Author's Note: Thank you, dear readers, for all the alerts and encouragements!
Kakashi had spent a few hours looking half-heartedly for Tenten to see if she was alright, but eventually had given up as duties dragged his attention elsewhere. She had been avoiding both him and Neji after her strange rushing in, and he was wondering if there was something she was seriously upset about. He recalled how the emotionally evasive kunoichi, who was also a former Grass sleeper agent and only recently cleared, had reacted when he put her under genjutsu. In a manner of days, she had gone from playful to somehow deeply distressed, then seemed to recover from it only to dive straight into unpredictably moody again. Kakashi was forced to conclude he had no idea what was going on in the kunoichi's head.
Unfortunately, when he came to the Hokage tower the next day to see if Tenten would have any business there, he learned she had been sent out on a mission, and was no longer in the village. Kakashi decided to wait until she came back to deal with whatever it was that might have been bothering the girl.
The day passed by with routine tasks performed with a fifth of his mental capacity, while the rest was dully brooding over the distracting concern he found he had for the feelings of the little vixen who had been happily flirting with him just two days ago.
When he finally returned home, a pile of essays to be graded had appeared in his mailbox, with a note from Umino Iruka saying, "Thanks a ton for helping out, you're a real lifesaver! I need these done by tomorrow morning. -Iruka."
So much for a quiet night, he figured, letting out a sigh. It was not the first time his young academy teacher friend got him to help out with assignments; he would occasionally pop by at his class to make an educative demonstration or give Iruka an ANBU recruiting point of view in analyzing the kids who might end up going far with the right sort of push.
But it was not like Iruka to be so forward with his delegation of work. Kakashi decided he should ask the younger man about it, and headed back out for a quick stroll to the academy. Somewhat disappointingly, it turned out he could not find the ninja academy teacher anywhere near his office. Maybe he had taken a day off sick? That would explain his acute need for help.
With a shrug, Kakashi returned home to deal with his surprise paperwork. It was well past midnight by the time he was done, and when he dropped off the papers early in the morning, Iruka was still nowhere to be found at the academy. He decided to go search in the Hokage Tower next, idly pondering that he would definitely sic his dogs on the next person to disappear on him this week.
One.
Kakashi admittedly had to wonder, just a bit, what reason Sakura had for assembling a complex hydraulic device for the hospital in a small side room of the Hokage tower. He did not suspect anything untoward when she asked him for help. By then it had become apparent that Iruka was not to be found at the tower, either. Locked in the small room, they pulled up their sleeves and got to work.
Kakashi had some misgivings about the instructions Sakura had been given when he took a look at the available parts. The hospital could really work on being more selective in their acquisitions. But he was already determined to comply with the request for aid from his former student, so he would get the work done even if it meant he would have to use some brute force and forbidden jutsu to get this infernal device together.
It was not before he stepped out to a round of hearty applause from a gathered crowd that it all started to click into place. As he peered at the assembled crowd quizzically, Genma and Anko were helpful enough to burst into a mimicry of what had just passed, to the jeers and cat-calls of the people present.
"I think you're just going to have to shove it in hard, Kakashi-sensei!"
"I don't know, Kakashi-sensei, maybe it just needs more lubricant?"
"Let me hold on to it and you... no, that doesn't work. I've got this stuff all over me now."
"Give it up, Kakashi-sensei, it's too big, it won't fit!"
His little fan club dogged him all the way out of the tower. If the aloof copy-ninja's posture ever faltered, it was when Genma tried to trip him so that Anko could steal a peek at his "hydraulic shaft".
Two.
On his way home, Kakashi popped by the sweet shop which, as he recalled, would by now have prepared his special order of chocolate delights. They were both somewhat pricey and took a day or two to prepare, but they were also exquisite enough to be well worth it.
When he entered the shop, the owner's assistant was the only person around. The young man looked at him curiously when he asked for his goods. "Your order? I don't have your order here."
After some polite insistence from Kakashi, he looked at his books. "Ah, I see that you have placed an order but it's set as cancelled on the next day. It seems you owe us the cancellation fee." The assistant reached out his hand.
Kakashi decided it was not worth it to argue the matter with an assistant who was not even there when he had originally made the order. Maybe the shop owner had been away on vacation and her aides had gotten the books confused. He decided to pay the fee and bring the matter up with the owner later, when picking up his order.
He told the shopkeep that this time, he would pay up front and would expect his treats to be here on time, which the still somewhat suspicious assistant grudgingly agreed to.
Quite certain by now that this was not his day, Kakashi took no further detours on his way home.
Three.
Kakashi was just about to relax at his dining table with at truly well-deserved cup of tea and some Icha Icha Tactics, when something flew in through the window and promptly exploded in his kitchen. While his reflex when seeing the projectile enter the room was to quickly dodge out of the way of any shrapnel, the explosion turned out to merely produce a large puff of smoke instead of something more devastating.
Kakashi hastily reassessed the seriousness of the situation when he got a first whiff of the aforementioned smoke.
Stink bombs! In his kitchen!
He hastily made a wind jutsu to fan the smelly smoke out, and grabbed the remains of the bombs to throw them out of the window while holding his breath. At that point, the wickedness of the small weapons dawned on him: under the smoke screen, they had also splattered the room with a sticky substance that was, if possible, producing an even more acrid stench that made his unprotected eye tear up even while he was still struggling to not breathe it in. And it was all over his hands too, now that he had touched the bomb husks to dump them out.
Kakashi jumped out through the window, still holding his breath, ran for one block and leaped into the river meandering through Konoha. With his hands carefully kept underwater, he drew in a careful first lungful of air. It still smelled unpleasant from the momentary exposure the air had had to his hands, but thankfully, it did not burn. He took the moment of resupplying his body with air to compose his scattered thoughts.
This prank was too well-executed to be coming from any of the students of Iruka's whose essays he had been grading late at night. None of them showed the level of promise that would entail a booby-trapped stink bomb in the apartment of the one jounin in the village with a nose as sharp as the dog-bonding Inuzukas'. If someone wanted trackers out of the picture and could get into the village, he should check with the Inuzukas whether they had been hit as well.
But that would have to wait until after he could get rid of the stinky substance coating his hands. Thankfully, it seemed to be water-soluble enough to lose its edge in the river. He rubbed his hands vigorously together, but found that he would have to leave his gloves behind for someone with a less sensitive nose to pick up later. He figured Genma, the old sleazebag, would be just the man for the job. It would hopefully teach the man to treat the privacy of his seniors' "hydraulic shafts" with more respect, too.
There was no going back home for now; his apartment had to be declared a hazard zone not to be approached without protective gear. Instead, Kakashi headed for his landlady's place next door to let her know not to wonder about the reek wafting from his apartment, and to momentarily refrain from making a surprise visit with foods or other treats she sometimes blessed him with. While the old lady's mercifully civilian nose was nowhere near as sensitive as the master tracker's, Kakashi was quite convinced the stench would be enough to brutally violate anyone's olfactory senses.
Four.
After he had borrowed a nearby refreshment establishment's bathroom to wash the worst of the river muck off himself, Kakashi appeared on the doorstep of his landlady, armed with his most disarming puppy-dog eyes.
The old woman who opened the door was disturbingly resistant to such charms for some reason. She took one look at the elite jounin on her doorstep, huffed and motioned for him to come in. Unperturbed, Kakashi followed her to the sitting room.
"I have been expecting you to pop by, Kakashi-san," she noted while he found himself a seat among the exuberant flower-embroidery that had thoroughly laid claim to the room. Her comment gave him pause. "You already heard, ma'am?"
The old lady emerged with two steaming cups of tea. Kakashi noticed from the lack of accompanying pastries that she was possibly quite miffed with him at the moment. This confused the jounin further as he accepted his cup with a wordless nod. "It's not like I can not hear them, young man. I have never heard such howling before. Whatever did you do with them?"
Howling? Now things were just getting bizarre. "Eh... Please go on, ma'am. I'm all ears."
"I really wish you could do something to the poor dogs so they won't miss you quite so badly whenever you're out, Kakashi-san. I have been listening to the poor creatures howl in misery for two nights in a row. A woman's got to get her beauty sleep, you know."
Had the entire world gone completely crazy overnight? He had been home, and he had not been summoning his dogs for days. But Kakashi knew that when it came to little old ladies with very polite requests over a cup of tea without biscuits, they should be treated with equal seriousness as any other person who was screaming and flailing with rage. It was even worse, in fact, as this particular little old lady held special powers: it was within her whim to passively-aggressively kick him out of his apartment, which, stink-bombed or not, Kakashi had grown quite fond of over the years.
So he denied nothing, elaborated that he was very grateful the lady had brought the issue to his notice, as he had not realized the commotion that was going on during the nights, and that he would see to it immediately. To further appease the old lady, Kakashi offered his help for anything she might have need of doing, and was promptly assigned a personal D-rank mission of reattaching some loose shingles on the roof.
Being an efficient team leader, he opted to delegate the task to a shadow clone while he went on to investigate what the mysterious howling was all about.
After a few hours spent investigating the scene, Kakashi discovered a localized, very basic but effective genjutsu trap that would generate an illusory sound to plague the hapless victim whenever they moved to a particular area of the landlady's apartment. The affected area covered her bedroom and some nearby windows, all likely for her to approach during nighttime in particular. What irked him even more was that even after dismantling the trap, he still had no clue who would have set something like that up – or why.
Five.
Kakashi was growing rather confident that the howling was connected to the stink bombs, however. The theme matched, and both plots took some personal knowledge concerning the target to execute. But who would benefit from pranking him like this? It was too forceful to be Naruto or Sai's doing, as they knew better than to risk facing the jounin's inevitable revenge.
Could it be Genma's handiwork? After all, he had told the special jounin off about his lack of undercover recon skills during their last mission debriefing over a week ago. He recalled making a rather empathetic remark about the his senbon-chewing colleague spending too much time chasing tail instead of taking care of his training.
When he considered the option further, a more disturbing theme began to appear: what if the two pranks were not the only things he had set up? The leering crowd gathering to Sakura's closet exercise earlier seemed even less like a coincidence now. Kakashi grit his teeth.
He decided this would call for immediate clarification, and headed to the Hokage tower once again, where he would surely find the man posted as a bodyguard of the Hokage. There would be some serious talking to do.
