She was the fire, the blazing heat that seared through the black and made the shadows of the shinobi shudder and dance in the flames of her gaze. She could spot them without any struggle without batting an eyelash. 

And he was the fan to the flame, building it and teaching it how to climb higher, burn brighter, destroy more. 

“Two on the right.” 

Her voice was soft, it whispered and long ago he had given up trying to convince himself that the smell of her breath, all soft flowers and pure brooks in summer didn’t make him drunk. 

He spun, and with his eyes he would have seen them, but a second too late to dodge the blow to his right. With her warning he was able to dig inside the chest cavity of one, disrupting in a very catastrophic way the energy flowing within the folds of his torso while her hands spit and sparkled with chakra, slamming her pulsing energy into the invisible points on the other attackers body only she could see. 

In the black of night with no moon due to the rolling black of the cloud cover they were demons. Nothing could hide from them, and they could hide from everything. 

“Where’s the mark?” 
She had already found it, but he loved to speak, watching her chakra shift in the darkness as she tuned herself to him. 
“Two miles south.” 
“These scouts will not be noticed until after we’re gone.” He stepped over the body bleeding into the forest ground and she followed. 

“Uchiha-san.” Her hand was suddenly on his back, along the blasting inferno he was ignoring on his shoulder blade where one of the enemy kunai had managed to carve into his body. 

“It’s not bad.” He dismissed it but had stopped moving at her touch and in the way she usually did things she ignored him, her chakra starting to seep into him between the chain links of his atoms. 

“You will be distracted by it. It’s nearly to the bone.” She murmured, and he hardly heard her. Her chakra was an ice bath after sunburn, it was a warm fire after a snowfall, a warm meal after starving. 

He tried to steady his heart beat, irritated with himself even as he relished her fingers on his skin. 

If only they didn’t always have to work in the dark. Maybe then he would have seen the heat that overwhelmed her face as she touched him. Maybe he would have noticed the shift of her all seeing eyes unwilling to meet his gaze or the tremble in her usually rock steady hands.

But it was always dark when the Fan and Flame, the two man elite team of Konoha was ever needed. 

It was always dark.