Author's Note: I've been formulating this for a week or so now. Be afraid, lol. Poor Ko and Izumo. Fate dealt them a shitty hand. No one likes an irate Iruka. No one.

If you don't like bad language, be wary of the end of this chapter. Iruka loses it. :)

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Shameless Plugs: Go vote in my poll. Go. Now. Or face my wrath.

Also – go play Maple Story. It's another of my I-have-free-time-at-work pleasures.


Chapter 7: In which Iruka has a potty mouth.

Izumo and Kotetsu were less than pleased about having been forcefully removed from the party. For once, they hadn't even done anything wrong. Iruka had tersely explained the situation and his time constraints (read: bullied and threatened), and the duo had agreed to help.

The trio stood silently at the gate to the Forty-Fourth Training Grounds, fondly nicknamed the Forest of Death. Beyond the chain-link fence, the jungle seemed to be going out of its way to make scary and ominous noises.

Kotetsu sighed gustily, then pulled out a small scroll.

Iruka frowned, recognizing the type. "I didn't know you had a summons. Where did you pick one up?"

Ko smirked his standard smirk, his spiked hair defying gravity. "I didn't, and I haven't." One quick jutsu later, and a pair of aerosol cans had replaced the parchment.

Iruka scrubbed a hand down over his face.

Mosquito repellent and Raid.

Some ninja he had recruited to help.

Lovely.

Kotetsu smiled sweetly.

Iruka did not trust this.

Izumo was not nearly the prick his partner tried to be, and tried to explain. "You took your chuunin exam where? Suna?"

At Iruka's nod, he continued. "Our exam was held right here – after your class, they began to cut back on the rotation of the test locations, something about the war, and traveling with a couple of dozen genin. Anyway, our team – the two of us and Gekkou Hayate, got attacked by a roach the size of a school bus. Hayate ended up cutting it in half, and Ko got slimed by roach goobers. Ko is a little scared of bugs. His hair's been spiked ever since."

The aforementioned chuunin glared from where he was busy dousing himself with the repellent. "Am not!" He stuck his tongue out.

Iruka chose not to point out that he could see the flyswatter stuck in the back of his waistband.

"Besides," Izumo pulled out a scroll of his own. "I'm the one with the summons. I got good trackers, too." A quick jutsu, then a poof of blue-gray smoke.

"You can't be serious."

The summons, a penguin wearing a leaf symbol sweatshirt, apparently did not like being easily dismissed. He began to attack Iruka's toes.

Izumo had the good grace to look chagrined. "Oops. Wrong scroll." The penguin vanished in another poof of smoke, just before ingestion of Iruka's pinky toe would have been completed.

Another quick jutsu. Another plume of smoke. Iruka mused. If chakra smoke contributed to the hole in the ozone layer, did that mean he needed to expand on his unit dealing with environmental topics? Realizing that his thought was far too in-depth for how his day was going, he dropped the thought, filing it for possible usage another day. Anyways, the smoke had cleared and Izumo's summons had appeared.

A pair of ferrets, one a sable, one an albino, sat on Izumo's shoulder, chattering happily.

"My babies!" Izumo cooed.

Iruka was grossed out. Cooing? Dear Kame.

Kotetsu apparently agreed, and shoved bug spray into his weapons pouch. "Their names are Dante Leon Belmonte," the albino perked up, "and Artemis Sephiroth Prime." The sable smiled, showing teeth. Sharp, pointy teeth. Iruka was mildly puzzled; never before had he seen smiling rodents...

As one, the pair shrilled, tails poofed to ten times their normal diameter, and lunged at Iruka.

"Ow! Ow! Owie!" Iruka danced around, trying to dislodge the toothy balls of fur.

Izumo sighed as he collected his "children". "You thought of them as rodents, didn't you?"

"Yeah, so?"

Ko sniffed disdainfully. "Weasels."

"Huh?"

"They're weasels, not rodents. They're very picky about that."

"Er. Oh. Sorry?"

Izumo had knelt down, stroking his weasels with long strokes. He whispered to them softly, his lips barely moving. After a kiss on each pink nose, the pair took off beneath the fence.

"Hopefully they'll scare up some clues," Kotetsu eyed the gate that they themselves would enter.

Iruka had decided not to even bother exerting the effort to puzzle any information out himself. "What do you mean, hopefully?"

Ko frowned, then readjusted the bandage across his nose. "Duh, they're ferrets. Even as a summons, their brains are the size of the ball of cotton on the end of a q-tip. They have the attention span of a pre-genin."

"Oh."

Ten minutes later saw the team still frowning at the gate in the fence. A rusty padlock hung from the chains fastening the gate shut.

Kotetsu had flatly refused to try to open it. He was afraid his fly-away hair would get caught in a hinge (or something to that effect) and he didn't want to have to pull any of his hairs out, lest his entire pate start to thin. After all, as he explained to Iruka earnestly, hairlines run on the mother's side of the family.

Not knowing how else to respond, Iruka nodded cautiously.

Heartened by this show of support, Ko launched into a monologue regarding how the females in his family had been known for their premature baldness. In fact, as Ko had told him solemnly, his fifteen year old cousin Nyara was completely bald, and had been since age twelve.

Izumo, too, had refused to attempt opening the gate, claiming his tetanus shots weren't up to date.

Iruka had had it. He snapped.

"We're ninja! Nin-ja! Assassins, warriors, soldiers, whatever! Ninja don't worry about their maternal hairlines! Ninja do not worry about tetanus, well, at least not until their mission is over. But only then! And ninja don't need to break through a fence, damnit! We can jump over it!"

And he did.

Ko's mouth dropped.

Izumo sat down in shock.

"Did he just -"

"Ko, I think he did."

Kotetsu sniffled, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye. "Our little boy is growing up."

Izumo glowed with pride. "Iruka just said his very first curse. I am so very pro-"

"Shut the fuck up, Izumo."

The mouths dropped again.

"Goddamned cockfucking dicklicking assmunching whore slut cock fuck dick ass shit fuck dildo ass fuck floppy donkey dick shit ass titty whore fuck fuck FUCK!"

Iruka looked sunburned, he was so red.

Ko now had real tears in his eyes. "That was beautiful, man. Sheer poetry."

Izumo just clapped.

Iruka duplicated Izumo's earlier actions and sat hard on the ground. What had he done? He had just blown up spectacularly, and had used profane language.

... And damn. It felt gooooooood.

A quick check of his watch.

Quarter to midnight.

Of all the floppy donkey dicks.

He added this to the tally of what he had to take out of Genma's hide.