We'd been in the mouth for maybe ten minutes and it already needed to spit.
"I gotta pee," Naruto announced.
Loudly. Like he was declaring war.
I tripped over a root.
"Why would you say that at full volume?" I hissed. "Do you want to die with your pants down?"
Sasuke's eye twitched. "Can you not broadcast bodily functions to the entire forest?"
Naruto folded his arms, already defensive. "What? It's natural!"
"So is decomposition," I said. "Less keen on you demonstrating that one."
We'd stopped in a little dip between three giant trees, roots twisting up and over each other like an ossified wave. The canopy above was a clotted mess of leaves and hanging moss; everything smelled like damp wood, old mud, and too many things that had died in the underbrush.
The pressure in the air had only gotten worse the deeper we went. Forest chakra hugging my skin, pressing in on my teeth. That distant metal-scrape under it all hadn't changed—still there, still wrong, still too far away to be useful.
Naruto bounced in place. "Look, if I just hold it, I'm gonna get distracted and then I'll die, and it'll be your fault."
"That's not how causality works," I said automatically. "Also, leave a clone."
He made a face. "Why? I'll be, like, thirty seconds, tops."
I stared at him. Sasuke stared at him. The forest probably stared at him.
"I do not believe you have ever done anything in thirty seconds," I said. "You can't even pick ramen toppings that fast."
He opened his mouth, closed it, thought about it. "…Okay, fair. But I don't wanna waste chakra on a clone just for peeing!"
"We are in a forest specifically designed for child-on-child violence," I reminded him. "We're not wasting chakra, we're investing it in 'not being stabbed in the spine while your hands are busy.'"
"Naruto," Sasuke added, voice flat, "you're the one carrying the scroll. You don't go anywhere alone."
"That's why I'm telling you I'm going!" Naruto said, exasperated. "C'mon, you think I'm stupid?"
"Yes," we both said.
He spluttered. "You traitors."
I rubbed my face. The air felt thick enough to chew. In the back of my skull, the marks I'd set on them earlier hummed faintly—Naruto's loud, restless presence ahead, Sasuke's tight, steady one beside me. Little anchor points in a place that felt like it wanted to swallow us whole.
"Fine," I said. "Compromise. No clone, but you're not walking off completely untagged."
He squinted. "I already got your Squad Mark. You just zapped me, remember?"
"Yeah, that's for general 'are you alive' stuff," I said, lifting my hand and snapping my fingers near his hip. "You want premium service, you get premium seals."
He looked immediately suspicious. "What's that mean?"
"It means stand still," I said, already stepping in. "I'm not looking, I promise."
He yelped as I grabbed the waistband of his shorts and yanked it up enough to get skin and cloth both. The fabric was warm and damp with sweat. Definitely not thinking about that.
"Hey! Buy me dinner first!" he protested, going bright red.
"Can't afford it," I said. "Hold still or I write 'emergency latrine' instead."
That shut him up.
I thumbed my ink, smearing a quick crescent-and-dot sigil low near his hip bone. Fast, simple, tuned specifically for him. Not a full-on Squad Mark, just a little thing that would ping when I pushed at it and send me a tiny echo back from his chakra, not anyone else's.
"Okay," I said. "Pulse Tag installed."
"Pulse Tag?" Naruto echoed dubiously.
"So I can feel the exact moment someone murders you mid-stream," I said.
He made a strangled noise. "That's messed up!"
"Talk to literally any chūnin about statistics," I said. "Go. Bushes. Now. Shout if you get murdered."
"That's what I'm trying to avoid," he grumbled, but he shuffled off toward the thicker undergrowth anyway, one hand already going for his zipper.
"Don't go out of sight," Sasuke called after him.
"I'm not a baby!" Naruto yelled back right before he disappeared behind a tangle of ferns and low branches. "I'll be—"
His voice cut off as the forest swallowed him.
"—thirty seconds," I muttered. "Sure."
We stood there.
The insect drone pressed in. Something chittered high up. My senses stretched whether I wanted them to or not: big slow presence off to our right, insect cluster overhead, faint flutter of some other team panicking in the distance.
Naruto's mark buzzed at the edge of my awareness, moving a little further and then stopping. Even when I wasn't focusing, I could feel that knot of…Naruto-ness, right where he should be. Loud, restless, grumpy.
Don't think about last time, my brain offered helpfully.
Last time there hadn't been marks or tags or anyone who cared enough to keep track. Just empty woods, wet air, and a sense of being already forgotten.
I shoved the memory down and watched the bushes Naruto had vanished behind like they were going to grow teeth.
"Relax," Sasuke said quietly.
"I'd love to," I said. "I think I forgot how."
He made a noncommittal noise.
We waited.
Thirty seconds became a minute. Then two. Time stretched out, long and sticky. My shoulders crept up toward my ears. The static in the back of my head kept buzzing.
"Is he composing a ballad back there?" I muttered. "We should have forced him to leave a clone."
Sasuke's jaw tightened. "If he's being an idiot, I'll knock him out myself."
"You're gonna have to wait in line."
Branches rustled. Footsteps squished through damp leaf mold. Naruto pushed his way back through the undergrowth, brushing a leaf out of his hair.
"See?" he said. "Told you I'd be quick."
Some of the tension leaking out of my spine froze halfway.
Naruto looked…normal. Headband crooked, hair messy, clothes rumpled. Same bright orange eyes, same whisker marks, same ridiculous grin—
No, not quite.
His grin was there, but it was sitting wrong on his face. Too careful. His eyes didn't crinkle the way they usually did. His shoulders were a little straighter. His chin a little higher. The way you hold yourself when you're copying someone from the outside in.
Could've been my nerves, I told myself. Could've been the weird forest pressure skewing my read.
"Bravo," I said anyway, because my mouth didn't get the memo. "You didn't die. Gold star."
He barked a laugh. "You worry too much, Sylvie."
The sound rolled over my skin and didn't quite land. Like hearing a recording through static.
I flicked my awareness toward his Squad Mark out of habit.
He was still where he should be in my sense—roughly in front of me, same distance, same general Naruto-shaped noise. It lined up. But that could just be the fact he was standing there and my brain was doing the lazy thing.
"Hang on," I said, forcing my fingers to unclench. "Tag test."
Naruto blinked. "Huh?"
I tapped two fingers against my thigh, feeling for the little scrap of chakra I'd braided into the Pulse Tag. Then I pushed.
The seal was simple. It sent a little knock of my chakra into the mark and waited for the pushback—Naruto's chakra answering along that thread. Nothing fancy, nothing flashy. Just "you there?" "yeah."
Except when I pinged, the sense of him right in front of me didn't echo at all.
No bounce. No familiar tingle of response where my ink should be. Just my chakra going out…and not coming back from the person wearing his face.
For half a second, I thought I'd messed up the seal. But the thread of chakra I'd laid into the tag was still there, humming faintly—just not in front of me.
The faintest hiccup tugged at my attention a few meters off to the side instead, somewhere deeper in the underbrush.
Cold slid down my spine.
The boy in front of me smiled Naruto's grin at me and got nothing from my seal.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
"Yup," I said. "Tag's just being weird."
My voice sounded wrong in my own ears.
Beside me, Sasuke's posture went very, very still.
He'd noticed the moment "Naruto" stepped out of the bushes.
It wasn't obvious. Superficially, it was perfect: same loud voice, same stupid hair, same ridiculous orange eyes.
But Naruto never came out of the woods that quietly.
He usually crashed, or tripped, or announced himself like a one-boy parade. He always wore his weight impatiently, leaning forward, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet.
This Naruto's steps had been careful. Centered. His shoulders weren't slouched; they were set. His grin came late, like he'd remembered to put it on.
And his eyes—
Naruto's eyes were loud even when his mouth was shut. Always moving, taking everything in, never still for more than a heartbeat. The eyes on this face were too steady. Watching, not just seeing.
Sasuke had clocked it in two seconds and filed it under possible henge, confirm before killing the idiot.
Then Sylvie said "Tag test" and something in her chakra pulled tight like a drawstring.
She looked normal on the surface. Teasing, easy voice, the usual fake-casual tilt of her head. But her shoulders had climbed a fraction, fingers twitching like they wanted ink.
Most people wouldn't have noticed the difference.
Sasuke had spent months standing next to both of them. He noticed.
She pushed chakra into her seal. Sasuke didn't feel it, exactly, but he knew the moment something went wrong. The tiny pause. The way her pupils shrank for half a second.
She was lying when she said, "Tag's just being weird."
"Naruto" laughed it off. "See?" he said to him. "Overprotective."
Sasuke tilted his head. "Right," he said, keeping his voice flat. "Hey. Naruto."
"Yeah?" the fake said, a little too eager.
"Remember the last time we had a mission with Tora?" Sasuke asked. "What did you yell you were going to turn him into?"
There was only one correct answer.
They'd spent an entire afternoon chasing the daimyo's wife's cat across rooftops. Tora had shredded Naruto's arms and face so badly that when he finally grabbed the cat, bleeding and furious, he'd screamed that he was going to make it into "a really ugly pair of mittens" before Iruka smacked him.
Naruto had been very loud about this. For days.
Real Naruto would've exploded on reflex. "MITTENS! AND A HAT!" Or some equally stupid variation.
The boy wearing his face blinked once.
"Uh," he said. "I don't remember. Why are you asking about some stupid cat? That mission sucked."
Wrong.
Sasuke didn't let his expression change. Inside, the last of his doubt slid into place.
He saw Sylvie tense, just in the corner of his vision, hand twitching toward her ink pouch.
Good. She'd figured it out too.
"Yeah," Sasuke said. "It did."
He moved.
One moment he was standing still, the next he was in "Naruto's" space, kunai already in hand. The fake flinched too late, stepping back on instinct.
Sasuke swept his foot behind the impostor's ankle and hooked, yanking. At the same time, he jammed the flat of his kunai up under the other boy's chin.
"Drop the henge," Sasuke said calmly, blade kissing fake-Naruto's throat. "Now."
For a heartbeat, "Naruto's" eyes went wide with something that wasn't Naruto-panic. Then they narrowed.
Smoke burst around them as the transformation failed.
When it cleared, Sasuke had a stranger under his blade.
Older than them by a year or two, maybe. Dark, dirty hair stuck to his forehead. Cheekbones sharp. His eyes were a muddy color, hard and mean. The hitai-ate on his forehead bore four vertical lines: Amegakure.
Hidden Rain.
"Well," the Ame genin said, lips curling. "You're not as dumb as you look."
He twisted his wrist, trying to bring his hand up. Sasuke shifted his weight and drove his arm down with his knee, pinning it.
"Don't move," Sasuke said.
The boy snorted. "Or what? You'll scratch me?"
Something flicked overhead.
Sasuke's muscles moved before his thoughts. He jerked the boy sideways as a kunai whistled through where his head had been.
Second attacker. Maybe third. Of course the impostor hadn't come alone.
The Ame genin under him used the distraction to wrench his pinned arm free, twisting like an eel. He slammed his heel into the ground, kicking up dirt into Sasuke's eyes.
Sasuke turned his head, but grit still stung. He let go of the wrist, rolled, came up into a guard.
Another kunai hit the tree next to him. A shadow flickered in the canopy and was gone.
Cowards.
By the time his vision cleared, the boy whose face had been Naruto's was already sprinting back into the underbrush, light on his feet despite the blade-cut at his neck. He vanished into the greenery with practiced ease.
"Tch."
He could chase. He wanted to.
But the faint trail of scuff marks in the leaf mold behind those bushes, the broken branches, the weird angle Sylvie's eyes had gone when she used her seal—those pointed somewhere more important.
To the right. Deeper in.
"Can you track your tag?" he asked, turning to Sylvie.
Her face was too calm. Her knuckles were white around her ink brush.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah. This way."
She took off toward the undergrowth without waiting for him to answer.
He followed.
The place where Naruto had "gone to pee" looked like something had grabbed him and tried to erase him from the scene.
The ground was torn up, dirt churned with footprints. Broken branches, scuffed bark, a smear of something darker that my brain refused to identify. A disturbed patch of ferns led off to the side like an arrow.
My Pulse Tag thread was humming now that I was paying attention fully. Not from the pseudo-Naruto that had just run his mouth at us; from somewhere ahead and right, like a distant, steady drip.
"Here," I said, shoving aside a curtain of vines.
They clung in my hair, sticky and damp. I ducked under, pushed through a narrow gap between two roots big enough to drive a car over, and nearly tripped over him.
Naruto lay on his side in a little hollow between roots, turned away from the path, half-hidden by underbrush. His hands were tied behind his back with coarse rope. Another loop bound his ankles. Someone had been considerate enough—if you could call it that—to yank his pants back up before dumping him.
His face was slack. A red mark bloomed on his temple where something had hit him.
The Pulse Tag on his hip warmed under my mental touch, finally answering properly, not that flat nothing I'd gotten off the fake. His chakra felt…smaller. Dimmer. Pushed inward, like a hearth fire banked down to coals.
My knees gave out faster than my brain could tell them not to. I dropped beside him and grabbed his shoulder.
"Hey," I said, too sharp. "Naruto. Hey."
Sasuke slid in on my other side, eyes already sweeping the surrounding trees for more Rain idiots.
"He's breathing," Sasuke said, as calm as if he were commenting on the weather.
"Yeah," I said, and the word snagged on something in my chest. "Help me get him loose."
Sasuke's kunai made short work of the rope. As soon as Naruto's hands were free, I caught his wrists and pulled them forward, careful not to yank. The skin around them was already red and bruised.
"Hey," I said again, softer this time. "C'mon. Time to wake up. You don't get to nap during the murder exam."
He didn't move.
My stomach did a slow flip.
In my old life, this was the part where you shook someone and they didn't wake up, and you had to decide how long to keep pretending.
"Check him," Sasuke said.
"I know," I snapped, more sharply than he deserved.
I pressed my fingers to Naruto's neck to feel his pulse, just like they'd drilled into us in the Academy. Strong. Fast. Not fading. I let some chakra trickle into my fingers, the way I'd practiced in the hospital: not enough to heal, just enough to skim the surface.
His circulation sparked against my senses. Brain activity normal. No fracture under the swelling on his temple, just a nasty knock. Whatever they'd hit him with, it was made to incapacitate, not kill.
Relief hit so hard it made my fingers numb.
"Concussion-lite," I muttered. "They clocked him and dumped him. No internal bleeding, no obvious damage. Come on, idiot, wake up."
I shifted my chakra, this time pushing a little pulse up toward his head, just enough to annoy his nervous system. A half-step below the "I will absolutely give you a migraine" line.
"Up," I said. "I am not carrying you. You're too dense."
"Too loud," he mumbled.
His eyelids fluttered once, then again. I could've cried with how stupidly beautiful that was.
His face scrunched. "My head hurts."
"That's because you let someone hit it," I said, sitting back just enough to breathe. "Ten out of ten, would diagnose you with 'being Naruto.'"
His eyes cracked open. Unfocused blue washed over my face, then Sasuke's, then the trees overhead.
"What happened?" he slurred.
"You got ambushed," Sasuke said, blunt as a kunai handle. "By an Ame genin using henge."
Naruto pushed himself up onto his elbows, wobbling. "Like—the rain guys we saw at the gate?"
"The very same," I said. "One of them borrowed your face, came back to us, and tried to get us to let him walk around with our scroll. Sasuke caught it."
Naruto scowled, then winced, bringing a hand to his temple. "So you guys…you fought him without me?"
There it was. Not "I could've died." Not "thanks for saving me." Just offended he'd missed a fight.
I snorted, the tension in my chest melting into something mean and fond.
"Wow," I said. "Sorry we didn't schedule our life-or-death struggle around your bathroom break."
He glared at me with all the fire of a wet kitten. "I can't believe you beat someone without me."
"Oh, calm down," I said. "Technically, he ran away. Sasuke just scared him hard enough he forgot how to lie."
"Which counts as winning," Sasuke put in.
Naruto pouted. "I wanted to punch him."
"You can punch the next one," I promised. "Consider this motivation to not give kidnappers easy access to your kidneys."
He huffed, then squinted. "Wait. How'd you even know he wasn't me? I'm very convincing."
"You are deeply, profoundly unconvincing," I said. "For one, fake you didn't immediately complain about the rope burns. For two, he didn't remember your very loud threat to make Tora into mittens. For three…"
I tapped his hip where the Pulse Tag sat under his waistband.
"…this."
Naruto blinked down at my hand. "The…pee seal?"
"Do not call it that," I said.
Sasuke made the tiniest sound that might have been a choked laugh.
"The Pulse Tag only pings for you," I explained. "When the faker showed up, I poked it and got nothing. Which meant you weren't where your face was, which is generally a bad sign."
Naruto's eyes widened. "So wait, if you hadn't put that on me—"
"You'd still be tied up in a ditch because Sasuke would've still noticed," I said quickly, because my throat had tried to close around the words. "He clocked your imitation like, immediately."
It was true. Pulse Tag or not, Sasuke had swung the kunai first. My seal had just turned the bad feeling in my gut into facts.
Naruto looked between us, frowning. His expression softened for half a second before he covered it in bluster.
"Still," he muttered, rubbing his wrists. "Guess that was…kinda smart."
"Careful," I said. "You're going to strain something if you keep complimenting me."
He stuck his tongue out. "Shut up."
"Gladly," I lied.
His Squad Mark and the Pulse Tag both hummed steady in my awareness now, warm and solid. No flat zeros. No empty spaces where he should've been.
Like someone had taken a weight off my ribs.
The forest didn't care, of course. The pressure in the air stayed thick. The creepy far-off scrape under everything kept going. The bugs kept buzzing.
But Naruto was sitting up and yelling at me, and that mattered more than all of it.
"Can you stand?" Sasuke asked.
Naruto pushed himself to his feet, swayed, and caught himself on my shoulder. His weight slammed into me harder than it should have; I planted my feet and pretended that was on purpose.
"Yeah," he said. "Totally fine. I'm awesome."
"Sure," I said. "Awesome at getting kidnapped while peeing."
He flushed. "Don't tell anyone about that!"
"Oh, absolutely telling people," I said. "I'm starting a list. 'Ways Naruto Almost Died: Number One, Peed in the Forest of Death.'"
"Sylvie!" he howled, mortified.
Sasuke's mouth twitched, just a little.
I clung to the sound of Naruto's outrage like it was a lifeline and pretended my hands weren't still shaking.
"Come on," I said, turning back toward the path, forcing my legs to move. "We've already wasted time. Rain creeps know we're here now, so let's try not to give them another shot at our bladders."
Naruto grumbled under his breath. "Next time I'm just peeing on them."
"Honestly?" I said. "If you can weaponize it, I'm not stopping you."
We pushed back through the curtain of vines, rejoining the twisted path between the trees. The forest closed around us again, heavy and green and hungry.
The static in the back of my skull scraped on, uncaring.
We started running anyway.