Sky Runs Red

By: firefly

Note: After writing these two in ch.17 of Crack Whims, I couldn't help myself. Takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting after Madara succeeds with the Moon Eye plan. A lot of guesswork here, so forgive me if I mess up on the technicalities. |D Multi-chapter; have no idea how long it will be, so let's just go with it and see. :)

As for warnings, rated M for language, violence, and dark themes. Enjoy, and as always, reviews are love!

Sky Runs Red ch.1

The Sun beat down from high in the sky, scorching the landscape from its apex. Temari could feel it against the back of her head, a hot, prickling weight. Perspiration and grime covered her face and her eyes watered, stinging where the sweat ran into them. She blinked furiously and kept her back to the stone wall, fan clutched in her hands.

Beyond the barrier, she heard them. Vultures. They punctuated the dead silence with faint flapping. Pecking sounds. Occasionally a squawk. Nothing more.

She waited.

Several minutes went by, filled only by the sounds of the carrion birds. Then there was a muffled footstep and she froze, holding her breath. Slowly, steps ascended up the stairs on the opposite side of the wall she was leaning against, emerging from the basement of a burned down house.

Another set of footsteps followed the first ones out. They emerged out onto the sun-baked ground, neither of them speaking. That was no surprise. The tainted never spoke.

She didn't have to make much effort to hide her chakra. It was so drained she was down to the last dregs, left with just enough energy to keep herself upright and maybe use her fan as a bludgeoning weapon if they discovered her. If she breathed an iota louder than her current, shallow breaths, she was dead.

The two figures lingered by the cellar doors for a little longer, probably communicating their findings telepathically. After a few seconds, she heard the scrape of their feet over the gravel and almost wilted in relief.

They were leaving.

She didn't dare move for the next twenty minutes, straining her ears for even the slightest sound before cautiously venturing out from behind the wall. The first thing she laid eyes on was the decomposing corpse lying a few feet from the basement entrance. The vultures were still pecking at it, paying her no heed as she slowly circled around the wall towards them.

She looked at the body, expressionless. It was lying facedown. A civilian, probably.

Sheathing her fan, she raised her head to crack her neck and gaze into the clear, vivid blue of the sky, only to stop herself midway. The sun burned against her crown and she swallowed hard, heart rate picking up at the near miss.

It was no longer just the threat of night she had to watch for. Even now, during the mid-afternoon, she was at risk of seeing the gibbous moon in the clear sky. The slightest slice of it in the night was enough of a hazard. She didn't want to think about how well she'd fare against it during the day.

Keeping her eyes down, Temari swept the area for any potential threats. When she found none, she descended the steps leading down to the basement and shut the cellar doors behind her.

The powerful smell of burnt wood and soot hung thick in the dank air. Panels of sunlight streamed through the cracks in the doors, illuminating the dark recesses just enough to see by. She threaded her way through the debris and searched for anything useful.

Now that she was out of sight and underground, she let her shoulders slacken and breathed freely, the sudden loss in tension nearly driving her to the floor in exhaustion.

If anything, she could snare a bit of food, some supplies, and maybe clean up and rest for a few hours. She was confident the other tainted shinobi wouldn't come by to scope the area again. The first two had been enough. Madara was efficient like that.

Against her expectations, the basement turned out to be a lucky find. It was intact and spacious, all concrete and drywall and separated into two rooms. The first housed the laundry room and a tiny washroom. A furnace stood in the back, the space around it mottled with cobwebs. Clothes still hung on the line suspended between the walls. A few chairs lay scattered around. An ironing board and sewing table rested in the corner.

The second room was visible through the door standing ajar at the end. When she entered, she found it to be a cross between a pantry and a safe house. There were several cans of food and jars of preserves inside the cabinets, along with a few cases of baby formula.

She paused her exploration long enough to eat, doing so until she was full to the point of vomiting. Downtime was a precious commodity and she wasn't going to waste it snacking. Gorging was a safer tactic.

Once her stomach was full, she continued her search. A bare, queen-sized mattress lay in the corner, blankets lying rumpled at the end of it. Beside it, toy blocks and stuffed animals. She bit her lip. A family had been here recently. She didn't bother wondering if the corpse outside was one of them.

There was an armchair near the mattress. In the set of drawers at the opposite end, she found a tool set, flashlights, batteries, candles and rudimentary weapons. Definitely civilians; some of the many who'd stayed behind in lieu of evacuating.

She raised her gaze to the ceiling. The wooden planks that had comprised the first floor of the house were blackened and singed from the fire but still intact. She wagered that unless someone went stomping over them, they'd remain in one piece. She followed the path of the flames in the singed wood until her gaze landed on a piece of burnt drywall that had collapsed near the set of drawers.

There was nothing more to see.

A few minutes later, she stripped herself of her clothes and clambered into the large, plastic sink next to the laundry machine, almost crying in relief when warm water spilled from a turn of the faucets. When she couldn't find soap, she bathed using laundry detergent, desperate to rid herself of the sweat and dirt. She washed her clothes along with her body, then used her miswak—an oral hygiene twig crafted from a persica tree—to brush her teeth.

When she was finished, she hung her dripping garments on the clothesline, dressing herself in the oversized t-shirt and shorts she found still sitting in the dryer. Gradually, the bright panels of sunlight faded in the basement, casting it into the pitch.

Temari was ready for it. Arming herself with her fan and the rest of her supplies, she took up a spot in the darkest corner of the basement next to the furnace. Reclining there, she watched, expectant, as the darkness slowly diffused into a dull, coppery colour, growing brighter and more intense until the dim light flooding the room was a deep, threatening red.

Outside, she could imagine the eerie transformation of the landscape. The ground glowed russet, plant life and water following suit. A rusty tinge settled upon everything.

One direct look into the moonlight was enough to lose yourself forever. She'd seen it happen with her own eyes. The majority wandering the surface were the tainted, already taken in by the all-encompassing genjutsu; they scoped the land for survivors of the purge, killing the ones who resisted.

The two who'd searched the basement before had been Suna and Mist ninja, respectively.

It occurred to her as an afterthought that she hadn't marked her calendar. Though she was exhausted, the recall of her nightly ritual spurred her to wakefulness again. She dug through her pack, searching until she found the small, business agenda she'd scrounged up from one of the other ruins.

Flipping it open to the right page, she uncapped the adjoining pen and carefully marked an X onto June 16. Then she went back to the beginning and counted through the days, flipping through page after page of red X's.

Twenty-nine.

She laid her head back against the wall, gazing blankly into the darkness. Twenty-nine days since the purge began. Twenty-nine days since they lost the war.

Her memory of the exact moment it happened was fuzzy. She'd been separated from the rest of her division, as well as from Gaara and Kankuro, in an effort to dispatch more victims of the Edo Tensei. The group of undead had been targeting the makeshift medical centre they'd set up in an abandoned warehouse, endangering the most precious commodity they had at that point in the fight—their medical nin.

They proved far easier to subdue than the kages, and the squad's success at sealing them bolstered them with the first flare of optimism since Naruto and the Eight-Tails had gone off to confront Madara two days before. A cheer went out when they sealed the last one, a moment of celebration Temari felt was well deserved when they'd succeeded without casualties.

They'd had a few precious minutes of happiness after that, the team entering the warehouse to recuperate for the night and Temari joining the chief medic in the corner office for a brief status report.

Then it happened, as silent and swift as a cloud blinking out the light of the sun. She'd heard the noise of celebration—any noise at all, really, cease from where she stood in the side office. Her gaze met that of the chief medical nin for a fraction of a second, the look in the man's eyes reflecting the same sentiment in hers.

Something had gone wrong.

Then the screams started. She whipped around, freezing in the doorway when she caught sight of the blood red moonlight streaming through the windows. Members of her division, the injured, and the medics gazed up at the moon through the glass, faces frozen in expressions of terror.

Then, in a movement so swift and simultaneous it had to have been orchestrated, every shinobi exposed to the moonlight calmly drew out their exploding notes and detonated them. The resulting explosions collapsed the entire building with her inside, killing everyone.

She didn't recall the moment of impact, only able to piece together what had happened when she'd come to in the coffin-like niche formed by the office desk and a collapsed wall that had shielded her. The first thing she'd registered was the sight of the dead chief medic, his motionless form visible through the gap in her enclosure.

Next to him, the collapsed wall and the open night sky. Tinged red.

The broken wall crushing into her chest turned out to be her saving grace, shielding her eyes from exposure to the moon. But through the gap, she made out flashes of light. The noise of fighting. Screaming.

It had taken her three days of observing the massacre to learn the basic workings of the genjutsu. It had taken her another two days to claw her way out of her prison.

Since then, she'd arrived at some tentative conclusions about the situation, marking them down in her agenda for the sake of keeping her mind occupied.

The ones directly exposed to the moonlight were the tainted, made distinct by the red haze clouding their eyes. In the first few days following the inception, their only purpose seemed to be the complete and systematic extermination of the untainted shinobi. They attacked ruthlessly and without reprieve, impervious to the pleading of their comrades.

That, she'd come to write in the agenda, circling the word, was the purge.

For reasons as yet unknown to her, Madara wanted to start his new world with a clean slate. He was not willing to wait on those who'd managed to avoid exposure to the Infinite Tsukuyomi, instead sending the tainted out to exterminate the stragglers.

Another thing she'd noted was that the phases of the moon differed in their potency of the genjutsu. She'd realized it after observing the numbers of tainted that appeared after each phase. The waxing and waning crescents, as well as the first and fourth quarters yielded far fewer repurposed shinobi.

The gibbous and full moons garnered the most, the full moon in particular potent enough to sway the senses even through reflections on the ground. The new moon was their only salvation, putting the red out of sight for one night and blanketing the landscape with familiar, comforting blackness.

Despite that, there was no safe time to travel. The tainted wandered the surface constantly, ebbing in numbers during the day and coming out full force in the night. It all came down to how best you could avoid them, a feat made difficult in daylight even if the sun provided better bearings, and a feat made damn near impossible at night when your vision was limited and you were forced to divide your concentration between not looking at the moon and not getting killed.

Quick, covert movements in the afternoon were the best bet. They allowed just enough time to rotate positions without a high risk of being spotted. She was able to see where she was going. She could scavenge supplies from the burned out dwellings dotting the landscape. And the sight of the sun kept her from going insane.

Temari chewed her bottom lip, tracing her finger over the map from her pack. Her fingernail skirted the border line between Lightning Country and the Land of Frost, her last known position before everything had gone to hell. In nearly thirty days, she doubted she'd advanced more than two kilometres from the line, bringing her no closer to where she knew the rest of the 4th division would be. Where Gaara and Kankuro would be.

The thought of her brothers made her hand slacken around the map, eyes growing distant and foggy. She could see them perfectly, reassembling the army and revaluating their attack plan, Kankuro rallying their spirits and Gaara commanding them with surety despite the dismal circumstances. She knew, too, that while they were doing this, they were wondering about her in equal measure, worried but confident she'd find them again.

Temari smiled faintly, gazing with unfocused eyes into the dark.

Perhaps she'd gone a little insane. The time spent trapped in the collapsed warehouse with a clear view of the massacre going on around her probably had something to do with it. But like a proper shinobi, she shoved the experience to the back of her mind and concentrated on the here and now, focused despite knowing things were probably worse than she thought, that all control had been lost, that because Madara had managed to accomplish his plan, he'd gotten the Eight-Tails and Nine-Tails and that Naruto was dead. She focused, even if it left her with inexplicable tremors and a constant nausea roiling in her gut.

As far as she could tell, the Land of Lightning was ground zero. It had been teeming with the highest concentration of shinobi during the war. As of now, the rest of the world was probably following suit in a hellish imitation of the purge. Different, probably, for the civilian-dense countries, but with the same outcome.

She hoped her ruminations had some degree of accuracy and that her survival wasn't a freak accident while everyone else was actually dead or repurposed. They must have been in hiding, biding their time and trying to re-think their strategies. It's what she would have done.

It was the only thing that could be done.

Temari blinked, brought out of her reverie by the sting in her tired eyes. She dropped the map to the ground, back and neck stiff as she slowly rose to her feet. The mattress in the next room would be a haven after spending a month sleeping in low ditches and the hollows of trees. Shuffling, she made her way into the room and sank heavily onto the bedding, falling asleep instantly.

She didn't dream, a boon she was grateful for when she usually went to bed with the fear of confronting all the doubts, terrors, and anxieties she shoved down into her subconscious during the day. But she slept in comforting blackness, so deep she didn't hear the sound emanating faintly from the other end of the room.

It escalated in volume, worrying at her slumber till her features twisted in her sleep, jaw clenching at the disturbance. It was the pain of her gritting her teeth that suddenly jarred her awake, leaving her disoriented and alert in the dark.

She listened to the silence, hearing nothing but the faint stirrings of wind above ground and her own racing heartbeat.

Then she heard a noise that made her blood run cold.

A muffled cry.

She flung off the blankets instantly, sitting up and willing her eyes to adjust to the dark. The room was near black, none of the red moonlight reaching past the door. Tense, she strained her ears for the sound. It didn't take long; another soft cry pierced the silence, somewhere to the left of her.

Her head whipped in that direction, eyes searching aimlessly until they adjusted enough to make out the edges of the collapsed drywall. Her heart leapt into her throat.

An instant later, she was shoving her weight into the wall, pushing until it crumbled away and fell to the floor. Behind it, she found an overturned cot, tipped on its side and pressed into the adjacent brick. A baby teetered on the edge of it, inches away from falling out onto the floor. He was crying quietly, pathetically, as though he'd been doing it for hours and could no longer keep it up.

She stared at him for a good five seconds, entranced by both his miraculous survival and the utter incongruity of the sight. When he emitted another hoarse cry, she snapped out of her reverie and reached down, taking him carefully from under the arms and lifting him out.

He hung limp in her hands, movements weak and fitful as she gingerly laid his head against her shoulder. Then she manoeuvred her way around the fallen wall and carried him into the laundry room where the red moonlight provided adequate exposure.

Taking a seat on one of the chairs, she checked him over. He had a few scrapes here and there, his curly brown hair riddled with dust and bits of drywall. There was a large cut on his forehead, crusted with dried blood. It stood out vividly against the fair skin of his face and Temari had to close her eyes to force back the image of Gaara that rose in her mind's eye.

She inspected his body, relieved to see him plump and well-fed. By the looks of it, he hadn't been there very long. Prodding his limbs, she checked for swelling or tenderness in case he'd broken any bones. She found none.

"You're one lucky kid," she murmured, rubbing his back comfortingly while looking into his watery green eyes. "Shh, you're all right...you're all right."

Something was dangling from his wrist. Temari raised his arm into the light to see.

It was a tiny, beaded bracelet, the sort handed out by hospitals with the baby's name spelled in white, plastic squares. A thread dangled loose, spilling a tiny blue bead onto the floor as she turned his wrist into the light to read his name.

She found half the beads gone, his name lost somewhere in the debris in the next room. The only letters remaining were m, a, r, u.

"Maru," she muttered.

When he emitted another agitated cry, she released his arm and carried him over to where she'd seen the bottles of baby formula. He must have been hungry. Probably needed a diaper change, too. She took about completing the tasks with single-minded intensity, grateful for the momentary reprieve from her scattered thoughts.

His diaper was soiled and had been for a long time, leaving him with a livid red rash. She had an aloe vera gel in her medical kit for burns and gently applied that to his raw skin, murmuring to him to soothe his squalling. After that, she'd been fortunate to find an entire package of diapers in the cabinet over the sink, and after following the diagram, she managed to change him into a new one.

Then she was preparing his formula, measuring out the powder meticulously and mixing it with heated tap water. There were a few bottles lying at the bottom of the laundry sink, left to drain after they'd last been washed. Rinsing them well, she filled one of the bottles to the brim with formula and carried him over to the chair.

He grabbed for the bottle and practically shoved it into his mouth, drinking so desperately he choked and spat up on her. She wrestled it out of his hands, holding it at a lower angle and watching him drain the milky fluid to its last drops. He fell asleep instantly after his feeding.

Temari just sat there for a while, staring at him with a calm, detached sort of shock. To fall asleep so easily, so trustingly in the arms of a stranger, and remain so ignorant of the sheer hell going on mere feet above seemed unfathomable to her.

As though afraid to break him, she gently swept the brown curls away from his forehead, rough fingertips trailing skin so soft it felt as though it would tear. Her eyes flitted to the cut above his left eyebrow, her stomach clenching at the sight. It looked heinously wrong.

Besides her limited experience with Kankuro and Gaara, Temari had no experience in rearing children. But her handling of him seemed to be innate, rising from a source besides simple maternal instinct. In the last few hours where she'd felt her thoughts teetering towards madness, she found herself holding to him like a piece of sanity.

He was the first untainted face she'd seen since it began. The first living one. If someone as frail and helpless as he could survive the purge, then perhaps her hopes weren't too far off.

Her arms instinctively curled tighter around him as she rose to her feet. She'd lost the will to live the moment she'd seen the devastation, attributing her survival solely to the thought of Gaara and Kankuro. But now, she'd live for him, too.

Carefully, she made her way back to the mattress and laid him down, taking a moment to swathe the blanket around his tiny frame. Then she slowly lay down beside him, tentatively shifting until she was comfortable and holding him in the crook of her arm.

In the back of her mind, she realized she should have felt burdened. Panicked, even, now that the life of something so small and helpless had been placed in her hands when she could hardly handle herself.

It's a paradox, she thought, eyes drifting over his serene features, and I really have lost my mind, because I feel...

His lashes fluttered, lips moving soundlessly in his slumber. Temari drew him nearer and pulled her knees up to surround him fully.

I feel secure.

She fell asleep with him curled against her, comforted for the first time in thirty nights.

Three days passed.

Maru seemed to overcome his initial shock and began viewing his surroundings with inconsolable panic, as though he remembered who he was and that the blonde woman taking care of him was not his mother.

He began screaming, bursting into crying fits at random intervals, forcing Temari to take him into the farthest, darkest corner of the basement to prevent the sounds reaching the surface. She'd smother him against her as tightly as she could without cutting off his air, features twisted in a grimace as his sobs reverberated against her chest.

"I know, I know," she murmured to him repeatedly, reassuring in a flat, mechanical sort of way. "It'll be all right..."

She felt no guilt for lying, forced to believe the falsehoods herself to cope with the sight of red light flooding the basement every night. Every time she opened her eyes was a reminder that she was living on borrowed time.

And she made good use of every minute, charting the moon phases to plan her next excursion outside and keeping her body strong through resistance training. Her main endeavour, though, was improvising a way to see in the dark.

She had excellent eyesight but it wasn't enough in the current circumstances. Not when her only available time slot to roam the surface was the new moon and the world would be in blackness.

The technique was something she'd been working on since before the war began, secret because she wanted to show Gaara and Kankuro first when she'd mastered it. It involved exuding chakra over the entire surface of her body and manipulating the air inches above her skin, swirling it till it created a wind barrier around her.

Its main purpose was to alert her to an oncoming assault before it landed, designed to pick up changes in air pressure from the force of an impending blow. She'd created it with the intent to compensate for her disadvantage at close-range battle, or if she ever found herself incapable of using her fan. The concept was simple enough, but mastering the dispersal of chakra was incredibly difficult.

Her chakra control was already above par, a necessity to manipulating her energy to be as sharp and thin as possible. But she was unused to emitting a steady, even flow over her entire body in the way used by medics. Her control was not wound tight enough to manage it yet, making the technique inefficient. Her chakra leaked from her the way air leaked from a punctured balloon.

Where she was now, she could only use it for ten minutes without half her energy diffusing uselessly into the air around her.

It was in that state, drained of half her chakra reserve, that they found her.

The night had proved to be an anomaly from the beginning, darkness falling with no red moonlight to accompany it. She was taken aback, knowing the moon was supposed to be in its waning crescent, and was momentarily seized with the unbidden hope that the genjutsu had been broken. But then she smelled it.

Ozone. It seeped, thick and cloying, into the damp basement. Occasionally, the gentle patter of drizzle could be heard striking the floorboards overhead. Her shoulders slackened when she realized what had happened. A heavy overcast had blotted out the night sky, hiding the moon and stars.

Maru stirred, agitated by the smell and the humidity, and broke into fits of crying every other hour. The fourth time he did it, she rose from her cross-legged position on the floor and strode over to his cot, expression taut with frustration.

"You need to stop," she told him, lifting him out and leaning his head against her shoulder. "You're going to get us—"

Temari cut herself short, freezing when she heard a noise from above. Maru continued to fuss into her chest as she strained her ears and listened.

Footsteps.

She slowly raised her eyes to the ceiling, throat growing parched at the sound of feet treading the singed floorboards overhead. Maru made another keening noise and Temari tightened her grip on him compulsively.

"Quiet," she hissed.

To her relief, he actually fell silent, probably distracted by the unfamiliar expression of terror on her face and the noise of footsteps. They waited, hearing nothing. Then quite suddenly there was something that sounded like rain hitting the floorboards—only heavier.

Temari's brow furrowed in confusion, the feeling slowly giving way to foreboding when the liquid leached through the cracks in the wood and a powerful smell saturated the air.

Oil. They were going to torch the place again.

She'd hardly realized it before a match dropped and she heard the whoosh of flames igniting. Then she was running, grabbing her supplies and stowing them in her satchel. She tucked Maru into the sling she'd fashioned from a bed sheet, swaddling him tightly against her chest.

Her fan was out by her side as she slid open the latch on the cellar doors, fingers twitching around the handle as she counted the seconds between the footsteps walking away.

One. Two. Three.

Embers exploded into the air and the roar of flames filled her ears when she burst from the cellar doors, fan unsheathed and open before the tainted could even react to her appearance. Gritting her teeth in effort, she swung the fan in an arc and unleashed her dust wind technique, simultaneously blowing them away along with the flames. The fire extinguished completely with the thick layer of dust that settled upon it.

Without wasting a second, she sprinted away from the scene and caught the next gust of wind, swinging her fan again and leaping upon it. It soared into the sky, into a blackness so absolute she had to look down at the fires dotting the landscape to ascertain how high and far she'd gotten.

Distance, she thought intently. I just need to get far enough. I need to put Maru somewhere safe.

At this wind speed, it would take her half a kilometre, tops, before she had to land again. And with the speed she'd seen the tainted run at, that gave her approximately three minutes to hide Maru and take them on.

She looked forward, lips thinning into a thin line as she counted the seconds towards descent.

Her estimation was right on target, bringing her to land several metres from a burning farmhouse. She hit the ground running, sheathing her fan while frantically searching the area for a hiding place.

There. A stone wall.

She dashed over to it, undoing the knots on the sling and carefully lowering the bundled infant into a niche between the brick and the debris of another razed house. Miraculously, he stayed quiet, comforted by the snug swaddling. Temari pressed a reassuring hand against his cheek before sprinting back towards the darkness to await their arrival.

The farther she could keep them from the firelight and Maru, the better. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, leaving her just capable of making out the outlines of stone columns and sparse vegetation. Despite the overcast, the environment retained a muddy, carmine tinge. Her tension mounted. There was too much room for them to dodge her attacks and she was liable to get surrounded. That, and she had no idea how well they could see in the dark.

She clenched her fists and waited.

A minute later, she caught sight of the first figure in the distance, running towards her at full speed. There would be another. They never travelled alone. True to her judgment, another figure appeared shortly after that. Then another. And another.

A cold weight settled against her ribs, cutting off her breath.

There were four of them. Two from Konoha, one from Suna, and the last from—

No, she reminded herself sharply. There was no Suna anymore. No Konoha. No Kumo. The world was a giant arena with no sides, and if she wanted to get out of this alive, she couldn't let archaic notions like alliances and patriotism hold her back. Her heart lurched when she recognized the Suna nin as Kera, a bubbly chuunin who'd been part of the tactical subdivision. The girl's face was marred with scratches and bruises, her clothes in tatters. But her eyes were hazed with redness, acute and hyperaware.

Kera, she knew, was a close-range fighter. The Kumo nin, she could only guess, though the presence of the katana strapped to his back and their natural affinity for lightning suggesting close to mid-range. The other two, she had no idea.

They raced towards her, unrelenting at the sight of her standing ready with her fan. Temari waited for the exact moment they got within range, then swung the fan open to three stars. The first gale of wind knocked them off their feet, throwing them to the ground. The second was filled with lacerating winds that could have levelled a forest, its gusts heard tearing into clothing and flesh even from a distance.

The move swallowed up massive amounts of chakra, even more so than usual as she spread it to cover a wider range to compensate for her poor aim in the dark. It was a justifiable sacrifice considering it usually left victims too heavily injured to move.

Her expression morphed to one of shock, though, when she caught sight of them staggering to their feet, impervious to their injuries. Once more, they charged her, countenances twisted in rage. Once again, Temari threw another gust of wind, forcing even more chakra into it. It hit them like a brick wall, knocking them off their feet again.

A cold, trickling feeling of dread ran down her back when she caught sight of them rising seconds later, clothing shredded and skin lacerated beyond repair. Before she could gather her bearings for the next swing, the Kumo-nin formed a seal and the smell of static filled the air.

Temari hardly registered what was about to happen before throwing herself out of the way, the tingle of charged particles grazing her skin as a bolt of lightning gouged a hole in the ground. One of the Konoha nin was on her immediately, swinging a windmill shuriken towards her neck. Sparks burst from the collision of the shuriken against the side of her fan, the force of impact driving a jolt of pain up her wrists.

As he moved to pull back and swing again, Temari lunged forward and swung around, bludgeoning him in the side of the head with her closed fan. The blow shattered his jaw and skull, spraying teeth and blood across the ground. He staggered, senseless, then collapsed.

She wasn't allowed a moment of reprieve, her muscles protesting at the sudden leap backwards she had to take to dodge another one of the Kumo nin's lightning strikes. Desperate, she unleashed another gale of wind, knocking him back as Kera and the remaining Konoha nin leapt at her.

The Suna chuunin was adept with weapons and did not waste a second in swinging her tanto at Temari's neck, using her momentum from the missed blow to swing around and slice at her midsection. The tip of the blade caught her flak jacket, millimetres from penetrating through to the skin.

Hearing it tear, Temari jumped straight into the air, bolstered by a swing of her fan to dodge the next cut and in anticipation of the Konoha nin bearing down on her from behind. The two skidded to a stop, almost colliding. Kera recovered first, catching sight of the jounin plunging down towards them with the serrated edge of her fan glinting in the dim light. She flipped out of the way. The Konoha nin did not react in time.

He dropped a moment later, his body hitting the ground before his head did.

Once again, Temari barely managed to land before she was forced to dodge again, the constant, volatile movements spilling dangerous amounts of lactic acid into her muscles. The desperate flings of her fan to keep Kera and the Kumo nin at bay were making her chakra plummet to critical levels, a fact she was all too aware of as her movements slowed and Kera managed to form a seal without her notice.

Her movements ceased altogether when the chuunin burst from the ground behind her and seized her fan, kicking her in the back. Temari stumbled from the blow, cold panic flooding her veins as she the felt the iron weight of her fan slip from her grasp.

Kera flung it somewhere into the darkness the same instant the Kumo nin lunged on Temari from behind, his breaths hard and animalistic. His arms tightly ensnared her neck.

She immediately clamped down on his wrists, straining against his grip to stop him snapping her neck. His strength was monstrous, stemming from total lack of inhibition in the use of his muscles. At the same instant, Kera came charging her from the front, kunai out in front of her.

Temari's reaction was both instinctive and desperate. She reached back and seized the hilt of the sword on the Kumo nin's shoulder, yanking it out and slashing violently in front of her.

Kera fell back, throat spraying blood, and Temari wrenched the kunai out of her hand, kicking off of her and sending herself and the Kumo nin crashing to the ground. The impact loosened his grip just enough for her to gauge the distance between her neck and his and she rammed the kunai into the junction beneath his chin. It was a near miss, the blade nicking her throat before it found home.

He snarled, gushing blood against her shoulder, but his hold didn't relent, instead tightening on her windpipe. Frantic, Temari stabbed him again. Then again. Then once more. He was gurgling now, arms slackening just enough for her to twist out of his grip. She lunged to her feet, flipping away from the barrage of weapons the madly shrieking Kera unleashed on her. The chuunin ran at her, eyes wide and wild despite the gush of blood still spraying from her throat.

Temari thought herself finished until she realized she was still holding the katana. It was unfamiliar in her grip, far from being her weapon of choice, but she'd gotten past the point of efficiency. If it could stab, it could work.

Kera had the same idea, her tanto in hand once more. She sliced at her, black hair flying in wild disarray about her head. Temari parried the blow with the katana, ears ringing from the clang of steel, only for the younger girl to swing the blade around and make a devastatingly fast swipe at her midsection again.

It caught the tear in the flak jacket, this time finding skin. Temari stumbled back, bracing a hand against her side. Her fingers immediately became wet with blood.

Kera came at her again, swinging mercilessly and forcing her to retreat. Temari was nowhere near on par with the chuunin when it came to sword fighting, but she knew her well enough to anticipate the pattern the girl fought with. Her technique was geared towards making the opponent bleed out, comprised by quick, zigzagging cuts at all the major arteries and soft tissue from the neck down. Her last destination would be the femoral artery, putting her at a vulnerable position as she bent to strike with the short tanto.

Temari waited for it, counting each strike with a mounting heart rate until Kera aimed low and left herself open. Without wasting a beat, Temari drove her knee into the girl's chin, snapping her head back and sending her reeling backwards with her arms spread-eagled. Gripping the katana in both hands, Temari raised it and put every ounce of her strength into plunging forward.

Her gaze met the other girl's for a fraction of a second, long enough to convey what she couldn't say through words.

I'm sorry.

The blade pierced her chest, driving her up against a stone column and penetrating the rock behind her. The impact drove cracks up the surface. Undeterred by the impalement, Kera's arms swiped at her, fingernails managing to scratch the crest of Temari's cheek as she lurched back.

She stared, horrified, as the girl continued to glare lividly and seethe through the blood pouring between her teeth. Her hands reached up and gripped the blade of the katana, fingers squeezing in an effort to wrench it out of her chest.

The blade was immovable. That much was fact. But she persisted, pulling till her hands slid along the steel from the blood streaming from the lacerations, pulling till her fingers were severed to the bone, pulling till the blood drained out of her neck and her hateful glare froze on her face, staying even after her heart stopped beating.

Temari stared at her, panting harshly and shaking from exertion. She took an unsteady step backwards, tearing her gaze away from the dead girl to the others. The Kumo nin lay motionless, bled out. The other two were also dead.

She couldn't even bring herself to feel relief, shoulders still taut with the adrenaline rushing through her. The landscape seemed much brighter to her now, another effect of the adrenaline as her pupils dilated to the extent of taking up her irises. The farmhouse continued burning in the distance, a false beacon.

Slowly, she started forward, eyes skipping over the copious amounts of blood staining the ground in search of her fan. She found it several meters ahead, bloodstained and muddied in the dirt.

Stooping, she retrieved it, pausing a moment to look at the sight of it shaking in her hands. Steeling herself, she clenched her fists to stop the tremors and reached up to sheath it, only to stop midway when she caught sight of something ahead of her.

The air left her lungs.

Another one.

The figure was moving steadily across the arid ground a fair distance ahead, hardly distinguishable against the darkness. Too far from her.

Much too close to Maru.

Without even realizing it, she took a running leap upon her fan and soared into the sky once more, teal eyes fixed on the indistinct black blur she was hurtling towards with reckless speed. Her flight was soundless, its presence going unnoticed due to her severe loss of chakra until her feet collided with the dirt behind him and she swung the serrated edge of her fan at his neck.

The sound of her landing was all it took to alert him to the oncoming blow and he instantly ducked, whirling around with his fingers raised in a seal. A massive fireball erupted across the ground, the sudden vibrancy slamming into her pupils despite the shield of her fan. When she lowered her weapon, she found herself half-blind, the sudden flash of light undoing her adjustment to the dark.

But the rush from her last battle left her hyperaware, her ears alerting her to the sharp ring of kunai cutting air before he released it. She knocked it away with her fan, realizing she needed to get in close for a killing blow if she was to have any chance at winning.

She was taken aback when he dodged the blow of her fan and avoided her elbow, hardly able to wonder how he'd anticipated it before she found herself barely evading the kick flying towards her head. She couldn't avoid the sudden volley of shuriken that followed, though, feeling several snag in her flak jacket and one bite deeply into her thigh.

She fell back, suddenly overcome by the hysteric fear that this was it. Her limbs turned to jelly, thoughts dissolving into a fog and a mantra of not now. Not like this. Please not like this.

A hoarse noise lodged in her throat as she saw him step forward.

Then Maru suddenly cried out.

The shrill sound cut through the night like a knife, stopping the man in his tracks. His head whipped towards the source of the noise. Temari did not allow him an opportunity to recover, only managing to catch him by surprise through the sheer brutality of her next move.

Maru's voice was drowned out by the near-inhuman shriek of effort that tore out of her throat when she raised her fan and slammed the blunt end of it into his thorax. She felt his ribs and sternum cave beneath the blow, shards of bone splintering his organs and sending him flying back.

It was an instant kill.

The amount of energy she'd propelled into the attack drove her to her knees, pain ricocheting through her overtaxed muscles. Her heaving breaths sounded like sobs in her ears, uncontrollably loud and harsh in the dark. The body landed with a distant thump somewhere ahead of her.

Maru wailed from behind the stone wall. She flinched and tried to stand, gritting her teeth when she found her limbs trembling uncontrollably. Staggering to her feet, she braced a hand against the top of her fan and lifted her head.

Movement. He was getting up again.

She merely stood there, petrified. That blow should have killed him. He couldn't be alive, not unless he was—

He took a step towards her.

Run, a voice interrupted her musings. Run, run, run, run.

She finally obeyed, launching herself over the stone wall where she'd hidden Maru. Snatching him up from the ground, she dashed away as fast as her legs could carry her, only to stumble to a stop near the burning house when her fan slipped from her grasp and fell to the dirt.

She seized it, stalling only a fraction of a second. It was all it took for the voice behind her to reach her ears.

"Wait."

Temari froze.

Her pulse hammered in her ears, eyes wide and unblinking as a prickling feeling ran down the back of her neck. Maru whimpered into her chest and she rested a tremulous hand upon his head, bracing herself as much as she was bracing him when she slowly turned around.

Basic shinobi logic dictated that one never stopped or reconsidered a course of action at the behest of an enemy. It was just common sense.

But the tainted didn't talk.

She swallowed hard, waiting, eyes searching the dark for the nearing footsteps.

Maru's whimpering turned to crying, smothered into her shirt as she stood near the crackling timbre and he slowly approached. She knew what he was the instant she saw the ashen skin in the light, her realization confirmed when he stepped forward and the firelight bled over his face.

Black sclera. One of the Edo Tensei.

His slow gait bespoke caution and wariness, features arranged in a way to suggest he was just as surprised to see her as she was him. The look only intensified when his gaze fell on the infant held against her chest.

Belatedly, she noticed the red glistening in the centres of his eyes, recognizable for all the times she'd seen it in her perusal of the bingo books. Then her gaze drifted, taking in the rest of him. The dark hair. The world-weary expression. The distinct facial features.

She'd just found Uchiha Itachi.