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Sasuke hits the ground running.
His right eye pulses with pain and goes dark, chopping his field of vision short and turning his depth perception into more of a guessing game. But the price of Izanagi is expected, anticipated, and paid willingly.
If this works... if he can save them—
His left eye sees the walls of Otafuku-gai. It’s an absolute perfect replication of the village in his memory — unnervingly perfect. His positioning is the same, not an inch off, as if he’s standing exactly in his own footprints. The fall of light is the same, the same time of day at the same time of year.
Of course it is. That’s the whole point.
“Sasuke?” Shikako asks sharply, looking at him sideways. There’s a frown on her face, more worry than he’s used to seeing her actually show. There is more stress visible in the lines around her eyes, her pokerface not quite as good. She looks so young — short and round faced, with the bangs she’d grown out years ago.
She is young. Young and untrained — just a genin — but of course she’s already noticed something is wrong.
Shikako had always noticed, even before she had been — they had been — strong enough to do anything about it.
The last time they came this way, the first time… they hadn’t been strong enough. They’d known, at the time, that they weren’t strong enough but they hadn’t known what it would cost them. What it would cost her.
I’d do it again, she’d told him in the hospital, after Tsunade had woken her up. Without hesitation.
He means to make sure that she doesn’t have to.
“I’ll tell you later,” he tells her, barely stumbling in his steps as he goes from memory to reality. The genin he was would have faltered and tripped, but the jounin he is now — he will be in future — is more than capable enough of smoothly sliding into place.
“Your eye—” Shikako says, voice climbing a pitch higher in distress and confusion.
“Later,” Sasuke stresses. “We need to get to Naruto before they do.”
Her jaw snaps shut and she nods, determined, but he can see the questions percolating in her mind. It’s lucky that he does mean to tell her because otherwise — well. He’s seen Shikako after mysteries before.
He pushes forward, increases their speed by gentle notches. It feels to him like they’re going too slow, but Shikako is starting to lag behind him and he can’t leave her behind when Itachi is roaming the countryside. Knowing their luck… she’d end up running into them while he was focused on Naruto, on getting Naruto out of the way.
“Naruto and Jiraiya have split up,” he says, as they near the gates, without waiting for her to sense it first. He misses the range she will develop on her sensory abilities, but there’s no need of them right now. He remembers where Naruto is. He could never forget it. “You need to go and find Jiraiya. Get him to come to us as fast as he can.”
Shikako doesn’t immediately go. She looks at him, conflicted. “I can find Naruto faster.”
Immediately, Sasuke shakes his head. “No. You need to find Jiraiya for us. Please. Trust me.”
She stares at him for a long, long moment — almost like the pieces are lining up and she knows — and then she sighs. “You’re explaining later,” she says, already turning away. There’s tension in every line of her body. “So you better not get hurt.”
Nothing about this whole self assigned mission to rescue Naruto had ever implied it would be safe — but Shikako sounds so certain in her admonishment, like she knows as well as he does exactly what they’re about to face.
That’s a thought for later.
—
Shikako dashes through the streets of Otafuku-gai, looking for Jiraiya. His chakra signature is muddled to her senses, like he’s everywhere and nowhere, like her gaze keeps sliding off of him.
Which means—
She needs him to find her instead.
Instead of plowing her way through the festival crowd where she’s a head and a half shorter than the adults and near invisible, she jumps up the walls and runs along the sides of the buildings, drawing stares.
Extremely bad if Akatsuki notices her but… she’s willing to bet that Akatsuki wouldn’t care much about a random other genin in the vicinity of their target. She’s nothing for them to be worried about.
“I didn’t tell you where we were going so you could follow us,” Jiraiya says, displeased, from behind her.
There was no one there a second ago.
Shikako spins around. She’s gasping for air, sweating and breathing hard from the run, and has to brace her hands on her thighs. For a second, she thinks she doesn’t have the air to speak — that she won’t be able to pass her information on because of her frailty.
“Itachi Uchiha is here,” she gasps out. “He’s looking for Naruto. He’s already taken Kakashi-sensei out.”
Jiraiya mutters a black oath and then his hand is grasping the back of her shirt, hoisting her like a naughty kitten and they move, the world blurring about her in a way that makes her stomach flip and flop with nausea.
And then they stop abruptly on the rooftop above a hotel because there are thousands of orange clothed Naruto’s pouring out of the building and onto the street, a swarm of them that makes it almost impossible to pick out Sasuke in the middle.
They’re running.
Which means—
Akatsuki is already here.
She hopes like hell that the real Naruto is one of the ones fleeing, because two figures with black and red cloaks step out of the hotel and the clones all die en-mass around them, leaving nothing but chakra smoke wisping down to the cobblestones.
Jiraiya drops her heavily onto the rooftop and body flickers down to the street. Sound doesn’t travel very well and she can’t hear what they’re saying but Shikako doesn’t dare move or draw attention to herself. She’s trying to quiet her breathing, make herself as unobtrusive as pussible, but her lungs are burning and she sounds so loud.
The standoff grows tense…
And Itachi and Kisame leave.
“Oh, thank god,” she says, and drops herself down the side of the building in an ungainly scramble, going for Sasuke and Naruto. “Are you okay, are you okay?”
“Yeah!” Naruto says, in a raggedy chorus, before he appears to realise that there are still clones milling about and dismisses them. “That old pervert arrived just in time!”
“Watch it, brat,” Jiraiya grumbles half-heartedly, but his eyes are still sharp and scanning the direction that Akatsuki had gone. “You better be more respectful for the rest of the trip if you want your friends to come with us.”
Naruto lights up, but Shikako is just surprised. “You’re taking us too?” she asks.
Jiraiya snorts. “After this? I’d worry more about how much trouble you’d get in if I didn’t.”