aFireFist
A Life in the Hidden Leaf
Chapter 16 - Part 5
"I can't forgive you," he said. "I want to. I can't. You killed him. You put a rod through Hinata and made me watch. Half this village would cheer if I ended you."
He dragged a breath in through his teeth. It hurt.
"I'm not going to. That's your cycle. You hurt us, we hurt you, somebody else builds the next Pain. Jiraiya-sensei left me his way. I don't have the answer yet. I'm still going to look. If that's stupid, fine. That's my answer."
Nagato stared at him. At the blood. At the ruined cloak residue still steaming off his skin. At the student Jiraiya had chosen after the one who had failed him.
"He asked me for an answer too," Nagato said. "I gave him one. You are telling me it is wrong while you stand in a hole I put in your village."
"I'm telling you it didn't work. Talk didn't save Yahiko. Talk didn't save him either. Flattening Konoha didn't save anybody. It just made another hole."
Silence sat between them long enough to hear the fires outside, and a distant voice calling for a medic, and the wet shift of Katsuyu in the wreckage.
Nagato's mouth moved like a man tasting a word he had not used in years. "He chose you after me."
"Yeah." Naruto wiped blood off his chin and only smeared it. "He did. He died sending me after you. Not to become you. To stop this."
Nagato's hands tightened on the arms of the stand.
"Then I will spend what I have left on his choice," he said. "Not on mine."
The Rinnegan flared. The rods in his back lit from the inside. The jutsu that came out of him was not a push and it was not a pull. It went up and out through the ruined ceiling, into the smoke over the village, a wide light that did not care about streets or craters or who had been standing when the last breath left.
Konan stepped in as his body started to fail. She did not try to stop it. She put a hand on the stand and watched him give the last of himself away.
"Yahiko…" Nagato's voice thinned. "Sensei…"
He slumped. The light in his eyes went out. The rods dimmed. Pain was finished.
Konan stayed where she was, hand on the quiet stand, and did not look at Naruto when he turned toward the hole in the ceiling.
***
The light hit the village like a second dawn forced through smoke.
Yasuo felt it before he understood it. He was on one knee in the triage line with his hands in a chunin's chest, green chakra sealing a bleeder that should have already killed the man — a puncture under the ribs, the kind that filled a lung and ended a name. The body under his palms jerked. The man took a breath he did not have a right to take. Wet. Shocked. Alive.
The wound was still there. The dying was not.
Yasuo froze for half a second, then packed the seal anyway. Revival or not, the hole would still kill him if nobody finished the work.
Around him, it kept happening.
A woman who had been covered a minute ago, cloth over her face, sat up coughing dust and grabbed at the medic who had just written her off. A genin with a crushed leg gasped and clutched the man over him, eyes wide, like waking from a fall that should have been the last one. Further out, in the rubble fields, voices started. Confusion first. Then shouting. Then people calling names that had already been called once today and gotten no answer.
"Hana—"
"Dad— Dad, get up—"
"He's breathing. He's breathing—"
Yasuo wiped blood off his wrist with the back of his glove and kept moving down the line. "If they're up, they're still wounded. Seal it. Don't stand there staring."
A medic laughed once, short and wrong, and went back to work.
***
Tsunade felt it through Katsuyu.
The slug network was still spread across what was left of the Leaf, green fields holding the living together, a web of healing chakra she had been pouring herself into until the seal on her forehead was a live coal. The dead coming back hit her like a wave through that connection — lungs filling, hearts kicking, chakra signatures that had gone dark turning back on in clusters all over the crater. It was too many at once. Too much incoming life after a day of watching it leave.
She staggered on the command roof and had to catch herself on the broken parapet. Stone bit her palm. The Strength of a Hundred Seal guttered, the diamond flicker-dimming, then catching again because she forced it to. Milk leaked through her robe in a fresh run, soaking the cloth over her heavy tits, warm down the underside. The mess between her thighs was still there, ignored, filthy, irrelevant — Yasuo's load thinned by hours of running and still sitting in her while the village started breathing again. Her knees tried to go.
Shizune grabbed her arm. "Tsunade-sama—"
"I'm up." It came out as a growl. "Keep the fields open. Some of them are coming back wounded. They still need work. Revival is not a clean slate."
"You almost went down."
"I didn't." Tsunade peeled Shizune's hand off without looking at her. "You want me on a cot, you wait until the line is empty. Until then you keep Katsuyu spread and you stop hovering."
She stayed up. Barely. The seal held because she told it to hold.
***
Kakashi drew a breath under a pile of stone that had been a grave ten seconds earlier and started coughing himself back into the world. Dust came out of him in wet hacks. One hand already searched for a hitai-ate that was not on his head. The other found his own chest like he needed to confirm it was moving.
"Easy," a medic said, dragging timber off him. "You're here. Don't sit up fast."
Kakashi sat up fast anyway, visible eye wide, then narrowed. Alive. Furious about it. "How long—"
"Later. Breathe first."
Choza's huge chest lifted somewhere in the next street. A sound came out of him that was half groan and half laugh. A dozen people Yasuo had patched and written off in the back of his mind sat up with the same stunned look — the chunin with the side puncture, the woman under the cloth, the genin who had stopped breathing on the walk to the slug. Wounds still open. Deaths undone.
Hinata's wound did not vanish. The hole was still a hole. The bleeding that had been trying to finish her eased under the green and the light together, the worst of the emptying slowing like someone had put a hand on a tap. She made a small sound. Her fingers twitched against the tarp.
Shizune was already there, voice sharp, hands moving, ignoring the Hokage on the roof for the girl who had taken a rod for Naruto.
"She's here. She's here. Stay with her. Don't you fade on me after all that. I need pressure — now. She's breathing. Keep her that way."
Yasuo did not go to her this time. The medics had her. He had already done the street work. He kept working the line in front of him because the revival was not a cure. It was a second chance with the same holes in it. A man sat up with a crushed chest and started drowning on the air he'd just been given. Yasuo sealed. Passed him back. Moved to the next.
"If they're up, they're not done," he said to the chunin across from him. "Treat the wound you can see. Don't wait for the light to finish your job."
***
Naruto came out of the ruined hall on his own feet and almost did not make it down the steps. His hand found the broken frame and held. Konan did not follow him into the street. The stand behind her was quiet. Whatever she was going to do with what was left of Nagato, it was not going to happen in front of the Leaf.
He stood in the smoke and watched his village breathe again.
People who should have been bodies were sitting up. Someone was crying into a vest. Someone was laughing in a way that did not sound sane. A woman kept saying a name over and over until the person attached to it groaned. The crater was still a crater. The east side was still a pit. Whole blocks were still gone. The Leaf was still broken.
It was breathing.
Naruto's legs gave out. He sat down hard in the dust and stayed there, staring, orange whisker marks filthy with blood. He did not speak. There was nothing left in his throat that would have helped.
Tsunade got off the roof the ugly way, one drop at a time, because the seal would not carry a clean jump. She hit the triage field on boots that almost buckled and the medics tried to steer her onto a cot.
"Hokage-sama, sit—"
"No." She walked through the hand. "If I sit I stay down. Find me work."
She ignored them and walked the line until she found the work that still needed a Hokage's hands — a jonin whose revival had left the puncture sealed wrong, a child who would not stop shaking, a stretcher that needed to move and had no one left to carry it. She fixed what she could. Then she found Yasuo.
He was bloody to the wrists. Green still fading off his fingers. There was dust in his hair and someone else's blood up one sleeve. He looked up when her shadow hit him and did not stand like he was reporting. He just waited.
She looked at him once. Golden eyes raw, exhausted, still sharp enough to cut. The robe hung open. Her heavy tits sat flushed and leaking through the cloth, milk stains dark and obvious, nipples stiff against the wet fabric. She did not hide it. She also did not pull him anywhere. The village was first. The need was still there under it, dull and waiting, and she left it there.
"You did what I needed," she said, quiet enough that it stayed between them. "The rim. Hinata. The line. Don't go far. When this stops moving I'm going to fall over, and I am not doing that in front of them."
"I'll be here," Yasuo said.
"Good." Her throat worked. "If I start to go, you get me off this field before Shizune makes a scene."
She nodded once and turned back to the wounded. Command voice found her again, thinner, still hers.
"Triage by severity. Revival does not mean stable. If they can walk, they help carry. If they can't, they stay under Katsuyu. We work until the line is clear. I want names of the ones who came back and the ones who didn't. Do it quiet."
Yasuo went back to the next body.
Night did not so much fall as the fires burned down.
The crater was still there. Whole streets were not. People stood in clusters where houses had been, holding family that had been cooling on the stone an hour ago, not sure whether to laugh or keep crying. Someone had started a soup line out of nothing. Someone else was counting missing faces and then stopping when the faces sat up.
Kakashi sat on a broken step with his head in his hands, alive and furious about it, visible eye hidden. Choji had found Choza and had not let go. The big man's hand covered the back of his son's head and stayed there. Hinata was under the slug field, breathing, a clean seal over the worst of the hole. Shizune refused to leave her side. Every time a runner asked for the Hokage's aide, Shizune pointed at the girl on the tarp and did not move.
Naruto had been moved as far as a clear patch of ground near the Hokage monument's broken approach. He was awake. Barely. He kept looking at the village like if he blinked it might go back to being dead. Sakura had tried to sit with him and he had nodded her toward the wounded instead.
Yasuo passed him once with a canteen and did not make a speech. He held it out. Naruto took it, drank, and nodded at nothing.
"Thanks," Naruto said. His voice was almost gone. "For Hinata. I saw you. I couldn't— I was on the ground."
Yasuo gave him a short nod. "She's under the slug. Shizune's on her. Drink."
He kept walking. The rage had been Naruto's. The save did not need a conversation on top of it.
Tsunade ended the night on her feet because she refused the alternative. When the last critical was stable enough to leave to the night shift, she stood in the open near the big slug and let the seal finally dim. The diamond on her forehead went dull. The shake in her legs came back all at once. She locked them anyway, jaw set, robe still wet, the mess between her thighs still there and still not the point.
Yasuo was where she could see him, a street off, bloody and upright. She looked at him one more time across the ruined stone. Not done with him. Not now. The village first. Then the fall.
Smoke thinned over the hole that had been the heart of the Leaf.
The fight was over.
For the Full 12202 word Version Please check my p.a.t.r.e.o.n: pat.....reon.c.o.m/cw/aFireFist just remove the multiple periods in this link. Thank you for the Support!