Chapter 48 - 48

Chapter 48:

– Blake –

The canopy of the Land of Fire stretched below me like an endless green ocean, ancient and heavy and alive in a way that no forest on Earth had ever been. These were Hashirama trees. Living remnants of the First Hokage's will, planted decades ago during the founding of the Hidden Leaf, and they had never stopped growing. Their roots burrowed deep into the earth and tangled together in subterranean networks that Tsunade once described to me as a nervous system the size of a country. Every trunk hummed with residual chakra. Every leaf exhaled it. The entire forest breathed nature energy in waves that washed over my senses.

I adjusted the angle of my wings and banked left around a column of rising mist that curled from a river gorge below. I'd been flying for nearly twenty minutes since leaving Lee and Gaara behind, scanning with both my eyes and the divine sense that came packaged with my fallen angel bloodline. The latter was supposed to be my edge. But in the Elemental Nations, that skill was nearly useless at range. The Hashirama trees clogged my perception. 

It was, frankly, infuriating when I was in a hurry and had no idea if Naruto or Sasuke were okay.

Tsunade had warned me about this months ago during one of their late night conversations, back when I was still sleeping between her and Shizune in whatever inn they'd stopped at. The trees are the reason no invasion of Konoha has ever fully succeeded. They're not just trees. Anyone who isn't born and raised inside the Land of Fire will struggle to sense anything precise through that canopy. 

She'd been right. Orochimaru's invasion months ago had failed in part because his forces couldn't coordinate once they hit the treeline. 

I grit my teeth and pushed more chakra into my eyes, layering it over my divine senses like stacking two imperfect lenses on top of each other. Neither system worked perfectly in this environment on its own, but together they formed a rough composite image. 

And then I saw a pillar of red chakra in the distance that I hadn't noticed until now.

There was something deeply, fundamentally wrong about this energy. It wasn't human.

"Found you," I muttered.

I folded my wings and dove.

The wind screamed past my ears as I dropped through the canopy at a steep angle, branches whipping past in green blurs, leaves exploding in my wake from the displaced air. I punched through the last layer of foliage and the world opened beneath me into a massive river gorge carved between two sheer cliff faces of grey stone. 

A waterfall roared at the far end, hundreds of feet tall, white water crashing into a churning basin below with enough force to send plumes of mist curling fifty feet into the air. And flanking the falls on either side, carved directly into the living rock of the cliff faces, stood two colossal statues.

I recognized them from Tsunade's history lessons. On the left: Hashirama Senju, the First Hokage, founder of Konoha, the man who grew these very trees and shaped the landscape of an entire nation with his bare hands. On the right: Madara Uchiha, co-founder turned betrayer. Both figures stood with their hands forming seals, frozen mid-technique, forever locked in the moment before their legendary final clash.

The Valley of the End. Tsunade had told me about this place, too. The battle between Hashirama and Madara had been so catastrophic that it reshaped the geography of the region permanently. The waterfall, the gorge, the shattered cliff faces. All of it was collateral damage from two men who loved each other like brothers trying to beat each other to death over an ideological disagreement. A monument to what happened when the people closest to you became your enemies.

And now two more boys who were supposed to be friends stood on the water at the base of that waterfall, preparing to do the exact same thing.

My eyes locked onto them instantly.

Naruto Uzumaki stood on the surface of the churning basin thirty feet from the waterfall's impact zone. But he barely looked human anymore. A shroud of bubbling, translucent red chakra enveloped his body like a second skin, roiling and shifting with a life of its own. A single tail of the same crimson energy whipped behind him, lashing the water's surface and sending up sprays of superheated steam wherever it struck. His eyes were no longer blue. They were blood red with vertical slit pupils, feral and empty of everything I associated with the loud, enthusiastic kid who'd challenged me to a fight outside Tsunami's house months ago. His whisker marks had deepened into jagged black lines carved across his cheeks. His canine teeth had elongated into fangs visible even from my altitude. His fingernails were claws. The orange jumpsuit was torn and soaked and stained dark in places that might have been water or might have been blood. The red chakra pulsed around him in waves, each pulse carrying a blast of raw killing intent so concentrated that I could feel it pressing against my skin from a hundred feet up. 

This was the same as Shukaku's energy but worse. More refined. More angry. The Nine Tailed Fox. Naruto's passenger was awake. And right now it was driving.

Sasuke Uchiha stood opposite him on the water's surface, and I almost didn't recognize him either. The boy's skin had turned grey. Not pale or ashen but an actual dark grey, the color of wet slate, stretched tight over sharpened features that no longer quite matched the brooding pretty boy I remembered from Team 7. A black four-pointed star sat in the center of his face like a brand, its lines extending across his nose and cheeks in a pattern that pulsed faintly with dark purple energy. His hair, normally ink black and looking like a duck's butt, had grown longer and wilder and taken on a bluish tint. His Sharingan eyes blazed crimson with three tomoe spinning in each iris.

But the worst part was his back. Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened to this kid!? Orochimaru must have somehow gotten to him during the invasion and bitten him…

Two enormous hand-shaped wings jutted from Sasuke's shoulder blades, webbed and grotesque, like someone had taken a pair of human hands, scaled them up to six feet each, stretched the fingers apart, and filled the gaps with grey membrane. They weren't feathered. They looked like something a mad scientist would stitch together in a lab at three in the morning and call art. My own wings flexed instinctively at the sight, a fallen angel's visceral rejection of something that wore the shape of flight without any of its grace.

Both boys stood on the water forty feet apart. Both were breathing hard. Both were bleeding from wounds that painted dark streaks down their arms and faces and soaked into their tattered clothes. The water beneath their feet rippled with the sheer pressure of their combined auras, two columns of hostile energy, red and purple, rising like smoke stacks and twisting around each other in the mist above the basin.

And both of them were now charging.

Naruto surged forward first, his feet barely touching the water's surface as the fox's chakra propelled him like a launched missile. In his right hand, a spiraling sphere of compressed chakra rotated at impossible speed, the technique's high pitched whine cutting through the waterfall's roar like a dentist's drill. 

Was that the Rasengan? I'd heard Tsunade describe it as one of the most devastating close range techniques ever created, developed by the Fourth Hokage and it could put even the toughest ninja down in a single blow. 

Sasuke answered with his own charge, grey skin rippling as curse mark energy fed his muscles, his hand wings flaring behind him for a burst of speed that cracked the water's surface in his wake. His left hand crackled and screamed with concentrated lightning chakra, white-blue electricity arcing wildly from his palm and scorching the air around it with the smell of ozone. 

The Chidori. Kakashi's signature technique. 

They were fifteen feet apart.

Ten.

Five.

Their screams merged into a single sound, raw and hoarse, two boys who had shared meals and missions and the closest thing either of them had to friendship howling their rage at each other as they threw killing blows with everything they had!

I hit the water between them like a meteor!

My landing sent a shockwave rippling outward in a perfect circle, a wall of displaced water three feet high expanding from the impact point and crashing against both boys' shins. In the same motion, both of my hands shot outward. My left caught Naruto's wrist just above the Rasengan. My right caught Sasuke's wrist just below the screaming Chidori.

The contact was electric. Literally. Thankfully, electricity couldn't hurt me or Akeno. 

Naruto's Rasengan howled against my palm, the compressed chakra sphere grinding against my skin like a belt sander made of pure force. My holy lightning surged instinctively to reinforce my hand, golden energy wrapping my fingers in a crackling gauntlet that held the Rasengan at bay through sheer divine stubbornness. It hurt. The vibrations ran up my arm and rattled my teeth and the red chakra contaminating the sphere licked at my wrist like tongues of acidic flame, leaving angry welts on my skin that smoked and stung.

My arms flexed and I stopped both of their lethal techniques.

And then I whipped my body and I threw them!

Naruto flew backward and hit the stone base of Hashirama's statue with a wet crack that sent chips of ancient rock showering into the water below. Sasuke rocketed in the opposite direction and slammed into Madara's statue hard enough to leave a body-shaped crater in the carved stone before sliding down the surface and catching himself on the water with a stumbling, furious crouch. 

The symbolism of the two boys being thrown into opposite monuments was not lost on me, though I was too pissed off to appreciate the poetry.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO DOING?!" My voice boomed across the valley, amplified by the natural acoustics of the gorge and the inadvertent pulse of holy lightning that laced my vocal cords when my emotions spiked. The words bounced off the stone walls and echoed back distorted and overlapping, giving my shout a resonant, almost divine quality that had nothing to do with intention and everything to do with being genuinely furious at two idiot children.

Neither boy answered with words.

Naruto peeled himself off Hashirama's statue with a snarl that sounded more animal than human. The red chakra cloak pulsed and thickened, its tail lashing the water with enough force to send a geyser twenty feet into the air. His slit pupils locked onto me with no recognition. No hesitation. Just the raw, indiscriminate violence of a cornered beast presented with a new threat.

Sasuke pushed himself upright on Madara's statue, his curse mark wings spreading wide, dark energy pouring off him in visible waves. His Sharingan fixed on me with spinning tomoe, analytic even through the haze of corruption and fury. 

Where Naruto had become an animal, Sasuke had become a machine. His lip curled upward, baring teeth that had sharpened in the transformation. "Get out of my way," Sasuke said. His voice was deeper than it should have been, roughened by the curse mark's influence, each word dragged through gravel. "This doesn't concern you. Walk away and I won't kill you too."

My wings settled against my back in a tight, controlled fold. I planted my feet on the water's surface, chakra keeping me stable on the churning basin, and crossed my arms over my chest.

"You won't kill me too," I repeated flatly. "Kid. You're thirteen. You weigh maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, which you currently are. You've got Orochimaru's hand-me-down Halloween costume bolted to your spine and you're picking fights with your best friend at the bottom of a waterfall. Sit down."

Sasuke's Sharingan spun faster. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you're defecting to the guy who literally bit you on the neck like a vampire and branded you with a slave mark. I know he wants your body for a science project. And I know that the entire reason a retrieval squad of your classmates got sent into a combat zone today is because they actually give a damn about you. So I'm going to ask one more time." I unfolded my arms and let my holy lightning crackle across my knuckles in a slow, deliberate display. Gold and white arcs danced between my fingers. "Sit. Down."

Surprisingly, Naruto attacked first.

The fox-cloaked boy launched himself off Hashirama's feet with enough force to crack the stone, crossing the forty foot gap in a heartbeat, one clawed hand extended toward my face. The red chakra stretched ahead of his body, forming a translucent arm of demonic energy twice the length of his actual reach, fingers hooked to grab and tear and rend.

My right wings snapped open and I pivoted, letting the chakra arm rake across the surface of my feathers instead of connecting with my skull. The contact burned. Acidic red energy hissed against my feathers and left smoking lines across the black surface, the pain sharp and immediate. I grunted and swung my forearm into Naruto's extended wrist, redirecting the boy's momentum sideways. Naruto hit the water chest first, skipped twice like a stone, and was already twisting back to his feet before I could follow up.

Sasuke came in from behind.

I felt the displacement of air from the curse mark wings and ducked, Sasuke's lightning-wreathed fist passing through the space my head had occupied a quarter second earlier. Clearly, he hadn't figured out that wouldn't work on me, but it's still always better to dodge than take a hit arrogantly. 

I dropped low, swept my leg across the water's surface, and caught Sasuke's ankle. The Uchiha stumbled but recovered instantly, using one grotesque hand-wing to push off the water and flip overhead, landing in a crouch three meters away.

Both boys came at me simultaneously from opposite directions.

My training under Tsunade and my mother had beaten exactly one principle into my muscle memory above all others: never stop moving. Momentum was survival.

Naruto's chakra arm swept low. I jumped, wings giving me a burst of altitude, and Naruto's attack scythed through the space beneath me and slammed into Sasuke's hastily raised guard instead, sending the Uchiha skidding backward across the water in a spray of white foam. I descended onto Naruto's back, both feet slamming into the boy's shoulder blades in a controlled stomp that drove him face-first beneath the surface. Naruto's tailed beast chakra bubbled and boiled the water around him. I pushed off before the acidic energy could eat through my sneakers.

Sasuke was already airborne, curse mark wings carrying him upwards, another Chidori screaming in his palm. I met him in midair where our wingspans almost equal in spread though entirely different in every other respect. 

Sasuke thrust the Chidori forward. I caught the wrist again, absorbed the lightning again, but this time Sasuke anticipated it. 

I guess he had noticed…

His free hand produced a kunai and slashed across my forearm, drawing a line of bright red blood.

The little shit is lucky I'm not trying to hurt him too bad while he's obviously whacked out of his mind on Orochi's evil chakra!

"Tch." My grip tightened. I pulled Sasuke forward, headbutted him directly on the bridge of the nose, and the crack of impact echoed off the valley walls. Sasuke's head snapped back, blood erupting from both nostrils, his Sharingan eyes going briefly unfocused. I released his wrist and hammered a lightning-charged palm strike into the center of his chest that sent the Uchiha spiraling downward and crashing into the shallows hard enough to crater the riverbed beneath two feet of water.

A weight hit me from behind and drove me downward. Naruto had surfaced and leapt onto my back, clawed hands digging into my shoulders through my shirt, red chakra burning everywhere it touched. The boy's fanged mouth opened wide and bit down on my left wing near the joint.

"FUCK!" I screamed!

My wings were erogenous zones under normal circumstances. Under combat circumstances, with fangs sinking into the sensitive membrane between bone and feather, the sensation was pure white-hot agony that bypassed every mental defense and hit my brain like a lightning bolt of raw nerve fire. My vision whited out for a full second.

I grabbed Naruto by the back of the jumpsuit, peeled the feral boy off my wing with a wet tearing sound that took several feathers with it, and slammed him into the water with enough force to send a column of spray thirty feet into the air. Then I grabbed a fistful of orange fabric and hauled Naruto's face above the surface.

"NARUTO!" I roared directly into the boy's face from six inches away, golden holy lightning flickering behind my eyes like contained suns. "Wake. The. Fuck. Up! This isn't you. You're better than this. You're better than that fox!"

For a fraction of a second, something flickered behind the red slit pupils. A flash of blue. A twitch of confusion. The barest ghost of recognition, as if Naruto Uzumaki was trapped behind glass inside his own skull, pounding on the window, unable to break through.

Then the red swallowed it. Naruto's clawed hand swiped across my face and opened four parallel gashes from my left cheekbone to my jaw. I dropped him reflexively, blood running hot down my neck and soaking into my collar.

Sasuke was on his feet again. The Uchiha had pulled himself from the crater in the riverbed, water streaming off his grey skin, blood still flowing from his broken nose. His curse mark wings flexed and spread, scattering droplets. His expression had shifted. The cold machine calculation was cracking around the edges, and something uglier and more honest was bleeding through.

"I told you to stay out of this," Sasuke said. His voice was quieter now. More dangerous for it. "You think you can just fly in and play hero? You're not even a ninja! You're just the Hokage's fuckboy!"

"Rude—" I cut in, but he cut me off again.

"—You don't understand anything. I need power. Orochimaru can give me that power!"

"Power for what?" I kept my tone even despite the stinging fire across my face and the throbbing agony in my bitten wing. I stood on the water between them, bleeding freely, eight wings spread in a barrier stance that blocked their line of sight to each other. "To kill your brother? Tsunade told me about Itachi. And I get it. I do. You want revenge for your family. Believe me when I tell you I understand that feeling more than almost anyone alive."

Something tightened in Sasuke's jaw. "Then you know why I have to go."

"I know why you think you have to go." I pointed at Naruto, who was circling on all fours like a caged animal, red chakra cloak rippling and bubbling with barely restrained violence. "And I know that kid right there fought half a dozen enemies today just to bring you home. Not because someone ordered him to. Because you matter to him. Because you're his friend. His brother."

"He's not my brother!" Sasuke's composure shattered. The words ripped out of him ragged and wet. "My brother murdered everyone I ever loved and told me I wasn't worth killing! Naruto doesn't know what that's like! None of you know what that's like!"

"My clan tried to murder my whole family in front of me when I was ten years old," I said quietly.

Sasuke went still.

"They called us abominations. Me and my sister. They waited until our father was away and they came in the night." My voice didn't waver. It was the voice of someone who had spent eight years carrying this weight, who had processed it and made peace with some parts and weaponized others. "I lost my memories. I lost my sister. I lost everything. And for eight years I didn't even know who I was or why I felt like something was missing." The waterfall roared in the silence between us.

"So yes, Sasuke. I know what it's like to want revenge. I know what it's like to dream about making them pay… And I wholeheartedly think you deserve your revenge if you want it, but you're literally an ignorant child! Don't go running off to some pedo when you have an entire village that will support you if you ask for help. When you're older and ready!"

Sasuke's Sharingan eyes were wide. The tomoe had stopped spinning. For one long, trembling moment, the curse mark's influence visibly receded. The grey faded from patches of his skin. One of the hand-wings twitched and began to shrink.

Then Naruto screamed.

A roar of pure tailed beast fury that shook the water beneath my feet and sent cracks spider-webbing up the base of both statues. A second tail of red chakra erupted from behind Naruto, the pressure of his aura doubling instantaneously. The fox was done waiting. It wanted blood. It wanted chaos. And it could feel its host wavering, could feel the grip on Naruto's consciousness loosening, and it was seizing every inch of ground the boy surrendered.

My divine senses screamed a warning.

Naruto's two-tailed form blurred forward, faster than before by an order of magnitude. The red chakra shaped itself into massive clawed arms on either side of his small body, each one large enough to palm a car, reaching for me with the mindless hunger of something that existed solely to destroy.

I launched myself backward. My wings caught air and I gained altitude just as the chakra arms slammed together where I'd been standing, the impact detonating a column of water fifty feet into the sky and creating a concussion wave that knocked Sasuke off his feet. I climbed higher, ten feet, twenty, thirty, putting distance between myself and the now two-tailed jinchuriki below.

From above, the picture was clear. Naruto was losing himself entirely. The red cloak had thickened into something almost solid, a miniature fox-shaped silhouette forming around his crouching body. Bubbles of corrosive chakra popped and reformed across its surface. The water beneath him had begun to boil, literal steam rising in curtains from the basin.

And Sasuke was getting back up. The curse mark was reasserting itself, grey spreading across his skin again, the hand-wings re-extending, his momentary hesitation already hardening back into cold resolve. Whatever window I had opened with my words was closing. 

The boy's trauma was too deep, the curse mark's influence too strong, and the sight of Naruto losing control only reinforced Sasuke's conviction that power was all that mattered.

I hovered above the Valley of the End, bleeding from my face and my wing and my forearm, holy lightning crackling across my body in agitated pulses, and assessed the situation with the tactical eye Shuri had beaten into me through months of brutal training.

Two opponents. Both were wounded. Both were running on fumes and rage rather than reserves. And both would kill each other if I backed off.

I couldn't talk Naruto down. The fox was in control. I couldn't talk Sasuke down. The boy's mind was made up and every second that passed let the curse mark dig its hooks deeper.

Which meant I had to do what I had to beat the fight out of both of them.

"Alright," I said to nobody. I rolled my shoulders, cracked my neck, and let my holy lightning fully ignite. Gold and white energy erupted across my body in a blazing aura that turned the mist around me into a halo of golden light. My eight wings spread to their maximum span, each feather edge limned in crackling electricity, and the combined output of my divine power pressed downward on the valley like a physical weight, flattening the water's surface and stilling the churning basin into an eerie, reflective mirror.

Both boys looked up at me.

I descended.

I hit the water between them for the second time, but this time I didn't stop to talk. My first target was Naruto. The fox needed to be suppressed before its host tore his own body apart from the inside. I closed the distance in two wing-assisted strides and drove a lightning-charged uppercut into the underside of the fox cloak's jaw. 

The impact was like punching a wall of boiling tar. The red chakra resisted, absorbed, burned, ate at my knuckles with acidic hunger. But the holy lightning was poison to demonic energy. 

Where gold met red, the tailed beast chakra hissed and evaporated in wisps of foul smelling steam. Naruto's body inside the cloak jerked upward from the force, feet leaving the water, and I followed with a second strike. A palm thrust to the center of Naruto's chest, directly over the seal on his stomach, channeling every ounce of purifying divine energy I could muster through the point of contact.

The holy lightning surged inward. Not to hurt Naruto, but to give the fucking fox a good ZAP! Tell it to fucking BACK OFF!

Naruto's mouth opened in a soundless scream. The red chakra cloak convulsed and then collapsed, evaporating off his body in sheets of crimson steam that dissipated into the valley's mist. His eyes flickered. Red. Blue. Red. Blue.

Blue.

Naruto Uzumaki's original ocean-blue eyes stared up at me in utter confusion, the fox's influence burned away by the same divine power that had purified Orochimaru's curse mark months ago. The boy's body went limp, consciousness fading, exhaustion claiming what the fox's retreat left behind. I caught him before he hit the water and lowered him gently onto his back, floating on the surface.

"Sleep it off, kid," I murmured. "You did good. You came all this way for your friend. That's enough."

Naruto's eyes closed. His breathing evened out. The water around him stopped boiling.

I turned to face Sasuke.

The Uchiha hadn't moved. He stood on the water twenty feet away, fully transformed in his curse mark state, grey skin and spinning Sharingan and those awful hand-wings spread wide behind him. But he was watching me with an expression that wasn't rage or calculation or cold superiority.

It was fear.

He had just watched me punch the Nine Tailed Fox out of Naruto with my bare hands.

"Your turn," I said.

Sasuke turned and ran.

His curse mark wings beat the air and he launched himself upward, climbing toward the lip of the valley, toward the treeline, toward the border and Orochimaru's promise of power waiting beyond it. The Uchiha genius recognized an unwinnable fight and chose to preserve himself for the objective that mattered more to him than pride.

My wings snapped open and I gave chase.

We tore through the sky above the Valley of the End, weaving between the stone faces of Hashirama and Madara at dangerous speed. Sasuke's hand-wings were ugly but functional, giving him surprising agility for someone who'd only had them for hours at most. 

He banked between the statues, dove through the waterfall's mist for concealment, and hurled fire jutsu behind him in my direction. Great fireballs the size of minivans exploded against the lightning I hastily hurled right back at them.

I was still faster. I closed the gap with each wingbeat. Sasuke looked over his shoulder and saw me gaining. The fear in his Sharingan deepened.

"You can't run forever," I called out over the wind. "And whatever Orochimaru promised you, I promise you he lied."

"SHUT UP!" Sasuke screamed. He twisted in midair and launched his last Chidori. Apparently, forgetting I was immune in his anger.

I flew straight through it. The Chidori struck my chest and its lightning poured into my body and was devoured. My eyes glowed gold. My wings blazed with stolen electricity added to my own reserves.

Sasuke's face went white beneath the grey.

I caught him.

One hand closed around Sasuke's ankle. The other grabbed his collar. I killed both our momentum with a massive beat of all eight wings and held the thrashing Uchiha at arm's length like a struggling cat. Sasuke kicked and clawed and tried to form another jutsu, but my grip was iron wrapped in lightning and the boy's chakra reserves were running on empty.

"Let go of me!" Sasuke's voice cracked. The command that had started so venomous broke halfway through into something younger and more desperate. "You don't understand! I have to! He killed them all and I have to!"

I descended slowly, carrying the struggling boy back down into the valley, back to the water, back to where Naruto lay unconscious and breathing and alive because someone had cared enough to follow him through a forest full of enemies.

I set Sasuke down on the water's surface. The boy's knees buckled. The curse mark receded in stages. Grey skin fading to pale. Hand-wings shrinking and retracting with wet, disturbing sounds. His hair shortening. His features softening back to those of a traumatized thirteen year old who was too exhausted and too spent to maintain the monster's shape any longer.

Sasuke Uchiha knelt on the water, depleted and beaten, and stared at his own reflection with Sharingan eyes that slowly, slowly, faded back to black. 

And then he also passed out.

For fucks sake…

I stood there for a long moment after Sasuke's body went slack, the Uchiha's face half submerged in the shallow water near the basin's edge, mouth slightly open, completely unconscious. His breathing was steady. Shallow but steady. The curse mark had fully receded, leaving behind pale skin marred with bruises and shallow cuts that would heal fine on their own given a few days and some actual rest. 

Naruto lay a dozen feet away on his back, arms spread like a starfish, snoring faintly despite the water lapping at his ears. The Nine Tails' corrosive chakra had left angry red burns across the boy's hands and forearms where the cloak had been thickest, self inflicted damage from housing a demon that didn't give a damn about its container's wellbeing. But the burns were already closing. Jinchuriki healing factor. 

Kid would probably wake up starving and confused and asking what happened…

"Alright," I muttered to myself, wiping blood from the four parallel gashes across my left cheek with the back of my hand. The cuts stung. My bitten wing throbbed with a deep ache. My forearm bled sluggishly from Sasuke's kunai slash. My knuckles were cracked and swollen from punching through the Nine Tails' chakra cloak bare handed. My shirt was shredded across the chest and left shoulder, hanging off me in strips that were more decorative than functional at this point.

And to think… I could have just avoided all of this and stayed at orientation with Peter…

Nah… This was worth it, if nothing else Mom would have been upset if Naruto died…

I looked like I had lost a fight with a blender. But the two kids who had actually been trying to kill each other were alive and whole and breathing, and that was the only metric that mattered.

I retracted my wings. All eight folded inward with a rustle of black feathers and then vanished beneath my skin, the familiar tingle of reabsorption running down my spine. The absence of their weight always felt strange for the first few seconds, like removing a heavy backpack after a long hike. My balance shifted and I adjusted my footing on the water's surface.

I walked across the water toward Naruto first. Naruto was heavier than he looked. I carried him to the rocky shore at the base of the valley wall, where a narrow strip of gravel and smooth stone created a natural landing just above the waterline. I set Naruto down on his back against the flattest patch of ground I could find, checked the boy's pulse one more time out of habit, and then went back for Sasuke.

I sat down heavily between them. 

I tilted my head back and stared up at the strip of sky visible between the valley walls. It was almost peaceful. Almost beautiful. If you ignored the craters in the water, the cracks in the statues, the scorch marks on the cliff faces, and the two beaten unconscious children flanking me like bookends.

"What a day," I said to no one.

That was when my senses prickled.

Someone was approaching through the treeline above the valley's rim, moving at a steady pace, and I hadn't sensed them until they were practically on top of me because the forest swallowed everything. My body tensed. 

A figure dropped from the treeline and landed on the rocky ledge overlooking the valley floor about forty feet above my position. Silver hair. A dark mask covered the lower half of his face. One eye was visible beneath a slanted headband, and it swept the scene below with sharp, practiced assessment before settling on me.

Kakashi Hatake.

My shoulders dropped. The tension bled out of me so fast I nearly slumped sideways into Naruto. I let the half formed Lightspear fizzle out and pressed both palms flat against the gravel behind me, propping myself upright with the last scraps of my dignity.

Kakashi stood on the ledge for a moment longer, his single visible eye moving from me to Naruto to Sasuke and back again. Taking in the unconscious boys. The battlefield damage. The cracks in the legendary statues. 

And then, because Hatake Kakashi was constitutionally incapable of letting a genuine emotional moment exist without immediately undermining it, the jonin's posture shifted. His shoulders straightened. His visible eye curved into that infuriating crescent shape that meant he was smiling beneath the mask. He slipped both hands into his pockets and strolled down the rocky slope toward the shoreline with the casual unhurried gait of a man taking an evening walk through a park rather than arriving at the aftermath of a catastrophic three way battle between a fallen angel, a jinchuriki, and a curse marked Uchiha.

"Well, well," Kakashi said as he stepped onto the gravel beach. "Blake Himejima. Didn't expect to see you here." His eye traveled slowly and deliberately over my shredded shirt, the gashes on my cheek, the blood soaking my collar, the swollen knuckles, and the general state of someone who had been used as a chew toy by a twelve year old possessed by a demon fox. "You look a little roughed up. Were these kids too tough for you?"

I stared at him.

The waterfall roared. Naruto snored. Sasuke's unconscious body twitched once and then went still again.

"One of these kids," I said slowly, my voice flat and hoarse from all the screaming I had done in the last twenty minutes, "pulled on two tails worth of jinchuriki power. Red chakra cloak. Feral state. Claws and fangs and giant chakra arms that could flatten a building. He bit my wing, Kakashi. He bit my wing."

Kakashi's eye blinked once. "Yeaaaaah, he bites people sometimes…"

"The other one," I continued, undeterred, "received the mother of all mad science power boosts from Orochimaru."

"Sounds like you had quite the workout."

"Both of them were trying to kill each other." I held up one finger. "And me." I held up a second finger. "Simultaneously." I held up a third finger and then dropped my hand because the motion made my swollen knuckles throb. "I had to take them down without hurting them too badly, which, by the way, is infinitely harder than just winning a fight."

Kakashi absorbed all of this in silence. His visible eye had lost its teasing crescent shape somewhere around the mention of two tails. The jonin's gaze drifted down to Naruto's sleeping form, lingering on the fading red burns across the boy's hands and the torn jumpsuit and the dried blood at the corners of his mouth. Then it moved to Sasuke. The bruises. The broken nose I had given him with that headbutt. The faint residual marks where the curse seal had spread across his skin, now receded but leaving behind a pattern like a fading bruise.

The mask hid most of Kakashi's expression, but it couldn't hide the way his single eye tightened at the corners. "Blake." Kakashi's voice had changed. The casual drawl was gone. What replaced it was quiet and direct and stripped of every layer of deflection and humor that the man wore like armor. "Thank you. Sincerely, for both of them."

I looked up at the jonin.

"You kept alive," Kakashi continued. "I don't have words for how much that means. Especially for my more... my more stupid Uchiha student, who apparently decided that running to a pedophilic snake man was a viable career path."

I snorted despite myself. "In Sasuke's partial defense, I don't think it was entirely his fault. Or at least not mostly. I had that curse mark on my neck too, back during the Chunin Exams. Before my bloodline burned Orochimaru's influence out of my system." I touched the side of my neck absently, remembering the searing agony, the void inside my mind, the golden chains of lightning that had bound and purified the snake's soul fragment. "So no. I don't think this was his fault. Mostly."

"Mostly?" Kakashi asked.

"He called me the Hokage's fuckboy during the fight."

"Ah." Kakashi had the decency to look somewhat sympathetic. "Well. He is thirteen."

"He also stabbed me with a kunai."

"He is... a very aggressive thirteen." He then paused. "You think you could do that for Sasuke?" Kakashi asked quietly. "What your bloodline did for you. Purify the curse mark."

I tilted my head and considered the question honestly. "Probably," I said after a beat. I held up a hand to forestall the flash of hope that brightened Kakashi's eye. "I'm not going to promise miracles. 

"That's more than anyone else has been able to offer," Kakashi said quietly.

A beat of comfortable silence settled between us. 

I broke it first.

"Look, I appreciate the moment and everything, but I'm going to be completely honest with you." I pushed myself to my feet, wincing as every bruised muscle in my body filed a formal complaint. My knees popped. My lower back protested. The cut on my forearm had crusted over but split open again with the movement, a fresh line of red running down to my wrist. "What I really want right now, more than anything, is to see Tsunade and Shizune. I haven't seen them in months, Kakashi. …I would very much like to go see my girlfriends."

The crescent eye smile returned. Kakashi tilted his head and regarded me with the particular brand of amusement that only a man who read pornographic literature in public could truly achieve.

"Oh, by all means," Kakashi said, waving one hand in a go ahead gesture. "Please. Rush back to the village. I'm sure Lady Tsunade will be thrilled to see you. She's been... well." He paused, choosing his words with the delicacy of a man navigating a minefield he had personally mapped through painful experience. "Let's just say the past few months have been interesting for everyone in the Hokage's office."

I narrowed my eyes. "What does that mean?"

"It means that our beloved Fifth Hokage," Kakashi said, "has oscillated between two states since your departure. The first state involves punching things. Walls. Desks. Training dummies. One very unfortunate ANBU operative who made the mistake of mentioning your name during a briefing. The second state involves Shizune finding Lady Tsunade staring at your empty room in the Senju compound at two in the morning with a bottle of sake and a look on her face that I'm told could make the bravest shinobi run away in despair." He tucked his hands deeper into his pockets. "Shizune hasn't been much better, frankly. She's been running the hospital with ruthless efficiency and terrorizing the medical staff into competence, which is admirable, but she also threatened to castrate any guys that hit on her when they thought you were not coming back…"

The guilt hit me like a slow wave. 

I had never slacked. Not once. Not for a single day. Every night, after the last text from Pepper and the last suggestive photo from Emma and Jean's nightly lewd text barrage, I had closed my eyes and pressed against the membrane between dimensions, searching for the frequency of the Elemental Nations. Searching for Tsunade's chakra signature. Searching for Shizune's. 

And every single time, the power had slipped through my fingers like water through a cracked cup. Close. Always close. Never quite there.

Until today, when I had accepted the path Jean and Emma had laid before me, and felt the last tumbler click into place inside my soul like a lock that had been waiting years for the right key.

It had not been laziness. It had not been hesitation. It had been the stubborn, infuriating reality of a power that operated on its own developmental schedule regardless of how desperately its wielder needed it to cooperate.

"Kakashi," I said, pushing myself fully to my feet. "Can you handle both of them on your own?"

Kakashi glanced at the two unconscious boys, made a single hand seal, and a shadow clone shimmered into existence beside him with a soft puff of displaced air. The clone crouched and scooped Naruto's limp body onto its back with the practiced ease of someone who had carried unconscious teammates more times than anyone should have to. The original Kakashi bent and lifted Sasuke the same way, adjusting the Uchiha's dead weight across his shoulders with one arm while pulling his orange book from his hip pouch with the other. "I've been carrying these kids, literally and figuratively, since the day they were assigned to me," Kakashi said, flipping open the book one handed. His visible eye curved into that crescent smile again. "Go. You've earned it."

I did not need to be told twice.

My eight wings erupted from my back in a single explosive unfurling. The injured wing stung sharply as it extended, the bite wound from Naruto's fox-enhanced fangs protesting the stretch, but I clenched my jaw and spread it fully anyway. Pain was temporary. Tsunade and Shizune were waiting.

I launched myself skyward with a single massive downstroke that sent a gust of wind rippling across the basin and ruffled Kakashi's silver hair. 

The Valley of the End dropped away beneath me in seconds. The twin statues of Hashirama and Madara shrank from colossal monuments to miniature carvings to indistinct shapes lost in the mist of the waterfall. 

I banked northwest and flew.

The wind peeled tears from my eyes at the speed I was pushing. My wings beat in powerful, rhythmic strokes that ate distance in greedy gulps, each downstroke propelling me forward with a force that would have left a bird of prey scrambling to keep up. The forest blurred beneath me. Rivers appeared and vanished. A small town passed below, cookfire smoke rising in thin grey columns from thatched rooftops, civilian figures small as ants going about their evening routines unaware that a fallen angel was ripping through the sky above them at a hundred miles an hour.

My thoughts raced faster than my wings. What would I say when I saw them? What could I say? 

Sorry I was gone for months, I was busy attending a university my stepdad built, fighting fallen angels on the Pacific Coast Highway, getting arrested for street racing with Tony Stark, sleeping with Tony's secretary, adopting a healing nun, nearly getting murdered by Kokabiel again, and oh, by the way, my powers work now so I flew across dimensions to kill Orochimaru's pet bone soldier and break up a fight between your two most troublesome Genin?

That was too much. Way too much. I would start simple. Something heartfelt. Something that conveyed the depth of what I felt without drowning them in exposition.

Hi. I missed you. I love you. Please don't punch me for being gone so long.No. Knowing Tsunade, the punch was coming regardless. I might as well accept it.

I kept flying until I finally saw Konohagakure.

My breath caught.

The village spread across the valley floor like a living painting, thousands of structures clustered together in organic, unplanned beauty. The Hokage monument dominated the northern wall, four massive stone faces carved into the cliff, and I noticed with a swell of pride that a fifth face was being carved at the far end of the row. The scaffolding was still up, the features only roughed in, but the shape of Tsunade's jaw and the suggestion of her pigtails were already recognizable.

Her face on a mountain. My girlfriend's face carved into a mountain.

I grinned.

The village walls rose below me as I began my descent, manned watchtowers spaced at regular intervals along the perimeter. I could see guards in the towers, their heads tracking my approach with the alert tension of professional sentries spotting an unidentified airborne contact. I dropped lower and slowed my speed, making my silhouette clearly visible against the amber sky, wings spread wide in a non-threatening glide rather than the aggressive folded dive of an attacker.

I landed at the main gate.

My feet hit packed earth and I stumbled forward two steps before catching my balance, wings folding and retracting in a cascade of rustling black feathers that drew startled gasps from the two chunin guards stationed at the entrance. 

Izumo and Kotetsu. I recognized them from my previous stay in the village. 

Both guards stared at me with expressions that cycled rapidly from alarm to confusion to stunned recognition.

"Blake?" Izumo managed. "Blake Himejima?"

"In the flesh." I raised one hand in a tired wave and instantly regretted the motion as the crusted-over cut on my forearm split open for the third time, a fresh trickle of crimson running down my wrist and dripping onto the dirt. "Mostly. Some of the flesh is currently outside the body. Long story. Where's Tsunade?"

"The Hokage is..." Kotetsu started, then trailed off as his eyes traveled the full length of my battered appearance. The shredded shirt hanging in bloody strips. The general aura of a man who had recently been in a fight with something that did not care about conventional damage limitations. "What the hell happened to you?"

"I said long story. Where is she?"

"Hokage Tower," Izumo answered, still staring. "She's been in meetings all day about the retrieval mission. Shizune's with her."

Both of them. In the same building. I was already moving.

I walked through the village gates and into the broad main street of Konoha, and the familiar sensory experience of the Hidden Leaf hit me with the concentrated force of three months of absence compressed into a single moment of return. The smell of grilling meat from the food stalls lining the commercial district. The distant clang of a blacksmith's hammer from the weapons quarter. The chatter of civilians going about evening errands, voices overlapping in the comfortable, lived-in cacophony of a community that had survived an invasion and was stubbornly, defiantly going about the business of living.

People noticed me. Of course they did. A tall, broad-shouldered young man with blood-streaked features and a destroyed shirt walking through the main road with barely contained urgency in every stride was not the kind of sight that blended into a crowd. Vendors paused mid-transaction. A group of children playing in a side alley stopped and pointed. An elderly woman carrying a basket of radishes took one look at me, made a disapproving sound, and told me I should see a doctor. 

I thanked her without slowing down.

The Hokage Tower rose ahead of me. My heart hammered against my bruised ribs with every step that closed the distance. Not from exertion. From the sheer, overwhelming anticipation of seeing two women who were inside.

I took the stairs three at a time.

The tower's interior was busy. Chunin and jonin moved through the hallways with purpose, carrying scrolls and folders and the general busywork of a military village coordinating a sensitive recovery operation. Several of them recognized me and did visible double takes, one woman dropping her armful of paperwork entirely before scrambling to retrieve it. 

I offered quick nods of acknowledgment without stopping.

The hallway outside the office was quiet. A single ANBU guard stood beside the heavy wooden double doors, masked and motionless, arms crossed. The guard's animal mask was painted in the likeness of a hawk, and I could feel the alertness radiating from behind it despite the complete stillness of the body beneath.

"I need to see the Hokage," I said.

"Lady Hokage is in a classified briefing," the ANBU replied. The voice behind the mask was flat and professional and left absolutely no room for negotiation. "No interruptions."

I considered my options. I could argue. I could pull rank by invoking my relationship, which would be awkward and probably wouldn't work on an ANBU operative who took classified seriously. I could try to bluff my way in.

Or I could just open the door.

I reached for the handle.

The ANBU's hand closed around my wrist with startling speed, iron-hard fingers gripping just above my existing wound. I winced but did not pull away.

"I said no interruptions."

I guess I was pulling rank after all…

"And I said I need to see the Hokage." I met the blank eyes of the hawk mask and held steady. "My name is Blake Himejima. I'm the Hokage's boyfriend. I just stopped two of her genin from killing each other at the Valley of the End. I'm bleeding from about six different places and one of those places is a wing that a twelve-year-old bit. I am asking politely, the next time I ask won't be polite..."

A beat of silence.

The ANBU's grip loosened. The mask tilted slightly, as if the person beneath it was reassessing the situation through fresh intelligence.

"You're the boyfriend," the ANBU said, and something in the tone shifted from flat obstruction to something almost like amusement. "The one that's been missing?" The ANBU released my wrist and stepped aside. "Oh, thank fuck ...Go right ahead then..."

"Ok…?" Jeez, just how scary was Tsunade without me around that he is just immediately letting me in?

I pushed the door open.

The Hokage's office was large and circular, dominated by a curved desk positioned beneath a panoramic window that offered a commanding view of the village below. Bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with scrolls and reference texts and the accumulated bureaucratic detritus of five generations of village leadership. A low table to the left held a tea set, two cups still steaming, and a half-eaten plate of dango. The late afternoon light streamed through the window in warm diagonal shafts that painted golden rectangles across the hardwood floor.

Tsunade sat behind the desk.

She looked exactly as I remembered. The same devastating beauty that had short-circuited my brain the first time I ever laid eyes on her. The same honey-colored eyes, sharp and intelligent and carrying the weight of decades of experience behind a face that now genuinely looked mid-twenties thanks to the de-aging effect of our sexual relationship. The same impossible figure beneath the grey Hokage robes, curves that the official garments could not hide no matter how conservatively they were cut. Her blonde hair was pulled into the familiar twintails that framed her face and fell past her shoulders.

And her eyes, when they lifted from the mission report spread across her desk and found me standing in the open doorway, went through a sequence of expressions so rapid and so raw that I felt each one hit me like a physical impact. Confusion. Recognition. Disbelief. Hope so sharp it looked like it cut her from the inside.

Shizune stood beside the desk, a clipboard pressed against her chest, her dark hair falling in its usual neat frame around her gentle, lovely face. She had been mid-sentence when I opened the door, her mouth slightly parted, one hand raised to gesture at something on the clipboard. She was wearing her standard dark kimono-style outfit, and her eyes were the same warm brown that I had memorized during all those nights when she ran glowing green palms over my sore muscles after intense training.

The clipboard slipped from her fingers and clattered against the hardwood floor. Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes went wide and liquid and her entire body went rigid in the particular way that people locked up when reality presented them with something they had wanted so badly that the actual arrival of it felt like a trap.

"B-Blake?" Shizune's voice came out fractured, barely a whisper, the sound of someone afraid to speak too loudly in case the vision shattered. Her other hand gripped the edge of the desk so hard her knuckles blanched white. "Is that... Blake, is that really..."

Tsunade stood up. The chair she was sitting on shot backward on its wheels and slammed into the bookshelf behind her hard enough to knock three scrolls off the shelf. Tsunade's palms hit the surface of the desk, papers scattering, the mission report crumpling beneath her fingers, and her honey eyes locked onto me with an intensity that I felt in my bones.

"You," Tsunade breathed.

I opened my mouth to deliver the heartfelt, carefully considered greeting I had rehearsed during the flight.

What came out was: "Hi. I'm back. Please don't punch m..."

Tsunade cleared the desk. She vaulted over it. One hand planted on the polished surface, her legs swinging over the stacked paperwork and the tea set and the half-eaten dango, and she crossed the distance between us in a single fluid motion that my combat-trained eyes barely tracked.

She hit me like a guided missile.

Her arms locked around my torso with the kind of force that would have cracked a normal man's ribs. Her face buried itself into the crook of my neck, blonde hair spilling across my chest and shoulders, and the sound she made was not a word. It was something rawer. Something between a laugh and a sob and a growl of territorial fury, the sound of a woman who had been holding herself together with willpower and violence for three months finally letting the seams split.

My arms wrapped around her. My hands found the curve of her lower back through the Hokage robes, pulling her closer, feeling the warmth and the solidity and the realness of her pressed against every inch of my battered front. She was shaking. Senju Tsunade, the strongest kunoichi in the world, was trembling in my arms.

"You absolute bastard," Tsunade whispered against my neck. Her breath was hot and ragged and her voice cracked on the second word. "You incredible, reckless, beautiful bastard. Three months. Three months, Blake!"

"I know." My own voice was thick, rougher than I wanted it to be, the words tangling with the knot of emotion that had lodged itself in my throat. "I tried every day. Every single day, Tsunade. The power wouldn't cooperate until today. I swear."

"I don't care." Her arms tightened. Her nails dug into my back through the remnants of my shirt. "I don't care about the reasons. You're here. You're here and you're real and if you ever disappear on me again I will find whatever dimension you're hiding in and I will drag you back by your wings."

I laughed, a broken, exhausted sound that vibrated through my chest and into hers. "That's fair."

"It's not fair. Nothing about this is fair." She pulled back just enough to look at my face, her hands rising to cup my jaw, her thumbs tracing the edges of the four parallel gashes across my left cheek. Her medical instincts fired visibly, honey eyes narrowing as they cataloged the depth and pattern of the wounds. "Who did this to you?"

"...Naruto," I admitted after a pause. He had fucked me up way more than Sasuke had…

Her eyebrows shot toward her hairline. "Naruto? WHAT!?"

"Fox was driving his body. Long story. He also bit my wing."

Something dangerous flickered behind Tsunade's eyes, the particular maternal fury of a woman who considered Naruto family by extension and was already mentally scheduling a very serious conversation with the boy about appropriate uses of teeth. But the fury was secondary. Distant. Background noise against the foreground reality of my face between her palms and my body against hers.

She kissed me. It was not the kind of kiss that belonged in a Hokage's office during business hours with the door still open and an ANBU guard standing in the hallway pretending very hard not to hear what was happening inside. Her mouth crashed into mine with three months of wanting compressed into a single point of contact, lips parting, tongue sliding against mine with aggressive, unapologetic want. Her fingers slid from my jaw into my hair and gripped, pulling me down to her height, tilting my head to the angle she wanted, controlling the kiss with the same commanding authority she brought to everything else in her life.

I kissed her back with everything I had. My hands slid down the curve of her waist, pulling her hips flush against mine, feeling the soft, generous press of her breasts against my chest through the layers of her robes. 

Someone cleared their throat.

It was a very small, very emotional, very Shizune-shaped throat clearing.

Tsunade and I broke apart, breathing hard, a thin bridge of saliva connecting our lips for a split second before it snapped. I looked past Tsunade's shoulder and found Shizune standing exactly where she had been, hands clasped in front of her chest, tears streaming silently down both cheeks, her lower lip trembling with the effort of containing whatever tidal wave of feeling was threatening to overflow her composure.

She had not moved from beside the desk. She had stood there and watched the woman she loved most in the world reunite with the man they both loved, and she had waited, because that was who Shizune was. 

I extracted myself from Tsunade's arms. Tsunade let me go, though her fingers dragged across my forearm as I moved, reluctant to surrender the physical contact she had been starved of.

I crossed the room to Shizune. Two steps. Three. Four. She did not rush to meet me. She stood rooted to the floor, brown eyes enormous and overflowing, her chest hitching with the rhythm of someone trying very hard not to sob.

I reached her and stopped. I lifted one hand, bruised knuckles and dried blood and all, and cupped her cheek.

"Hey, Shizune…" That was all it took.

Shizune launched herself at me with a choked cry that contained my name and possibly three months worth of every word she had wanted to say and couldn't. Her arms wrapped around my neck and her face pressed into my chest and she wept openly, full body sobs that shook her slender body against mine. Her fingers clutched the tattered remains of my shirt like she was gripping a lifeline, like releasing me would mean losing me again, like she would never, ever let go if the universe gave her the choice.

"You're hurt," she managed between sobs, her medical instincts surfacing even through the emotional flood. Her hands were already moving, glowing green with diagnostic chakra, running over my chest and my arms even as tears fell from her chin and spotted the remnants of my shirt with dark circles. "You're covered in... Blake, you have lacerations, contusions, there's a... your wing, what happened to your wing, the tissue damage is..."

"Shizune." I caught her wandering, glowing hands and held them still. I brought them to my lips and kissed her knuckles, one at a time, left hand first, then right, tasting the faint tingle of medical chakra against my mouth. "I'm fine. I'm right here."

"You were gone," she whispered. The words came out small and broken and devastated. "You and your mother were both gone and we couldn't find you and I healed everyone in that hospital and I organized every file and I worked every shift because if I stopped working I would think about you and if I thought about you I would..."

She trailed off. I pressed my forehead against hers. Our noses touched. Her tears wet my cheeks and mixed with the dried blood from Naruto's claw marks.

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm here now."

I kissed Shizune. Soft. Slow. Her lips trembled against mine and I steadied them with patient, gentle pressure, coaxing her mouth open, tasting salt from her tears and the sweetness underneath. 

She whimpered against me, a quiet "Nnh" that went through my nervous system like warm electricity, and her fingers unclenched from my shirt to slide up my chest and rest over my heart, feeling it beat beneath her palm. I tilted her chin up and deepened the kiss, tongue brushing hers, and she melted against me. Her body softened. The tension she had carried for months bled out of her shoulders and her spine and her clenched jaw, replaced by the boneless surrender of someone who had finally, finally been given the one thing they needed.

When we separated, Shizune's eyes were still wet but something had changed behind them. The devastation had been replaced by a warmth so fierce it was almost aggressive, a look that said I have you back and I am never letting this happen again.

"Ahem."

Tsunade had circled around the desk and was leaning against its front edge, arms crossed beneath her considerable chest, one eyebrow raised, the ghost of a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth. She looked like a woman watching a scene unfold exactly the way she had predicted.

"I'm not jealous or anything," Tsunade said dryly. "Take your time."

"You literally vaulted your own desk," I pointed out, one arm still around Shizune's waist.

"I'm the Hokage. I vault what I want."

Shizune laughed through her remaining tears, a wet, hiccuping sound that was half sob and half genuine amusement, and pressed her face into my shoulder. I felt the vibration of her laughter against my collarbone and something inside my chest, something that had been wound tight for months across two dimensions, finally loosened and settled into place.

Tsunade pushed off the desk and crossed to us. She stepped into my other side, pressed herself against me, and wrapped one arm around my waist and the other around Shizune's shoulders, pulling all three of us into a tangle of bodies and warmth.

I stood between the two women I loved, one arm around each, my chin resting on top of Shizune's head, Tsunade's forehead pressed against my temple.

"So," Tsunade murmured against my jaw, her voice dropping into the lower register that I had learned to recognize as the precursor to either violence or seduction and sometimes both. "Three months apart. A lot of lost time to make up for."

"Tsunade..." Shizune's voice carried a warning note that was undermined entirely by the blush climbing from her collar to her hairline. "We're in the Hokage's office. The door is still open."

"Then close it."

I heard the ANBU guard outside pull the door shut without being asked. The click of the latch echoed through the circular room.

"Shizune," Tsunade continued, her smirk widening into something predatory and warm and full of promise. "Cancel my meetings for the rest of the day."

"All of them?"

"All of them. And tomorrow's. Tell them the Hokage is attending to a critical security matter that requires her personal and sustained attention."

Shizune's blush had reached her ears. Her medical chakra was still glowing faintly in her palms, pressed against my chest, healing my injuries on automatic while the rest of her brain processed the implications of Tsunade's declaration. She looked up at me, her eyes searching my face for something. Permission, maybe. Or confirmation that this was real and I was staying and the reunion was not going to be cut short by another dimensional accident.

I answered by kissing the top of her head.

"I'm not going anywhere," I repeated. "Not for the rest of the day… And I can now visit anytime I want!"

Tsunade's hand found the front of my tattered shirt and gathered the fabric in her fist. She pulled. What remained of the garment came apart with a soft tearing sound, strips of cloth falling away from my torso and fluttering to the office floor. I stood between my two lovers, bare chested. Tsunade's eyes traveled down my body with open, unashamed lust. Tsunade's fingers curled into the waistband of my pants and tugged, pulling my hips forward until they pressed flush against hers, and the heat of her body through the Hokage robes was enough to make my brain skip like a scratched record. Her mouth found the underside of my jaw and her teeth grazed the tendon there, not biting, just threatening, a preview of what she intended to do to me once we were horizontal and uninterrupted.

Shizune's hands were still glowing green against my bare chest. Her palms moved across the landscape of my injuries with clinical precision that warred openly against the blush consuming her face and neck. She traced the four parallel gashes on my cheek first, the medical chakra sinking into damaged tissue and knitting it shut from the inside out, new skin forming beneath a warm tingling sensation that always reminded me of carbonated water fizzing against sunburn. Her fingers moved to my forearm next, sealing the kunai slash Sasuke had given me, the crusted blood flaking away as fresh tissue replaced it. But her eyes kept drifting. Down the plane of my chest. Across the ridges of muscle that three months of additional training had carved deeper and harder than the body she remembered. Over the V-shaped grooves of my obliques that disappeared beneath my waistband. 

I caught her looking and she caught me catching her and her blush darkened by two full shades.

Tsunade's mouth moved from my jaw to the side of my neck, lips parting against the sensitive skin below my ear, tongue dragging a slow wet line from my pulse point to the hinge of my jaw. My breath hitched. My hands tightened on her waist. Shizune's medical chakra flickered and destabilized for a half second before she reasserted control with visible effort.

"Tsunade," Shizune said. Her voice was strained, pitched somewhere between professional authority and the thin, breathy quality it took on when she was aroused and trying very hard to pretend otherwise. "We need to completely heal him before we... before..." She trailed off. Her mouth worked silently around the words she had intended to say. Her eyes flicked between my bare chest under her glowing palms and Tsunade's lips currently attached to my throat and the growing tension in the room that was thick enough to taste, and something in her composure crumbled just enough for the truth to slip out. "...before we all fuck," Shizune finished.

My eyebrows climbed toward my hairline.

Tsunade's mouth detached from my neck with a soft pop.

Shizune's brain caught up with her mouth. The green glow of her medical chakra sputtered and died completely. Both of Shizune's hands flew to cover her mouth as if she could physically shove the word back in. Her eyes went saucer wide. The blush that had been contained to her cheeks and neck erupted across her entire face like a wildfire jumping a firebreak, flooding down her chest and up to the tips of her ears until she was so uniformly red that she looked like she had been dipped in paint. "I... that's not... I didn't mean to say it like..." Shizune stammered through her fingers, her voice climbing an octave with each syllable. "I meant, um, before we engage in... in intimate... before the physical reunion..."

"Fuck," I repeated, grinning despite the sting of my half healed injuries. "She said fuck."

Tsunade threw her head back and laughed. Not a polite laugh or a teasing chuckle but a full, rich, belly deep laugh that shook her shoulders and made her chest bounce against my torso in ways that were absolutely not helping anyone in the room maintain composure. She released my waistband and clapped both hands together in delight, her honey eyes sparkling with the particular glee of a woman who had spent over a decade listening to her apprentice use clinical terminology for everything and had finally witnessed the dam break.

"There she is!" Tsunade chuckled. "Three months without you and the prim and proper Shizune has been replaced by a woman who drops the F bomb in the Hokage's office!"

"Lady Tsunade, please!" Shizune's hands hadn't moved from her mouth. Her words came out muffled and mortified. "I was trying to be professional and it just... it slipped out because you were... your mouth was on his... and he's standing here without a shirt and I was healing his obliques and they're... they're very defined now and my brain just..."

"Your brain just said what your body's been screaming for three months," Tsunade supplied helpfully. She leaned into my side and stage whispered with absolutely no attempt at actual discretion. "She missed you. She missed you so bad that she reorganized the entire hospital filing system three times. Alphabetically the first time. By date the second. By severity the third. When she started talking about organizing them by blood type, I knew the woman was one lonely night away from a full breakdown."

"I was being thorough!" Shizune protested, lowering her hands from her mouth to plant them on her hips in a gesture of indignation that would have been far more convincing if her face was not the approximate color of a ripe tomato. "The filing system was a disaster!"

I stepped forward and caught one of Shizune's hands before she could cross her arms into a defensive posture. I lifted it to my lips, pressed a kiss against her knuckles exactly where the medical chakra had been glowing moments earlier, and watched the defiance in her expression melt into something soft and wanting and hopelessly vulnerable. "I missed you too, Shizune," I said quietly. "Every day. And for the record, you can say fuck whenever you want."

"Nnhh." The sound escaped her involuntarily, that tiny, helpless whimper that she made whenever I was gentle with her in the specific way that bypassed all her carefully constructed composure. Her fingers curled around my hand and held on.

"But she is right," I continued, turning to Tsunade with a lopsided grin. "I'm still bleeding from the wing bite and I'm pretty sure three of my ribs are bruised. If we jump straight to the... reunion activities... I'm going to be in actual agony."

"A little pain never hurt anyone," Tsunade said with a shrug that did devastating things to her neckline.

"That sentence is literally a contradiction."

"I'm the Hokage. I contradict what I want." She smirked again, re-using her earlier pun, and settled back against the desk, crossing one leg over the other. The robe shifted with the motion, revealing a generous expanse of thigh that my Nephilim brain cataloged and archived with embarrassing speed. "Fine. Shizune, heal our reckless angel properly. And then we have months of lost time to make up for." Her smirk deepened into something that was less a smile and more a declaration of territorial intent. "We're going to have a very busy week in bed now that you're back, Blake. I hope you rested on the flight over because sleep is not on the schedule."

Shizune's blush had barely begun to recede and now it roared back with reinforcements. But she reactivated her medical chakra without argument and stepped closer to me, her glowing palms finding the bitten wing first. I extended it for her, the injured appendage unfolding from my back with a wince. The membrane between the feathered joints was torn and swollen where Naruto's fox enhanced fangs had sunk in, bruised tissue mottled purple and black around the puncture marks. 

Shizune sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth. "This is deep," she murmured, all traces of embarrassment vanishing beneath the competent focus of a woman who had trained under the greatest medical ninja in history. Her fingers hovered millimeters above the wound, green chakra probing the damaged tissue with the delicacy of a surgeon navigating around exposed nerve clusters. "The muscle sheath is partially torn. Two of the secondary flight tendons are strained. And the saliva... Blake, whatever bit you left traces of corrosive chakra in the wound. If I hadn't cleaned this, it would have kept eating into the tissue for hours."

"Yeah," I said through gritted teeth as her chakra began the deeper repair work, the sensation somewhere between intense itching and the feeling of muscles being individually plucked like guitar strings. "The Nine Tailed Fox doesn't exactly practice dental hygiene."

"The Nine..." Shizune's hands faltered for exactly one second before professional discipline reasserted itself. "You let the Nine Tails bite your wing?"

"I didn't let anything happen. Naruto jumped on my back like a feral cat and chomped down before I could react. Trust me, there was no consent involved in the biting process."

"Ufufu," Tsunade chuckled from her perch on the desk. She had produced a sake cup from somewhere, because of course she had, and was sipping from it while watching Shizune work with the lazy satisfaction of a woman whose favorite show had just come back from a long hiatus. "My apprentice said fuck and my boyfriend got bitten by a jinchuriki. What a day!"

Shizune worked in focused silence for several minutes, her chakra moving systematically from the wing bite to the rib contusions to the residual damage from absorbing the Rasengan's grinding force against my palm. I stood still and let her work, watching her face cycle through the familiar sequence I remembered from dozens of previous healing sessions. The slight furrow between her eyebrows when she encountered something concerning. The way she bit the inside of her lower lip when concentrating on delicate tissue. The soft, almost inaudible hum she produced unconsciously when the healing was progressing well, a tuneless little sound that I had once told her was adorable, which had caused her to deny she did it, which had caused Tsunade to laugh so hard she spilled sake on an important diplomatic scroll.

I had missed these small things more than the grand gestures. More than the kisses and the intimacy and the explosive chemistry. I had missed the specific way Shizune hummed while she healed.

The wing wound sealed. The ribs settled. The ache in my forearm faded to nothing. The gashes on my cheek smoothed over until only faint pink lines remained, lines that would be completely invisible within the hour.

Shizune stepped back, extinguished her chakra, and examined her work with a critical eye. She nodded once in professional satisfaction. "You're fully healed," she announced. "Minor residual soreness for about a day. No heavy combat for forty eight hours minimum."

"Heavy combat isn't what I had planned for the next forty eight hours," Tsunade murmured over the rim of her sake cup.

I opened my mouth to respond and then stopped. The words died on my tongue and something heavy and reluctant settled over my expression like a cloud passing across the sun. Both women noticed the shift instantly. Tsunade's sake cup paused halfway to her lips. Shizune's satisfied smile dimmed at the edges.

"What?" Tsunade asked. Her voice had lost its playful edge. The Hokage was watching me now, not the lover. Reading the shift in my body language the way she read battlefield intelligence.

I exhaled slowly through my nose. I ran one hand through my hair, black strands still damp with mist from the valley, and searched for the words that wouldn't make this sound as terrible as it was about to feel.

"I can't stay past today," I said. The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut.

Tsunade set her sake cup down on the desk behind her. The porcelain clicked against the wood with a precise, controlled tap that spoke volumes about the restraint she was currently exercising over her hands. Her honey eyes narrowed. Not in anger. Not yet. In the focused, surgical way they narrowed when she was evaluating a patient whose symptoms had just taken an unexpected turn.

Shizune's recently restored composure cracked. Her lips parted and her eyebrows drew together and the warm satisfaction of a successful healing session evaporated from her expression, replaced by the raw, open vulnerability of a woman who had just been told the reunion she had waited three months for came with a time limit.

"Why?" Shizune asked. The word came out small. Controlled. The voice of someone who had already survived three months of absence and was bracing herself for the explanation of why the universe required more.

I looked between them. The two women who had taken me in when I was a broken, homeless kid from another dimension with nothing. The woman who had overcome her deepest phobia to save my life and the woman who had strapped hundred kilogram weights to my legs and turned me into something resembling a fighter. My lovers. My anchors in a world that wasn't my own but had become home anyway when I was here.

This was going to suck. "I'm a college student now," I said.

Twin expressions of blank incomprehension stared back at me.

"Back in my world," I continued, the words gaining momentum as I committed to the explanation. "My stepdad Tony built a university. A school for advanced learning. Think of it like... the civilian equivalent of an elite ninja academy, except instead of learning jutsu you study science and literature and engineering and things like that. I was enrolled. Peter's enrolled. Akeno and Rias and half the people I care about on Earth are enrolled. And classes start tomorrow."

"You have a stepdad?" Tsunade blinked. Then blinked again. Her mouth opened, closed, and opened once more. "You're in school?" she asked flatly.

"College," I corrected. "It's the level above regular school. After you turn eighteen."

"You're in advanced school?"

"Yes."

"And advanced school is the reason you can't spend more than a day with the two women you haven't touched in three months?"

"When you say it like that, it sounds terrible."

"It sounds terrible because it is terrible, Blake." Shizune had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was processing something that upset her but wanted to understand before reacting. Her arms were crossed loosely beneath her chest. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth. I recognized the posture. It was the same one she adopted when a patient gave her news she didn't want to hear but needed to evaluate rationally before responding. "What's orientation?" Shizune asked after a moment.

"It's... the first day," I said, grasping for analogies that would translate across dimensional and cultural barriers. "Before classes officially begin, the school holds a day where all the new students explore the campus, meet their teachers, learn where everything is, figure out their schedules. It's like..." I paused, searching. "Imagine if a new genin was assigned to a team, but before their first mission, the village gave them a full day to tour the mission assignment office, meet the other teams, find the training grounds, and learn where the good ramen shops are."

"So it's an administrative briefing disguised as a social event," Shizune summarized.

"That's... actually exactly what it is."

"And you're skipping it," Tsunade delivered with a raised eyebrow.

"I am skipping it to be here with you. Yes."

Something softened behind Tsunade's eyes. Not completely. The displeasure was still there, lodged in the set of her jaw and the tension across her shoulders. But it was tempered by the recognition of what I was telling her underneath the logistics. I had gotten the ability to cross dimensions for the first time today and my very first act with that power was to come here. To them. I had walked out of orientation day at my new school, opened a portal through the fabric of reality, fought a bone wielding servant of Orochimaru, broken up a near fatal battle between two genin, taken a beating in the process, and still dragged my battered body across the entire Land of Fire at top speed because seeing Tsunade and Shizune again was more important than anything else.

Tsunade sighed. It was the particular sigh she reserved for situations where she wanted to be angry but couldn't quite justify it because I had, yet again, been recklessly devoted in a way that made her chest hurt. "Can you really travel between worlds now?" Tsunade asked. "Whenever you want?"

I nodded. "Yes. The power fully clicked into place today. I can open portals at will. Controlled. Stable. I could go back right now if I needed to."

Tsunade's expression shifted. A new thought was forming behind her eyes, visible in the slight tilt of her head and the way her fingers drummed a slow rhythm against the edge of the desk. I recognized that look too. It was the look she got when she was about to do something impulsive and brilliant and possibly inadvisable that nobody around her would be able to stop.

"And you can take other people with you," she said. Not a question either. Another statement, this one loaded with implications that I could feel stacking up like explosive tags on a trigger wire.

I nodded again. Slower this time. "Yes? I think so…?" I felt like I could since I created portals and didn't just teleport.

"Change of plans!" Tsunade announced!

Shizune's head snapped toward her mentor with the practiced wariness of a woman who had heard those three words precede some of the most chaotic decisions in Sannin history. "Lady Tsunade, whatever you're thinking..."

Tsunade hopped off the desk. The Hokage robes swirled around her calves as she crossed the office to the center of the room, and her hands came together in a seal that I recognized. A puff of white smoke billowed outward from the center of her body and dispersed in a swirl of chakra, revealing a second Tsunade standing beside the original.

The Shadow Clone of Tsunade Senju, Fifth Hokage of Konohagakure, blinked into existence wearing an identical set of robes, identical pigtails, identical devastating figure, and a distinctly unimpressed expression. The clone looked from the original Tsunade to my shirtless, recently healed torso to Shizune's blushing face and back to the original with the slow, deliberate assessment of someone who already knew what was about to happen and was not thrilled about it.

"You," Tsunade said, pointing at her clone with the authority of a woman who was accustomed to ordering armies. "Are in charge of the village."

The clone's eyebrow twitched upward. "I'm in charge of the village," she repeated.

"Correct. Handle all meetings, sign all documents, manage the Sasuke retrieval aftermath, coordinate with Kakashi when he returns, and don't let Jiraiya anywhere near the women's baths."

"And where, exactly, is the real me going?" the clone asked.

Tsunade's smirk returned at full force. She hooked her thumb over her shoulder at me. "His world. If my boyfriend is going to be busy playing college student, then Shizune and I should see what all the fuss is about!"

The clone stared at the original. The original stared back. 

The clone's gaze drifted to me, lingered on my bare chest with an appreciation that was identical to the original's because of course it was, then moved to the door and the empty hallway beyond and the village full of responsibilities that the clone was about to inherit.

"So let me understand this," the clone said slowly. "You get to visit another dimension. Probably have sex with our boyfriend. Explore a completely new world. And I get to sit in this office and read mission reports…"

"That's the spirit!" Real Tsunade smirked.

"I hate you," was the clone's reply.

Tsunade pouted at…herself. "You are me…"

"I know. I hate me too. This is the worst assignment I've ever given myself!" the clone finally huffed in agreement.

I watched the exchange between the two identical women with the particular bewildered amusement of someone witnessing an argument where both participants shared the same brain, the same memories, and the same opinion about who was getting the better end of the deal.

Shizune's composure had shifted from embarrassment to concern, the responsible part of her nature asserting itself. "Lady Tsunade, we can't just leave," Shizune said. Her voice was firm despite the conflict visible in her eyes. "The village is in the middle of a crisis. The retrieval team is still out there. What about Naruto and Sasuke!. There are diplomatic implications, medical needs, reports to file..."

"Kakashi is bringing them both back," I interjected. "They're hurt but they're fine. Mostly. Naruto is already healing from the fox's chakra burns and Sasuke just needs rest and someone to keep an eye on the curse mark. Kakashi had it handled when I left. And I told him I'd take a look at Sasuke's mark later…"

"See?" Tsunade spread her hands in a gesture of case closed finality. "Kakashi's on it. My clone is the Hokage. The village will survive one day without the original."

The clone sighed from across the room. She had already moved behind the Hokage's desk and settled into the chair with the resigned posture of someone accepting their fate. Her hand reached for the stack of mission reports Tsunade had scattered during her vault over the desk and began reorganizing them with movements that were efficient and bitter in equal measure.

"I can handle it," the clone said with a shrug that carried the full weight of a woman who absolutely could handle running a military village for a day and was simply annoyed that she had to do it while her original self was off gallivanting through interdimensional portals with a handsome fallen angel. "Go. Have fun. See another world. Have all the sex. I'll be here. Doing paperwork. Alone."

"Thank you for your sacrifice," Tsunade told her clone with theatrical sincerity.

"Hmph!"

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Shizune covered her mouth with one hand, a sound that was halfway between a scandalized gasp and a giggle escaping through her fingers.

Tsunade turned back to Shizune and me, her expression lit up with excitement. She grabbed the front of her Hokage robe and pulled it open, revealing the grey sleeveless top and dark pants she wore beneath the ceremonial garment. She shrugged the robe off her shoulders and tossed it casually onto the desk, where it landed on top of the mission reports the clone was trying to organize.

"Hey!" the clone protested.

"I'm not wearing the robes to another dimension," Tsunade said by way of explanation. "Blake, how does this portal thing work? Do I need to do anything special?"

"You just... walk through it," I said. My heart was hammering. From the simple, staggering realization that I was about to bring Tsunade and Shizune to Earth. To my world. To the Stark Institute of Technology, where my best friend and my sister and my stepdad's robots and a whole other life existed in parallel to this one. "I open it, you step through, and you're there."

"Sounds simple enough." Tsunade rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck in a gesture that I recognized as her pre mission warm up, and leveled me with a look that contained enough anticipation to power a small generator. "Open it."

I looked at Shizune. Her arms were still loosely crossed, her lower lip still caught between her teeth. But the concern in her expression was losing ground to something else. Something that looked like wonder mixed with nervous excitement mixed with the dawning comprehension that she was about to step into the world I had described to her during all those late night conversations when she would massage my sore muscles and I would tell her about skyscrapers and cars and pizza delivery and a sky without chakra.

"Shizune?" I asked softly. "Are you okay with this?"

Shizune looked at the clone behind the desk. The clone gave her a flat, unimpressed nod that communicated go, get out of here, I've got this, stop making it weird with the efficiency of shared memory and mutual understanding.

Shizune looked at Tsunade, who was practically vibrating with restrained eagerness. Shizune looked at me. At my healed body and my steady gaze and the way I was watching her with patience and warmth and the quiet, unflinching devotion that had made her fall in love with me in the first place, back in a roadside inn when she had strapped weights to my legs and I had refused to quit because I didn't want to disappoint her.

"I'm okay with this," Shizune said. A smile broke across her face, tremulous and bright and real, and it transformed her delicate features into something radiant. "Show us your world, Blake."

I grinned. I reached for that place inside myself, the place beyond holy lightning and chakra where dimensions folded and stretched and brushed against each other like pages in a book pressed together by gravity. I found the frequency of Earth. Manhattan. The SIT campus. The maintenance alcove behind the library where I had opened my first controlled interdimensional portal less than two hours ago.

The air in the Hokage's office split.

A swirling vortex of brilliant blue light tore into existence, three feet in diameter and expanding.

– Clone Tsunade –

The Shadow Clone of Tsunade Senju watched the portal close with a soft hum and a fade of blue light. The office fell silent. The clone sat alone behind the desk, surrounded by mission reports and diplomatic correspondence and the accumulated bureaucratic weight of an entire village.

She stared at the empty space where the portal had been.

She stared at the Hokage robe crumpled on her desk.

She stared at the cold, half eaten plate of dango.

"I can't believe myself," the clone muttered, pulling the first mission report toward her with the grim determination of a woman who was about to channel her jealousy into the most aggressively efficient day of village administration in Konoha's history. "I really just left me here..."

XXX