For a while I just stood there and watched the world not move.
The snake's corpse steamed in front of me, split open like something on a dissection table. Trees leaned in, all teeth and shadows. The air still tasted like metal.
Naruto and Sasuke were down.
Orochimaru was gone.
My Squad Marks screamed.
Not literally. No little siren noises. Just this frantic, double-pulsing tug in the back of my head.
Naruto's mark flickered weak but lively—like a candle that had burned too fast and was now stuttering, still defiantly on fire.
Sasuke's was worse. It didn't pulse in time with anything; it spiked and dropped and jittered like a heart monitor dragged down a flight of stairs. Every tiny surge scraped against my nerves.
The forest's background chakra hummed underneath all of it, that same muddy, crowded stew I'd been drowning in since we came in.
Except now it felt…wrong in a familiar way.
Wet bark. Cold dirt. The creeping realization that the world would keep turning just fine if I stopped.
For one awful second, all of it lined up with that other forest—different trees, different world, same taste in my mouth.
Last time, I'd lain in the mud and realized no one was coming back.
This time, I swallowed hard against the rising bile and made myself move.
"Nope," I croaked. "We're not doing that again."
The boys didn't argue. Which was incredibly rude, honestly.
I went to Naruto first.
He was closer, for one. For another, he was limp in a way that said "temporary," not "you failed." His chest moved. His face was slack. The whisker marks stood out stark against pale skin.
"Naruto," I said, dropping to my knees beside him. "If this is you napping, I will kill you."
He didn't twitch.
My hands shook as I pressed two fingers against his neck. Pulse: there. Fast, thready, but not falling apart. I let a trickle of chakra seep into my fingertips and skimmed along the surface of his network, the way they'd taught us in the hospital.
Everything in there felt tired. His coils fluttered like overused muscles. No tears. No jagged holes. Just an intense "please never do that again" vibe.
"You absolute maniac," I muttered. "You boiled your own chakra."
The background hum of the forest pressed in harder. I could almost hear it whispering the same thing that awful silence had told me once: You could leave him. No one would know.
I snarled under my breath.
"Yeah? Well I would know."
My burned fingers protested when I got them under his shoulder, but I clenched my teeth and hauled. Naruto was all compact muscle and deadweight; he felt heavier unconscious than he ever did when he was actively trying to tackle me.
I got my arms under his and started backing up, dragging him across the clearing. His jacket bunched under my grip; my palms slipped with sweat.
His hair brushed my arm. Sweat, dirt, forest, and underneath all of it—warmth. Skin. A hint of ramen and cheap soap.
"You know," I panted, "you…don't actually smell bad."
Naruto, tragically, did not appreciate the compliment.
My legs shook by the time I got him to the base of a big tree with a tangle of roots making a kind of natural bowl. I eased him down against the trunk, propping his head so it wouldn't loll at a weird angle.
"Okay," I breathed. "One idiot parked."
The Squad Mark on his wrist hummed against my awareness—low, but steady. I patted his shoulder, because I didn't know what else to do.
"Stay," I told him. "No exploding while I'm gone."
The forest behind me was too quiet when I turned. My burned fingers throbbed with every heartbeat, skin tight and shiny where the chakra backlash had scorched them. I flexed them once just to be sure they still worked.
They screamed. I ignored them.
Sasuke lay where he'd fallen, half on his side, half twisted like the pain had tried to reroute his spine on the way down. His shirt had ripped at the shoulder. Angry red-black marks sprawled out from a point at his neck, three comma shapes burned into the skin and radiating out in jagged tendrils.
The Curse Mark looked less like a seal and more like the forest had taken a bite.
Up close, his chakra felt…wrong. I'd gotten used to Sasuke being sharp and contained in my senses, like a blade kept in a sheath. Now it surged and stuttered under my hand, boiling up around those marks and then slamming back down again, over and over.
"Hey," I said softly. "Edge Lord, wake up."
Nothing.
His face was tight even in unconsciousness. His eyes twitched under his eyelids like he was still watching someone walk away.
My burned fingertips hovered over the mark. Just looking at it made my skin crawl. The chakra bound up in that seal wasn't bright or loud like Naruto's. It felt…heavy. Old. Like someone had poured wet cement into his network and told it to harden into obedience.
I knew better than to touch it again. My fingers still remembered the way the emergency seal I'd slapped on it had just…crumbled, eaten from the inside out. They remembered the way my chakra had been swallowed, chewed, and spat back as pain.
Black scorch lines still traced some of my own pathways, faint obsidian branches under the skin.
Even so, I had to fight the impulse to try again. To fix it. To prove I wasn't useless.
"Later," I lied to myself. "When my hands don't feel like overcooked noodles."
I slid my arms under his shoulders and tried to lift.
He did not cooperate.
Naruto carried his weight like he couldn't sit still in his own body. Sasuke carried his like gravity owed him a favor. Limp, he felt denser. Like he'd been concentrating his entire existence into a tight little knot and now all that mass was mine to lug around.
"If angst had a smell," I groaned, dragging him inch by inch toward the tree, "yours would be strong enough to carry you for me."
Sasuke stayed mercifully unconscious. If he'd heard that, I'd never live it down.
My burned fingers spasmed every time his shirt slipped and I had to grab harder. Sweat stung the raw skin. My breath sawed in and out, too loud in the suddenly soundless clearing.
I dug my heels into the dirt and kept hauling.
"I am…never…complaining…about D-ranks again," I wheezed.
By the time I got him to Naruto's tree, my legs were shaking hard enough that I had to crouch before they mutinied. I let Sasuke slide down the trunk beside Naruto, arranging limbs so they didn't tangle.
Two unconscious boys. One mostly-conscious me.
Squad Mark check. Naruto: flickering candle. Sasuke: broken metronome.
The forest watched.
I could feel it. Not a person, not exactly. Just the sense of being the only thing here shaped like this. Like a spotlight had clicked on over us.
Last time I'd been in a forest like this, they'd left me lying there to see if I'd get up on my own. Spoiler: I hadn't.
This time, I pressed my burned fingers into my thighs and hissed between my teeth.
"No one is leaving anyone," I told the air. "Not this time."
Being sentimental in a murder forest was stupid. Good thing I was stupid and sentimental.
Work. I needed work.
Step one: make it so anyone stumbling across us in the next few hours deeply regretted it.
I fumbled my supply pouch open. The brush handle had a melted spot where the backlash had licked it. My ink bottle was half-empty, the liquid inside dragging slow when I tilted it. Not great.
I counted tags with my good hand. Three standard explosives. Two flash. One sticky seal pre-drawn on rice paper, my handwriting ghosted faintly across it.
"Okay," I muttered. "Budgeting time."
I shuffled around the base of the tree, eyes picking out natural approach vectors the way my brain always did—where someone would step if they wanted to get close, where cover lay, what roots gave the best grip. I let the motions pull me along, let the part of my head that liked puzzles take over from the part replaying teeth and snake-flesh and that smile.
First, explosive tags.
I crawled to the side where the clearing funneled into a narrower path. Two trees leaned together there, roots twisted like a half-finished gate. Perfect.
I slapped one explosive tag low, just out of easy sight, behind a curl of bark. The second went on the opposite side, tucked under a root, ready to turn the gap into a shrapnel-filled surprise.
I wired both into a simple proximity trigger, a little twist on the standard seal that would respond better to foreign chakra than ours. Crude. Sloppy. Grandpa Jiraiya from the fiction shelves would have roasted me alive for the inkwork, but it was what I had.
"Congratulations," I whispered to the tree. "You're now a terrible doorman."
Next: sticky ink.
I unrolled the pre-drawn sheet and nearly cried when my burned fingertips brushed the lines. The seal flared faintly even before chakra hit it, eager. This one was more temperamental; I'd made it for fun during a quiet afternoon, not expecting to need it on real people yet.
"Surprise," I told it. "We're graduating."
I smeared a bit of blood from my lip into the center to key it, then pressed it onto a patch of relatively bare ground right where someone would probably step to get a better look at the unconscious genin under the tree.
"Step here, eat dirt," I said. "Very elegant."
Flash tags: the last line of defense.
I climbed a little up the tree and hung them on two low branches at different angles, facing outward. If someone approached from the wrong side and triggered them, they'd get a faceful of chakra-light. If we had to run, we knew where not to stand.
My chakra stamped each one like a tired signature. Every seal I tied into the web tugged at me—tiny threads dragging out what little energy I had left.
By the time I finished, my vision fuzzed at the edges. My burned fingers jerked when I tried to cap the ink bottle.
"Okay," I said to no one. "We have a…halfassed murder pinata. That's something."
I slumped back down between Naruto and Sasuke for a second, just long enough to catch my breath.
Naruto's face was weirdly peaceful now that he wasn't yelling or trying to die. Sweat had dried on his skin, leaving faint salt lines at his temples. In the back of my skull, his mark was a stubborn little coal.
Sasuke…looked like someone had taken a knife to his dreams. His brow knotted. His lips pressed thin. The mark on his neck pulsed once, ugly and dark, like a bruise made of ink.
I didn't touch it.
"In my old life," I said quietly, because the trees already knew, "nobody came back."
They'd told me to stay behind. To be quiet. To be small. Then they'd forgotten where they'd left me.
I remembered the way the cold had crept up my fingers, the numbness that had felt like relief because it meant I didn't have to be there for a while. I remembered staring at bark inches from my face and realizing it didn't matter if I screamed.
Here, these idiots were mine.
I'd decided that somewhere between Naruto shoving a bowl of ramen at me and Sasuke snorting at my seal homework. It wasn't official. No contract. Just a quiet internal "yes" every time I watched them be loud and stupid and alive.
"I don't leave people to rot in the dirt anymore," I told the forest. "I'm not…that girl."
That boy.
That body.
That life.
My burned fingers stung where I curled them into fists.
I was Sylvie now. Pink hair, cheap clothes, too many feelings. I had ink under my nails and blood on my sleeves and two unconscious teammates who trusted me enough to fall apart within dragging distance.
I was not going to let the universe run the same script twice.
The forest didn't argue. It just breathed around us, heavy and slow.
I forced myself back onto my feet before my legs locked up and climbed.
The nearest decent branch was a little higher than I wanted to go on shaky muscles, but it gave a clean view of the clearing and the main approaches. I hauled myself up with more determination than grace, gritting my teeth every time bark scraped my burned hands.
At the top, I wedged myself with my back against the trunk and one foot braced where I could launch downward if I had to. The boys were directly below, a tangle of limbs and bad hair.
My left hand pressed flat to the trunk. My right settled over my own Squad Mark.
I let the thinnest drip of chakra bleed out along the ink, down the line to Naruto's mark, then over to Sasuke's. Not enough for a full ping—just enough to keep their signatures distinct in my head.
Naruto: dim but stubborn. A little spike every now and then like his body was arguing with the idea of rest.
Sasuke: ragged, uneven, but not…dropping. The new seal meddled with everything, sending out phantom jolts that made my stomach twitch. Underneath, his original pattern still clung on.
"Okay," I murmured. "Alive is our baseline. Power-ups and trauma will have to wait."
Wind—or whatever passed for wind here—stirred the leaves overhead. The forest's chakra pressed down on me again, that crowded-room sensation turned up to eleven. Every rustle sounded like footsteps. Every creak sounded like someone drawing a bow.
My eyes burned from not blinking. My back ached. My fingers trembled around the mark.
Stay awake, I told myself. You already saw what happens when no one's watching.
Naruto shifted in his sleep, a tiny sound escaping his throat. His chakra flared in response, then sank back down. The little coal glowed brighter for a second.
"Good," I whispered. "You're not allowed to quit. I have way too many creative insults for you left."
My head drooped.
No.
I jerked it back up, neck pulsing with pain. The tree trunk dug into my spine. My hand slid a little on the bark; I tightened my grip.
Sasuke's mark spasmed again, sending a nasty ripple through his chakra. My own network flinched in sympathy; the burned pathways along my fingers lit up.
"It's fine," I told nobody. "I can hang on a few more hours."
My eyelids felt like they had weights sewn into the edges.
You're stronger now, I reminded myself. Stronger than you were. You're not the kid who lay there and waited to disappear.
The forest hummed.
The Squad Marks hummed.
My brain hummed.
The three rhythms didn't line up.
I blinked slow. The clearing swam a little. The boys' outlines blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again. Somewhere far off, something howled—a weird, warbling sound that could've been an animal or a genin or my imagination.
My body wanted to shut down. It had opinions about chakra depletion and burned nerves and dragging two other people with terrible posture.
"Just…a minute," I muttered. "Micro-nap. Medic-approved."
Terrible plan.
Fantastic idea.
I kept my palm pressed to the trunk, fingers hooked over rough bark like claws. My other hand stayed wrapped around my wrist, thumb planted over the ink as if I could physically keep the connection from snapping.
Naruto's chakra buzzed in the back of my skull, a low, stubborn thrum.
Sasuke's crackled and spat, but it was still there, the blade refusing to break even as someone tried to reforge it without his consent.
Mine wobbled, frayed, then wrapped itself clumsily around both like a tired blanket.
"Mine," I mumbled, not sure if I meant the marks or the boys or the battered, rebuilding self saying the words. "You're mine. I…come back."
My eyes slid closed.
The last thing I felt before exhaustion steamrolled me was the faint, overlapping heartbeat of three idiots—one unconscious, one cursed, one too stubborn to lie down for good—all tangled in ink and the promise that this time, no one stayed behind.