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“—and we are having a discussion later about pranks during school hours,” Iruka huffs as he pulls Naruto along by the scruff of his jumpsuit. Boar is still shadowing them, even three blocks out from the school, which Iruka appreciates; Naruto may be all of seven years old, but he’s a squirrelly kid, and if he gets loose, Iruka does not have the energy to chase him down again. Especially with half a school day left to get through with twenty-odd other children to corral.
Naruto drags his feet and pouts theatrically. Really, they should carve that pout onto door guardians, Iruka is sure it would scare away at least the littler malevolent spirits. “Hound-san said I could, so there.”
Iruka’s eyes narrow. “Did he.” The same ANBU Hound who had slipped into his classroom half an hour ago and offered to substitute for him if he wanted to lend his expertise to the other squads hunting down exactly where a juvenile prankster might get to. Iruka knew he had to be up to something, sure, no ANBU spontaneously decides to stand responsible for a bunch of children with pointy objects and active chakra pathways without one hell of an ulterior motive. With that mirthful smile he’d seen when he was leaving, Iruka is now fully expecting to come back to an entire classroom on a sugar high, left to him to rattle into some semblance of order again.
Well, ANBU are technically jounin. Iruka shouldn’t be surprised to find the same obnoxious sense of humor present.
He looks back over at his shoulder at Boar, who is thoughtfully lurking where Iruka can actually see him instead of stalking them from afar. “I’ll send Hound-san out for you to yell at,” he says wryly. “…Maybe after I yell at him first, though.”
Boar snorts and gives him a half-salute, which Iruka will take as agreement. Iruka shakes his head and ruffles Naruto’s hair again, which makes him squint up at him with the most offended look on his face. Iruka has to look away and bite his lip to keep from laughing.
It was a good prank, honestly. Iruka’s mostly bothered that Naruto was doing that instead of at school. He’s not sure how to tell Naruto that without it sounding like permission to be as obnoxious as he possibly can, but he’s going to think it over.
Boar strolls up a wall and onto a roof about two blocks away from the Academy. Iruka rolls his eyes, but isn’t surprised; shinobi like that appear to be allergic to children except in cases of mischief, and sometimes even then. He tightens his grip on Naruto’s jumpsuit, though, because if he loses the kid now, that would just be embarrassing.
“It’s almost the lunch hour, so we’ll have plenty of time for a nice chat with Hound-san about suggesting pranks that negatively affect your education,” Iruka tells Naruto. Naruto’s face screws up even more, impressively, and he digs his feet into the grass of the lawn they’re taking a shortcut across. It doesn’t slow them down much.
“Do we have to? Hound-san said I didn’t have to go back to the Academy after I did the prank,” Naruto grumbles.
Iruka scowls and adds that to the itemized list of things he’s giving Hound-san a tongue lashing for. Ordering Academy students around should damn well be reserved for the people who actually have to teach them. “Well, I’m pretty sure Hound-san is an ANBU shinobi, not a teacher shinobi. So we’ll talk to him about promising things he shouldn’t, too.”
Naruto peers up at him suspiciously. “Is Hound-san in as much trouble as I am?”
“He just might be.” Iruka probably should have said that quieter than he did, but he’s annoyed, and building up to a good rant for the trouble Hound has already caused and whatever chaos he’ll have caused in the last half hour.
He’s probably thinking about it too hard, which is the only reason he can give for how, despite lending half an ear to listen for any approaching mischief or suspiciously gleeful children, he gets within reach of the door before realizing that the Academy is oddly quiet.
The doors aren’t that thick. They’re not that thin, either, but… Iruka glances up at the sun, trying to judge the time, but Hitomi-sensei often runs late when letting her class out for lunch. And if his own shinobi training is treating the quiet with lurking suspicion—it’s the Academy. It’s probably one of the top three most protected locations in Konoha.
Iruka shakes his head at himself and puts the paranoia back where it belongs, with the last of his mission-going days. Well, most of it, anyway. Visions of glitter bombs and buckets of water over doorways dance in his head, and even if he has the usual suspect hauled along behind him by the scruff of his neck, Hound clearly has some sort of respect for pranks.
Also, Iruka has an eye for suspicious movement of the child kind at this point, and he saw that wisp from a smoke bomb in the hallway, way too efficient for his class and in the wrong part of the building for the classes that are actually practicing those.
Iruka stops outside the classroom door and gives Naruto a look askance. “If I get paint all over me, I am going to give you the biggest hug ever, and we’re going to be covered in paint together, okay?”
Naruto grins brightly at him for a moment before remembering he’s supposed to be grumpy and rearranging his expression again. It doesn’t have the same impact this time; the nose scrunch is more cute than anything.
It lasts all of a second and a half before Naruto’s eyes slide thoughtfully to the side. “…And then we can hug Hound and get him covered in paint, right?”
Iruka laughs silently and gives Naruto an exaggerated wink. Naruto grins again, wide and foxlike, and this time it doesn’t fade. He leans out of the way of any splash zone as Iruka opens the door just slow enough to get it to creak for dramatic effect.
No paint falls. No children squeal, or whisper, or hush each other and giggle. The door swings wider and wider and Iruka notes, first, that Hound is nowhere in sight. All of the children are in their seats, slumped over their desks and each other. That wisp in the hallway, the scent in the air—sedative. Sleeping gas.
Naruto scoots over to lean against his thigh and peek around the doorway. Iruka grabs him as soon as he moves, pulling him close with his face pressed against Iruka’s hip, before he can look. Naruto squirms and complains about being held too tight. Iruka doesn’t let go.
He stares at Ino’s eyes, half-open and glazed. There’s a faint trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. A short, neat incision makes a bloody line just under the the corner of her jaw.
Naruto pinches his thigh. “Iruka-sensei.”
Iruka’s gaze jerks away from Ino and skips across the classroom. Shikamaru, head pillowed on his arms: it’s anyone’s guess if he was already sleeping when the gas hit, but the red stain on his collar says he isn’t anymore. Sasuke’s arm warmers are suddenly only mostly white, and red has never been a staple for an Uchiha’s wardrobe. Chouji is slumped back in his chair, chin resting on his chest, but his neck is thick enough that the wound is larger, more visible.
The children really do look like they could be sleeping, if their throats had been cut on the side not visible from the door. There’s no blood on the floor. Professional work; they’d died fast enough not to bleed much.
Iruka would have stood there for far longer than any shinobi should if Naruto hadn’t stomped on his foot and yanked him back to reality. He jerks his foot away, and once he’s moving, he realizes that would be—best. Best to keep moving. He stumbles back. Away from—away. His head is spinning, and he isn’t sure if the sedative hasn’t had time to dissipate, or—
The whole school is quiet. Hitomi-sensei’s students should be in the courtyard for lunch. Iruka slams into the door across the hallways with his shoulder, and when it bangs into the wall, no one shouts. No one screams. Hitomi-sensei is crumpled on the floor at the front of the class room, throat slit wide open. A student is slumped against the wall next to the bookcase. The others are at their desks—no, one student is caught halfway out of their chair, fallen to the floor with her legs not quite free of the bench.
Next door. Slam. The next one. Slumped bodies. No one’s screaming, no one’s running. The whole school is dead silent. If Hound is already gone—if he’s still here—
Hound is ANBU. Iruka is a chuunin. Iruka is also a teacher, so he is perfectly capable of doing that very simple math.
He hauls Naruto up into his arms properly, which is more difficult than it strictly should be, with the way Naruto is struggling with rising panic in his voice. He’s a child, not stupid. Iruka has kept him from seeing anything, but that doesn’t help when Iruka’s been banging doors open and been silent too long. But he can’t form words when his head is still swimming with what may or may not be the lingering sedative, so Iruka moves instead, and the second he’s kicked open the door to the courtyard, he shunshins them both away.
He skids to a stop on a curb a block away from the Academy in the direction they came from, and he can’t find an ANBU that doesn’t want to be found but—
“Boar-san!”
The scream that rips itself out of Iruka’s throat surprises him, and makes Naruto flinch in his arms and then go still like a frightened rabbit. Iruka screams again, half expecting to have his throat slit by a lightning-fast shadow before he can get the name out a second time, but when there’s a blur and Iruka flinches back from the masked shinobi that appears, it’s Boar, not Hound.
All of Boar’s attention is trained on Iruka. Shinobi do not scream for ANBU without a damn good reason.
“The school,” Iruka says. “The kids.”
Boar raises a hand under his mask and lets out a piercing whistle. Another ANBU wearing a Ferret mask appears over a roof across the street. Boar takes a step forward to shunshin.
Iruka doesn’t expect it when Boar grabs his arm and pulls him and Naruto along with him, back to the courtyard, but he should. He’s a witness, as useless as he is, so when he stumbles back onto the grass in the courtyard hard enough to hit the ground on his knees, he stays where he is. Ferret lands a fraction of a second after they do, and Boar flashes a hand signal and points to the school. Ferret vanishes again.
Boar whistles again, longer than the first time, and this time an entire squad shows up. More hand signals. Two head for the school, one shunshins to a nearby building, and the last turns an expressionless feline mask in Iruka’s direction.
Naruto has perked up at the excitement and squirms free before Iruka can make a grab for him. He blinks up at the newest ANBU, who looks back down at him silently. “Panther-san, where’s Hound-san? Iruka-sensei hasn’t gotten to yell at him yet.”
Her mask doesn’t move, but Iruka can’t help but feel like Panther is eyeing him. But she steps away, slow enough for Naruto to follow, until they’re just out of comfortable hearing range.
Boar faces him and flashes a sign out of the regular Konoha set rather than the ANBU one.
Report.
It comes out halting and disjointed, more whisper than words, and Iruka doesn’t have much to say, but he tells Boar everything he knows. The knockout gas. The strange silence. Hound seems to be gone—or at least, not found yet—given the lack of fighting, and no, Iruka didn’t hear any sounds other than the ones he made, didn’t see anything move even out of the corner of his eye. It’s over in a matter of a handful of sentences, broken into awkward pieces with jagged edges.
Then Iruka backs up and starts trying to explain that Hound had offered to sub for him while he went to reel Naruto in, and that’s when the words dry up. He expects Boar to be firmer, to demand the rest of the report, but he just watches. Half an eye on Iruka, half an eye on the shifting flow of ANBU moving through the area.
Iruka supposes they’ll have time for that after they confirm where the hell Hound is now.
It takes him ten minutes to notice that his half-kneeling, half sitting position is actually starting to get pretty painful. He shifts to a normal position and stops again. Ferret has returned from the Academy and flashed a handful of signs at Boar.
Naruto drifts back over toward Iruka with Panther as his shadow. His eyes are darting around and his shoulders are hunched. As used to ANBU chases as Naruto is, there’s a weight to the air he’s clearly not immune to. Iruka wonders if he’s noticed that there aren’t any students coming out of the building, just ANBU. Hopefully not. And hopefully no one feels the need to point it out anytime soon.
The world still moves sluggishly, time twitching by in jumps and starts. It’s been long enough that Iruka doesn’t think it’s the lingering sedative anymore. He watches Naruto hunch in on himself and pull up the grass by his knee, and wonders about Hound luring Naruto away. Luring the ANBU away. Luring Iruka away. But it means that Naruto is sitting, grumpy and tense and breathing, when every child in the school isn't.
Every child in the—
Iruka is on his feet and bolting for the street before the thought even fully forms.
Boar is effortlessly faster than he is. Iruka has a fleeting thought that running from an ANBU shinobi is a really stupid way to die before his back hits the grass and Boar is on top of him, but Boar doesn’t kill him. His hand is bruising Iruka’s upper arm with his hold, and there’s a kunai held against his throat, but not slicing through. The sharp, shallow bite of metal against his skin is enough to shock Iruka into coherence again.
“Sakura,” he chokes out. His vision’s blurring, and he wonders again about the sedative. Unless he’s just going to pass out—oh. No, it’s just the tears. “He, Hound asked me if anyone was absent today—Haruno Sakura, she’s sick, is she—“
He loses the words to finish that sentence, but that’s okay, he doesn’t want to say it out loud, and he can see that Boar understands by how his eyes widen behind his mask. The kunai stays, but the hand holding his arm lets go to form a sign. Location. Iruka stammers out the address, out in the civilian neighborhoods. She has—had—the walk to school from the Haruno’s house is one of the longest of any of his students’.
Boar looks at Ferret, who nods shortly and vanishes in a shunshin.
Iruka goes limp. It’s nothing like relief, not at all, just. Surrender. There’s nothing he can do but wait, and breathe, and even though less than a hundred meters from him is an entire building full of children who will never breathe again. Hound killed Sakura, or he didn’t. Iruka not knowing the answer can’t change it. He can’t change anything. It’s all over. It’s all over.
A very quiet voice drifts over to him. “Iruka-sensei?” It’s not a whisper, just quiet. A good inside voice. A pity Naruto never mastered it for classroom voice, Iruka thinks inanely, and slowly turns his head toward Naruto. Boar has removed his kunai; Iruka isn’t sure exactly when that happened, but Boar is now only crouched next to him, poised for movement, like he thinks he might need to stop Iruka from—from doing something. Something stupid. Like running for real, or dissolving into hysterics, or—or—
“Naruto?” Iruka says dumbly.
Naruto’s eyes are wide and afraid. He steals a quick glance at Boar but looks back just as fast. “Iruka-sensei, are you hurt? Did Boar-san hurt you?”
Iruka opens his mouth. It takes a too-long pause before he manages to form any sort of response. “No, I—Boar-san didn’t hurt me. I.” He can’t say he isn’t hurt. Or maybe he can, but only in the way that when a burn is bad enough, there’s no nerve left to report the pain. The sort of thing you have to amputate. Iruka had hurt for a handful of seconds between seeing the blood on Ino’s lips and realizing that every student in the Academy had been methodically slaughtered, but those seconds have long since passed and Iruka is nothing but numb. He can’t feel it, but the weight of it presses him down like a limb too damaged to use. His mind moves at a snail’s pace. Speaking is a struggle. “Boar-san didn’t hurt me,” he repeats in a whisper.
“Oh,” Naruto says.
He looks so small, huddled in on himself and unsure. Iruka may have kept him from seeing the—his classmates—Iruka desperately hopes he kept him from seeing his classmates, the way Naruto was trying to escape his hold he couldn’t be completely sure, but even if he did… Naruto is too young and inexperienced to put the pieces together just yet, but he knows enough to be scared and sad. And when he does figure it out—and he will, sooner rather than later—
Iruka is in no shape to comfort him. He should ask—
Iruka stares up at the clouds. Deliberately not at the school building. No stretchers have been carried away, child-sized or otherwise. There’s no coworkers to ask, no Hitomi-sensei to bribe with chocolate for her secret tear-managing techniques, no Kaito-sensei to sit silently near (but not too close to) Sasuke when he wouldn’t go outside during lunch and Iruka had to watch the more adventurous students to make sure they didn’t get hurt, and for that matter there’s no Sasuke anymore either.
For the span of about ten seconds, the weight is too heavy. Iruka can’t move. The pressure on his chest makes it difficult to even breathe. But shinobi, even chuunin, are built and trained to push themselves well beyond what any sane human should be able to take, so when time insists on ticking onward, Iruka makes himself move anyway.
He goes slowly enough that Boar doesn’t do more than turn his head slightly to keep a better eye on him. Iruka shoves his elbows into the ground underneath him and forces himself upward—head about his shoulders, then all the way back into a sitting position. The invisible weight doesn’t diminish but it doesn’t, at least, get heavier.
“Naruto?” he whispers. Naruto focuses on him and Iruka loses words again. He silently holds his arms out.
Naruto stares at him in shock for a series of seconds that flow like syrup, but then he scrambles into Iruka’s lap all at once. He’s still when Iruka wraps his arms around his shoulders, the way he always is for the first second or two when Iruka pats him on the shoulder or ruffles his hair, but like always, it fades, and he slowly relaxes into the hug. The rhythm of his back moving with his breathing is almost hypnotic, and Iruka lets it act as a meditation. In, out. Inhale, exhale. A child in his arms who still breathes.
Iruka is so focused on Naruto’s breathing that, when little arms wiggle out of his grip to hug him back, he starts a little in surprise and then almost bursts into tears. Almost. Iruka takes in a deep, shuddering breath, and rests his chin on the top of Naruto’s head, hugging him just a little tighter.
Ferret reappears in a burst of leaves, and Iruka can’t breathe again. Naruto shifts in his arms at the change. Iruka presses a hand to his had to keep his face half pressed against Iruka’s shirt and facing away from the returning ANBU.
Ferret looks at Boar. He shakes his head, two sharp, tiny movements.
Sakura is—
Oh. There’s the pain.
Iruka squeezes Naruto close and sways. His cheek is against Naruto’s hair, and Iruka can smell that strange scent of ozone that always clings subtly but stubbornly to him, and also that Naruto hasn’t washed his hair this week. The tears are almost a surprise. Iruka can’t remember if he’s cried yet, but if he has, it wasn’t like this, with shuddering sobs that try to shake him apart and the ache in his throat slowly trying to strangle him.
His eyes are squeezed shut. Iruka doesn’t remember closing them but has no intention of opening them. The world feels gray, washed out and unreal, and he doesn’t want to see it. He already saw the other children, and while he hasn’t seen—and never wants to see—Sakura, he can’t help but picture it in his head. Pink hair, red ribbon. No shy expression or small smile, just emptiness. A line of blood at her throat, or, more likely, a smaller stab wound under her ear, not quite hidden by the child-soft line of her jaw.
Her parents had told Iruka this morning that she was still sleeping off the fever that kept her home yesterday. Was she still asleep, when Hound found her? Or did she see him? Did she know when it happened? Was she afraid? Did it hurt? Was it quick?
Breathing through the sobs feels like breathing molten metal, or maybe that’s just the fire-bright pain inside of him, lodged in his lungs because it’s too big for his heart. He wishes he didn’t have to breathe anymore; wishes Hound had dropped the act three or seven or ten minutes earlier than he did, and killed Iruka first.
Some indeterminable amount of time later, someone rests a hand on his shoulder, and Iruka blankly lifts his head. Naruto is gently shuffled away, too worried and scared to complain too loudly, and Boar grabs Iruka’s upper arms to haul him semi-gently to his feet. Iruka only staggers a little at the feeling of pins and needles. He thinks for a moment about limbs going numb and how it’s always a little too close to pain when sensation returns, and then he stops thinking about it.
They’re starting to bring stretchers out of the school, now, covered head to toe in sheets. Most of the sheets are much too long for the children underneath them. Iruka wonders first if they’re going to do open caskets with the bodies in such good condition. Then he wonders if they’re going to do a mass funeral, and how long it all would take if they don’t. Then he wonders, more seriously, how to make his brain shut up.
Boar puts a hand on his shoulder and turns him to face the street. Genma and Raidou are watching him with expressions he can’t read, but honestly, he’s not trying very hard.
“We’re escorting you to T&I,” Genma says levelly.
Iruka has no intention of trying to run; this is about what he expected. He allows himself to be escorted, a heavy hand on each shoulder, and doesn’t set a foot off the most direct route to the T&I building.
They bring him to a cell, search him for weapons and take them away, and seat him in the wooden chair with chains on it. Presumably, the other is for the interrogator. As they’re about to leave, Genma takes a breath like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t. Iruka doesn’t even try to form words.
The door closes behind them, and Iruka is left alone.
He feels numb again. The urge to check that he can still feel physical pain is strong, and Iruka thinks about it seriously before he remembers he’s in T&I and can’t have sharp objects. Then he remembers why sharp objects are not allowed in T&I and thinks blankly that he’s not actually sure if he wants to bleed or not.
His hands are chained up anyway. He couldn’t reach any of his weapons even if they’d let him keep them. After a long moment of thought, he digs the nail of his pointer finger into the pad of his thumb. Hmm. He lets it go and looks at the dent in his thumb even as it slowly disappears.
Iruka can still feel physical pain, then.
Burns are, as rule, breeding grounds for bacteria. When they’re bad enough to kill nerves, they’ve killed the flesh around them, too. If the dead cells aren’t removed, they do as all dead things do, and rot. Surviving a battle with a burn to show for it is one thing. Surviving the infection if that same burn isn’t cleaned and treated properly—and sometimes even when it is—is harder.
Sometimes… there’s just too much damage. Not enough circulation left in a limb to keep it alive, or infection reaching the bone. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do but amputate the damage, and learn to live with what’s left.
Iruka wonders if there’s a way to amputate the parts of him that are supposed to be in pain, because there is clearly something very wrong with them. Something to ask Inoichi, probably. He would be the sort of person to know.
When the door does finally open, though, it isn’t Inoichi, but another Yamanaka that Iruka doesn’t know the name of. He blinks, slow and confused, because Inoichi is indisputably the best at Yamanaka clan techniques, and he assumed… Iruka wouldn’t have the ability to hide anything even if he wanted to, certainly, but given the importance, given that Iruka is the best witness they have to the deaths of every student enrolled in the Academy—
Ino.
Iruka breathes out very slowly at the memory of glazed, half-open eyes. Of the blood. He doesn’t want to take another breath. That is, unfortunately, the sort of thing that his body is willing to do without his input or permission.
Iruka doesn’t fight, doesn’t resist, and doesn’t ask any questions of his own. The Yamanaka scrapes through his head for every bit of information, for any trace of guilt, but Iruka doesn’t have enough of the first and doesn’t have the right sort of the latter. He didn’t know. He didn’t know. Hound had been up to something, but ANBU so often are. To leave a classroom of Konoha children alone with a Konoha shinobi, in the middle of the day in the middle of the village, wasn’t a betrayal. It shouldn’t have even been a risk.
The Yamanaka leaves him in the cell when he’s done. Iruka’s head is pounding, his eyes feel like they’re being squeezed by his skull and it hurts, but it’s not the right kind of hurt. The numbness stays.
Maybe he’ll ask Inoichi about it, later, but. More likely he won’t.
The numbness is threaded through the core of him, and that’s not the sort of place you can amputate. Maybe, sometimes, if you’re lucky and careful and strong enough, you can scrape the dead out and keep it clean enough for something to heal over and survive.
But Iruka is of Konoha, raised hidden in the leaves, and he knows what happens when a tree begins to rot.