Author's Note: Poor Itachi. He has no idea what he's gotten himself into.

Also, shit hits the fan. Really. Really. Fast.

Light My Way

Chapter 2

Lungs

The more you see, the less you know.

1

Naruto woke up bright and early the next morning and made sure his teeth were brushed. It wouldn't do to make a bad impression with his new sensei.

He wandered out of his apartment and watched the sun rise as he approached the gates of the Academy. There were some students there already, most the children of shinobi who had early obligations. The wind was gentle that morning, so most of the children were practicing with shuriken and senbon needles rather than their kunai.

"Naruto!" someone shouted. It was Inuzuka Kiba, who used to play with Naruto sometimes during lunch. "Where did you steal a hitai-ite from?"

Naruto smiled, wide and with a hint of challenge. "I passed yesterday. I'm a genin now. On a team. With Sakura-chan and Sasuke!"

True to his word, Sasuke's pretty mom had dropped him off at the gate before disappearing in a shunshin. Her own forehead protector had been visible and there was a wazikashi strapped to her belt. She must have had a mission.

"Sasuke!" Naruto called. "Where's Sakura?" he asked, in an attempt to make conversation.

Sasuke shrugged. "She won't be late, but we're really early I think. You have to listen to everything Itachi says," he said, changing gears at a blinding speed in the way only children could.

They sat around talking with the arrivals from their class, whose reaction ranged from "I wonder if Iruka-sensei would let me take the test" to "I can't believe you two are joking about something this serious."

Sakura finally arrived several minutes before they were due to meet Itachi, out of breath and with red stains on her shirt.

When she realized that Naruto and Sasuke were both staring, she looked down and blushed, then began wiping them away frantically. "Mom's spaghetti," she explained. "I was so nervous I threw up a little."

Naruto scrunched up his face, but Sasuke had only sympathy. He, too, was extremely nervous - he kept wiping his palms against his pants and he wanted to sit down. Naruto seemed to be the only one who wasn't affected by the monumental event before them.

When they arrived in the room, Itachi was already waiting for them.

"Weasel-san!" Naruto shouted, his face splitting into a huge grin. Itachi groaned.

"I'm not part of ANBU anymore, Naruto-kun." Itachi turned to the other two. "Outoto. Sakura-san."

"Sakura-san?"

She had been looking between her new jonin-sensei and Sasuke, over and over again, her face getting progressively redder.

"S-sensei!" she snapped to attention.

Itachi groaned. This was the team from hell.

2

It had been four days since Itachi had gotten his team, and he wasn't sure who he hated more, the Hokage or himself for being suckered into teaching his little brother, Uzumaki Naruto and an eight year girl with a crush on him.

They had been completing a D-rank mission a day after the Hokage had tipped him off about Naruto's financial situation. It hadn't been difficult to paint a fence, or let Naruto haggle over the price of vegetables in Horse district (the boy was far too good at that). It was a little tougher trying to catch a stray cat, as animals seemed to hate Naruto with a passion.

The worst mission, by far, was moving the contents of a supply depot from one side of town to another. At this point, the novelty of receiving money for missions had worn off and Itachi's team had started to make careless mistakes in labeling things. Sasuke had a particularly bad habit of going on 'bathroom breaks' which lasted twenty minutes or so.

"When are we going to go on some cool missions?" Naruto complained.

Itachi never remembered having complaints of this sort when he was younger.

"How about we start doing some C-ranks next week?" Sasuke suggested.

Even Sakura looked a bit hopeful at that.

Itachi sighed. "Okay. All of you are dismissed. Have the mission report ready by tomorrow."

His three genin disappeared off to parts unknown, and Itachi was left wondering when Naruto and Sakura had replaced him when it came to free time.

3

The genin members of Team Seven were currently discussing how performing a shunshin might be possible in their favorite park.

"Well, basically, you're putting yourself through space really quickly. It's not air or anything like that, because it's not a wind jutsu. So it has to be more based in moving yourself rather than letting the wind move your or something like that, right?"

Naruto stared at Sasuke, in deep thought. "The seal is just ram, so it forces an instant release of chakra. This is supposed to be a D-rank technique!"

"And everyone can do it," Sasuke said gloomily. "Just not us."

"Why don't you just ask-"

"No!" both of them said.

"I want to learn this by myself," Naruto said. His fingers cycled between the handseals. "There has to be some sort of packaging. No technique that does more than just one exact thing will use just one hand seal, no matter how people learn it."

"Iruka-sensei calls this reinventing the kunai," Sakura grumbled, but her fingers flashed through the twelve generic hand seals as well. She fed her chakra to each one experimentally.

"Snake!" Sasuke called out. "Definitely snake. We use snake seals to speed up our fire techniques, and in the kawarimi to determine locations."

"But if it were just snake, it'd go everywhere. Something has to stabilize it," Sakura said. "Horse? Boar? Boar has more direction, but it slows it down again."

Naruto twisted his hands into Ram-Horse-Ram in quick succession and willed his body to move. He tripped, hitting his head on the ground.

Sasuke chortled, then tried it himself. He, too, landed on his face.

"We've made a self-tripping jutsu, then. This is good. It's a fall in the right direction." Sakura struggled to not burst into laughter and failed.

They experimented with the boar seal, then Naruto started throwing out random seals into the mix, and ended up charring a tree, knocking himself out twice and blowing up a park bench, the last of which he wasn't able to replicate.

"How about we just ask Itachi-sensei tomorrow?" Sakura grumbled. Even Sasuke, who was extremely determined to discover the shunshin without help, nodded at this.

But when they left the park, Naruto begged off, claiming that he wanted to enjoy the weather a little more.

All three of them knew what he'd be doing for the rest of the day.

4

"That's not the Shunshin. That's a thousand, million times cooler," Sasuke declared.

Naruto formed a string of eight handseals from ten feet away, then exploded. Aside from vaporizing everything in a two feet radius, he had left a Naruto shaped hole in a large oak tree, appearing completely unharmed on the other side.

Unfortunately for Naruto, Itachi-sensei had appeared right behind him in his own Shunshin and knocked him unconscious with the back of his tanto.

"What's the big idea, sensei?" Sakura shouted, horrified.

Naruto came to his senses groggily.

"Never. Ever. Do. That. Again." Itachi's tone of voice had become deadly, his Sharingan was spinning wildly and he looked more frazzled than Sasuke had ever seen him.

Sasuke stared at his older brother blankly. "Why not? That was…" Sasuke struggled for the adjectives which Naruto used, before settling on, "awesome."

"He converted half of chakra and all of the mass that surrounded him into an explosion and used the energy to propel himself at speeds which my eyes couldn't pick up."

All three of his students looked at him blankly.

"Yeah!" Naruto said. "That's why the last three seals are there. To form a chakra shield. I nearly killed myself yesterday."

Itachi looked at Naruto weakly. "How about I teach you how to use the Shunshin and you do that from now on, instead?"

5

The missions desk was cluttered that fateful morning. Gekko Hayate, a newly minted Tobeketsu Jonin was manning the desk due to a cold he had just developed from an excursion to Snow Country and was coughing a ton.

"Genin Team Seven, first C-rank?" he asked. He coughed lightly into his hand twice.

"Yes, Team Seven, consisting of Jonin Sensei Uchiha Itachi, Genin Haruno Sakura, Genin Uchiha Sasuke and Genin Uzumaki Naruto. Requesting surveillance or reconnaissance." A discreet handseal from Itachi started bartering with Hayate.

"Mission assignment in Zero-zero-fifteen. Await orders, line position four." They continued to barter.

The three genin members of team seven looked to one another.

"Some ninja hate some missions, but technically we're not allowed to choose which missions we're allowed on. You see that handsign that Itachi-sensei keeps using? It means less death. I think he doesn't want us to go on a mission that could possibly end with us killing anyone."

Sasuke and Sakura looked at Naruto with no small measure of curiosity.

"How do you know this?" Sasuke asked.

"I've been in here a lot. Jiji's son, the man with the beard and smells like smoke, he explained it to me once, but then Jiji yelled at him."

"Do you think they're bribing each other?" Sakura wondered aloud. A team which was clearly several years older than them sneered at them. She glared back.

"Please forgive my students, Itachi-san. They are not used to seeing distinguished members of our younger generations."

"There's no harm done, Uroko-san."

The woman briefly smiled at the three of them before briefly informing her students crossly that they'd be doing D-ranks for the next week due to bad behavior.

"Line Positions One, Two and Three, your mission scrolls are ready."

The woman and several other jonin-sensei took the mission scrolls with their students and left, leaving Itachi, his team and Hayate alone in the room.

"They're going to have to be blooded at some point, Itachi. You know how the Council is about this sort of thing."

Hayate wasn't a very celebrated member of the Leaf Shinobi forces, but everyone knew that his crowd was the sum total of the stars in his generation.

"Gai says that he and Kakashi were having lunch with Ino-Shika-Cho, and they talked about how Mitokado-sama was pushing the Hokage to teach your team assassination techniques."

"We don't have good precedence for any successful resistance to that."

"Aye. We run this village because we preserve our young one's innocence. This doesn't sit well with me. Your case doesn't sit well with me."

For a moment, Sasuke saw a type of strain in his brother's eyes that he'd never seen before.

"You know about Special Order Nine-Four-Three?"

"Yeah. I was part of it. God damn we nailed those Kiri bastards, but I didn't anticipate anything like that happening. To the Roots of our Great Tree, the fire may burn down the world if nary a spark touches our leaves."

"That kind of talk is dangerous."

"They can't touch me. I grew up with one of the Three Great Generations. I'll stick my neck out for Asuma no matter how much I hate him, and Kakashi would die for me as much as he wants to be in Yuugao's panties."

"That must be nice," Itachi said, his voice carrying an undertone of wistfulness. "Now, may I have my mission assignment before my genius genin have a chance of figuring out what we've been talking about?"

Hayate nodded and handed Itachi the mission scroll.

Itachi made to walk out of the missions room, but he turned around quickly. "Watch out for Kurama Uroko. She's Danzo's, through and through." His Sharingan flashed red as he checked Hayate for any Genjutsu but, as he expected, none were found.

6

Konoha, the Village Hidden in the Leaves, was considered the largest Hidden Village amongst the Great Villages of the Elemental Nations.

Each district boasted between ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants and the areas between districts held as many, for an astonishing total of nearly two hundred thousand inhabitants. Truly, they were the least hidden of the villages, with the shinobi population being less than a single percentage of the population. The next largest village was Iwa, with a tenth the population and roughly the same amount of shinobi.

Yet Konoha was considered the most successful, despite the fact that the village was hidden in name only. Most maps in this day and age published Konoha as a city in Fire Country. It was, comparatively, truly difficult to find Suna.

Konoha was dwarfed in size easily by the capital of Fire Country, Yeddo. The absolutely gigantic city was situated against the ocean and nearly twenty five times the size of Konoha. And three million people.

Yet, Sasuke marveled, they still had no control over Konoha.

While villages like Suna were dependent on their daimyo when it came to things like funding, the Shodai Hokage had made it so that Konoha could declare itself independent at no cost whatsoever.

If push came to shove, all the land within village limits, all the training fields and, if terraced properly, the mountainside could all be farmed. It wasn't a myth that every Konoha jonin had killed a hundred ninja and if push came to shove, Sasuke was damned sure that every Konoha jonin could kill a hundred thousand civilian.

It felt good to be powerful.

Civilians were just so helpless - he could break necks for hours without feeling any sort of tiredness, breath fire and he was eight years old.

"Your expression is scaring me, Sasuke," Sakura said meekly.

She looked every inch the scared eight year old girl. All four of them were dressed in civilian garb, with literally nothing to give them away.

Naruto's hair had been tamed, his own was cut down to an inch despite his displeasure, and Sakura had dyed her hair blonde.

"Okay. So, we're from Lightning Country. I'm Higa Naruto and she's Higa Sakura. You two are our cousins, Oshiro Itachi and Oshiro Sasuke. Our parents are traveling merchants who went to do business in Suna. We're on vacation in Yeddo with our cousins and their parents. If there's anyone who can be suckered into investigating, we'll probably end up killing them anyway…" Naruto trailed off.

"It's okay, no one's going to care too much. The city's far too large," Itachi said, with no small amount of trepidation. "As ridiculous as it is to send kids, we're investigating some multinational corporation-"

"Correction," Itachi said, stopping for a moment. "I am investigating a large multinational corporation. The three of you are what we call my cover. That means you act like how you're supposed to act so I can do what I want. Have you studied your dossiers to satisfaction?"

Naruto nodded. Itachi quizzed him three or four times, then was satisfied. "You never want to know your cover too well - then it starts sounding mechanical. These guys are civilian, but they're good at this sort of thing."

"I can't believe we're going to be taking Gato Corporation-"

"Sakura. We are not taking a corporation down. We are investigating. If the Hokage needed to take a corporation down, he would send me with Sharingan no Kakashi and my mother."

Sasuke looked at him confused. "Mom kills people?"

Itachi gave a rather mirthless chuckle.

7

As they approached the capital, the farms became spaced closer and closer until there weren't farms but very large houses several hundred paces from one another. Soon, the houses became more cramped and the tall buildings became visible in the distance. Somehow, Itachi had picked up an unevenly shaped plank of wood with wheels on them and was now rolling along.

His personality had totally changed as well - he was wearing skin tight jeans which made Sakura blush, all black - stylistically and not out of necessity, and he was flashing smiles at girls. Sasuke thought he was going to have a heart attack.

Sasuke, too had changed his personality the best he could - he became surly and withdrawn, like an introverted mirror of his brother. Naruto had turned his loudness up to eleven and Sakura screeched like a harpy, reacting loudly with Naruto. All three of them complained (in jest in Sasuke and Sakura's case and in truth in Naruto's) about the long walk loudly.

Itachi stopped several times to talk with girls and with two boys.

Sasuke was beginning to think that his brother had been trained to do this.

They had ditched all their weapons and scrolls back in Konoha. Sasuke felt rather naked without kunai and shuriken.

"Damn it," Naruto whispered, "if I had one senbon."

Naruto didn't even use senbon.

"How do you feel safe without a weapon?" Naruto whispered to Itachi.

"Naruto," Itachi said, out of the corner of his mouth. "You can walk on walls, teleport and explode. If push comes to shove, we can run for hours, Sasuke can breathe fire and Sakura can collapse a civilian sternum in one well placed elbow." He didn't need to elaborate on what he was capable of.

Naruto seemed much happier after that.

They checked into a dingy motel a mile from the daimyo's inner city and Naruto instantly felt at home. The streets were narrow, allowing ninja to run through them much quicker than civilians. There were even ladies of the night on the corners.

After the bored receptionist gave them a pair of rusty keys, Itachi left them alone in the room to meet a deep cover chunin on the other side of the city.

"This is a good opportunity to practice attention-diverting genjutsu, Sakura," Itachi said, pulling a tiny scroll out of his… crotch area?

Sasuke and Naruto gaped.

Itachi unsealed the scroll, which became an even larger scroll, unsealed that and let a trio of kunai, a packet of senbon and two other scrolls tumble onto one of the two ratty mattresses.

"As for you two, Sasuke, practice the more advanced sleeper chokes from the Interceptor Fist on Naruto. Naruto, practice your calligraphy. I'll teach you low level Sealing. If any of you make any noise at all…"

Itachi jumped onto what he called his 'skateboard' and glided out of the door which Sakura threw open, then slammed shut.

"Who knew Itachi could be anything other than Itachi-sensei?" Sakura asked.

"I've never seen my brother like this," Sasuke said. "It's kind of scary. He could have been any civilian teenager if we didn't recognize him."

Sakura got to work, copying over the extremely useful genjutsu on a notepad with a pencil that the motel had provided and supplementing the texts with her own theories on the way the chakra worked.

Naruto had unsealed the other scroll and was gaping at the huge amount of calligraphy equipment presented. Once in a while, Sasuke, who quietly practiced his katas while standing on a bed, attempted to put on of the others in a sleeper hold.

He managed to get Naruto twice, before Naruto learned to completely difficult brushstrokes without too much concentration.

"Your handwriting is still really bad," Sakura admonished, staring over to the desk from the bed where she was working. Sasuke still hadn't managed to nail her.

After several hours of hard work, she quietly attempted the genjutsu.

Sasuke realized something was wrong when he tried to place a sleeper hold on… who was he trying to get this time? He looked at Naruto.

There had been two people in the room earlier, he was sure of it.

"Naruto." Naruto snapped his attention to Sasuke.

"Where's Sakura?" Naruto and Sasuke asked at the same time.

"Uh… I think she was… what was she doing?"

Sakura materialized behind Sasuke, pining his arms with her knees against the bed and with her inner forearm against his neck. "Got you!" she cried triumphantly.

Naruto jumped, knocking his chair back.

"I am going to kill all three of you," Itachi groaned, still in his other persona.

Sakura squeaked, pulling her elbow back and actually choking Sasuke, who coughed violently. Naruto managed to keep himself from screaming.

Itachi closed the door soundlessly. "The good news - no alarms have been triggered, despite the fact that Gato all but owns this district. The bad news - Masashiro-san says that there's tons of evidence that Gato is cheating on his taxes somehow, and no one knows how. I'm going to have to discover how before we leave. And that means I can't torture it out of anyone, or kill anyone."

"And the really bad news?" Sasuke pressed.

"Thirty minutes after I met Masashiro-san, I was supposed to meet him in his apartment, but he never showed up. I liberally used the Shunshin and genjutsu to get back here."

"So our cover's blown?" Sakura asked.

"Damn it!" Naruto groused. He had spent hours reading that dossier.

Itachi shook his head, then resealed all of the calligraphy material and Sakura's scroll, then returned it to his pants.

"I'm going to have to stage my own death. The three of you are going to have to go hungry for several days, then escape with one another into the slums. I'm going to go back to Konoha. In four month's time, another jonin will show up at a location we'll designate now. This is what we call 'going native'."

His genin gaped at him.

"There is thirty two billion ryo on the line, enough so that the Hokage can pressure the daimyo to agreeing to everything he asks for with this money. Think of it like this - around twenty five million D-rank missions. Naruto. You are team leader. You have… experience in these matters."

Naruto nodded firmly.

"Suiton: Awa." Itachi's hands flickered and sent out a stream of bubbles, washing the dye out of Sakura's hair.

"In the next two hours or so, you must master the Fade-Into-Nothing, Sakura. You can hold a maximum of two people with that technique, and we'll have to escape through the window."

"I'll do it in fifteen minutes, Itachi-sensei." There wasn't a hint of arrogance in her words. Sakura got to work, cycling between the handseals.

"A little more chakra to the tiger seal, I think," she mumbled to herself. Itachi was glad he was working with someone who had scored even higher than he had on the Intelligence Quotation exam.

"Okay, trying it," she confirmed.

"Take Sasuke. Naruto has far more chakra than he does - it'll be a lot harder," Itachi whispered. "When I'm gone, you three need to train. Nothing difficult. Brush up on your Taijutsu - I'm sure that Naruto can find some cul-de-sac. Chakra control for Naruto, chakra-growth exercises for Sakura. You all know the big three - leaf control can be done with any small, light object, tree-walking can be done on any wall, water walking can be done with any spilled bucket of water," he started speaking in a rapid fire staccato.

"I'm going to set explosive charges here now - this explosion's going to be huge. Konoha would never blow up anything in its own cities or towns: that's what most people think, no one knows what type of thing the Hokage can or will order. They're going to think that we were from some other hidden village or that I was a missing-nin who's exploited children along with genjutsu and was eliminated after getting caught. Civilians don't think things through - this entire floor is going to go up-"

"There are other people living-"

"Do you have any idea how many lives thirty two billion ryo will save?" Itachi hissed at Naruto. "This is the hard, cold choice that we ninja must learn to make, and damn it I thought this mission would not be the one you children learned it on."

Itachi made a strange hand seal, then pressed his fingers to Sakura's head, then to Naruto's, then to Sasuke's. "In some ditch all-alone, I may die tonight, killed for my country where there isn't light… in your minds, may there be a funeral pyre, in your hearts, may you remember... I carried the Will of Fire."

Itachi and Sakura performed the Fade-to-Nothing and suddenly Naruto and Sasuke basked in a feeling of invisibility, before they all leapt out an open window.

They skidded along the side of the motel, then dashed into an alleyway.

"Katsu."

The world turned yellow and white as the entire motel lit up.

"Good night, travel well," Itachi's voice ghosted and Sakura felt his chakra signature fade.

"That building, two hundred paces north, along the wall - it's abandoned, there's a small hole in the brick, squeeze into it," Naruto whispered into each of the other two genin's ears, and they made a mad dash during the confusion.

No one saw hide or hair of them.