Ahahahahahahahahahaha, whoops. Turns out studio is worse that I thought it would be this year. Just a heads up, I might not be able to post again 'til winter break or something. Sorry guys. In the mean time, feel free to reread chappies and tell me if you find any mistakes! Plus! In this chappie, we get some names! ;)

(Quick question, longer chapters or shorter?)

(And I don't wanna be one of those people, but... follow, fave, review? Please?)

Warnings: Blood. Lots of blood. And death. Lots of death.

It was not so different from one of her usual hunts.

The greatest difference were the identities of her prey. Running down those that had tormented her for nearly as long as she could remember was… refreshing. Cathartic, perhaps, if she understood the word correctly. Besides that, there were also more targets than usual, but it mattered little beyond extending the range and duration of the hunt.

The three strongest of the facility- not really masters, but not Masters to her either, no, they'd failed to bind her to their will even as they'd bent her to it- were all already dead, from what she could tell. She'd noticed the lingering scents of them on the friends earlier, and guessed they must have dealt with them already. The remaining swarm were guards and handlers who ranged in strength, a few masters, and the occasional group of fodder-creatures that had happened to be outside at the time of the facility's destruction. A few lesser-creatures had popped out of the earth in some places, having managed to dig their way out from the upper levels, and only posed slightly more of a challenge than most guards. At one point, she returned to the place she'd dragged the others out herself and eliminated the three surviving expendables that had made it to the surface.

Slinking nimbly through the foliage, she paused, one, two, and dropped, silent death on silent paws, dispatching the harried squad in a few efficient strikes.

She'd taken to the ground again after circling and spitting lethality from above to draw all focus to trying to kill her. The muscles in her back and shoulders were severely damaged, and would not be carrying her again before some regeneration. Instead, she slipped through the shadows, predator to her prey, and fought only when she could not simply kill. She'd been forced into major confrontations several times, but they'd been nothing several more powerful attacks couldn't deal with. Chakra was not the issue here. Being injured, and receiving more injuries, was.

Working her jaw, she shook off the latest to be impaled on her massive canines and reached through her senses. These should have been the last ones. She was quite a distance from the facility now, since at one point the remaining prey had realized the futility of even attempting to salvage from the rubble, let alone fight her, and had scattered, abandoning the site. Her sensory range was quite large when she concentrated, though, so she could be sure she had not let any escape. Some were rather decent at hiding their signatures, so it took a second look to find them, but as far as she could tell there were no more survivors.

A flicker of something just past the edge of her range caught her attention. Surprised, she focused on it. It was decently muted, and had already been outside her range before she began hunting, so she'd not picked up on it before because she'd not expected anyone to have already begun running. Now that she was paying attention, though, she immediately recognized the signatures.

Turning her head in the direction of the cluster of presences, she stared for a long moment.

Considered.

Rounding on her heel, she slipped into the shadows of the forest canopy once more and made a beeline for the cluster.

The red-masters.

What were they doing so far away from the facility?

She scanned them, eyes narrowed. Clothes rumpled, fear-reek- and kunai in hand. A second scenting confirmed her suspicions- the tiniest whiff of the shared scent that her Master and his friends carried, originating from several pieces of paper. Given her Master's persistence in having her return with him, they'd probably also gotten the red-masters out, who, in turn, had probably gone willingly; all the red-masters had been captured and coerced into service, each held hostage against one another. That threat had not been empty- their numbers had easily halved and then dwindled over the years.

There were five of them in total, huddled in the hollow of an ancient tree's dead husk. Eyes darting, muscles tensed, they were clearly on guard, ready to bolt at any notice. None were debilitatingly injured, though, so why had they not yet gone? It was out of character. Were they waiting for the friends? They had not gone to aid the friends, though that was hardly surprising, weak, selfish things that they were.

Just another half-step, a tilt of her head, a twist of her paw, a snap of her teeth-

Her jaws parted, itching to close down on and tear into their dirty, backstabbing flesh even as she drew the air over her glands to triple-check the scents they carried and listened with half an ear to their muted conversations.

She mulled over her options. She could kill them all, of course. In fact, she ought to, and for more reasons than one. But if the friends wanted them alive, did that also mean her Master would? He could not have known about them beforehand, trapped together as the two of them had been. No red-masters had visited in the time he'd been there. They rarely did, were usually holed up in some other room to scribble away instead.

Should she capture them, then, fetch them back for her Master the way that the masters had done? There was a slight issue of how, since she was optimized for elimination, not retrieval. She certainly wasn't going to be carrying them on her back. Perhaps she could simply hold them all by a limb? But no, that might work when she was flying, since squirming would be deterred by the height of the drop, but on the ground she'd need all her paws, and holding so many in her mouth at once would inevitably put a few limbs too close to her neck for comfort.

She'd herd them, then. Drive them back towards the friends and her Master. They weren't that far off, just over three miles away. She could even see the edge of the cliff peeking through a gap in the trees.

Course of action decided, she made her way around the tree husk so that it was lined up between her and the cliff. A pair had sidled their way out of the cramped hollow and were murmuring in low tones- late… too long… not going back… leave… Konoha- beside the large split in the side.

Convenient.

Gliding forward on padded paws, she made herself known.

One step, two.

Eight smooth paces placed her clearly in view.

Neither set of darting eyes noticed her.

She waited for only a moment. Deliberately raising a hindpaw, she brought it down on a suitably large fallen branch.

The crack was highly satisfying. It almost equalled the volume of a broken bone.

The murmuring cut off abruptly, both inside and outside the tree husk. Neither of the pair outside were breathing. Slowly, ever so slowly, their heads turned to face her, eyes wide and sclera prominently showing. Inside the tree, she could see the remaining three doing much the same.

Five pairs of blue-violet eyes met starburst purple-gold.

She curled her lips into a soundless snarl.

They started breathing again, ragged and fearful and heartbeats hummingbird-fast.

Oh, yes. No misidentification here. They knew exactly what she was.

After all, they had been the ones to cut her open and carve the 'masterpiece' seal into each and every bone in her body.

She lunged, left-right, into a crouch, flared her wings wide, whip-lashed her tail, roared-

-and pounced.

"Run!"

The high-pitched shrieks of prey faced with the horrible potentials of their imminent doom pierced the still air of the forest (because that was what she was to them, yes, the horror they'd molded with their own, selfish hands) as the five red-masters turned tail and bolted.

They knew there was no fighting her.

They knew there was no hope.

Still they fled, as disgustingly terrified of death as ever.

She let them get a lead on her, allowed them to pull ahead until she was lost to the foliage and the fear of not-knowing intruded their every thought and motion. When they strayed from the target, she'd burst in from one side or another, corralling them back, though not too obviously, letting them drift a bit erratically lest they notice and attempt a desperate break. She snapped at their hands and feet, ravaged the branches and patches of dirt they pushed off, brushed glancing blows with her tail on her side-charges. They knew she was toying with them, knew and despaired and did not infer her actions might have ulterior motives.

Still they fled.

They burst into the clearing at the base of the cliff face and screeched to a halt. At the top of the cliff, the uncertain-friend shuffled into view, weight fully on one leg, and looked down at them.

The red-masters' scents were a riot of emotion.

Terror, panic, surprise, disbelief, overwhelming relief-

She barged into the clearing in a blast of wind and leaves and wild vindication, calling out her return to her Master, conscious or not, as she slammed one last landing of dust and ruptured earth into the ground.

The red-masters scrambled back, squeezing noises of alarm from their throats and shooting desperate looks at the uncertain-friend.

She eyed them emotionlessly, huffed a full breath, more winded from her wounds than the run, and primly sat down in the epicenter of her small, fragmented crater, paws tucked neatly under the curl of her tail. She favored them with a bland stare.

The uncertain-friend dropped down from the top of the cliff where they'd presumably been keeping a watch and stuck a clean landing despite only using one leg. They barely had a chance to straighten before the red-masters were flocking around the friend, grasping at straws in what they perceived to be a doomed situation.

"Thank heavens!" the oldest red-master gasped, seemingly on the verge of fury-and-stress-induced tears, for all the good they would do him. "This monster- it's one of the experiments we told you about! It's the worst one- call it the divine beast- kill us all- hurry and-"

The uncertain-friend looked at her, then back at the red-masters, breathless and tensed for death on either side. They directed their words to the oldest red-master, one of the last of the leaders among the red-masters.

"We found and released our taichou from the lower levels. He established that the… divine beast, was a friendly."

The oldest red-master blinked, nonplussed. He abruptly reeled back in disbelief. "Are you out of your minds?! That thing can't be reasoned with! Its higher-level thinking has been completely compromised by the oversaturation of foreign chakra! The only thing it knows how to do is butcher everything in its path!"

This time the uncertain-friend didn't bother to shoot a hesitant glance at her. "It helped us escape from the facility when the self-destruct was initiated. We would be dead without it."

"Impossible," the oldest red-master insisted. "It's clever, yes, but the only thing it has any interest in is carnage. No doubt it had recognized your strength and is trying to get you to let your guards down. That thing will kill us all, given the chance!"

The oldest red-master turned back around and thrust an accusatory finger in her direction. She didn't bother blinking. He was lucky she'd already killed all the other guards and keepers and creatures and masters, he was making such a racket. "Don't be fooled! What could it possibly gain from helping you? Maybe it helped you before so you would free it. But there's no restraints to bind it now, it can go wherever it wants! Why would it bother sticking around unless it was after your blood?"

A fair argument, in theory.

Why did they always think she was a bloodthirsty thing? She killed on orders. They of all people ought to know that. Evidently they didn't know- didn't understand anything about her. He didn't understand anything about her.

Master understood.

She had chosen her Master, just as the legendary weapons in the tales he'd shared with her had. She would go where he went, do as he bade, kill in his name. She didn't need anything else.

She trusted her Master.

Did his friend trust him too?

She felt the weight of the uncertain-friend's gaze on her again, but it was fleeting.

"Taichou is rarely wrong. As for reasoning, well. Didn't you yourself just say that there is no reasoning with it? It's fine if it's on a whim. It's a friendly right now, and we will treat it as such until given reason otherwise." The oldest red-master opened his mouth to protest again, perhaps lambast them with more insults to their intelligence, but the uncertain-friend was having none of it now. "All of us suffered debilitating injuries during the altercations. If it wanted to kill us, it could have done so. It has not. We will need its help to return to Konoha. So long as it chooses to continue to aid us, it will come with us." The uncertain-friend tilted their head. "Will that be a problem?"

The four other red-masters were fidgeting nervously, none daring to take their eyes off her for more than stolen glances at their elder and the uncertain-friend. The sour reek of their fear clogged her scent glands. She wrinkled her nose in displeasure. They only fidgeted more in reaction, constantly inching further away from her and towards the illusion of safety distance granted.

The oldest red-master's gaze darted between her and the uncertain-friend, and she watched as the rising panic and hysteria-induced anger was forcibly suppressed into something grimly determined. She did not like the look of it. She did not like the familiarity of it.

"Fine," he groused, critically running his eyes over her, obviously making note of the singed patches and splotches of darker and lighter areas on her coat. "But you're a fool if you think this won't end badly."

The uncertain-friend didn't bother deigning that with a response. Turning on their heel, they slipped into the crevice in the cliff face. The red-masters practically dove in after them.

Disliking the fact that those displaying such thinly veiled hostility (towards her, at least) were in close quarters with her Master, she quickly rose and ducked into the cavern after them, unconcerned with keeping a watch. It was no longer necessary.

Edging her significant form through the narrow gap, she tailed the others into the dark space, watching the red-masters. Just as they recognized her, she recognized them as well.

The oldest red-master was middle-aged, she knew, though no loss of color to his brilliantly scarlet hair gave away any accurate estimate to his true age. He was a man of calculations; he was the one who picked the pawns when the high-masters had played their games, doing his best to preserve as many of his people as possible, and if not, then the more valuable ones. She'd once seen him sacrifice a sick and dying child of theirs for mercy on an able-bodied adult over a mistake on a seal. He made the hard decisions, and was both respected and hated by the other red-masters for it.

The woman red-master never raised her voice. She spoke in a neutral tone, and went untouched by the guards and keepers and other masters despite being female. From what she could understand of the seals, the woman was the most skilled of all the red-masters once the first-oldest, a man with hair more like rust-streaked steel than fire, had died. When the other red-masters seemed close to crumbling, she was the one there with a featherlight touch or low-toned murmur.

The boy red-master was the quietest. He spoke only to the woman and the creatures when no one else was around, and gave single-phrase responses to the oldest. He cried a lot. He was also the last of the useless red-masters, the ones that were not masters at all, and did not work the creatures. He stopped trying to touch them, too, after one bit two fingers off of his left hand.

The angry red-master was the loudest and quickest to work into a fit. He reeked of hatred always. His hands were cruel, painful things, even behind the horsehair and wood of his ink brushes, trailing fire in their wakes. He burned. He resented. He was helpless. He turned around and poured all his hateful, burning resentment on the creatures because he was helpless against his true tormentors. She did not like him. She disliked him.

The cold red-master never participated in a conversation unrelated to their sealwork or immediate needs. He never attempted to comfort the others. He behaved the most neutrally to the guards and keepers and other masters, even more flatly and emotionlessly than the woman, and often used his free time to sit before the bars of one cell or another, staring at the creatures within. Perhaps he was fascinated. Perhaps he pitied them. Perhaps he had nothing better to do. Once, she'd nudged at the strange sensation surrounding his mind, and found a seal of his own there. He'd locked himself up and thrown away the key. Smart man.

Looking at them now, still pulled together in a sloppy half-forgotten formation despite being among allies, she did not like what she saw. Their minds were a feebler kind; the masters had been careful to take the strong-but-not-too-strong, those that they could bend a little without breaking. And they had bent. Hadn't snapped, surprisingly enough, but the damage from forcing them into line was enough. They clung to each other, pressed into each other until they'd fit together, pieces of a whole, as they had been, and shied away from the rest of the world, the world that might as well have not existed for them the last several years for all the aid it had spared them.

They would not trust.

They could not be trusted.

She did not trust them.

The uncertain-friend communicated something to the glowing-hands-friend in a flurry of hand signs that were responded to in kind. The red-masters watched the exchange. She watched the red-masters.

She managed to edge herself between her Master and the red-masters in the meantime. His face had been covered by a mask just like the other friends wore, bone-white and wolf-like and painted with deep electric-blue markings the color of stark lightning under its eyes and across its cheeks and forehead. It was less strange than she might have thought it could be, since they'd lived together in near-complete darkness for much of the time they'd known each other.

At long last, though in truth it was only a few minutes, the glowing-hands-friend swept up the last of their supplies- already packed and ready to go- and the pair swept the area clean of all signs of use. The tall-friend was woken from a light doze with a single touch to the shoulder, who looked at her, and she looked at them, and they nodded at her, and she dipped her head in acknowledgement. She had returned successful from her hunt, and they were in the clear for now.

Her Master remained unconscious.

When the friends were ready, she crouched and let them climb up onto her back once more. No longer focused on the other friends' hurts, the glowing-hands-friend immediately pressed their hands to the ravaged flesh of her back and began doing something that was warm and cool and painful and soothing all at once. She purred brief appreciation before turning her gaze to the red-masters as the other friends settled themselves out of the way of her wings. The oldest red-master took a wary step forward.

For an instant, she considered standing up and leaving right there, forcing them to run on their own power. They wouldn't be able to keep up, though, and she had no intentions to reduce her pace when her Master needed to get proper medical care. Staring the red-masters down with distaste, she resigned herself to the inevitable. She would have to trust the friends to monitor them.

The red-masters tentatively approached, the oldest in the lead. They weren't nearly so careful of her wounds as the friends, prioritizing getting a good grip over avoiding agitating sluggishly oozing injuries, though they at least didn't go out of their way to do so. Nine passengers made for a squeeze, even when this form stood nearly twenty feet at the shoulder. She rolled her shoulders, disgruntled, testing that her burden wouldn't dislodge themselves. None slipped.

In the moment of imbalance as she rose to her feet, they struck.

The oldest made the first move. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him grip his single kunai, wrap it in white-blue wind, and plunge it towards an area along her spine where her guard hairs had been completely scorched away.

It never reached.

The tall-friend gripped the oldest red-master's wrist tight enough for her to hear the bones grind together. They might have spoken, asked what the red-master thought he was doing, but didn't get the chance as the woman and the cold red-masters lunged forward as well, the first aiming an open palm at the tall-friend's hand and the second spinning to plant his own kunai between the ribs in her left flank. The tall-friend was forced to react, dragging the oldest forward so that the woman's palm hit his back and thrusting a jab into his throat that had him choking the half second before he passed out. The boy had thrown himself to cover the cold one even before the glowing-hands-friend moved to stop him and took the punch straight on his cross-armed block. Both skinny arms snapped under the force. Up by her shoulder blades, where the angry red-master had somehow managed to get in the disarray, starburst purple-gold met hateful blue-violet. He sneered back at her heavy gaze as he stabbed his own kunai down, down, sharpened point trained directly on her neck-

Metal screeched as the uncertain-friend turned it aside with their own blade. The kunai, deflected off-course, drove deep into the hard flesh of her trapezius instead of through her spinal column.

She snarled in irritation.

Swiftly folding her wings carefully to cradle the friends, she swung her head around to pluck the uncertain-friend up from his precarious position on her neck and then lashed the length of her body like a whip, dislodging the red-masters with impetus. They shot from her back like scattered rain, and careened into the stone walls of the cavern with resounding impacts. If they hadn't been knocked out during the scuffle, they certainly were out now.

She released the scruff of uncertain-friend's armor to drop him carefully to the ground before prodding the red-masters' presences with her sense to ensure they weren't faking. The friends, slightly disoriented and injuries a bit jostled, were not much worse for wear, though steadied themselves against her back for a moment to get their bearings. She obligingly held still, fully content to trust them her back after that display.

"Well, fuck," the uncertain-friend muttered from where they'd seated themself on the ground between her front paws. They seemed entirely unconcerned at the way her claws were grinding into the stone floor as she flexed them in contemplation. "And here I thought we could all be friends."

Her ear flicked, back, forth. Had they really thought so? Had she made a mistake?

"Ah, right," the uncertain-friend tilted their head back and extended a hand, carefully patting her blood-stained chin. "Thanks for not throwing me with them."

She blinked at them, nonplussed, and decided that reacting to a threat could not have been a bad thing.

"Regardless, we still need to bring them back with us." The glowing-hands-friend slipped off her back and approached the boy red-master, leaning down to examine the broken arms. "Perhaps this is for the better. We would only waste time arguing." Straightening, they glanced at the other slumped red-masters. "I will administer first-aid, and then we will leave. I will ensure they remain unconscious for the remainder of our mission."

She had no complaints with those arrangements.

None of the others did, for that matter.

The red-masters were bandaged and bone-set before being thoroughly trussed up, with special attention paid to their hands. She presumed this had to do with those strange gestures the guards and keepers and masters so often made when channelling chakra. They were also stripped of their equipment, which was dumped into a spare storage seal. A few minutes, and the friends clambered back on so they could really, finally leave.

They departed the cave under the pale orange tones of the first hints of sunset. The glowing-hands-friend pointed out directions and landmarks, and explained the paths that they could take- one for subtlety and one for speed. The friends and her Master had come the subtle way, and they were now leaving the speedy way. Once the sun had fully set, the tall-friend pointed out constellations for her to navigate by before succumbing to their exhaustion, physical and chakra, and the drop from the adrenaline high alongside the other friends.

According to the glowing-hands-friend, they were currently near a place called the Mountains' Graveyard. The return journey would last maybe a week in total, at their current speed and accounting for the varying terrain. The first three to four days would take them to the border of the Land of Fire. The latter one to three would bring them to the place they called Konohagakure, their place of origin, depending on how she fared among the apparently unique environment dominated by 'Hashirama trees,' as well as the reception they received from the border guard and patrols. This was all also under the assumption that they ran into no further complications, such as missing-nin or bandits.

She disliked the time estimates. The scent of blood clung strongly to each of them. She knew she'd be able to move faster if not for her injuries; she was currently only able to maintain something around two-thirds of her usual long-distance speed. The only thing that she could identify that might cut their travel time shorter was removing any rest time inserted into the estimations. She did not need sleep; she was physically incapable of it. In fact, it was likely that it would kill her if she ever did fall into its clutches. The friends could rest as she carried them and the red-masters were out anyways.

And so she ran.

She ran through a land of dark undergrowth and soaring bones.

She ran through deep shadows and across bridges of fragmented skeletons.

She ran up sides of mountains and down others until the great white remains of ancient beasts disappeared into the distance.

She ran through the night, and into the next day through to the evening.

The glowing-hands-friend woke when the sky stained the color of flames once more, and roused the tall-friend and the uncertain-friend. She stopped by the side of a gushing river rapids and let the friends clamber down.

The rapids flowed for quite a ways in either direction, and they didn't have the time to spare searching for a slower stretch, so they picked out a relatively flat, shallow stretch and made do.

The friends removed the red-masters from her back and dunked them into the water until they'd stopped staining it rust-red. None woke during the process. Clearly the glowing-hands-friend was very good at what they did. The red-masters were draped on an easily visible piece of the bank under the fading daylight.

With practiced motions, the friends stripped out of their gear and cleaned it of blood and dirt and set it all aside to dry, then repeated the process with their clothes. The same was done with her Master's clothes and a set of weapons and armor that smelled of him. They must have been retrieved from the facility at some point.

Hands tightly clenched in the blood-matted fur of her coat, they then directed her into the river, her Master carefully laid out on her back. The water was thankfully refreshingly cool rather than flesh-numbing, and while the friends were injured and weakened, they were fully capable of holding onto her and keeping upriver of her so she could catch them if a particularly strong current grabbed them.

Soaking third-degree burns in water for extended periods of time was very much not advised, but they were covered in battle grime and the accumulated filth of days' worth of rigorous exercise, which was an even worse idea to let sit in any of their wounds. They scrubbed the dried blood and grime from skin and carefully rinsed it from all wounds until their chilled skin pinked redness and their hair was several shades lighter. They did the same for her Master, then pulled him out at the shore and insisted on washing her, too. She'd seen the logic in reducing trackable scents and complied.

She'd laid down in the water beside the bank, occasionally moving to deeper pools as directed to dip under or roll to flush out the dislodged filth. The glowing-hands-friend had taken the upstream side this time, being the least impaired and most qualified, to clean out the worst of the damage to her back, while the other two waded through the calm patch of water created by the shield of her bulk to tend to the stab wound to her flank and help clean the rest of her.

When they were done with her, the white in her paws and stripes were visible once more, and the friends were only slightly surprised by the clusters of feathers that fletched stretches of her coat. The tall-friend called her 'reverse albino'. The glowing-hands-friend called her 'melanistic'. The uncertain-friend called her 'fucking badass'. She understood the conveyed 'abnormal'. She was not bothered, though, because none spoke with ill-meaning.

She dried them all off with a carefully controlled stream of fire-breath pointed to the earth, etching a ring of grassfire around each of them to warm both them and surrounding air up in the quickly falling twilight. Once dry, wounds were redressed, changes of clothes were unsealed and pulled on, and the glowing-hands-friend left to secure a perimeter and lay traps while the other two friends rummaged through their supplies for a meal.

The glowing-hands-friend returned with a freshly killed rabbit that they gutted, skinned, and lightly burned- 'cooking,' they called it, and it did look a bit like what the masters would sometimes eat- before directly passing it over to her, staring at her with a strange intensity, while the friends gnawed through several scentless sticks of something. They offered her two of those, too, and she accepted. The sticks were just as tasteless as they smelled, but were still a large step up from what rubbish the facility tossed her on a good day.

She turned down the other offered sticks when the friends saw how easily she took to them, unable to communicate the lack of need. They gave apologies- apologies- for not being able to provide anything else, nor what they perceived to be enough for her body size, and behaved correspondingly concerned, and she found herself thinking how inconvenient it was to be unable to explain things to them.

Throughout the exchange, the glowing-hands-friend did quite a bit of staring at her, though it was discreet. Belatedly, she realized that they had been there, too, when she'd bound herself to her Master- had seen the seals, had seen her appearance before the transformation. Her normal form occasionally got her strange looks of moroseness and internal conflict from new-comer creatures and guards and keepers, though they disappeared quickly enough given time. The looks the glowing-hands-friend was giving her now reminded her slightly of those, though these looks were more morose and less conflicted. She didn't entirely understand, but then, she would learn. This was the world that her Master lived, the one that he saw, and now that she thought of it, he'd given her a few similar looks too, hadn't he? Yes, she would learn this later, for her Master's sake. She should not be the cause of those heavier expressions he made, not when she could avoid it.

The friends had removed the bone-masks to wash and eat, and she was finally able to identify them as individuals. The glowing-hands-friend was female, while the other two were male. They 'introduced' themselves to her. She carefully committed the information to memory.

The glowing-hands-friend's moniker was Fukuro- 'owl'. She was female, and was the medic of the team, which her Master, Zouge, 'ivory', led. She was unusually pretty by common standards, probably in her early twenties, with black hair and green eyes and pink-pale skin, and made use of medical techniques in battle in a precision-oriented style. Her mask was an owl, marked with an outside-to-inside pair of curving green crescents around the outsides of the large circular eyeholes.

The tall-friend was Dobutsu, 'animal'. Male. He was the long-ranged ninjutsu fighter, appearing around the same age as Fukuro, and used weighted chains and non-standard neko-te in addition to the standard-issue gear the friends were equipped with. A shock of short, rich brown hair stuck up at straight angles from his head, matching in shade with his eyes. He wore a hyena mask marked with the same brown in outlining streaks along the bottom edges of jagged teeth, sharp-cut eyeholes, and a rounded splotch centered on a blunted muzzle.

The uncertain-friend was Hai, 'ash'. Also male. He was the youngest of the friends, looking to be in his late teens and in training for a close-combat oriented specialty, and the least stoic of them. Fine eyelashes framed droopy pale-brown eyes, and black-brown hair was cut in short, wavy locks. His mask was of a raccoon's, marked in rusty orange in a stripe up the muzzle that flowed up between two oblong ovals hanging lowly around the eyeholes to branch into a horizontal line across the brow.

And then her Master woke up.

He stirred partway through the meal, blinked open bleary eyes, unconsciously checked the chakra signatures in his vicinity, and immediately attempted to get up. Fukuro shut down that course of action quickly enough with a firm hand to his sternum. He turned blinking bleary eyes at her then, before becoming self-aware enough to take in his surroundings. The friends, the forest canopy, the small fire, the sun-streaked sky, the red-masters- and then her.

She'd curled up around him, cushioning him from the ground with her flank, so he'd not been able to get a good look at her immediately. He had to crane his head up and back to find her face.

Something equally warm and delighted sparked in her chest when silver-grey met purple-gold starbursts and utterly lit up.

It immediately wilted when he seemed to finally take in the rest of her and a tense line rose in the set of his shoulders.

"You…"

She waited for the fear, the disgust, even the neutral disturbed expression, or perhaps anger at the deception. He could see her inhumanity in all its terrible truth now.

"You're hurt."

It was a murmur, half a whisper, that almost sounded like it hurt him to speak it despite the clear effort to maintain a neutral tone, and she found herself wondering how she could have ever thought her Master would react in a way her small fragment of world perception could predict.

She lowered her head into his reach and closed her eyes against the warm palms that threaded themselves through the fur of her face, her forehead, her ears, her neck, her ruff, calming, soothing. She remembered what he'd said about dogs. Leaning into the touch, she nuzzled into his arms and chest, pausing a moment to check on the terrible wound in his gut, before properly burying her face into his torso in the fashion of canines, leaving the most vulnerable parts of her body completely exposed to him, literally in his hands. She was anxious to reaffirm her allegiance to him in the presence of his friends so that they knew she would aid them by extension through her Master, though a greater part of her was eager to do so in order to merely confirm things for herself, things that she herself knew she wanted to know but did not know how to phrase even if she could speak.

"Third degree burns," Fukuro agreed from the side. "Worse than any of ours by several times- larger, anyways. She took the brunt of the explosion. Debris in the wounds, some deeper gashes from where sharper rocks dug in when she was holding the earth up around us, grind damage to bones. Spine seems okay for the most part, though the skin is broken around several vertebrae."

Phantom fire burned the span of her back, yes. She was aware of it, and was aware that carrying passengers on her back had only aggravated it, so she'd identified it as recognized and accounted for and dismissed the sensation to a back corner of her mind. The whole of her body burned and ached, so she'd repeated the process for every other injury. Pain was useful as an indicator, an alert system for damage, but irrelevant beyond that. She did not pay it more attention than it deserved.

"But you can't do any more," her Master surmised, wearily exhaling a breath.

"Too large of an injury," Fukuro agreed apologetically. "We're all in deep shit at the moment. I'm low on basic supplies, too. None of us have any chakra to spare, and we're all starting to crash from the chakra exhaustion. Not to even get started with you, infection has already started setting into all of our burns and I can't do anything about it. It'll be a miracle to make it back without our wounds worsening. And that's not even counting if I managed to remove enough of the poison previously to minimize the effects."

She nosed at her Master's face, needing to tell them all something and not sure how to go about it.

And then she realized that her Master couldn't really speak with her, either. Not fluently, and not as she was now. But then he hadn't needed speech to understand her in the beginning. He just understood.

And actually tried. And guessed a lot.

That was good enough for her.

"Neko-chan?" He laid a placating hand on the bridge of her nose. She couldn't tell if he was steadying her or himself more. "Something up?"

She growled.

"Uh, want to tell us something?"

A purr. The others watched, tired but still managing curious attention.

"Something to do with… our injuries?"

A hesitation, then a purr.

"With yours?"

A growl.

"With just ours." The intricacies of grammar.

A purr.

He blinked rapidly for a moment. "Ah, right, you have that technique of yours. But-" he shot her a worried glance and a pointed look to her back, "-you're not in much condition to be transferring more infections to yourself."

She growled, nudging his arm in a rather insistent way.

"No, you're in bad shape too, probably worse off than the rest of us if we count long-term ailments. No more consuming." He held her with a stern look, and she dropped her gaze in submission after only half a beat, uninterested in defying him.

That didn't change the fact that they had a problem, though.

Considering their options, she carefully shifted her bulk, telegraphing her intent to rise. Her Master obligingly moved over so that he would not be dumped into the dirt upon the loss of her support. Pushing herself to her feet, she looked at him, looked in the direction they had been travelling before stopping, looked at him, turned back to the unmarked path and took a deliberate three steps, looked back at him.

"Soon," Fukuro was the one to respond, her Master leaning heavily on her supporting arm. He was already starting to sweat from exertion. "Once you've rested a little more. At least another two hours. You ran almost twenty-three hours straight on top of three of combat."

Grunting dismissively, she growled low and swung her head back and forth in the way she'd sometimes seen other humans respond in the negative. Her stamina was fine, and she was not capable of sleep. There was no need to prolong things- in fact, it was quite inadvisable. She shuffled her wings and paws restlessly, trying to think of a way to convey that she did not have one of the basic needs of mammals.

Her Master frowned. "Speaking of rest, now that I think of it… In all the time we spent together in that cage, I don't think I've ever seen you sleep before, Neko-chan."

Her Master's ability to make leaps in logic was wonderful. She purred urgently in encouragement.

"Do you…" he hesitated, clearly doubtful at the, to them, absurd conclusion from that piece of information. "Do you just not need it?"

More or less. Another purr.

He furrowed his brows at her, struggled for a brief moment, then seemed to have come to terms with another abnormality of hers. "Which means… Huh. Okay. So what you're trying to say is that we don't have to sit here and waste potential travel time." He blinked again. "I guess this means that you've got some sort of heightened recovery rate? Or something related? So your stamina is still good, too?"

Her purr was a deep, continuous thrum in her chest, excited as she was by such accurate guesses. Some of the logic was a bit murky, but the gist of them was close and the conclusions drawn were relatively accurate. She ambled back to her Master's side and enthusiastically pressed her nose to his shoulder in confirmation.

He chuckled lightly, then wheezed at the exertion necessary for the act. Fukuro tightened her grip on his arm in warning, but he just patted the hand distractedly.

"Alright, then. We'll leave once we've finished up here."

They didn't bother waking the red-masters up. It wasn't worth the trouble, and they didn't have enough rations to feed all of them for a week. Fukuro cast some sort of weakened stasis technique over them, calmly commented that a few days without food wouldn't hurt them any more than their time in the facility might have, being mostly adults and at least partially trained shinobi as they were, and that was that.

Having finished her meal first, Fukuro looked at her ravaged back, looked at the meagre remains of the rolls of bandages in her hands, looked at her back, and turned around and commandeered the freshly washed clothes. None of the others made any move to stop her. Once the clothes had been sufficiently wrung of moisture, Fukuro cut them up with a kunai and covered her back wounds with them, somehow plastering them into place with a glow-technique or two.

"Is it okay for her to carry us with those?" Her Master watched the medic work, expression not quite letting his concern to surface.

"We don't have much of a choice," Dobutsu reminded him quietly. He had a pile of steel on one side of him and several neatly laid rows of freshly sharpened blades on the other, and a whetstone in hand.

"It's not the best thing for them," Fukuro answered, just as subdued, "but as long as we're careful to avoid the worst bits and move around as little as possible, they shouldn't get too much worse. Painful, of course, since I doubt we've got nearly enough painkillers to give her a dose large enough to help, but your Neko-chan here seems to be quite the tough one." Smoothing out a last piece of makeshift bandage, the medic carefully carded a hand through the thick fur of her shoulder. She turned her head to blink placidly at her in response.

Hai, the most free with his expressions and body language, even more so than even her Master, fidgeted in a distinctly distressed manner. "We could lay out the rest of our clothes on her back? Put some padding between us and her?"

"She'll need to cover at least another several hundred kilometers. We don't want her to get overheated, or to keep a layer of damp pressed up against the burns," Fukuro informed him.

"But then-"

She snorted and rose to pad a circle around the little group, testing how the fabric affected her movements. She bumped each of the friends lightly with her nose in passing and let a little purr rumble in her chest even as she huffed pointlessly large breaths out, trying to express the new type of warmth that had bloomed in her chest that she could not name. She'd never imagined there were so many emotions she hadn't known before- so many warmths.

Even Dobutsu twitched a lip in a piece of a smile at her. "She appears to be trying to tell us that she appreciates the concern, but it's not necessary."

Not in so many words, but that sounded about right. She purred a little more.

They packed up quickly after that, re-equipped their gear, erased all signs of their presence, and set off once more.

The red-masters had been resecured to her back, tied together side-to-side to be draped over her spine, alternating so that each found themselves cheek-to-cheek with a pair of feet on either side. They were such a hassle to drag along, but the friends wanted them brought so she complied with their wishes.

As they were being slung up on her back, though, she'd made a startling realization. They were no longer masters, in the sense that she'd dubbed those like them in the facility. They didn't have any power over her anymore, whether it be to have her strapped down and her seals recalibrated or to permit her a week of inactivity to allow rent flesh to close and regrow. In the past day, she had had many an opportunity to rend their flesh in return and spared them each time. They were no longer red-masters; they were merely red-ones.

Something settled in her with the epiphany.

Her other passengers were clearly exhausted still- physically, mentally, chakra-wise- but made a clear effort to stay awake for a little while to 'keep her company,' whatever that meant.

Her Master, having directly claimed the place at the height of her withers so he could talk to her, was laid out on his back, legs draped to either side of her neck. She could feel the way the wind stirred through her fur and his hair so that they mingled at her ruff, the way his heart beat weakly but steadily, the way his muscles clenched in pain at the mere action of breathing.

She ran faster.

Their journey was quiet, though, filled with the sounds of the night forest and the rushing air. She didn't take any detours. Being the most dangerous predator around had its perks; the wildlife got out of her way fast when she bothered to let them know she was coming.

"Neko-chan."

She rumbled a quiet response to let him know she was listening.

"I was thinking… You said you have no name?"

A purr. The other two were listening now, too.

"Well, I was thinking. About things that suit you. And I thought, the way you move through the forest, the way the night doesn't hamper you, the way you're here and moving but you're so quiet that maybe you were just a dream, a figment of my imagination that I dreamt up when I was delirious…" He trailed off, seeming to forget each fragment of his sentence as soon as it had been said, but still there, still awake, still thinking…

"Asuga."

It was sudden, but not abrupt; a murmur in the night.

She could feel the tentative twist to his lips, a hopeful smile in the making.

"I know I've been calling you Neko-chan, and it's fine as a nickname, but, 'bird that flies'... Or 'swift like wind.' I think it suits you."

She suspected he truly might have been slightly delirious at that point, but there was something more to it than what he was verbally saying, she sensed, as if thinking of deeper meanings and other such things, but she knew that he would tell her if it mattered, and in that moment, she didn't care.

Her Master had given her a name.

She had a name.

"Tasogare no Asuga," he breathed into the night, "Asuga of the Twilight. Yes- I think it suits you. What do you think?"

Asuga.

She purred, long and deep, and even opened her mouth to attempt to make some other sound, a more special sound to convey the more special meaning, but came up with a strange crooning note that echoed strangely clear in contrast to the more vibrating sounds she usually produced. Her Master laughed at the warped sound, weak but so so bright, and the friends might have made lightly amused noises in the background, too, though said nothing, letting them have their moment.

When the moment faded, left behind in another sigh of wind and shadow, her Master broke the peaceful silence that had fallen. "That's right," he murmured, voice faded more than ever, "I never did introduce myself properly, did I? How rude of me." Asuga's ears flicked back in his direction, perked up in rapt attention even as she held her pace steady, never faltering.

"Well, I suppose it's not good form to do this while we can't even look each other in the face, but it would be much more rude to not tell you at all." She could feel the smile in his words. "And the four of us are ANBU, one of the most elite groups of shinobi of our village, so we have monikers we go by for secrecy's sake. Dobutsu, Fukuro, and Hai are all monikers. Mine is Zouge."

Moonlight glimmered off his wild tussle of hair, and she was reminded once more of star souls and star-touched and decided he was all of those and none of those.

He was something better.

He was real.

"We're not supposed to tell anyone our real names while we're on duty, but it wouldn't be fair for me to give you a name and not tell you my real one, would it?" She didn't know about that, but if he thought so then it must be so.

"Besides," she felt his smile turn sharp-toothed and certain here, "I get the feeling you can keep a secret.

"When I'm wearing my mask, you've got to call me Zouge. But when I'm not, and it's just the two of us…" and there was teeth in the smile in his words now, fierce and genuine, "Call me Sakumo. Hatake Sakumo, of Konohagakure's Hatake Clan."

Notes:

The reason why the friends adjusted so easily to Asuga, going from wary to comfortable in her presence, is because they don't know much about her so far, because their taichou told them she could be trusted, and because they're highly capable killers themselves who have worked with large summons before, namely Sakumo's. There is a marked difference with the red-masters because, as the creators of her seals, they know what capacities she's intended to have, what she's done before, and that they're completely outmatched regardless as non-frontline combatants.

In something of a similar line of reasoning, Asuga's behavior is so openly demonstrative because she is making an effort in trying to communicate her intentions and really has no reliable baseline to compare against. She's also really young at the moment. Despite the lifetime of abuse and general lack of normal human socialization, she's not a completely introverted wreck because of her status as the 'divine beast'. That is to say, she's the most powerful and the most intelligent of the experiments, and she knows it, so she's obviously not going to behave like a terrified little thing around those she can easily thrash, especially since that would be a very blatant display of weakness and all the others would jump her at the first sign of that. The others recognized she was different, superior, and while not exactly shunned, she was left alone with a sort of basic reasoning that she should not be antagonized, which to them equated to staying far away when feeding time came around so she wouldn't misinterpret them as encroaching on what was hers, and doing their very best not to appear confrontational when they were all put together in a combat simulation or situation.

No, she is not a result of Uchiha Madara or Akatsuki or Orochimaru experimentation. I just don't think that they would have been the only ones to have recognized how conveniently secluded and avoided the area was. The facility was never aware of any other people in the Mountains' Graveyard. All the test subjects were imported from all over the Narutoverse, though primarily from either extremely rural areas or areas of conflict / affected by the Second Great Shinobi War.