carry me home [discord prompts]

(Jounin Naruto and Sasuke. A few years after chapter 699.)

“Fuck, it doesn’t fit, hold on.”

“Try again,” Sasuke hissed into the chilled air between them. They were trying to open a dusty old storage shed at the far corner of a ramshackle estate that was clearly rotting from disrepair and abandon. It was surprising something like the shed could have survived for so long in the humid atmosphere of the countryside surrounding Amegakure, and it only made them more suspicious.

In any case, it was the last place they needed to search before they could consider the mission complete and head back to Konoha.

“Shit!” Naruto fumbled with the lock picking tool and almost dropped it. As it was, it jangled far too loudly. “Y’know my clones could just but down the door and—”

“Tch. Give me that!” Sasuke snatched the tool away and knelt down in front of the door handle. “Keep watch.”

He inserted the tool carefully into the slot and worked it around. It was slow going. Naruto wasn’t wrong; it was a tight fit and something was jamming the lock from the other side. Usually he would have used his Sharingan to examine the mechanism and open it in a matter of seconds or even allowed Naruto to break it down as he’d suggested, but they were both trying to conserve their chakra. This wasn’t an ordinary mission and they couldn’t be too careful.

Finally, there was a soft click and the door creaked open. Sasuke took a step inside, then froze.

Something wasn’t right.

He had paused just inside the doorway of the squat little shed. “Something’s…wrong with this room.” Sasuke’s instincts howled for him to turn away, to run. A primal, visceral fear slithered over his skin, coursed through his veins. It was only through discipline and the objectively intolerable humiliation of looking cowardly in front of Naruto that he kept his feet planted firmly on the spot.

Well, that and the jutsu.

Naturally, this was when Naruto returned from keeping watch. He stepped into the room beside Sasuke, who raised his outstretched arm across Naruto’s chest to block his path.

Naruto hadn’t noticed yet. Of course.

“Hey, are we gonna go in or wha—mmdfkljlsf!”

“Shut. Up.” Sasuke clasped his hand over Naruto’s mouth.

“Don’t move, Naruto. Don’t speak. Don’t even fucking breathe if you can help it,” Sasuke whispered between them and Naruto nodded into Sasuke’s hand that he understood. He let his arm fall, releasing Naruto from his grip. It didn’t make Sasuke feel any better; it just meant Naruto had grasped the severity of the situation. Oblivious Naruto was one kind of problem. Mission-serious Naruto could be his own kind of trouble.

For now, it would have to be enough. Sasuke examined the shapes on the floorboards. They were barely illuminated in the waning moonlight, but he could understand them well enough. The seals were written in blood, thick bold calligraphic strokes that promised a slow and excruciating death for its victims. The jutsu was custom made—designer—and the symbols required a blood sample from the target or targets to function. (Not for the first time, Sasuke grudgingly offered thanks to Orochimaru for teaching him things that Konoha considered too unsavory to acknowledge.)

He thought back to their mission briefing, looking for anything they had missed. Ostensibly, their mission had been to investigate a disappearance in the area. Rather than pay the local Ame shinobi, the petitioner had sent the request directly to Konoha along with a fee three times the normal rate for a search and recovery mission—with one important stipulation. They wanted the mission assigned to Naruto and Sasuke, Konoha’s war heroes. No one else would do. Something about only wanting the best for their missing loved one.

Sasuke had thought it was bullshit. It was clearly a trap. And while Kakashi had agreed with his assessment, that was a lot of money for the village coffers and they still needed to know who had set the trap…so he sent them anyway, but with revised mission parameters: Make sure it looks like you’re investigating the missing person, then determine what’s really going on.

And despite knowing what awaited them, they had still walked right into it. The trap was right there, scrawled across the floor of this shitty, dusty shed in the middle of the most miserable, wet, disgusting country in the known world.

“Stupid…”

“What?” Naruto’s sharp whisper was too harsh against the silence.

“Not you.” Me, Sasuke admitted to himself. He was the only one between them capable of detecting the jutsu. And he hadn’t felt a thing before unlocking the door.

“Why’re you being so quiet? There’s nobody home, so—“

“Naruto!” It barely qualified as a whisper this time. Sasuke took a deep breath and tried to calm his own rising frustration. “Listen very closely.” Sasuke leaned into the darkness between them. “Do not under any circumstances use or even access your chakra.”

“Or…what?”

“We’ll die.” Naruto’s eyes widened, bright and pale in the faint glow of moonlight and Sasuke lingered on them for a moment longer than he really could spare before letting the rest of his sentence slip free. “Unless we can disable the jutsu.”

“Start with that part next time, asshole!” Naruto paused, features screwed up into what passed for his thinking face. “Wait, can’t you disable it with—oh shit. No, you can’t.”

“Yeah.” Sasuke huffed and straightened up. He couldn’t trace the chakra in the seals of the jutsu to unravel and nullify it. They were stuck. Whoever had actually requested the mission wasn’t even brave enough to meet them face-to-face; they had been caught in a passive snare that would either kill them outright or starve them over time and leave their bodies for future retrieval.

“So we need to destroy it then. Or like, the wood underneath it? With something physical…like a rock? Or a kunai!” Naruto was already pulling one out of his pouch, but Sasuke shook his head.

“It will probably have safeguards against accidents or animals disturbing it.” He looked around, but the shed was empty save for dust and some leaves blown into a corner.

“But it might not!” Before Sasuke could stop him, Naruto tossed a kunai at the dark shapes on the floorboards. Sasuke winced, expecting some kind of reaction, but it just bounced off with a soft thud and skittered across the floor into a corner with the rest of the detritus. It hadn’t embedded itself in the wood and the jutsu hadn’t reacted, so there was definitely some kind of protection seal layered on top. But it couldn’t be covering the whole thing, right? There would have to be cracks, missed spots, maybe even intentional gaps to ensure the chakra contained in the blood jutsu would come in contact with the chakra of its intended targets when they walked over or near it.

Contact with the targets…

“Give me one of your kunai,” Sasuke demanded and Naruto complied immediately. He took Naruto’s wrist and slid the bladed edge across the thin skin on the back of his hand.

“Shit! What the hell?!” Blood immediately seeped to the surface and ran down Naruto’s wrist in thin rivulets. “You know, Kurama’s chakra isn’t exactly gonna heal that right now. He’s holding it all back just in case it triggers something.”

“If this works, he’ll be able to heal you in a minute.” Sasuke ran the kunai through the blood, coating both sides with as much as possible until it was dripping. “And if it doesn’t work, it probably won’t matter anymore. Shield your face.”

With perfect aim, Sasuke launched the kunai at the center of the seal. Instead of the soft thud of metal bouncing and sliding across the floorboards, they heard the hollow, clear thunk as it embedded itself into the wood beneath the seal. There was a flash and the scent of magnesium and scorched, sour meat as the seal burned up from the inside out. The bloody symbols etched into the wood smoldered and smoked, but otherwise evaporated. And the heavy feeling that had settled into Sasuke’s chest the moment he had entered the shed seemed to evaporate with it.

It was replaced with relief.

“Yeah! I knew we could do it!” Naruto pumped his fist in the air, then shoved it in front of Sasuke’s face to show off the fact that Kurama had already healed the cut on his hand.

“Pfft. Idiot. It’s not that big of a deal.” It was, but Sasuke wasn’t going to make it one. “Let’s just see if we can find any evidence, then get the hell out of here.” He activated his Sharingan and took another step deeper into the shed.

Then, Naruto yelled something he couldn’t make out and everything went black.

[.end]