. "We suspect your baseline genes carry something that has not yet awakened."
Hinata cleared a collapsed stretch of wall in one long bound and landed without breaking stride. She remembered pressure. On her eyes, and worst of all behind her forehead, a weight pushing outward from a place she had no name for, as if something on the far side of the bone had been trying to come out.
"And there is another matter," Venom went on. "This mission has shown us flaws. In our abilities, in our fighting capability. More of them than we are willing to accept. Our evolution must continue. When this mission ends, you will provide biomass, a great deal of it, and the pressed bars, the ones you showed the male and the red one. Many of them." The coil drew itself tighter along her back. "There is a great deal of work to do."
You will have all of it, she answered, and put her sight back on the ridge line and ran.
The stronghold sat north along the ridge exactly where Sasuke had pointed, and it told the same story as everything else he had touched that night. Its walls stood unbroken, its rogues lay dead at their posts with single precise burns and cuts, and behind a barred inner door he had not bothered to disguise, the civilians of the fishing village sat packed together in the dark, hundreds of them, soaked and starved, but alive. Hinata's doubled voice through the door frightened them nearly as badly as their captors had, and in the end it was Karin who talked the bar off its brackets, and Naruto's grinning clones who carried the children out.
The rest of the night turned itself into a rain-soaked cleanup. Naruto flooded the island with clones and they went through it hill by hill, put down the mutants that turned on them, bound the ones that could be taken, and dug the last of the rogues out of hollows and sea caves with Hinata's sight walking ahead of every group and Karin sorting the living from the dead across the whole breadth of her range. The storm hammered on through all of it, and only toward dawn did the rain finally begin to thin, the thunder pulling away out over the sea and the fog peeling up off the channels in long grey sheets.
First light found the three of them on the shore of the first island, near the wreck of the fishing village, with clone garrisons left standing over the civilians on both islands, and out of the brightening haze a ship came. It ran clean and fast for the beach, and its hull had pale seamless timber without a joint or a nail in it, grown whole out of Yamato's Wood Release. The first person off it did not wait for the ramp to settle. Anko came up the wet sand at a fast walk, planted herself in front of Naruto and Hinata, and demanded everything, from the beginning, leaving nothing out. Behind her the rest of both squads poured ashore, Guy's people and Naruto's team together, and several dozen more Konoha shinobi after them.
The morning went to work. Shinobi spread into the woods after the hidden villagers and into the strongholds after the freed captives, fresh squads crossed the channel behind Naruto, Hinata, and Karin to be walked through the ruins, and the three of them laid out everything the night had held, the tunnels, the mutants, Sasuke, and above all Orochimaru, and the remote island far to the south where Sasuke's arm had pointed. The council that gathered on the beach was short. Anko wanted the ship turned around and an expedition on the water before the trail cooled, and nobody argued with her twice. Most of the squads would hold the twin islands and wait for the ships coming behind. A combined squad went aboard within the hour and sailed south.
The remote island rose out of open sea near midday, and unmarked on the charts they carried. Folded into a ravine at its inner heart they found the hidden base, and it was newer than anything else they had walked through this whole campaign, the stone still sharp-edged, the seals along its corridors barely weathered. Its staff were all dead. They lay gathered into a single heap inside the entrance hall, cut down and stacked with the same surgical method as the rogues on the strongholds, Sasuke's own cleanup, finished before he ever crossed their path. Every trap on the way down had been disabled, every barrier seal cut, and the corridors stood open one after another until the combined squad reached the deepest level and stopped before the doors of Orochimaru's chambers.
Hinata stood at the head of the corridor with her sight already through the far wall. "The way is safe. Nothing ahead of us is alive."
Anko went past her without a word. The large wooden double doors at the corridor's end were already broken, split down their faces and hanging crooked off the bolts, and she kicked them anyway, whud, both leaves slamming wide and one tearing loose to slap flat against the inner wall. Beyond lay a wide chamber that had been lived in and then fought in, a large bed against the far wall, shelves toppled, cabinets and lacquered furniture smashed and scattered across the floor, the struggle written into every splintered piece of it. And on the floor directly before them lay Orochimaru.
"Is that…" Sakura's voice cut through from the second rank. "Is that him?"
"Ugh." Kiba had a hand clamped over his nose. "The smell is awful."
Kakashi stepped in past the both of them, his one visible eye moving over the floor. "He certainly looks different."
They looked. The thing filling the chamber would have been horrifying alive. Orochimaru's body had turned itself into a huge bone-white snake, its coiled length spilling across the whole floor and climbing partway up the walls, and its wide maw hung open where the head lay nearest the door, baring two full rows of teeth set one behind the other in the pale gums. His dead, glassy eyes looked at nowhere. Hinata's gaze slid along the length of him and caught what no one else's could. The white scales were small white snakes, thousands of them grown into a single crawling hide, and every last one of them was dead.
"He really turned himself into a complete monster," Kiba said, muffled through his fingers. "I mean, look at this thing. There's no person left in it at all."
While he talked, Hinata watched Anko. The jounin had walked up close to the dead coils and stopped there, looking down at what was left of her old teacher, and her face gave away nothing at all. One by one the rest of them drifted up and stood beside her, and for a while nobody said anything, the whole squad looking down at the body of a man who had wanted to live forever and had made a great many people suffer for the wanting.
Anko lifted one foot and gave the pale coil a soft kick. The dead mass shifted the way dead meat shifts, and settled.
"So, is this it?" Tenten asked from the edge of the group. "Is Orochimaru finally over?"
"Not quite." Anko's eyes stayed on the body. "The main body's done. But he stamped his curse marks on a whole lot of people over the years, and some of those marks are carrying nasty surprises inside them. Waiting for their moment."
"Then let's not spend ours here." Kakashi turned back toward the corridor. "We proceed. Strip this place of everything usable, and then we take it apart."
They stripped the base to bare stone. Documents, samples, sealed storage, intact equipment, all of it catalogued and hauled up the ravine to the ship, and when the last crate was aboard they brought the hidden levels down and left the island holding nothing but rubble. Then the ship turned north, back to the twin islands, and the routine part of the mission began, the part nobody would ever write stories about. Squads rotated through the cleanup of both islands and the care of the civilians. The half-wrecked fishing town on the continent was cleared, repaired enough to stand, and formally handed back to the Land of Rivers' own forces. The abandoned laboratory complex in the Land of Rivers was stripped to its walls, and the mountain fortress in the Land of Grass after it. All of it was driven hard and fast, because Konoha's forces were stretched thin across two countries that were not theirs, and the other great nations and their hidden villages had begun to notice. A presence that size on neutral ground would read as intervention to a friendly eye and as invasion to any other kind, and so the squads folded up their operations one after another and flowed back east toward the operational base on the Fire border. All of it together took more than a week.
The command building was new. It had gone up while the assault teams were abroad, a wide, long hall of fresh-cut timber near the center of the base, high-raftered enough that Hinata could stand at her full height beneath the beams with her helmet sealed away and her hair bound back. Her squad stood drawn up on the boards beside Naruto's team and Shikamaru's, three formations deep in front of the broad map table, and behind the table stood Shikaku, reading down a final sheaf of reports.
He set the papers down. "Asuma. Last piece. The Land of Tea. Your conclusion."
"The prison was already finished when we got there." Asuma's voice was even, an unlit cigarette held forgotten between two fingers. "Small facility, remote corner of the country. Most of the staff and most of the inmates had either died or run off long before us. What was left was one prisoner, alone, inside the high-security wing." He paused. "He read as severely weakened. Neglected, starved, the wing had been failing around him for months. So we opened the cell to make contact. To help him, if it came to that." He made a brief pause. "It went badly. He was a young man, barely more than a boy, and the moment the door moved he went berserk. His body mutated faster than anything we've seen out of the curse marks, and he attacked us. We tried to reason with him the whole way through. There was no sanity left in him to reach, and he took down close to half the prison trying to get at us." The cigarette turned over in his fingers. "We were forced to put him down. We came back with a sealed body."
Shikaku took that in without moving, his eyes going down for a long moment as it filed itself away, and then he looked up across the assembled squads. Nobody was fidgeting. Ino was studying the floorboards, Sakura's listening quietly, and even Kiba stood quiet, the whole room chewing on the same thought.
"We are still compiling everything this operation brought in, from every source," Shikaku said. "That will take time. The Suigetsu individual has been taken into our custody for further notice." He straightened off the table. "All squads. As of this hour you are stood down from the operation. Rotations and leave postings by end of day. Dismissed." The formations broke, and over the first shuffle of feet he added, "High-ranking jounin, remain."
The hall drained until only a handful stood at the map table. Shikaku waited for the door to close.
"The picture forming out of the captured records is this. Orochimaru's operations look to have severely weakened both the Land of Rivers and the Land of Grass, hollowed them out from underneath over years, and the full accounting is still being compiled."
"Is there anything preliminary we should be aware of?" Kakashi asked.
"Two things." Shikaku laid a hand flat on the map. "First. Orochimaru was keeping his own tab on the Akatsuki. Between his files from the captured bases and the description of what Hinata saw through that ring, we now suspect the Akatsuki have already taken two jinchuuriki. Both from the Stone village."
That moved through the room like cold air. Guy's brows came down, Yamato went very still, and Anko's arms folded hard across her chest. Hinata should be concerned. When she saw the chamber through that ring, only one was sealed, which means other is still kept somewhere.
"Second. The claim Itachi passed to Naruto through that illusion. This Madara." Shikaku's eyes came up and settled on Naruto. "I expect a fully detailed report. Every word he said, everything he showed you, in order, on my desk."
"You'll get it. All of it." Naruto's answer came out prompt and flat, and Hinata, standing bareheaded at his side, caught what sat under the flatness, the annoyance ground down thin, the same splinter that talk had left in him on the cave floor days ago. He shifted his weight. "And Sasuke? Is he gonna stay listed as a missing-nin?"
"He is no longer under Orochimaru's command, but he remains rogue, and his status remains what it is," Shikaku said. "We are also not yet sure how deep he ran in Orochimaru's operations. Until we are, nothing changes."
Naruto pulled a long breath in through his nose and let it back out, and said nothing.
"And Orochimaru himself?" Yamato asked. "Will his status be changed to deceased?"
"For now, no. We are still compiling." Shikaku's hand moved off the map. "If Anko's testimony, Jiraiya-sama's assessment, and Hinata's readings are all correct, then some of his curse marks may still hold fragments of his soul. Enough, potentially, for a partial resurrection. Perhaps a full one, under the wrong circumstances. We are hoping the man catalogued his own marked subjects, because otherwise we will be finding them the hard way."
Hinata's eyes went to Anko without turning her head. The jounin had not moved and had not spoken, but something in her stance had shifted at the words, her weight settling back a fraction, one thumb hooking into her coat where the collar hid the faded mark on her neck.
"And the other villages?" Guy's voice had lost its usual volume, gone level and professional. "After everything we have done inside those borders, will we need to deploy again to counter them?"
"All the major countries and their villages are at least aware we were operating inside Grass and Rivers. Tea, not quite yet." Shikaku said. "We have already caught scouting attempts along both borders. I expect spies and emissaries moving into those countries within the month, all of them asking what we found and what we took. That is a problem for the diplomats first and for us second." He looked down the table, and his attention moved to Naruto, Hinata, and Shikamaru and stopped there. "You three. I will want you later, on the handling of everything new that came out of this. Our forecasting says there is another campaign of this scale coming, in other countries this time, and it will be about the Akatsuki. The remaining jinchuuriki look to be under direct threat."
"Then I'm in it. Whenever it comes, wherever it is." Naruto's shoulders had squared before Shikaku finished the sentence.
Shikamaru dragged a hand down his face, looking exhausted by the mere shape of the future. "…What a drag," he muttered, barely above the floorboards.
"That will be all." Shikaku bent back over his reports, and they filed out into the daylight.
The base had changed while they were gone. What had been a walled patrol village with tents in its lanes was now streets, real ones, packed earth graded flat between rows of prefabricated buildings, strung lamps swaying on lines overhead, supply carts parked in ranks by the depot, somebody's laundry drying between two barracks.
"Y'know," Naruto said, hands laced behind his head as they walked, "we kinda turned this place into an actual little town."
Hinata hummed at that, ducking a lamp line without breaking stride. He tipped his head all the way back to find her face, high above his own even at a walk.
"I'm gonna go talk to Sakura. About Sasuke. All of it, start to finish."
She nodded down at him. Sakura needed the proper details, and she needed them from him and from no one else.
"It's just sad, y'know?" His hands came down off his head. "That he wouldn't come back with us. I could've helped him with his crazy brother. We could've done it together, that's the whole point. But no, he's still got it in his head that it's his problem and nobody else's." He kicked a pebble down the lane. "At least he gave me his word nobody else gets hurt while he's out there. I'm hopin' he keeps it."
Hinata walked beside him and let him talk, her steps shortened to hold his pace, her shadow laying half the street into shade.
"And now the interesting part's over," he went on, groaning up at the sky, "and you know what's left? Paperwork. Reports. Pages and pages of 'em, every word Itachi said, everything on the islands, all of it in multiple copies. It's so tedious it should count as a forbidden jutsu."
A laugh slipped out of Hinata, her voice doubled and echoing as it always was, the deep resonance running gentle under her own. "You and Hokage-sama were already trying to simplify the paperwork, as I recall."
"Yeah, and after all that work we made it, like, two-three forms shorter." He threw his hands up. "It needs way more than that. When I'm Hokage, I'm streamlinin' the whole thing, top to bottom. And maybe, maybe…" He trailed off, and his face folded into the hard frown of a man thinking at the very edge of his range. "…maybe I put one of those computer things on it. Yeah. Like the ones in the snake freak's bases. Computers can do all the tedious paperwork for me, and I just do the important stuff. I gotta figure out how they work first, but that's a detail."
"I will help you," Hinata said.
"Then it's basically already done, believe it." He grinned up at her, and the two of them turned down the lane toward the long medical building at its end, where the lamps were already lit over the door and Sakura was working, and kept walking.