I tried not to fall asleep, I did.
The bark at my back dug into my shoulder blades. My thighs burned from bracing on the branch. Every time my head tipped, my fingers jerked and I shoved the tiniest drip of chakra down into the Squad Marks.
Naruto: dim but steady, warm orange ember.
Sasuke: ugly, spasming pulses around the new seal, like someone scribbling over a heartbeat.
The forest hummed around all of it. Chakra in the roots. Chakra in the air. Chakra in the bugs. It pressed at my teeth until my jaw hurt.
"Just another ten minutes," I whispered to myself. "Then you can—"
My body did not care about my plans.
My eyelids slid down.
The forest went away.
At first I thought I was still in the trees.
There was a sense of height, weightless and slow, like the moment in a fall where gravity hasn't properly remembered you yet. But there was no bark at my back, no damp smell, no insect buzz.
Just…dark.
Not empty-dark. Deep-space dark, with something huge and pale hanging in it.
The moon.
It was bigger than it had any right to be. Close enough that I could see faint scars across its surface, like someone had dragged fingernails through stone. Light spilled off it in a way that made no sense—too soft, too bright, like it was trying to reach me specifically.
There was a person between me and it.
For a second my stupid heart said Kakashi, because: tall, and the hair. Pale, falling in a straight line, catching that not-moonlight in sharp edges.
But Kakashi didn't glow.
This guy did. His skin was the color of milk under water. His clothes blurred into the dark around him, some kind of pale robe that bled into the background. His eyes—
I couldn't see them. Every time I tried, the light shifted, smearing his face into a white shape with a mouth.
The mouth was moving.
He was talking. I could tell that much; his lips shaped words, steady and intent, like he had all the time in the world and I was the one on a clock. The sound didn't make it to me. It broke on something invisible halfway, dissolving into a low vibration in my ribs.
I lifted a hand. Or I thought I did. My arm moved like it was underwater.
"…can't hear you," I tried to say.
No voice. Just breath.
He tilted his head, like he'd heard anyway. Like he was listening to the way my lungs dragged air instead of what I said.
It didn't feel like being watched the way Orochimaru's gaze had. That had been a knife pressed just under the skin, waiting to go in.
This was…gravity. Soft, relentless. A pull from behind the eyes and under the sternum. The kind of attention that said you were a piece of an equation, not a target. Important, but not necessarily safe.
Something in his expression shifted. Gentler. Sad, maybe.
His lips shaped one clear word.
Not yet.
A drop of something cold hit me in the chest.
I felt it even though I was pretty sure I didn't have a body here. A single point, right behind my breastbone, like water landing on a still pool.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the ripple started.
It moved out in circles: chest, shoulders, fingers. A spreading awareness that this was wrong, this distance, this floating. There was weight I was supposed to have. Pain I was supposed to be feeling. Two idiot heartbeats I was supposed to be listening for.
My Squad Marks screamed at me.
Not literal sound. Just a sudden spike in the pattern I'd been keeping half an eye on even in sleep—a frantic, tiny jitter on the edge of the web.
Not human. Not Sasuke's jagged scribble, not Naruto's stubborn burn.
Small. Fast. Pure panic.
Animal.
The moon blurred. The white-haired man's hand moved like he was reaching out, like he wanted to press something into my palm.
I fell.
The last thing I saw was the moon, huge and bright and wrong, rushing up at me like it was going to crack my skull open.
I slammed back into my body so hard my teeth clicked.
The forest snapped around me in pieces—smell first (damp wood, cold sweat), then sound (Naruto's soft snore, the distant scream of something unfortunate and feathered), then the ache in my burned fingers.
And under all that: chakra.
The genin-old-battlefield stew was still there, thick and ugly, but on top of it, close, something else jittered.
Tiny. Fast. Skittish.
I blinked grit out of my eyes and forced my head up.
Below, at the base of the tree, the boys were where I'd left them: Naruto sprawled on his back, one arm flung across his stomach, mouth open slightly; Sasuke on his side, muscles locked around the curse mark, sweat soaking his collar.
Nothing near them.
The feeling tickled at the far edge of my range again. I shifted my focus outward, combing clumsily through the static.
There.
A little knot of chakra, all sharp pulses and no control, zigzagging across the forest floor. My awareness brushed it, and the emotion behind it hit like a slap.
Fear.
Something small and furry was having the worst night of its life.
I squinted, letting my eyes catch up to what my senses were screaming about.
A squirrel burst through a clump of ferns, skidded, and froze right at the edge of our makeshift clearing.
Its tail fluffed to twice its size. Its sides heaved. It looked like someone had dipped its flank in ash.
No. Not ash.
Paper.
A strip of it was plastered along its side, half hidden by fur. Seal script crawled over it in neat, ugly lines. The faintest hiss of molded chakra sizzled across the ink.
My brain took exactly one second to assemble that.
Explosive tag.
Moving explosive tag.
Moving explosive tag running straight for the unconscious boys I'd just spent all my remaining muscle hauling into a safe-ish spot.
My whole body tried to panic at once.
No time to climb down. No chakra to spare for anything fancy. If I screamed, I'd wake Naruto and he'd flail in exactly the wrong direction.
The squirrel twitched a front paw forward, testing the edge of the clearing.
"Sorry," I whispered.
I jammed my hand into a crack in the bark, fingers closing around the first solid thing they found. A pebble, smooth and cold and exactly a squirrel's-worth of fate.
I flicked my wrist.
Chakra jumped along my tendons out of reflex—barely a spark, just enough to add spite.
The pebble shot off the branch. It smacked into the trunk just to the left of the squirrel with a sharp, mean crack.
The squirrel levitated.
Okay, not literally, but the jump it did was impressive. It spun midair, let out the rodent equivalent of "NOPE," and bolted the other way, straight back into the undergrowth it had come from.
I exhaled slowly, the tremor in my chest catching on my ribs.
The little knot of animal chakra receded, still panicked, but moving away from my boys instead of toward them.
"Sorry, little guy," I muttered again. "Wrong nightmare."
A few seconds later, there was a muffled whump somewhere deeper in the trees. A bloom of overpressured chakra hiccuped through the forest, making all the background signatures flinch.
Naruto snuffled and turned his head, but didn't wake.
Sasuke's pulse spiked, then dipped, the curse-mark-cancer in his chakra flaring in answer to the shock. I rested my palm against the trunk and pushed the barest bit of stability down into both marks, more instinct than technique.
"I've got you," I whispered. "I'm still here."
I was not the girl who bled out in the dirt and got left there.
Not this time.
I shifted on the branch, eyes scanning the dark at the direction the explosion had come from.
Someone out there had decided we were worth blowing up and had also decided to use a squirrel to do it. I took that personally.
Fine.
I could be petty later. For now, I kept my back against the trunk, my fingers pressed to the ink on my wrist, and let the forest's noise wash over me until my heartbeat stopped trying to hammer its way out.
Sleep crept up again on soft feet.
I bared my teeth at it.
"You get nothing," I told the dark. "You had your turn."
My eyelids slid down anyway.
From their perch, Team Dosu had an excellent view of the near-miss.
They were crouched in the branches of a tree two trunks over, high enough that most genin wouldn't think to look up, low enough that they could see the whole clearing: the unconscious Uchiha slumped against the roots, the jinchūriki sprawled beside him, the pink-haired girl tucked into the crook of the branch above like a badly dressed bird.
Zaku shifted, wood creaking under his weight.
"This is stupid," he muttered. "We should just drop in and take his head. How long are we gonna sit here?"
Dosu didn't answer immediately. His good eye tracked the flicker of motion as the squirrel they'd tagged darted into view.
The animal froze at the edge of the clearing.
A pebble cracked against the trunk beside it.
The squirrel bolted.
The tag went with it.
Dosu's attention didn't follow the squirrel. It stayed on the girl.
She was slumped against the trunk, glasses crooked, head tilted at an uncomfortable angle. From a distance she looked half asleep, more dead than on guard. But her hand was braced on the bark, fingers twitching in irregular patterns, like she was counting something only she could feel.
She'd thrown the stone without even looking down.
The muffled explosion rolled through the forest a beat later. Zaku flinched. Kin's eyes went wide, catching the flash between leaves.
The Uchiha didn't move.
The blond idiot snorted, rolled, and kept snoring.
The girl's shoulders eased a fraction. Her hand stayed where it was, pressed to the tree, muscles taut.
"The girl's not just decoration," Dosu said quietly. "She's got perimeter awareness."
Zaku made a dismissive noise. "She got lucky. If we'd used a bigger tag—"
"You're the one who insisted on 'not wasting a good seal on a rodent,'" Kin cut in, voice cool. "Don't complain now."
Zaku scowled at her. "Tch. Whatever. We regroup and do it properly. I can blow the whole clearing with one hit if you let me—"
"No," Dosu said.
He wasn't looking at them. His eye was on the three Leaf genin and the faint traces of chakra webbed around their little camp.
Ink on the bark. Paper tucked against roots. Little smears the girl had left in the cracks of the trunk. Crude work, but layered cleverly—flash and adhesive and more he couldn't read without getting closer.
Orochimaru-sama had said Konoha's new generation would be soft. Secure. Complacent.
He had not mentioned they'd hand some orphan girl the beginnings of fuinjutsu and a frontline placement.
"She's laced that area with tags," Dosu went on. "And she's reading chakra, at least in a small radius."
Kin's gaze sharpened. "A sensor?"
"Not a skilled one," he said. "Her control's a mess. But she knew the moment that squirrel crossed the perimeter. She's monitoring something."
"The Uzumaki?" Zaku asked. "Or the Uchiha?"
"Both," Dosu said. "And us, if we're careless."
Zaku blew out an annoyed breath. "So we wait more. Great."
He flexed his bandaged arm, the one that hid his air cannons, like he was trying to shake off boredom.
"Orders were clear," Dosu reminded him. "We observe Uchiha Sasuke. Test the results of the curse. If he's weak, we kill him. If he's strong, we report back."
"And if we get to break some Leaf in the process," Zaku said, grin returning, "we enjoy it."
"That part was implied," Dosu said dryly.
He watched the slow rise and fall of Sasuke's chest.
Even from here, the seal was visible, dark marks spreading from the bite on his neck like ink dropped into water. The cursed chakra was a sour note against the forest's usual background, wrong in a way even Dosu, who was not a sensor, could feel. It spiked, receded, waited.
"We mis-timed the bomb," Kin said. "He's still out. That wasn't a proper test."
Dosu hummed in agreement.
He thought of Orochimaru's hand on his shoulder earlier that day, Snake Summoner fingers cool even through cloth.
"The Hidden Sound is small now," Orochimaru had said, voice calm, almost bored. "But with the right instruments, even a small sound can shatter stone."
Instruments. Tools. Weapons.
Dosu knew what he was to most people. A failed experiment from a failing village. An ear full of wires and a chakra system tuned to frequencies he didn't get to choose. Zaku's temper and Kin's precision made them dangerous; Orochimaru's attention made them useful.
But only as long as they didn't break.
"We're not strong enough to fight him as he is," Dosu said. "Not if that girl's awake and the jinchūriki's at half capacity."
Zaku scoffed. "The jinchūriki's down. You saw it—whatever he pulled to get out of that snake, he's spent. He's not waking up for a while."
"And when he does," Dosu said calmly, "the fox in his gut will remember we tried to blow him up in his sleep."
Zaku opened his mouth, then shut it again. Kin smirked very slightly.
"We move when the Uchiha wakes," Dosu continued. "That's when the curse will be loudest. Orochimaru-sama didn't paint his new toy just so we could stab it before it plays a note."
Kin nodded. "We should reposition, then. This branch is too obvious. If she wakes again and looks up, we're silhouettes."
"And I'd rather not find out what her tags do the hard way," Dosu added.
Zaku muttered something rude in the direction of Team 7's clearing, but he didn't argue.
They shifted back into the deeper foliage, moving from branch to branch with quiet, practiced jumps.
Before he turned away, Dosu allowed himself one more look at the three shapes in the clearing.
The boy with the demon in his gut. The Uchiha with a snake's bite on his neck. The pink-haired girl who threw pebbles in her sleep and wired the forest around her like a second skin.
"Decoration," he repeated under his breath, tasting the word.
No.
Konoha liked their kunoichi pretty and quiet and in the background. Dosu had seen enough of their teams pass by to recognize the pattern.
This one had been given space to sharpen.
Instruments came in sets. You didn't ignore the one that held the rhythm.
"Don't underestimate her," he said finally.
Zaku snorted. "Relax. I'll blow them all away the same."
Kin rolled her eyes. Dosu let the argument pass. Zaku would learn or break; those were the only outcomes that mattered.
They vanished into the trees, three shadows folding into the larger darkness, and the Forest of Death closed back over their absence.
Behind them, in the little trapped clearing, the bomb that didn't go off still echoed in the way the animals had hushed and then started up again.
Above the sleeping boys, a girl slumped against a trunk and refused, even in dreams, to let the perimeter go.