Up close, Sasuke's chakra felt like a crime scene.
I'd been tracking it since the second he woke—jagged spikes stabbing through the web on my wrist, the Squad Mark over his pulse pounding like it wanted to bruise bone. But standing this close, feeling it roll off him?
It was all the same wrong colors as Orochimaru. Rotten gold, bruised purple, slick black oil. Except instead of a snake man looming over us, it was poured into Sasuke and set on fire.
Zaku lay at his feet.
His arms shouldn't have bent like that. There was bone where bone shouldn't be, metal twisted at bad angles, blood leaking into the dirt in dark, ugly fans. The memory of the sound—wet crack, scream—sat in my own muscles like phantom pain.
Sasuke stood over him like a blade jammed point-down in the ground.
He didn't look like he'd just done something that should haunt you forever. He looked…focused. Breath rough. Eyes too bright. Curse marks crawling over his skin in jagged flame shapes—up his neck, across his jaw, licking down his shoulder and arm.
The Squad Mark on him throbbed so hard my ribs echoed it.
Across the clearing, Dosu stared.
He hadn't moved since the arms went. His bandaged hand hung low, gauntlet catching every tiny vibration. His visible eye was flat and calculating and, for the first time since they'd dropped in, genuinely shaken.
He took a slow step back, then another, picking his way between the spent scraps of my tags.
"We're done," he said at last, voice tight under the calm. "Retreat."
Kin flinched like she'd been slapped out of a trance.
She was still halfway between us and the treeline, wires slack in her hands, bells chiming faintly from where they'd tangled in broken branches. At the word "retreat" she jerked into motion, sprinting toward Zaku's ruined body.
"Zaku," she hissed, looping an arm under his shoulders. "Get up, idiot, before he—"
Sasuke's head turned.
Not toward her. Toward the word.
Retreat.
His gaze slid off Zaku, off the wreckage he'd made, and locked onto Dosu like a predator tracking a new target. For a second his eyes were just black, flat. Then something ugly flickered there, a light that wasn't his.
The cursed chakra surged.
My mark screamed against my skin. The taste of it in the air went from "this is bad" to "this is Orochimaru" in one breath—metallic and bitter and too thick, like trying to inhale hot oil.
"Sasuke," I said. It came out small. "Hey. Hey."
He didn't hear me.
He stepped off Zaku's chest without even looking down. Zaku made a broken sound. Kin tried to haul him away; his ruined arms flopped uselessly, body refusing to coordinate.
Sasuke started walking.
Not a charge. Worse. A slow, deliberate stalk straight at Dosu, shoulders loose, hands relaxed at his sides in that way Kakashi had when he was about to do something horrifying. The curse marks crawled farther with each step, black flames licking over his collarbone, creeping toward his cheek.
Dosu's eye widened by a millimeter.
"That chakra…" he breathed. "Kin. Now."
They tried.
Kin dragged, Zaku stumbled, Dosu backed up fast, picking his lines around my remaining tags with the cautious precision of a man who did not want to explode today. But there was a limit to how fast you could go while hauling one and a half broken teammates.
Sasuke was going to catch them.
And it wasn't going to be a clean shinobi kill. It was going to be…whatever this was. Whatever Orochimaru had turned on inside him. A message written in other people's bodies.
No.
My legs were already moving.
Pain came back as soon as I pushed off—everything screaming at once. Burned channels in my hands, bruises, shredded muscles from dragging boys twice my weight through a murder forest. My lungs didn't like this. My vision didn't like this. My nervous system filed a formal complaint.
I ignored all of it.
There was a narrow band of space between Sasuke and the retreating Sound trio. I cut across it from the side and behind, feet slipping in torn-up dirt, breath rasping loud in my ears.
He didn't even twitch toward me.
He was so locked onto Dosu's chakra—same village, same stink, same connection to the man who'd bitten him—that my presence barely registered. I was background static.
Great.
I threw myself at him anyway.
My shoulder hit between his shoulder blades. It was like tackling a stone pillar someone had put legs on. We both lurched. He staggered a step; I grabbed higher, arms locking around his chest, weight hanging off him like an oversized backpack.
One arm across his collarbones. The other—
The other slapped straight over the side of his neck, right where Orochimaru's teeth had sunk in.
My burned fingers shrieked.
The skin under my palm was hot. Not fever hot—stove-coil hot. The curse mark crawled there, ink thick and raised, shifting under my hand like it was trying to wriggle away or up into me. My chakra sense flared in self-defense, translating it into color and taste: rotted gold, oil-black, bitter metal.
Sasuke jerked.
"Get off," he snarled. His voice sounded wrong—rougher, like something else was pressing through his throat.
He surged forward anyway, dragging me.
I dug my heels in. The ground slid under my sandals. My arms strained, every joint screaming as his momentum hauled us both toward Dosu. My whole body was a faulty anchor tied to a cursed freight train.
"No," I wheezed, because apparently my survival instincts had unionized and gone on strike. "Hard pass."
The Squad Mark on him slammed pain down into my wrist in time with his heartbeat. I latched onto that rhythm for lack of anything else and did the only stupid thing left:
I shoved chakra into him.
Not threads, not some clever sealing formation. I didn't have the training for that, or the chakra to power it. This was more like taking everything left in my miserable little reserves and ramming it through my arm on pure spite.
I grabbed the shape of my own chakra—thin, frayed, hazel-green around the edges—and forced it down my channels, into my hand, into the curse mark.
Slow. Even. Like the breathing exercises the clinic nurse had shown me when a kid came in panicking.
In for four. Out for four.
His chakra hit mine like a thunderstorm hitting a candle.
The curse mark bucked hard, thrashing against the intrusion. It wanted this. Wanted the chase, the hurt, the message written in someone else's blood. It smashed my little steady pulses around like they were nothing.
Static screamed up my arm. My vision whited out at the edges. Every nerve between my fingers and shoulder turned into raw wire.
"Let. Me. GO," Sasuke ground out.
His muscles bunched under my arms—too taut, buzzing with borrowed power. The marks crawled higher while I watched, licking against my knuckles, creeping toward my jaw like they meant to climb into my skull next.
"This isn't you," I said.
I didn't plan the line. It just ripped its way out, ripped out of some stupid hopeful part of me that still believed this boy was more than the worst night of his life and the monster who'd branded him.
He went rigid.
For a heartbeat, he stopped pulling.
The curse flared under my palm, hot enough I had to bite down on a scream. My wrist throbbed so hard I thought the Mark might split skin. His breath hitched.
Later, he'd probably tell himself that line was cliché. That it shouldn't have landed. That he was above being swayed by some girl clinging to his back and yelling feelings at him.
Right then, something about the words snagged on him like a hook.
He made a low sound in his throat. Not quite a growl. Not quite a sob.
"It's what he made me," Sasuke spat.
"He" meant Orochimaru. I heard that in the venom. But there was another "he" underneath it, older and sharper. Brother-shaped.
The curse seemed to like that. It surged, riding the line of that thought. Yes, it said in the way it hammered against my hand. Made. Forged. Use it.
I bared my teeth.
"I am not letting him use you like that," I snapped.
My voice shook hard enough to rattle my own bones. Didn't matter. The words came from somewhere past my good sense, from that stupid soft place that had watched Naruto take beating after beating from the village and still get back up, that refused to write Sasuke off as a lost cause just because a monster wanted him.
Sasuke jerked again, trying to lurch forward. I held on, legs sliding another half-meter in the dirt. Dosu and Kin were at the treeline now, half-carrying Zaku, not quite gone but very much ready to sprint.
"You don't understand," Sasuke hissed. "I need strength."
His fingers flexed around empty air like they were already closing around throats.
"Power," he bit out. "Enough that no one can ever—"
"Hurt you?" I cut in. "Use you? Make you watch while they walk away?"
His spine locked.
My chakra faltered under the weight of the curse. The pushback was constant, heavy, like trying to hold a door shut against a house fire. My burned channels screamed. I kept counting anyway.
In. Out. One, two, three, four.
"I need—" he started.
"I need you alive," I snapped. "And you. Not whatever he's turning you into."
Naruto flashed behind my eyes. Not the idiot I saw every day, but all the ways he'd already refused to be what they wanted him to be: not just the fox, not just the village's cautionary tale. Naruto with his stupid big dreams and his bigger mouth, Naruto dragging us forward by sheer gravitational stupidity.
"If Naruto can keep getting back up with nothing but yelling and spite," I rasped, "you can fight one dumb snake tattoo."
"Sylvie—" His voice broke around my name.
"Fight it," I said. "Fight him. Or I will. Don't make me go get the weird moon ghost in my dreams, I will escalate this."
That last bit fell out half-hysterical. My arm had gone from pain to a kind of distant buzzing, the way a limb felt when it was about to stop belonging to you. The mark's heat seeped into my bones.
I wasn't winning.
I could feel that as clearly as I felt anything: I wasn't scrubbing the curse away, wasn't sealing it. All I was doing was getting in the way. Throwing my small, stubborn chakra into its teeth so it had to chew through me before it got what it wanted.
What worked was not technique.
It was stubbornness.
"It doesn't care if you die," I said. "It doesn't care who you kill. It doesn't care about Naruto, or your clan, or—"
My throat closed up for a second.
"—or me."
His fingers finally moved.
They came up, slow and shaking, and clamped around my forearm. His grip was too tight; it hurt. I didn't pull away.
"Sylvie," he said again, and it sounded like him this time. Just him. Tired and furious and terrified.
The cursed chakra bucked one more time, like a horse realizing the rider wasn't going to fall off by accident.
Then, inch by inch, like someone letting air out of a too-full lung, it started to recede.
The marks crawled backward.
They didn't pop and vanish. They writhed, dragging themselves under the skin, lines fading from solid black to bruised grey to a faint, ugly outline coiled at the bite. The heat under my palm cooled from stove-hot to just feverish.
My own chakra guttered with it.
By the time the last of the black flame pattern had sunk back into the mark, my vision had narrowed to a little tunnel around my hand and his neck. Everything else was static.
His knees buckled.
I went down with him.
We hit the ground in an awkward heap—me on my ass, him half across my lap. The impact slammed the breath out of my lungs in a useless little squeak.
"Ow," I said, very intelligently. "You're heavy."
He didn't answer.
His hand slid off my arm. His head lolled, forehead bumping my shoulder. His breath hitched once, then settled into a rough, uneven rhythm against my collarbone.
The mark under my palm was just a mark again.
Ugly. Wrong. But quiet.
I peeled my hand away.
It took effort—my fingers were cramped and half-numb, dug into his skin like claws. When I finally got them to uncurl, the sudden absence of contact made me sway.
For a second, that was all there was: just me and this idiot boy and the empty space where Orochimaru's chakra had been trying to eat him alive.
Then the rest of the world leaked back in.
Leaves rustling. Someone groaning. The distant creak of a tree that had definitely been hit too many times today. Voices, thin at first, then clearer.
"Is it…over?" Choji asked, from somewhere to my left.
"Don't jinx it, you idiot," Ino hissed.
I blinked grit out of my eyes.
Dosu and Kin were at the edge of the clearing now, Zaku slung between them like a broken mannequin. He was conscious enough to limp, barely; his arms hung at nightmare angles. Blood dripped a slow, sticky trail behind them.
They had stopped.
Dosu's gaze was on us. On Sasuke slack in my lap, on the faint remnants of the curse mark, on my burned hands.
He raised his free hand, palm out.
"We're done," he said.
My throat scraped when I tried to talk. "Stay back."
It came out more plea than threat. I tightened my grip around Sasuke's shoulders anyway, like I could haul him behind me if they decided to try again.
Dosu shook his head once.
"We came to observe," he said. "We have observed. Anything further is suicide."
His visible eye flicked to Sasuke's neck, then to my face. There was something almost…not quite respect. Not quite. Recognition, maybe, of a fellow idiot who'd stood too close to the same monster.
"For what it's worth," he added, "you fought well. Your seals were…annoying."
"Career goal achieved," I croaked. "Be as annoying as possible to people trying to kill my friends."
Kin glared around Zaku's sagging head. "You're lucky," she snapped. "If we weren't on a schedule—"
"If we weren't on a schedule," Dosu cut in, "you would be dead. We misjudged the Uchiha. We won't do that again."
"Cool," I said. "Put it on a vision board and don't come back."
He ignored that.
Instead he fished a scroll out of his vest with his unwrapped hand.
Shikamaru, somewhere behind me, tensed so hard I could feel it. "That's convenient," he said. "Too convenient."
Dosu tossed the scroll.
It landed halfway between us with a soft thump.
"Payment," he said simply. "For the data."
Ino's chakra flared sharp behind me. "You think a scroll makes up for—"
"Ino," Shikamaru said, warning.
She hissed air through her teeth, but subsided.
Dosu's gaze rested on Sasuke one last time. On the mark. On me still wrapped around him like some overcooked bandage.
"That power," he said quietly. "It belongs to Orochimaru-sama."
"Funny," I said. "Sasuke's not his."
His eye narrowed a fraction, like he was filing that away for later.
Then he turned, hauling Zaku with Kin's help, and disappeared into the trees. Their chakra signatures thinned, threads pulling away from the mess of the forest until they were just another sour note somewhere far off.
The clearing sagged in on itself.
I didn't.
I was too busy trying to get air in.
Ino dropped to a crouch beside me. Her hand hovered over my shoulder like she wasn't sure if touching me would shatter something.
"Sylvie," she said. "Hey. You okay?"
I let out a noise that was supposed to be a laugh and came out more like I'd swallowed a sob the wrong way.
"Define 'okay,'" I said. "I can't feel my arm. My hair's a hate crime. Ten out of ten would not recommend."
Ino's mouth did that pinched thing again. Her eyes flicked over my hacked-off hair, my burned fingers, the smear of blood at my temple. Then she looked down at Sasuke, unconscious in my lap.
"You idiots," she muttered. "You absolute, stubborn, self-sacrificing idiots."
"Plural," I agreed weakly. "Naruto gets a slot. Lee is on the waitlist."
"Me too," Choji called from somewhere near Naruto. "I rolled over a guy."
"Yeah," I said. "We're a…group package."
Shikamaru snorted. "A very troublesome one."
Background noise. Bickering. The sound of people still here. It all washed over me, distant and weirdly comforting.
My fingers finally remembered how to move. I brushed Sasuke's hair back from his face with the tips, careful not to touch the mark. His forehead was hot. Not curse-hot. Just regular "almost got turned into a meat puppet" hot.
"Hey," I murmured, mostly for me. "Don't you dare check out on me after all that."
He didn't respond.
His breathing stayed rough but steady. The Mark on my wrist pulsed in time with it—a faint echo, no longer a scream.
I looked around.
The clearing was wrecked. One tree half-stripped of bark. Another scored from an explosive tag that had gone off at the wrong angle. Craters from Zaku's blasts. Sticky ink stains. Lee sprawled where he'd fallen. Naruto slumped against our original tree, head tipped back, mouth open just a little like he was trying to catch rain.
We had two scrolls now—the one we'd taken earlier, plus the Sound's "payment." Our tags were spent. Our chakra was shredded.
We were alive.
"We are such a nightmare," I said, almost to myself.
"Huh?" Ino asked.
"Anyone who walks into this forest and thinks, 'yeah, I can take those guys' without doing research is suicidal," I said. "We're not a team, we're a health hazard. There should be warning signs."
"Nah," Shikamaru said. "Let natural selection do its thing."
That did it.
My body decided the adrenaline contract was up.
All the fear and anger and almosts hit at once—the image of Sasuke's foot on Zaku's chest, Naruto limp in the snake's mouth, Lee flying, the curse mark trying to climb up my arm, Dosu's eye when he said we misjudged the Uchiha.
I started laugh-crying.
No buildup. No graceful slide. One second I was breathing; the next my chest seized and this horrible hiccuping sound clawed its way out—a mix of hysterical giggle and broken sob that hurt my ribs and made my burned hand throb.
Ino panicked instantly. "H-hey, hey, hey, don't— it's fine, you're fine—"
"I know," I gasped around it. "That's the problem."
Choji made a helpless noise. "Do we…get her water? Food? Blanket? All of the above?"
"Just let her," Shikamaru said, voice softer. "She held it together longer than any of us would."
I tried to clamp my hand over my mouth. My arm refused. The sounds kept coming anyway, wild and ugly and a little freeing.
Somewhere in the middle of it, something tugged on my sleeve.
Naruto stirred.
His head rolled against the tree, face creasing. One eye cracked open, gummy with sleep and blood.
"'s that you laughing?" he mumbled, voice thick. "Weird. Sounds like…crying."
"Shut up," I sniffed, which only made another half-laugh, half-sob escape. "Go back to sleep."
He hummed something that might've been "no way" and might've been "ramen." His eye slid closed again. His chakra fluttered a little brighter, like a stubborn little flame licking higher, then settled.
My laugh-crying tapered off into hiccups.
Everything hurt. Nothing was actually fixed. Orochimaru had his teeth in our lives now, and the mark on Sasuke's neck wasn't going anywhere.
But we were still here.
For one wrecked, smoking patch of forest, that was enough.
Konohamaru sprinted.
The village streets whipped past in a blur of sun and dust and adult ankles. He dodged around a cart, hurdled a stray dog, nearly plowed straight through an old lady with groceries.
"Sorry! Important business!" he yelled, because that definitely made it fine.
The Forest of Death towered ahead, that big ugly fence line and the warning signs that made it sound awesome instead of terrifying. The second exam. Boss Naruto, going in like a real chunin-to-be. Sylvie-neechan too. Duck-butt jerk, whatever.
He was supposed to see them off. He'd promised.
"I'm coming, Boss!" Konohamaru gasped, pumping his legs harder. "Don't leave without—"
A blur of white and green cut across the road in front of him.
He skidded so hard his sandals squeaked.
Three squads of medical-nin shot by, white coats snapping in the wind, masks up, hitai-ate gleaming. Two to a stretcher. The stretchers were…weird-looking. Not the open kind with people groaning on top, but big long lumps zipped up in thick dark fabric. Like giant caterpillars.
"What the—"
He caught a flash as one passed: a pale hand, limp, sliding back inside as the zipper finished closing. Someone's sandals, dangling at an odd angle.
His stomach did a small, confused flip.
Before he could really see, they were already gone—racing down another path, toward a different gate, some adult shouting "Make way!" behind them.
Konohamaru stood there for a second, chest heaving, watching the empty space they'd left.
Weird, he thought. Then: Right. Naruto.
He shook it off like a dog flinging water, lowered his head, and charged the last stretch.
By the time he reached the Forest of Death gate, his lungs felt like they'd been replaced with sandpaper and bad decisions. He stumbled to a stop just as a tall woman in a tan trench coat snapped a heavy padlock shut on the big metal doors.
Anko turned the key, tested the lock with a jerk, and only then noticed him.
"Huh?" Her eyes slid down to his height. "You're a little late for the horror show, kid."
Konohamaru bent double, palms on his knees, wheezing. "D-did I…did I miss it?"
She arched an eyebrow. "The second exam started yesterday."
He made a sound like a dying kettle.
"Yesterday?! But—Boss said—he was going into the scary forest, and I was gonna—" He flailed a hand toward the gate, words collapsing into frustrated noise. "You mean Naruto already went?!"
Anko watched the way his lower lip wobbled, the way his eyes shone with something that wasn't just out-of-breath.
For half a second, all she saw was the med-nin again. White coats. Zipped bags. Little bodies that had never really been theirs, roped and carved and thrown away like old skins.
Orochimaru's work.
Her fingers tightened on the lock without meaning to.
The brat's gaze flicked past her shoulder, toward the path where the med-nin had vanished. His brows pulled together.
"Hey," he said. "Those bag things they were carrying, were they—"
"Camping gear," Anko said, too fast.
He blinked up at her.
She caught herself. Forced her shoulders to unclench, her mouth to twist into something like a grin.
"Emergency camping gear," she added, more lightly. "Some teams wash out early, we have to go drag 'em home before they pee themselves. You know how it is."
Konohamaru straightened, scrubbing a hand across his nose. "I wouldn't pee myself."
"Sure you wouldn't, squirt."
"I wouldn't!" he insisted. "If I was in there, I'd— I'd beat everybody up and get, like, five scrolls and Boss would be like, 'Whoa, Konohamaru, you're so cool!'"
"That so?" Anko drawled. "You planning to do that from out here?"
His face crumpled again. "I wanted to tell him good luck," he muttered. "And to Sylvie-neechan. And to rub it in Sasuke's stupid face that he still only has two fan clubs and I have a whole Corps."
Anko snorted. "Tragic. Truly."
He kicked at a rock, sulking. "He didn't even say bye."
Anko looked at the locked gate, at the forest beyond it. At the invisible lines where kids went in normal and came out…different. Or didn't come out at all.
"Trust me," she said. "He was thinking about you."
Konohamaru squinted up at her. "You don't know that."
"Kid like that?" Her grin went sharper, fond and a little mean. "He probably yelled your name on the way in just to scare the trees."
That got a tiny, reluctant smile out of him.
"…yeah," he said. "He would do that."
Silence settled for a moment. Not the heavy kind—just a pause, like the village taking a breath.
Anko rolled her shoulders, flicked the end of her trench coat back. "C'mon," she said. "Brooding at a locked door's for teenagers. I'll walk you back."
"I'm not a kid," he grumbled automatically, but he fell into step beside her.
They headed toward the village, away from the forest and all the things it was chewing on.
Behind them, the Forest of Death loomed, quiet and hungry.
Ahead of them, Konohamaru started plotting loudly about how, next time, he'd camp out by the gate all night if he had to. Anko listened with half an ear, hands in her pockets, eyes tracking the rooftops.
She didn't look back.
No point staring at a closed door when you'd already thrown the kids in.
All you could do was wait and see which ones crawled back out.