Naruto/Dragon Age feat. Kakashi & Sakura in Inquisition.

[tozette]

Kakashi came around when the fire reached his sleeve. He jolted awake and smacked it into the ground until it stopped smouldering. It stung, but it didn't feel bad enough to even blister.

There were chakra signatures, but they were weak and not particularly close. He got to his feet, steady on unfamiliar ground.

The last thing he remembered was the mission. Having assassinated his enemy and killed the team sent in pursuit, he'd gotten trapped with a broken ankle beneath an Iwa jounin's last, lingering 'fuck you' rock slide. He'd sent Pakkun for a medic and Tsunade, short on manpower and trusting his report that the area was clear, had sent Sakura out to shore up his bones and bring him home.

Her medical skills were clearly coming along beautifully, even if she'd seemed nervous to be alone in the field with an injured patient. But then…

His memories were a jumbled mess from there. They were mostly visual and half unrecognisable, which meant that what he had was probably captured by the sharingan. More unstable stone underneath him. A tumble. Sakura's shocked face, green eyes wide, mouth open in a shriek. Black, glossy, layered rock, like a mirror with no silvering. Crack.

And then green. Spiders. A woman in a strange hat. Run, run.

There was something in Sakura's hand, a glowing green rock of nightmare chakra. He couldn't remember how or why, just that he'd seen it once and his implanted eye had dutifully burnt it into his brain forever.

Kakashi hoped it wasn't the last he'd see of her.

In that, his long experience taunted him.

Don't panic, he thought. He looked around at the world. The sky was on fire, burning green with a gaping hole in its middle. The buildings were on fire, too, but it was a regular orange kind of fire, melting the snow around them to refreeze in dangerous patches of wet ice. Desiccated bodies, trapped in anguished poses of supplication, decorated the ground around him.

Behind him, a stone building creaked and groaned as it settled. Recently demolished.

Sakura, his student — his last remaining student, inasmuch as she could be called his — was nowhere to be spotted.

He filtered a tiny thread of chakra to his nose. He smelled nothing over the battlefield stench of burning meat and hair.

A lightning bolt split the uncanny sky, crashing into the stones before him, and it resolved into a greenish, vaguely human shape. This ghost didn't hesitate before it shot a little bolt of energy right at him.

Kakashi dodged it. Then he replaced himself with a rock right behind it and put a kunai through its ragged, airy body.

It dissipated into the air like it had never been there at all.

So the sky was… raining… chakra ghosts. Somehow.

They would have to… deal with that eventually? In the moment, all it told him was that this place was alien and dangerous, which meant it was even more important to find Sakura.

He bit his thumb and slapped the ground to create his summoning seal. He felt the technique draw on his already low chakra reserves, dragging it out through his veins to spread through the bloody characters in a split second. It caught. It tugged.

And yet… nothing answered. No Bisuke or Uhei or Akino. No Pakkun.

Kakashi's breath caught in his throat. Even behind his mask, the smoke in the air burned. He coughed. His eyes watered.

Don't panic, he repeated to himself. This place, whatever it was, must exist within the bounds of a seal that could suppress space-time techniques, such as summoning. It wasn't unheard of, exactly, although it was costly and the practice was now rare. Such techniques had enjoyed brief, dramatic popularity during Minato-sensei's lifetime and then become unfashionable again after his death.

He filtered chakra to his nose again and inhaled. The air smelled like the battlefields of his youth, but if he ignored that and the burning in his throat as he breathed in and in… he crossed the battlefield on silent feet, inhaling, inhaling, passing acrid air through his mouth and nose until he at last caught something familiar.

There. Sakura wasn't foolish enough to wear perfume, but when she'd become Tsunade's apprentice, she worked as a hospital trainee and not in the field. She had no need for scentless products. He caught the familiar waft of hinoki cypress, highly distinct in this landscape of blood and ice and smoke, and took off after it like a he'd been shot out of a cannon.

Don't panic, he thought, but this time he was thinking it at Sakura, wherever she was. I'm coming to get you.

-----

When Sakura woke up, she was in a cell with her hands bound before her.

She could not remember how she'd got there.

Stay calm, she thought to herself. People rendered unconscious by head trauma or drugs forgot their immediately preceding memories often. She blinked around, thinking hard. She had to take stock of her surroundings, recall what she could remember, think about who had tied her up, and assess her body for damage. These were the important next steps.

She was seated in a large room on a chair bolted into the floor, and it was lit only by ruddy, distant firelight. It was all stonework: floors, walls, ceilings. All dark stone, and too dimly lit to spot anything useful in it, except that the firelight was a dim glow and not a sharp reflection — nothing polished. Before her was a door made of wood and banded with heavy steel, guarded by people whose shadows were hard to make out in the gloom, but whose footsteps were loud. Four of them, she thought.

Every so often, the dimness brightened in a flash of sickly green light.

Sakura's left hand was burning so brutally that she didn't want to look at it, but she made herself do it anyway.

It was intact. Her fingers moved when she moved them, one by one. But there was a glowing green chakra set into her palm. It was deep and hypnotic and, every time it flickered, she felt it like a stab straight up her arm and into her chest.

Sakura thought queasily of the mark on Sasuke's neck, flickering dark and leaking corrupt chakra into the air, and her heart thumped unsteadily in her chest.

Don't panic, she told herself, craning her neck to glance behind her and above her too. Little was different, except she was facing the only door. No windows. Nothing to grab or touch. Just her, the bolted chair, and her restraints.

She closed her eyes and cycled her chakra carefully, following the thread from her belly to her toes and her skull and back, down through her heart and to her belly again. Nothing was suppressing her chakra, so that was something.

She didn't remember anything that had brought her here. The last thing she recalled was Hokage-sama, sending her to extract Kakashi-sensei from a rock slide barely ten miles away from the village gates. She'd followed his ninken. They'd found him. She'd moved a few rocks and healed the broken bones, closed a stab wound, transferred the tiny amount of chakra that stores could spare, and felt rather accomplished when he got to his feet and patted her hair. He'd smiled at her with one eye crinkled up in his face. She remembered that.

But then: nothing. She didn't know where she was. She didn't know where he was, which seemed somehow worse. She'd left him with recently-healed injuries and low chakra.

She looked down at her hand.

Fear grew in a knot in her belly.

Don't panic, she thought again, more firmly. The door before her opened, then, and a tall, armoured woman stepped in.

She wore trousers tight to her skin in an unfamiliar style, and a cuirass of dark metal painted with a white eye and sword. Her face was foreign, with dark eyes, high, prominent cheekbones and a wicked scar on the left.

When she spoke, Sakura didn't understand a word she said.

She understood she was angry, though. And demanding something.

Sakura watched, tense and narrow-eyed, as she stalked around the chair where she was tied. Her boots made sharp noises on the floor. Between that and the metal armour, it seemed to Sakura that the woman was dressed for war like the shinobi of the warring clans era. Or perhaps she was more like the samurai of the Land of Iron.

A second woman slipped in after her, red haired and pale with a pretty face, smooth-skinned and unscarred. Younger, too, Sakura thought, beneath her hood. She was totally silent as she paced the room, watching Sakura as she drifted in and out of shadows with nary a flicker of chakra — a ninja, for sure.

The first one yelled something at her and grabbed her hand, yanking both Sakura's arms up as she gestured with it. The green chakra in it crackled maddeningly, and Sakura grimaced.

The woman's voice was very loud. Her hand was on her sword hilt now. Her voice rose, distorting with her emotions.

"I don't know what you're saying!" Sakura yelled back, scowling furiously up at her. She wished she did, for perhaps then she'd understand what was going on, what was in her hand, and how she might escape.

The warrior stared down at Sakura. Her mouth pulled tight across her jaw, a grim slash in her scarred and striking face.

She turned and said something to her coppery-haired kunoichi companion, who glided silently in closer and stood before Sakura. In the green glow of the foreign chakra implanted in her hand, Sakura could see that she wore the same symbol — the eye and the sword — over her clavicle. Something they had in common. A clan mon? An unfamiliar village?

She chewed on the tip of her tongue, staring at them both, cataloguing information as she found it.

This one spoke with a slightly different inflection, but her words were just as incomprehensible. She tried what seemed to be multiple languages, fluidly at first, then less confident as she went on: Tu parles Orlais? Parli Antivano? Then, after a pause, and less confident: Loquerisne Tevene? Qunlat? Er… qunlat zablokra?

Sakura had never heard so many new languages before, and there were none she knew in the elemental nations that featured some of these sounds — she doubted she could even pronounce 'zablokra.' She mouthed them as her captor spoke them, and shook her head.

Her stomach felt tight. Where was she, that they couldn't find a single language she'd ever heard?

Eventually she frowned, then gestured at Sakura instead, then waited for her to say something.

"Where am I?" Sakura asked. "What is this?" She gestured with her hand. It pulsed as though responding to the gesture, and she grimaced. The burning was bad, but the pulses of light were worse, and throbbed with an intensity that left her breathless and nauseated.

The women shared an unhappy glance. The shorter one, the kunoichi, gestured for her to keep going.

Sakura didn't know what else to say, or what would be safe to say in case they did recognise her language. But there was something that had been drilled into any academy graduate, after all, and she opened her mouth and rules came tumbling out: "A shinobi must prepare before it is too late. A shinobi must obey their commander's instructions. A shinobi must prioritise the mission. A shinobi must not shed tears. A shinobi must seek hidden meanings. A shinobi must show no weakness. A shinobi —"

The kunoichi held up her hand.

Sakura stopped.

She watched Sakura speak with as much intensity as Sakura had watched her, gauging her expression and contemplating what she'd said, and then at last she turned to the samurai woman and shook her head. They shared a brief exchange, glancing at Sakura again and again, and then the ninja left.

That left Sakura with four staring guards and the angry woman in the cuirass, who (with alarmingly little effort) hauled her out of her seat by the arm and bore her away towards the door.

Outside, the sky was torn asunder.

It pulsed in time with her corrupted hand.

A pall of dread fell upon Sakura then. Her oesophagus felt tight and hot, from her belly up to her mouth, and her extremities were very cold.

The warrior was talking to her, but Sakura wasn't even trying to decipher the words. Instead she stared, wide-eyed, up at the sky.

She suddenly thought she knew exactly why they seemed so mad at her.