Disclaimer: Standard disclaimers apply.

A/N: Hey guys! This story is currently under revision, but the changes aren't too obvious. I've just been correcting some grammar and spelling mistakes here and there, but also adding a few things to make it flow better.

Revised: March 3, 2017.

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Kakashi liked to think that he was a relatively simple man. He had a cute little pug named Pakkun, he worked a normal job as a financial consultant, and he occasionally liked to indulge in a few beers with his friends during Sunday football.

But as he pushed through a screaming crowd while simultaneously incapacitating burly thugs, Kakashi reflected that perhaps his life as a financial consultant by day and assassin by night wasn't as simple as he'd like it to be.

Because, really, whoever thought that assigning such a high class mission to the agency's most dysfunctional partners—who, mind you, had just come off of probation—must have been on drugs and should be fired. Said dysfunctional partners were currently throwing insults at each other as they broke necks and jaws, and Kakashi sighed because he had been the one to teach these two idiots.

It wasn't that Naruto and Sasuke were awful at their obscure job—oh no, they were actually great—it was just...they managed to botch most missions they came across simply because they couldn't refrain from partaking in their weird form of foreplay where they insulted and beat the shit out of each other.

One would think that these two grown men of twenty-three years would have some amount of maturity and set their differences aside for the sake of the mission, but whoever thought that had quite obviously never met the obnoxious Uzumaki and surly Uchiha. And although they had a grand success rate in getting the job done, their failures were almost always due to the way they went about completing their assigned task.

"Road bumps," Naruto liked to say.

"It was the dumbass's fault," was Sasuke's unchanging response.

In fact, Kakashi had walked into the debrief room on multiple occasions to see both men either charred, bloody, or covered in something completely unrelated to their mission's objective. Despite this, he noted (with the type of gratitude that comes from not having one's image tarnished) that they were competent enough—all prior mishaps aside—to get the job done without needing reinforcements for damage control.

Until now, that is.

Kakashi grit his teeth as he ducked under a heavy fist before delivering a round house kick to the offender's head. It was supposed to be a simple assassination, a "get in, get out" type of thing, and their boss made sure to stress that it was important that they don't draw attention to themselves or else cause a national crisis.

But of course, of course, things could never be simple with those two.

Somehow, some way, they had been noticed and Kakashi had been called in by a frantic mission coordinator requesting (Code Black emergency, he said) that he make his way to a popular night club smack in the middle of downtown Konoha. He wasn't given many details, but he figured he should have been surprised at the utter chaos that greeted him when he arrived, except, if he were honest, he only felt highly exasperated. Because of all people to fuck up this badly, it had to be Naruto and Sasuke. Of all the people that could have enacted the only Code Black in the Agency's history, they just had to be the only students he had ever taken in his long career.

When he made his way into the grand building, he found himself dodging stray bullets and shoving frantic club goers heading for the exits. His unruly shock of silver bobbed over the crowd as he searched for his two idiot subordinates and it took him only a moment to find them crouched behind a pillar.

All he really had to do was listen for the shouts of "Bastard!" And "Shut the fuck up, Deadlast!" over the sound of the music.

Kakashi pulled his pistol from its holster covered by his black jacket and shot at enemy shooters while he made his way towards the pair, careful to avoid hitting an innocent person. He lunged at the pillar beside the duo, and was greeted by a loud shout of, "Kakashi-sensei!" from Naruto whereas Sasuke merely grunted and focused on aiming and shooting from behind cover.

"What the fuck happened." Kakashi ground out and then Naruto hurriedly, and bashfully, filled him in.

Naruto's story telling theatrics were ignored in favor of pulling out key details from his exaggerated recounting of events. According to him, he and Sasuke had found their target without complication and everything was set to carry out the assassination swiftly and silently. The target had been lounging in a private pool while his guards stood outside, and both assassins had snuck in and hid behind a large column that gave them an unrestricted view of the portly man.

The plan was that Naruto would pose as a server and hand the target a poisoned drink, wherein said target would then drink the substance and they would watch as it took effect a few minutes later to confirm his death. It would look as though he had died from a heart attack and it would have been untraceable, therefore the agency would not have been linked to the crime.

It was a good plan...except they hadn't considered the unknown factors that had presented themselves.

Like how the target kept denying the drink and became suspicious when Naruto insisted he take it, or how the target kept sending the drink back just because, or how, for some reason, the target liked to bring his pet hamster everywhere.

To Kakashi, as he listened on incredulously, it all sounded like something out of a horribly cliché B-list movie because somehow the hamster had escaped the cage and had crawled up Naruto's pants leg.

Naruto's face twisted painfully as he told Kakashi that it had also crawled into his boxers, and he had startled so bad he accidentally dropped the drink—which had also contained the last bit of poison—on their target who then grew angry and sent him away for good.

Heedless of the gunshots chipping away at the limestone of the pillar protecting them, Naruto scrubbed his face and recounted how he and Sasuke had resorted to Plan B after rendezvousing behind the column once more.

Except the hamster had still been in his boxers and he couldn't remove it without drawing attention to their location. Naruto implored Kakashi to believe him when he said he had tried to ignore it and remain still as Sasuke screwed on the silencer to his pistol and took aim.

But then it took a bite out of his junk and it was a downward spiral from there.

Naruto screeched and Sasuke flinched and missed the shot.

Kakashi resisted the urge to bash his head repeatedly against the pillar because they missed the fucking shot and in doing so alerted security, which then caused a firefight and mayhem and the target got away and oh God, they didn't pay him enough for this shit.

They tried to chase their target, but he was surprisingly nimble for a hefty man, and they lost him in the gyrating bodies on the dance floor. And then shots rang out and they were forced to react and then it was simply chaos—and that was when Kakashi found them. They had been behind the pillar for a while returning fire, until Kakashi saw their target—clad in only a towel—shove his way towards the exit.

And that's how he currently found himself punching, jabbing, shooting, and stabbing his way through thugs only to see the objective through by providing a distraction. Kakashi winced as a woman screamed in his ear at an unholy decibel as he stabbed a man through the eye, and he accepted, miserably, that no amount of damage control could fix this mess.

Naruto and Sasuke's voices faded as they chased the target and Kakashi was left behind to take out the increasing number of sketchy security. But fighting in a terrified shoving mass was proving to be a lot harder than he thought it would. Another woman screamed in his ear and he was forced to shove her away before she caused permanent damage.

Unfortunately, his momentary distraction gave his enemy an opening, and Kakashi didn't realize it until he felt a searing pain in his side that took his breath away. He stumbled backwards and clutched at the bullet's entry wound to stem the bleeding. A humorless laugh fell from his lips because it was just his luck that the bullet had gone through the one part of his body that wasn't protected by his armored vest.

His steely bicolored eyes flicked over to the club's second floor where more men were starting to gather and he conceded that this was a lost cause and he had to find a way out of there before he was overrun and killed. There was a moment of stillness as he drew in a deep breath and ignored the throbbing in his side in favor of scanning the area. His eyes landed on a storage closet that was partially obscured by a large plant and he knew that he had to find his way there until the commotion died down so that he could later escape.

Straightening, Kakashi loaded another magazine into his pistol as his shoulders deflated with released tension. Barring one disastrous mission when he'd been young, he'd never failed his objective; and if the mission coordinator and his boss wanted this fixed, then that's what he'd do. They wouldn't send in the big guns—one of their own living legends—if it weren't important, but that didn't mean he had to die doing it.

Besides, it was steak night and Pakkun had been looking forward to it all week, so who was Kakashi to disappoint him?

The closest thug to him swung out with his arm as he sprang into action, and it made an audible snap when Kakashi broke it before he shot him twice in the chest. He spun on his heel and put two more rounds into another man's chest before he was grabbed from behind. He dropped his weight, but the burly man fell with him with Kakashi's wrists in his grasp. He brought his knee into the man's groin—an underhanded tactic, he knew—and then grabbed his beard as he fell to slam his head into the ground. His heart pounded in his chest as he shot the man in the head and then rolled away to avoid the onslaught of bullets that came at him from behind.

However, Kakashi was pleased to note that he was getting closer and closer to the storage closet and security was lowering in numbers. He took a moment to catch his breath from behind another column, knowing that there was a man on the other side. The bass of the music had not subsided, and he felt it thrum under his booted feet.

Speaking of feet, he rose a silver eyebrow at the booted toe that peeked out from the other side of the column and shot it, almost as if it were an afterthought. A man screeched and for a second Kakashi was afraid he'd shot an innocent civilian, but then a pistol peeked from behind the corner so he shot the bleeding foot again and then the man's head when he fell to his knees.

He took this opportunity to barge into the storage closet, locking the door with bloody hands and then sliding down it with a pained wince. His head leaned against the door tiredly, and he raked a hand through his unruly mop of hair, marring the silver color with streaks of red.

He hoped Naruto and Sasuke had been able to take out their target so that he could go home, make those steaks, and then watch the film adaptation of his favorite book. If they hadn't, then that meant he would have to take over the mission and find the target himself and he really didn't want to do that. His eyes shut as he forced himself to calm his heart rate in hopes that the blood flowing from his wound would ebb.

"Don't move, or I'll spray you!"

His eyes snapped open in cursed surprise at the shrill voice to see a mere slip of a woman with pink hair aiming a can of Mace at his face with shaking hands.

He nearly groaned out loud; he was getting too old for this shit.

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tbc

Two Cents: The frantic mission coordinator's Code Black is an ode to Lt. Col Jeff Cooper's Color Code! Lt. Col Cooper was recognized as the father of the modern technique of handgun shooting, but he surmised that the most lethal tool in surviving a confrontation was not the weapon, but the combat mindset. He devised a sliding scale of mental readiness by designating levels of awareness and psychological fortitude to 4 different colors:

White: Relaxed, unaware and unprepared. (Oblivious)

Yellow: Relaxed state of alert. (Alert)

Orange: Heightened, specific state of alert. (Aware)

Red: Fight or Flight. (Engaged)

Though not an original part of Lt. Col Cooper's Color Code, the USMC later added Condition Black: Catastrophic breakdown of mental and physical performance.

By enabling a Code Black, Naruto and Sasuke are, literally, the worst.