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About ten minutes out from Konoha, Cat staggered.
Well. Twitched slightly and broke a twig underfoot, same thing. Hound landed on the next branch and stared as Cat perched on the branch, frozen. Then he made the oddest sound in his throat, something halfway between holding in a sneeze and choking, and swatted his mask askew to spit out a mouthful of thin black blood.
"Status," Hound snapped, already reaching for his medical kit.
"Unknown," Cat replied hoarsely, spitting again. This time it was a mixture of red and black, with a few traces that were clear. "Not poison," he added, sounding far too certain for a shinobi coughing up blood.
Hound didn't reply to that. He simply wiped up the mixed blood with a testing strip and ran chakra through it. Cat was right that it wasn't poison, but it read out as blood and... ink? Hound had never heard of... what, someone trapping food with a seal? They hadn't had anything but pills and their own water the entire mission anyway, when would it have happened?
... Ink, though. "Open your mouth," Hound ordered. A few sparks of raiton at his fingertips let him see passably well, though the back of Cat's throat spasmed between trying to swallow or cough, and probably with well-honed wariness of even this little chakra use so close to killing points.
What it didn't have under the flexing was the damn Root seal.
Hound snapped the raiton sparks off, shifting back to let Cat replace his mask, and readied to catch him. "Say something about Danzo."
Cat stiffened, but not unnaturally like the seal would do. "Danzo?" he repeated obediently. A tiny, startled pause, as the seal failed again to paralyze him. "... Root," he tried, then, "The Foundation." Still nothing. After another, longer pause, Cat inhaled, slowly and over-controlled. "Shimura Danzo's training procedures for The Foundation are fucked up."
Nothing.
With the scarcest tip of Hound's head, the pair of them darted for the village.
They cleared the walls seven minutes later, through a dissipating cloud of vaguely fruity pink smoke.
Every head on the Hokage Monument had people hanging upside-down from their carved nostrils. Hound couldn't see who, from how various coats and robes (all of them currently lined in either sequined, neon, or hideously-patterned fabric) fell over their heads and faces. The venerable stone faces were also covered in sequins and neon colors: Hound wasn't sure if they were supposed to be kabuki characters or drag queens like was growing popular in the capital. Probably some of each.
(Minato would've laughed at his bedazzled, pouty-lipped head so much...)
Continuing on, over rooftops strewn with confetti, they found that half the stores in the marketplace had goods flying off the shelves into the streets, not a single item hitting any of the small children grabbing free toys and candy. Others had multicolored waterfalls blocking their doors and flooding the roads. One particular store was covered in serrated spikes and tar; Hound knew the owner had been fined several times for upcharging anyone who 'looked like a hooligan'. The only time payment had been enforced was when she'd mistaken Inuzuka Hana for the kind of orphaned teenage genin she disproportionately targeted.
T&I's secret entrance, an unassuming public bathhouse, flashed with strobing colored lights and throbbing bass like a nightclub.
The Uchiha's sacred mikoshi, which hadn't been allowed out of their compound for nearly seven years, was driving itself through the center of town on a rickety, glitter-sprayed cart, handbells clanging on every corner of the shrine and the kami's statue inside wearing the vibrant red-and-gold Whirlpool uchikake that the Shodaime's wife, and later the Sandaime's, had been married in. Apparently it had not been in Kushina's home all those years ago, waiting to be used once more.
Even as Hound and Cat stared, assessing the situation, an explosion at the Hyuuga compound heralded the escape of the Hyuuga's sacred mikoshi, handbells tuned to an entirely different key and their kami's statue (Inari rather than Amaterasu, and kept out of the festivals just as long from the deity's association with foxes) in the white-and-red uchikake worn before the red-and-gold in the ceremony.
Dread did not sink heavy in Hound's stomach. It didn't.
(This was worse than That Year. How?)
"Ah, senpai...?"
"Watch for tripwires." And Hound led Cat over the disaster zone, eyes scanning for the tiniest glint of chakra wire against the background. An urban environment was the worst place to look for that, though: the straight lines vanished against those of the buildings, and every flicker of sunlight could be off a window, a vent, or even a candy wrapper blown into a corner at just the right angle, instead of a wire.
Still, they managed to make it to the Hokage Tower while only setting off one trap, which fortunately just splashed cold, glitter-filled dashi at them. Granted, it was near the Inuzuka kennels and brought all the nin-puppies barking to besiege the area, but not enough actually landed on Hound or Cat to have the puppies hunting them.
The Hokage Tower was also under siege, this time from what was probably every single cat in Konoha, yowling in painfully loud cacophony as catnip rained from the eaves.
A few sprigs of catnip caught on the wet spots on Hound's pants when they jumped through the shower and into the Hokage's office. Hound slammed the window in the face of a nin-cat, winced at the screech of claws that would cut through glass anywhere else in Konoha, and turned to bow at the Hokage. And, belatedly, noticed his guests.
Shikaku (ignoring a lacy pink sleep mask glued to his hitai-ate), Eagle (his hair replaced with an intricate seal, ink already smearing under the straps of his ANBU mask), and Uchiha Fugaku (stained several delicate shades of spring green from head to toe, hair and clothes included) stood before the desk in varying degrees of professionally stoic. Between them, some random, unpranked chuunin held a small blond boy by the arm in a death grip, killing intent radiating out in weak ripples.
From the chuunin, not the boy. Naruto just stared at Hound, eyes startled and damp behind a mask of hopeless fury.
"Hound," the Sandaime said heavily. "You'll have to wait to report. As you can see, we have a bit of a situation--"
"Which is entirely his fault," the chuunin hissed, shaking Naruto roughly.
"I dint DO nuthin!"
Which was when something small and round rocketed out of the hidden ANBU entrance in the ceiling. Hound had Naruto halfway across the room with armored gauntlets covering the boy's back and head by the time the ball finished bouncing to a halt almost at the chuunin's feet; everyone else had leapt back just like Hound had, weapons out and (in the case of Shikaku and Fugaku) clan jutsu at the ready. Fugaku's Sharingan spun once, dangerously.
"Well," Hound said into the silence, staring at Danzo's head, stripped of all bandages to show a blankly staring Sharingan eye. "I for one believe you, kid."
The chuunin finally took a couple of belated, shaky steps back. "That's." He swallowed, and pointed at a line of what wasn't actually blood. THIEF was written right down Danzo's sunken cheek, under the Sharingan, in bright red ink. "That's Iruka-sensei's handwriting."
Hound met Sandaime's stricken stare, then followed it straight out the windows to the chaos raining down upon Konoha.
-0-0-0
"Umino Iruka does not need to be armed to be dangerous!" Eagle bellowed across the ranks of ANBU, as reactivated and summoned agents geared up and collected their masks from the quartermaster. (No one had considered for even ten seconds that this might be the work of an infiltrator, except for Weasel, who'd only been in ANBU for a matter of weeks.) "He does not need ninjutsu to overpower you! He does not need taijutsu to escape you!"
He has five extra years of ideas and experience to play with, Hound mentally added.
"We do not know if he will respond with lethal force!" Eagle continued. Hound would never have believed the possibility was even there if Danzo's head didn't have Iruka's writing on it. No word yet on what had happened to his body, either. With Iruka, it could be anything.
"Orders are to subdue and capture only!"
Hound did not have high hopes for success.
-0-0-0
As night fell, all of ANBU still empty-handed without even having caught a glimpse of Iruka, the empty gaps high above the streets started to fill with softly glowing bubbles in every color. Carp found out the hard way the bubbles were full of laughing gas.
Horse found out the harder way that the bubbles made a maze of the rooftops that herded them into traps. Nothing lethal so far; the worst had been a shower of pine 'flowers', puffy cones about a kunai handle long, so laden with pollen that just falling through the air left a yellow cloud before impact. So now Horse's team was yellow, sticky, and sneezing their way to the nearest secure shower, and Hound had to split his team to cover their part of the search grid, sending Cat with Weasel instead of having them all go solo.
A lone ANBU agent would be an irresistable target. Weasel shouldn't have to get caught up in that.
Hound bypassed a plaza where the mikoshi were currently fighting, crashing into each other as if they actually had competitive teams of porters carrying them. After that he circled a training ground that was now a saltwater pond full of miniature tuna with several people fishing in it, then Ichiraku Ramen which was suspiciously but unsurprisingly untouched, and headed along the street full of little restaurant stands and bars that Ichiraku was on the corner of. None of the restaurants or bars were damaged, all of them Friday-night levels of busy (even though it was a Tuesday) with civilians and shinobi Hound knew lived in buildings that'd lost power. (Mysteriously, they were all buildings with landlords under investigation.)
Not all of the street's buildings had gone unpranked, though the businesses themselves were fine, and Hound had to slip down into an alley behind a bar whose rooftop was knee-deep in flowers and presumably traps. Though of course Iruka would've trapped the entire alley just as much, having herded down whatever hapless shinobi avoided the roof. Hound crouched against the wall, a few steps up from the ground, looking to see if there more tripwires, or perhaps seals camouflaged in the uneven shadows of wood and water-stained stucco.
Or perhaps a random, club-hopping shinobi wandering into the alley, unaccompanied and not seeming the least bit drunk. At least not enough to be sneaking into an alley to get sick, or forgetting the bars had toilets available, or forgetting that this alley happened to not actually go anywhere that the open and better-lit street on the other side of the flower-roofed building didn't.
The man's fishnet armor shirt left broad shoulders bare and his throat covered, with no weapons pouch visible at the low-slung waistband of his plain shinobi pants or strapped high on his thigh in easy reach. No choker, no armbands, no bracelets or gloves or even rings that could be hiding chakra wire or hooked spikes. Hound didn't catch any glint of earrings that could also be weapons in the man's loose hair, though that didn't mean he couldn't be wearing any. The man looked almost completely unarmed (except of course for the entirely reasonable chance of chakra wire in his hair, blades in his sandals, or chemical pellets in any of the hidden pockets standard-issue pants had) other than a long, thin scroll strapped across his back like a quiver. He tilted his head slightly, and the light caught on a horizontal slash across his nose.
Forget the scroll, Iruka's real weapon was his mind. Hound lunged to take it out of play.
And very nearly dislocated both his shoulders and a knee when the wall refused to release his chakra grip on it.
... Seals. Herding. Sage dammit.
"Oh, perfect," Iruka breathed, his smile bright and dangerous as he slunk closer. "I was hoping to catch you."
Oldest sage-dammed trick in the book, Hound thought, shifting against the wall to test the extent of the glue trap. They'd all been looking for a ponytail and standard uniform; Iruka hadn't even covered his scar with makeup...
Though, faintly, Hound caught the scent of soap as Iruka ducked in close, eyes all pupil and nose almost touching Hound's mask, and his face looked freshly scrubbed. Okay, the honor of ANBU wasn't completely tarnished, but still they should've all been able to recognize Iruka from a block away even without the scar and his usual hairstyle. He'd been working the mission desk for nearly three years! The only agent he hadn't shouted into compliance at least once was Weasel!
"I knew you weren't that much older than me," Iruka said, vindicated.
What.
"And that you found my pranks entertaining." He shifted even closer, fingertips against Hound's armor. "'Would recommend to sabotage or security,'" Iruka quoted happily, and dammit he did have the clearance to read his own full file now, didn't he? "'If he wasn't such a wild brat.' And a warning that I bite. An ANBU warning even before I graduated! I blushed so hard when I found that, Hound."
Hound hadn't even really meant it as a compliment. He'd been fourteen, just gotten back from a two-week mission, and spent two days in a row chasing Iruka down instead of collapsing into a pile of rock dust and chakra exhaustion. He'd just wanted to dump Iruka's chaos on Iwa for a fucking change instead of dealing with the pranks himself.
.... Nevermind. Considering Iruka's pranks viable weapons basically was a compliment, wasn't it.
"But we both know you'll finish breaking free in about two more minutes." Iruka beamed at him winsomely. "Do you think you could demand sexual favors in exchange for not taking me to the Hokage?"
Kakashi sputtered.
"I mean, you'd break the deal and take me there anyway, but at least I would've gotten to give my favorite agent a back-alley blowjob. Please?"
What the absolute fuck was wrong with Iruka? "You wa-- Iru-- I can't just-- Iruka you killed Shimura Danzo."
Iruka made a face, then groaned and dropped his head onto Kakashi's shoulder pauldron. "Ugh, I know. If I could've left it until after you captured me I would've. Damn bastard ruining a perfectly good fantasy..."
"You just admit it?!" (Kakashi was going to disregard that last sentence.)
"Why wouldn't I?" Iruka asked simply, lifting away from Kakashi's shoulder. "I wrote on his face and plenty of people saw me walk right into his office." He tilted his head, meeting Kakashi's eye through the mask. "Do you want to know how?"
He wanted to know what happened to Iruka. (One minute fifty-eight, one minute fifty-nine...) Kakashi groaned, opened his Sharingan eye, and knocked Iruka right out.
-0-0-0
Ten minutes later, in a secured hospital room with a team of ANBU's nurses stripping Iruka like they were defusing a bomb, "Hound." Sparrow gestured him to step closer to the hospital bed, then to look behind Iruka's left ear, where she had just brushed his hair out of the way. Kakashi leaned over, and she delicately pushed Iruka's ear outwards to show a small black mark on the tenketsu cluster fitted into the curve there. It looked a bit like a broken starburst, and given where it was and what the results had been...
Kakashi pressed a tiny bit of chakra into the mark to open up the seal, and it splayed out into three lines of spiky writing that was relatively legible (most seals were written so expressively that you had to be familiar with that particular handwriting already to read them), but still unintelligible. It was written in what looked to be a personal code, or at least one too obscure for Kakashi to know, which was highly unlikely for Konoha script.
One line curled around Iruka's ear and very nearly to the corner of his scar; another pointed at his spine, close enough to his hairline that they were going to have to shave perhaps as much as a finger's width off to be sure they were seeing the words in full; and the third lay halfway between, straight down behind his ear and to the pulse point on his throat.
Between the placement and results, "Looks like some sort of 'lower inhibitions' seal."
"Most of those are for interrogation," Sparrow pointed out, jotting down a copy of the seal text. "Or fake drunk to party without the hangover. Or sex games, though what I've heard says Umino doesn't need help to be wild in bed." Sparrow kindly pretended not to notice Kakashi choke, and continued, "I'll take this over to R&D, drop it on the Cipher Squad, and go report to the Hokage. Put Weasel on watch and get some sleep before Umino wakes up and you can use Evil Sealing on him." She waved the paper a bit to help the ink dry, and muttered, "You'll need it. Nobody's getting this thing off Umino any time soon."
"At least he'll be easy to interrogate," one of the nurses muttered. The fishnet armor latch under his fingertips spat pink raiton sparks at him. "Motherfu--"
"Weasel!" Sparrow yelled, heading out the door. "Get in here and strip the guy, he's not gonna have traps that'll hit a kid! Hound. Rest. I have to do all the thinking around here I swear to--"
Weasel darted in, and Kakashi gave up. He dragged over a hospital chair, curled up in it despite how no hospital chair had ever been designed for a human being to actually use, and went to sleep.
-0-0-0-
Hound woke to an unfamilar scent wafting through air that was stirring wrong. There was faintest added bit of volume to Iruka's in-breaths, just the slightest bit too much for a trained shinobi: not air at all, but cloth brushing across the linoleum floor as someone glided their footsteps in rhythm with Iruka's breathing.
The room was devoid of any chakra presence other than Hound's, Weasel's, and Iruka's.
Another faint brush of cloth, this time leather against metal.
The kunai screeked across armor -- Hound's gauntlet, between the intruder and Iruka, followed by the crack of his fist against the intruder's ANBU mask. The intruder didn't stumble in their backstep, just twisted away from Weasel's own kunai and brought a second one up to defend.
Strike, parry, parry, Hound went high while Weasel went low, a smooth switch as they circled around the intruder, strike again; sparks went up with every hit, blade to blade, the intruder holding their own against Hound and Weasel two-on-one.
On the defensive, Hound thought, in not so many words. Obviously on the defensive: very few people could take on Hound and Weasel together in close quarters, and almost nobody could do so without getting driven back like this Root agent.
Something's wrong.
Hound didn't have any reason to feel that. The agent fought like an agent, moved like an agent, was on the defensive and being driven back just as almost anybody would be in this fight, and yet...
A wooden cocoon swallowed the Root agent to the throat, just in time for Hound to spin and tackle the second agent slithering out of the vent nearest Iruka's bed.
Impossible, the vents were specifically designed so a shinobi wouldn't fit--
The Root agent's mask was too big for them. The body under Hound was too small, arms like sticks in his grip and his knee slipping off a knobby little ankle instead of shoved in a nastily painful pin against the agent's pelvis.
Hound was shit at guessing kids' ages. This one looked a little bigger than Naruto, maybe. (... So it was for the best that Iruka was still out. He'd kill Danzo again and then go after Hound.)
"Taicho...?"
"Senpai...?"
Slowly, Hound inhaled. He shifted his grip on the kid and twisted to get his hip pinning both the kid's ankles. "You realize," he said, dangerously mild and mostly to the decoy adult agent, "that in Danzo's absence, the Hokage is in control of Root."
Arguably. Mostly in that the Hokage was supposed to be in charge of all Konoha's shinobi in the first place, and fuck Danzo's delusions of command.
Neither Root agent answered, though the kid's eyes went wider behind his oversized blank mask. Not that Hound had expected an answer. "Did the Hokage sanction this mission?"
No answer.
"Did the Hokage assign you any mission regarding Umino Iruka?"
No answer again.
"Are you under any circumstances allowed to take independent action?"
Hound knew the answer to that. To all three questions, really. He sighed heavily and stood, dragging the kid up with him and holding him out towards the cocoon. "Cat, take them to report to Eagle. Find out what contingency plan they're trying to work off of, because there's no way there's one that actually accounts for Danzo's death. He can take this headache to the Hokage in the morning."
"Yes, senpai." Cat took the kid into the same firm grip Hound had used, adding a light set of Mokuton cuffs-and-belt to keep the kid subdued, and gestured for the adult's cocoon to pull up roots and follow along.
The door shut silently in their wake. Another sigh (this was going to be such a pain to deal with), and Hound turned back to the bed.
Iruka was gone.
"... Those are bad words, Taicho."
"Some situations call for them. Come on, we have to rouse ANBU again."
"Yes, Taicho."
-0-0-0
The chaos had died down some around Konoha. Someone had managed to subdue and remove the mikoshi, and the stores had long since run out of inventory to throw out their doors. Only a few of the bars remained open, wild carousing drained to the tired dregs of people nursing drinks instead of having gone home with anyone. A yatai had set up in front of the darkened and closed Ichiraku, its middle-aged proprietor sitting behind the counters with her feet kicked up onto a second folding chair, idly reading Icha Icha while a last batch of gyoza cooled in the nearly-empty serving bins.
Those buildings that had been impacted remained so, be-flowered rooftops and waterfalls and all, but the laughing gas bubbles steering shinobi into traps had dispersed. Someone had, with a clever use of doton, dug canals for the waterfalls that drained into nearby fountains and gardens, and the river, and into the new training ground pond, now devoid of fisherfolk for the night. No one remained hanging from the graven noses of the Hokage Monument, though the paint and bedazzling were still in place.
It was too quiet for Iruka to be on the loose. But...
If I were an Iruka not rampaging through town with new pranks... something else took priority.
Something that had Iruka either not notice or not care that Weasel was eleven, that Hound had a six?-year-old pinned to the floor in Iruka's hospital room.
What could be more important to Iruka than noticing children in his vicinity?
Other children.
But who? He'd already hung the older half of the Hyuuga Main Branch off a cliff, and Hound couldn't think of any other children in Iruka's class that he wouldn't have targeted bad parents for already...
... except one.
Sage dammit. "We're checking on the Uzumaki boy first," Hound said, changing course slightly towards a more derelict section of town. "You will be responsible for taking him into protective custody if necessary."
If he needed to be rescued...
Hound would never have believed it of Iruka -- still could barely convince himself that Iruka might be a threat to any child -- but... Naruto was the jinchuuriki. Iruka was just one of far too many orphans of the Kyuubi. He had motive, and Naruto wouldn't know to be wary of him. At least, not any more wary than he was of any other villager, which honestly was not a lot from what little Hound had managed to observe.
Maybe Hound's guess was wrong, he hoped, as he and Itachi darted across rooftops in increasingly poor repair; and between clotheslines dripping with indifferently-washed, threadbare clothes; cracked flowerpots sporting more rocks and windblown twigs than dirt, growing scraggly edible weeds.
Naruto's building looked, if one was generous about it, something like a pink fluffy cake. If one was realistic, it had once been painted red, but now was almost gray from sun-bleaching, with eaves and windowsills starting to sag with age. The wall, when Hound landed on it, felt more spongey to his chakra than undamaged timber and concrete would.
Itachi's sharingan flickered red where he stared at Hound from the other side of the boy's kitchen window, half a spin before they went black once more.
Kakashi wiped a bit of the dull plaster dust out of a crack in the concrete, spat at it, and rubbed his thumb to get a very poor and extremely temporary -- one use within the next five minutes -- sealing ink that wouldn't smell of blood. A quick scribble on the windowjamb, and when he pushed at the sliding half of the window, it moved in a sticky, jerky way that would've been a half-rusted screech fit to wake up everyone in a five-block radius. Except, of course, that the makeshift seal silenced it.
He gestured for Itachi to stay outside for a few seconds. Just long enough for Kakashi to slip through the window, not brain himself and destroy any chance of stealth on a pile of dirty plastic cups and dishes (most of them chipped, with cutesy faded designs or wobbly childish drawings in faded marker, though there was no small amount of instant ramen cups) left precariously in the sink, and land on the sticky kitchen floor.
Naruto's bed was visible from here as a shadowy nest-like disaster of scrap cloth on a bare mattress, with no sign that Naruto actually had any idea what a sheet was, and was empty of little jinchuuriki.
The shadows falling in stark, chaotic lines across the apartment flared into a watery barrier dome in the corner between the kitchen and bed.
"Iruka."
"Hound," Iruka replied evenly, crouched in that corner (fortunately having somehow found shorts to go under his hospital gown) with Naruto unharmed on his knee. The boy stared at Hound, all bedhead and wary eyes... but not, Hound thought, afraid of Iruka. Iruka's arm pressed Naruto that slightest bit more protectively against his shoulder. "Did you know there are no guards on this apartment at all."
WHAT. "I did not," Hound replied.
"And are there supposed to be?"
"That's certainly what I was told."
Iruka's pointed silence was damning.
"Sooooo..." Hound's icy formality wouldn't really work in front of the kid. Kakashi asked, "Whatcha doing here, Iruka? It's four in the morning. Little boys and teachers need their rest."
"Do they." Iruka's flinty gaze flicked past Kakashi, at the window that Itachi shouldn't be visible through. "And yet you've brought one along."
Kakashi didn't do the novice mistake of following Iruka's glance. He'd let Iruka out of his sight for two minutes already tonight, and look where that got them. Anyway, it was just Weasel, the light blocked for a moment as Weasel also slid through the window and avoided the dish pile of doom. "Good morning, sensei," he said politely, as if he was just dropping that little brother of his off at school. "I was already awake due to the chaos." Excellent, just a little stab of a guilt trip, good job Weasel. "Do you know if class will be cancelled?"
"You're not in our class," Naruto said accusingly, instead of letting Iruka answer.
Weasel paused. Then, in a gently amused tone, said, "No, I am not. I am familiar with some of your classmates. Naruto, isn't it?"
"Uzumaki Naruto, dattebayo!" The boy pointed sharply. "And don't you forget it!"
"I would never." Then Weasel bowed. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Naruto-san," which put open shock on Naruto's little face, "despite the late hour."
"... Well... well it should be!" Naruto proclaimed, stuttering with false bravado. "I'm gonna be Hokage!"
"It is an honor to meet my future Hokage, then." He tipped his head ever-so-slightly up, towards Iruka. "Did I hear that our future Hokage does not have a proper guard? I believe several of his classmates have parents who would be willing to extend their hospitality for the time being, if I may take him."
Iruka frowned, but he couldn't refute the point; something like half a dozen of the classmates were children of different clan leaders. Instead, he cast a knowing look at Kakashi, then turned to the child. "Naruto?" he asked gently, encouragingly, giving the boy's stunned face a little tap to turn his attention off Weasel. "This is your decision as well."
To his credit, Naruto did think it over for a long moment, all furrowed brows and squinty eyes cast to the floor as he thought. "... long as 's not a girl," he finally said in a small voice. "They're all mean."
"I shall endeavor to choose a nice classmate," Weasel promised gravely.
"An' not Shino!" Naruto added. "He's not bad but we gotta stay apart in class, his bugs get sick."
Weasel inclined his head. "No, not Shino," he agreed. "I was considering the Uchiha." Well, that was yet another political bomb set off. Kakashi should've expected it. "Is Sasuke acceptable? His clan has many strong shinobi on duty in the village, including the head family."
Naruto frowned, shifting a little on Iruka's knee, Iruka loosening his grip on the boy. "I guess Sasuke's okay."
Iruka poked at one of the seal scribbles on the floor, and let Naruto slide free to walk through the barrier and into Weasel's offered arms. With a quick, subtle nod in salute, Weasel flickered away... though not fast enough for Kakashi to not hear Naruto shyly ask, "Didja know I'mma hero?"
... Oh, Iruka. "Really?" Hound asked, as Iruka slowly stood to face him.
"That secret wasn't protecting him one bit and you know it," Iruka scoffed, folding his arms across his chest. "An Academy student could figure out what Naruto is just by his age and treatment in public, if we told them jinchuuriki exist. At least now he knows it's people being idiots instead of anything he did."
"Iruka."
"Hound," he replied in the exact same tone. Then, "Why is there a child in ANBU?"
"I honestly could not tell you."
A pause. "... Is that 'you don't know' or 'you aren't allowed'?"
The latter, really, but Kakashi was mostly guessing that Itachi had been added to the roster for politics, so technically it was both.
"Nevermind," Iruka sighed after it became clear Hound wasn't going to answer. "Back to the hospital?"
"Back to the hospital," Kakashi agreed.
"We will be discussing this later."
"We'll see."
Iruka dropped the barrier and let Kakashi put him under again.
-0-0-0
Later, Hound got knocked out of his sleeping-as-ordered by hitting the ground hard in a tangle of live weight and branches and killing intent. His claws clanged against metal, and by the time he finished opening his eyes he'd identified the 'branches' as furniture and the killing intent as just maiming intent.
"It's later, Hound." Iruka growled. "Why is there a child in ANBU?"
Well, at the moment, the child was saving Iruka from being gutted: Hound's clawed gloves were trying to stab through Weasel's gauntlets, one against Iruka's stomach and the other blocking his throat. Iruka didn't seem to have even noticed Weasel clutching him from behind.
In a more general sense, the answer was probably Danzo. But, "Iruka. They took the shorts." Iruka's eyes blazed at the non-answer. "I think Weasel's a little too young to appreciate the view."
Iruka bolted upright, jerking his hips forward, and yanked the back flaps of the gown over his ass and his ass away from Weasel. Which gave Hound a view he would remember for later, even covered as it was.
Hound let go of Weasel's gauntlets, letting the kid back off and settle in a polite, formal seiza next to them, on the side that was not taken up by the toppled chair Hound had been sleeping in. "Do not worry, sensei," Weasel said, earnest and monotone. "I will avoid appreciating it if I do grow up."
"If?!" Iruka all but shrieked.
Weasel didn't even blink. "Yes." Then, "May I ask how you killed Councilmember Shimura Danzo, Umino-sensei?"
"I handed a scroll to him and he didn't even check what it might be before he opened it," Iruka snapped, still in high dudgeon. "What with me being far too emotional and sentimental to be at all competent at anything," had Danzo somehow not noticed That Year? "except coddling children. He probably thought it was yet another fostering application he could deny," Iruka hissed. "Or an Academy budget for him to cut. Or one of his own proposals to lower the Academy standards and graduating age, so that he could completely ignore all the arguments in the marginalia again and rewrite it with even more double-speak to try to sneak it past committee."
Weasel exchanged looks with Hound. Well. That was motive covered, several times over. "And... what was it?" Hound asked.
"Headhunter scroll." A pause. "I invented it, bit of an accident, I was trying for a live capture scroll that could let the head out for interrogation." Another, longer pause, while Iruka's gaze dropped and went distant. "I... was never going to use it..." He raised a hand to his head. "Why did I use it?"
Slowly, Hound levered himself up to his elbows. Then, when Iruka didn't protest, he slid out from under the chuunin and -- carefully, considering his claws -- wrapped a gloved hand around Iruka's bicep. "You're under a 'lower inhibitions' seal."
Dark eyes snapped to meet Hound's. "I most certainly am not. 'Lower inhibitions' doesn't do this."
"What do you think it is, then, sensei?" Weasel asked.
Iruka shook his head. "I'd have to see a copy of the seal, and even then I probably won't be able to read it unless it's Konoha kinjutsu. It's definitely kinjutsu, though," he concluded. "Something that makes a shinobi kill one of their own, against all their loyalty and better judgement? The possibility of weapons like that is what got Uzushio destroyed." He paused again, paling slightly. "... Weapons. And this went off while I was in class."
Hound went very, very still. If the jutsu had been on anybody except Iruka... almost nobody knew about Iruka's crippling hesitation to kill. "This was supposed to be a bloodbath."
Killing intent flashed through Weasel's chakra. "And all the clan heirs are in your class."
-0-0-0
"When I wake up I had better be tied to the bed," Iruka grumped at the room. A room which was currently empty of anyone but him and Hound: he'd thrown Weasel out with a sharp 'you have enough nightmares already, you don't need to see this'. Iruka continued, "In the not-fun way. Hound, these cuffs are useless, doesn't ANBU have anything better?" He tugged sharply at one of the jutsu-disrupting cuffs attached to the hospital bed, making the chain clatter against the rails. "You know damn well I don't need jutsu-- are these things even welded on?" He ducked underneath the bed, heedless of how his hospital gown gaped in the back and rode too high on his thighs as he twisted around, fingertips tracing along the bed's understructure. "Is this made of aluminum?" he asked incredulously.
Hound sighed, finished his current seal stroke, and said, "I don't know, Iruka."
"I could break this thing in three minutes," Iruka said in open horror. "I'd have half the bed structure still attached but that just gives me spiky weapons to swing around. You can't tie me to this."
This next letter went to the right, not the left. Hound barely made the correction in time.
"My glue trap seal won't work, I know how to get out of that too." Obviously. "Who's that guy who mimics Mokuton? He should flatten me to the floor. I don't know enough about his work to have plans for that already, I'd have to start thinking from scratch."
Hound finished the current phrase with a couple flicked droplets for diacritics, then wiped his finger clean and reopened the cut on his palm to get fresh blood to write with. As it pooled into his hand, he pointed out, "You still have to be able to duck assassination attempts."
"I still have to be able to not act on anything else this seal might pull," Iruka snapped. "There could be a time-delayed suicide impulse, or one to attack the Hokage, or one to bring down the barriers for an incoming army like what happened to Uzushio!"
"You're still going to be under guard, too, Iruka."
A pointed silence.
Right. By the end of That Year, even an ANBU guard could only do so much if Iruka didn't cooperate. There had to be something-- oh. Kakashi's face went hot under the mask. It took some effort to keep his voice flat as he said, "If you do break loose, you owe me a blowjob before doing anything else."
A different flavor of pointed silence. "... Before getting dressed, even?"
Iruka was going to kill Kakashi with blushing. He scrambled for some sort of answer that wasn't freeing Iruka and going straight to his apartment. "Maa," he hummed, buying time. What to say, what to say, something to keep Iruka distracted with banter instead of plotting... "Depends what you'd be wearing."
"Hospital gowns don't do it for you?" Iruka asked rhetorically. "I could go a lot of different directions from here... There's naked, of course," Kakashi choked again, "or stealing back the clothes I arrived in. Sexy club shinobi is a very good look on me," Kakashi unfortunately agreed and Iruka was killing him, "and it's also one that not a lot of people recognize me in. Or I could steal a nurse's uniform -- though I'm not sure ANBU's got much in the way of those that aren't full-surgeon shapeless jumpsuits -- or just a regular ANBU uniform. Bit of red ink to fake the tattoo long enough to sneak out, it could work."
"Iruka." Sneaking out was not the direction Kakashi wanted Iruka's train of thought to take. And he didn't want Iruka getting ideas about how to get hold of a mask.
"I don't really have or fit my bratty student clothes anymore. Not sure it wouldn't weird me out now, considering. I'd still have to go shopping for replacements, though, and that wouldn't keep to the 'blowjob before anything else' part... but following that rule, it'd have to be naked, really." Iruka, please, you're killing me. "That'll be fun, but would you let me get dressed before taking me to the Hokage? I really don't want to be naked in front of Sandaime, that's just creepy."
"I'll consider it," Kakashi said weakly. "In the meantime, could you go use the bathroom while I finish this? And don't," he added hastily, "don't say something flirty or suggestive. I've agreed already, you don't need to keep trying."
"Sure." Iruka slid out from under the bed, just audible enough to be polite, and flicked a tiny bit of metal (where did he get that?!) to tap the door. "An extra guard, please, and don't make it the kid," he called over.
Sparrow entered with a huff, clawed gloves at the ready. "We sent Weasel home," she told Iruka. "Does that please your majesty?"
Iruka smiled. "Enough that I don't think I'll need to dangle you off Hokage Rock."
"What did you even do?" Sparrow asked as she followed Iruka to the toilet corner of the room. "We're still arguing with some of them to let us chisel the rock off their feet--"
As Iruka cheerfully explained what he'd done to a large number of village and clan elders, Hound went back to writing. He wasn't much good at putting personal expression into the lettering, but he could tap into a lifetime and clan heritage of loyalty and protection, and focus on that to at least try.
Protect Iruka. Protect Konoha. Protect Konoha's children even if Iruka hadn't thought to lift a hand to any of them. He'd gone out of his way to ensure his chaos didn't throw merchandise at children in the streets, even.
Iruka of all people wouldn't falter.
Hound continued writing.
-- empowered by the heart, the Great Seal--
-0-0-0
Kakashi really hated Evil Sealing.
He sat slumped in the chair, carefully circulating chakra to quell the faint lightheadedness that came with losing so much chakra and blood to the seal, watching Iruka lay unconscious and cuffed to the hospital bed.
The chuunin had managed to choke on his initial scream, and somehow kept that silence via breathing harshly through the rest of the activation. Hound had no doubt he'd strained something in the process. It would have to wait for a medic, and the medic would have to wait until the seal settled fully into place. As it was, there was still the occasional eye-catching slip of ink appearing on the curve of Iruka's ear.
The pull on Kakashi's chakra had slowed to a trickle, at least. The process was almost finished. Perhaps fifteen or twenty more minutes, during which the lightheadedness would add increasing nausea. Just to make that last metaphorical sprint the worst for the seal caster.
(Sage did he hate Evil Sealing.)
BAM.
Hound had a kunai to Nara Shiho's throat before the woman finished her second step barging into the room.
The researcher froze, one hand splayed defenseless in the air and the other encumbered with a thin folder. "All right," she said, unruffled. "That was stupid of me." Cat followed her in through the open door, ignoring them both to start Mokuton-binding Iruka down. Shiho continued, "I have the initial results from the Cipher Squad, should I report from here or will you let me go first?"
"She's clean, senpai," Cat said mildly.
"... I'll just report from here," Shiho decided. "Long story short, it's being named 'Darkest Impulses', it's in Iwa code from the Second War, and either it wasn't written by an Iwa-nin or it was written by one who knows how to make their reed-penmanship look like guesswork instead of training. Archives is pulling Umino's mission reports from the Academy break last month and Intel is running more thorough background checks on everybody he came in contact with since. So far we've found one of Orochimaru's spies among the Academy students, who we don't think is responsible for this, and the seal doesn't show any signs of being Orochimaru's work."
Cat bent to root Iruka's restraints and the bed to the floor. "Umino-sensei's red-flagged until we've checked Evil Sealing," he added. "And Psych's going to run a full evaluation after that."
Good luck with that, Psych, Kakashi thought. Then, "Wait, one of the Academy students? Orochimaru's been banished for almost nine years." The kid couldn't have been more than three at the time.
Shiho shrugged, making Kakashi hastily twitch his blade away before she accidentally slit her own throat. "Intel's looking into that too. I don't know much about that part. Not my department. Can I go now?"
No. Kakashi needed to know what else to expect. The worst-case scenario, even if Evil Sealing had drastically cut the chances of that. "Parameters of 'Darkest Impulses'."
Sigh. "It's all in here, ANBU-san." She twitched the folder just the slightest bit. "Anything that's missing isn't going on the record at all. We don't want anybody recreating this thing even just by knowing the possibility exists." Another breath, and with no more information forthcoming, Hound let her go, reholstering his kunai in a flicker of motion.
Shiho didn't even glance back at him. She simply dropped the thin file onto Iruka's Mokuton restraints for lack of a side table, muttered "Troublesome," and wandered out.
-0-0-0
I have completely run out of steam here. So it's like. Team Hound and Iruka spend some time being kinda weirdly semi-domestic and kinda at each others' throats off and on at a safehouse until the investigation determines this was Danzo trying to start another war. (Even clan heirs can be necessary tragic sacrifices for the strength of Konoha, it gets this disgrace of a chuunin out of his worldview, etc). (And also determines that Kabuto was Root and Danzo was still actively in contact with Orochimaru.) Seal's deciphered well enough to come off, Iruka is acquitted of all charges because it's Danzo's fault really (like so many other things that are coming to light!), yay happy ending with Hiruzen and the Elders getting forcibly retired and idk a temp council of clans until they can agree on a Hokage that won't be seen by the other nations as an invitation to attack. Who knows, maybe they pick Tenzo as "not favoring any one clan, can be bolstered by the Shodaime's reputation, is sensible for a shinobi". OR WAIT. WAIT. THEY OFFER IT TO GAI BC STRENGTH, HONOR, AND COMPLETELY FUCKING WITH THE OTHER NATIONS' COMPOSURE AND EXPECTATIONS OF A KAGE. XD XD XD lololol ok it's decided they pick Gai lolololol
and at some point Iruka finally gets to give Hound that pretend-coerced blowjob.