Drip. Drip. Drip.
My eyes slide open, shifting up towards the damp stone ceiling of the cave. I watch as another miniscule drop of water falls, adding itself to the growing puddle by my head. Another storm, then. Only when the seas are particularly rough do they bleed through into my little dwelling. I sigh, closing my eyes again. I have a long wait ahead of me still.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"Hello."
My eyes snap open.
I come to my feet, snarling, but when I scan the cave I find nothing besides myself and the darkness.
"Where are you?" I say lowly, voice hoarse from long disuse.
"Everywhere." As if to confirm their statement, their voice echoes from all corners of the cave, pelting me from all sides. A familiar voice. If possible, I grow even warier. "I don't wish to fight."
My eyes narrow. "What do you want?"
"I want to work with you."
"Then face me."
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"No."
"I don't work with those that I don't trust." I say, shifting in agitation, eyes flicking from every nook to every cranny of the underground structure.
Another pause. "I can't face you. This is only my voice here with you."
I scoff. "Do you fear me, peace bringer? Am I too large a threat to confront in your own flesh?"
"Your current residence is rather far out of my way," The voice retorts, something like annoyance appearing and disappearing from it in a flash. "... And yes. You are a threat to me. But you don't need to be one."
I sigh, sitting back down. I know where this is going now, and know exactly how it will end. The same way it has every time before it. "I refuse."
"I haven't even made my offer yet."
I roll my eyes, and consider simply leaving. I have had more than enough of this particular man to last me a lifetime, and another meeting with him will no doubt do nothing but worsen my mood.
Still, even that might be preferable to the solitary drip, drip, drip of the water on stone. "Fine. Speak."
"We could start in Suna. They have been laid low by the war, and will devour any hope given to them. From there-"
"What happened to Ame?" I interrupt him.
"Ame has proven itself to be stronger than I first thought," He says, another flash of annoyance there and gone from his voice in an instant, though this time not directed at me. "It matters little, though. Suna would suit our purposes just as well. Just that instead of moving directly into the Land of Fire, we would have to deal with the Land of Earth and its hidden village first."
"And how do you propose we 'deal' with these nations, peace bringer?" I ask boredly. "They have begun to form groups designed for the sole purpose of combating me and the others. We will not catch them unawares."
"We could have if we had moved earlier." A sigh brushes against me from all sides. "Regardless, direct combat is not what I meant. I have moved past that."
And for the first time in a long time, I am interested. "What is your plan now?" I ask, keeping the curiosity in my voice carefully restrained.
"We will show them that your strength is not a destructive thing, that it can be used for good. We'll show them, and they will beg for us to do the same for the others. And when we do, they will follow our cause without question."
I ponder on that for a long time, chewing on the vagueness of it and what it might mean. Then, I ask calmly, "What do you mean 'us'"?
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"That is the key to this plan," he finally says, and I can taste the reluctance in his tone. "They will not give you the chance to prove your worth as you are. We will have to show them your power first, and then reveal you to them. We'll have to-"
"No." The word rumbles forth from my chest, echoing off the walls, shaking the very stone beneath my feet.
"Why!?" The voice explodes, the strained courtesy of our discussion shattered at last. "You know that this is how it must be! You know this, and you know that I'm the only one who can do it!"
"You are wrong, thief," I reply, and relish in the drip, drip, drip that follows. "There are others, and it is with them that I have aligned."
"You... You do not understand," he says. "You have never understood. This evil- It is not a physical thing. The path you're on now will only be wasting your strength. There is no single enemy to fight. You need to open your eyes!"
"No." I shake my head. "You need to clear yours."
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"There is nothing I can do to convince you?"
I shake my head, and again, "No."
"Not even-"
"My answer will never change, peace bringer," I say with finality.
"Fine. I'll do it myself." The voice changes, then. It becomes darker. "This is not the only reason I have come. I've brought news as well."
An uneasy feeling appears in my stomach. "What news?" I ask slowly.
"While your evil sleeps in the shadows, mine has swallowed your allies whole."
My breath freezes in my throat. "You lie." It isn't possible. The last time I saw them-
"I would gain nothing from it," The voice sounds, ice cold. "Uzushiogakure is no more. You've failed."
No. "You LIE!" I snarl, coming to my feet once more and lashing out at the walls of the cave, cutting goughs in it the size of men.
"You can see for yourself," he says. Six paths save me, no. "When you've changed your mind, find me." And just like that it disappears, leaving me alone.
"No! No!" I howl, lunging upward towards the ceiling.
"No!"
My eyes fly open, locking on to the far wall of my room, my familiar bedroom wall staring back at me. I pant as the remnants of terror and blood-red fury from my dream roar through my veins. I look down at my blanket bunched up around my waist- I'd sat up at some point in the night. I run a shaky hand through my air, struggling to dispel the feeling that all my hopes and dreams had just been crushed in one fell swoop.
"Only two months this time," I hiss into the darkness of my room. "What a load of bullshit."
It's been two months since I've had a crimson dream, out in the field on my first official mission as a genin. I always get at least three between the hellishly vivid night terrors- one time, when I was ten, I even got six months.
I pause in my surly thoughts, a sudden realization hitting me square in the face, forcing my eyes even wider.
I scramble out of my bed, throwing my covers aside and scattering broken balloon slivers across my floor. I jog out into my living room and start rummaging through the dozens of scrolls littering the place. The words Fuinjutsu and Bijuu decorate nearly all of them in some way, and some even contain both.
Finally, I alight on a blank scroll and snatch it up. I survey the room in disgust. "This place used to be nice, too." Well, nicer.
I turn back and pad into my room, grabbing a t-shirt hanging off my couch on the way and maneuvering into it with the scroll tucked under my arm. I pass by my bed and grab a pencil off my nightstand, then head out onto the balcony. For a while I just stand there, relishing in the feeling of the cool breeze on my clammy skin and the sight of the trees above, glowing in the light of the moon. Then I unfurl the scroll on the flat stone railing and begin to write.
Not-Crimson Dream #1...
The reason Sasuke had given my disturbingly vivid (or vividly disturbing) dreams their name was because of a single recurring theme: A crimson film that obscured my senses and imbued me with a sense of rage the likes of which I have never felt in my entire life, driving me to do horrible, horrible things. It dominated every single one of the dreams, driving "me" into such a state that one time, when I was eleven, I tried to tear Sasuke's throat out when he woke me up from one. I was that consumed by it.
To this day he never wakes me up while I'm in the middle of one.
But now... I narrow my eyes at the dimly lit scroll, grasping at the fading tendrils of thought from the dream that had not been my own. Now things are different. I had passed it off as a fluke two months ago, but every ninja knows that the saying "Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence" is complete nonsense. My crimson dreams are changing.
What exactly they're changing to, however...
I finish off my recount, read through it once, twice, three times, making sure that I've left nothing out of it. I think about trying to do the same with my other dream as well, but the particulars of that one have already faded into uselessness. Or been repressed. One of the two. All I can remember is that it lacked the crimson film just like this one, until the very end at least.
Satisfied for now with my recording, I roll the scroll up and take one last look at the trees hanging over the village before heading back into my room. The light from my alarm clock is the only thing illuminating the otherwise pitch black room, the numbers 5:49 glaring up at me. Far too early to be up, but I can never go back to sleep after having a crimson dream.
"Stupid dreams," I mutter, tossing the scroll down on my bed and shuffling into the bathroom. I go through my usual routine of showering and dressing in the dark, taking this rare opportunity of being up early to enjoy the heat of the water and actually find a clean pair of pants to wear before I have to go to my appointment for the morning. When I finally pass by my room with my sandals on my feet and keys in hand the clock reads 6:30.
Usually having to cede the rooftops to shinobi on duty is an enormous pain. But at times like this, when it's just late enough for some stalls to be open but early enough that the streets are pretty much deserted, it's actually kind of nice. I bump around from merchant to merchant, checking out breakfast foods and weapons and all kinds of other wares, exchanging a few words here and buying a few things there.
The sun is just beginning to peek up over the horizon of trees when I arrive at a small gray building made up of concrete bricks and little else. No windows. One solitary metal door. I walk up to it and raise my hand to knock, and flinch back just a little when an ANBU is suddenly there.
It's not like this hasn't happened every time I come to this place, but it never ceases to scare the hell out of me.
"Name, shinobi ID number, and purpose," the typical monotone that all ANBU are known for drifts past the ceramic mask- some sort of bird. I roll my eyes.
"Uzumaki Naruto, 12431, an appointment with Yamanaka Inoichi."
The ANBU raises a hand and taps an erratic beat on their armored shoulder, and after a moment of silence bows their head and opens the door. "Proceed."
"Yeah, good morning to you too," I grumble, moving into the building.
Drab tiles and more cement walls await me inside, illuminated by about a dozen shining bars in the ceiling. There's a small desk shoved up against the wall to my left, behind which a strained-looking woman wearing a chunin vest sits surrounded by piles of papers. She looks up at me briefly, nods towards the far side of the room and murmurs a clipped "good morning," and goes back to her work.
I walk over to the other side of the room where a set of concrete stairs leading downward await me, and descend into darkness. I emerge at the bottom into a hallway, and immediately turn to the right down a connecting hallway, thus beginning my journey through the labyrinth that is Konoha's Torture and Interrogation Headquarters.
It took me a lot of appointments here to get the path to Yamanaka's office down pat, and I'm still trying to forget some of the things I heard the first few times I got lost. I shudder, the memory of a stoic ANBU blocking my path and a woman's rising wails surging to the forefront of my mind. I come to a stop at another door, this one made of oak instead of metal. I shove it open. A large room lays inside, decorated with a couple couches, some tables, a large refrigerator, and a blackboard that covers an entire wall. The Employee Lounge.
I'm just about to turn into the door leading to Yamanaka's office when I notice a certain robed someone sitting on one of the couches out of the corner of my eye. I turn to look at him, puzzled.
"Old man? What are you doing here?"
The old man's head, which had been dipped down to his chest, jerks up. He looks at me with a startled look on his face that I don't buy even a little bit. "Ah, Naruto. You've made it." He forces himself to his feet, grasping at his hip and wincing theatrically. I shake my head, a little smile tugging at my lips. "I was hoping to accompany you in your meeting with Inoichi today."
"Why?"
"Today he will be giving me his final assessment of you," he says, smiling.
That perks me right up. "Wait, really?" He hums in confirmation and gestures towards the Intelligence Shinobi's office.
"Shall we?"
Yamanaka's office is a modest thing, done up with a medium-sized desk across from the doorway, a couple chairs, and a gray leather couch. The man himself is scribbling something down behind said desk, and waves vaguely at a chair.
"Have a seat, Uzumaki-san, we'll begin in a moment." I grab the seat on the left while the old man takes the one on the right, and the Intelligence jounin continues to scribble away. He finishes whatever it is he's writing with a flourish a few minutes later, and looks up. I try my best to contain myself at the look on his face when he sees the old man, I really do, but a choked snicker still slips out.
"Hokage-sama! I'm so sorry, I didn't realize you were here-"
"It's quite alright, Inoichi," The old man says, waving him off. There's a mischievous glint in his eyes, which only makes me laugh louder. "Any time away from my desk is time well spent, I always say. Just pretend I'm not here."
So after a little bit of hesitation and another apology for good measure, Yamanaka and I get into our routine.
It started a little over a week after I woke up from my coma, these routine visits to Konoha's cosiest shinobi division. An ANBU had appeared on my balcony at seven in the morning and scared the bejeezus out of me, and promptly escorted me to Yamanaka's office. What followed- after I got done ranting about privacy and the unholy hour, of course- was two straight hours of hundreds upon hundreds of seemingly random, utterly inane questions from the Intelligence Shinobi.
It had taken me all of five minutes to realize he was testing to see if I was a sleeper agent.
Sleeper agents had been one of Iruka-sensei's more passionate topics, so we'd gone pretty in depth in our fourth year in the Academy as to the various methods used to create and "disarm" one. One of the first things that's done to a suspected sleeper agent is a thorough sweeping of the mind by a genjutsu expert. If and when that doesn't pick anything up, the suspect is given another sweep through by a Yamanaka. Nine times out of ten, one of these two things will catch whatever that particular sleeper's trigger happens to be and measures will be taken to disarm it from there.
Unfortunately for me, Kazu's freaky doujutsu is subtle enough to slip past even Uchiha Itachi, the greatest genjutsu master Konoha has to offer, and for some reason I'm not allowed to get molested by the Yamanaka's clan technique. So I get the third and by far the most tedious method. Running me through every possible scenario that might set off my trigger until one of them does and they can disable it from there.
For the first few meetings we stuck mainly to shinobi-related words and images. Kunai, every major and minor hidden village along with their various headbands, the names of every major clan in the Elemental Nations, and on and on and on. As I'd later find out, it was done this way so that I could head back out into the field as soon as possible. All of the really stupid stuff came after I went on my second mission, an incredibly dull assault on a group of bandits lording over a supply line heading in from Kusa. Yamanaka hit me with kitchen appliances, articles of clothing, internal organs- sometimes literally after a particularly long meeting. Nothing was spared.
This meeting is no different. Though the questions and images are more complex than in earlier meetings, there's so many of them that it all starts to blend together. I'm considering trying sleep with my eyes open when he sits back and makes one final mark on a piece of paper on his desk and nods sharply.
"That's it," he says briskly, reaching over and grabbing a folder filled with papers from past meetings and sliding it in amongst them. He turns to the old man and smiles slightly.
"He's clear, Hokage-sama."
"Seriously?" I ask in disbelief. I turn to the old man hopefully. "So no more meetings?"
He clicks his tongue at that, hitting me with a chiding look. "A Hokage does not ask questions he already knows the answers to, Naruto."
My eagerness drains out of me and I nod, shot down. I don't know what I was expecting, really. The procedures in dealing with potential sleeper agents haven't changed much in the last few decades, if at all. You either get deactivated, or you get run through possible triggers in routine rotations in case you're a time-activated version. Which means if you happen to not be a sleeper agent at all, you get to go through the interrogations for the rest of your life.
I don't think I'm a sleeper agent. I'll never tell anyone why I think this, least of all the old man, because I doubt "That unknown ninja who kidnapped me just doesn't strike me as a bad guy" would go over well with anyone.
Honestly, since Sakura's insanity has passed and I've been able to refocus on other things, I've become more curious about Kazu than anything. But like I said, never gonna tell anyone about that.
"Yeah, yeah..." I concede to the old man's wisdom, crossing my arms over my chest and sulking.
"Don't worry," Yamanaka says. "Since we've gotten through the first cycle from now on you'll only have to come in to see me once every six months, or anytime you want to leave the village on a mission."
That's not even a little reassuring. "I'm a shinobi," I deadpan. "Going on missions is what I do." Yamanaka shrugs and begins packing seemingly random pieces of paper into another folder.
"Not all shinobi. There's plenty of work to be done right at home," he says easily. "But if that's all, Hokage-sama, I have a couple more appointments I'd like to get in before lunch."
"Of course," The old man says, amusement glinting in his eyes, and creaks to his feet. "Come, Naruto. Why don't you accompany me to my office for your debriefing?"
"That's today?" I blurt, scrambling after him.
"You only just got back from your latest mission yesterday, Naruto. How did you forget?" The old man asks in exasperation.
I scoff. "You obviously don't know how much I have on my plate right now-" I stop short as white and red robes swish off to the right, down a hallway that I've never been through. "Uh, old man, the exit is on the left."
"I'd rather not deal with the morning crowd," he replies over his shoulder. "I've been very busy myself lately, and I'm afraid it's starting to wear on me."
I pad alongside him, eyeing the solid cement walls surrounding us on all sides. "So is this taking us to a back road, or...?"
The old man shakes his head. "Straight to my office."
"Wait, what?" I ask, turning my head to stare at him. "How does that work?"
"A staircase that winds up from the bottom to the top of the Hokage Tower, and a specially concealed entrance into my office," he explains, smiling a little at my no doubt bewildered look. I chew on this for a moment.
"So do you have paths hooked up to other places too?"
"Every pivotal building and complex in Konoha," The old man confirms, sounding pleased. We hang a left and enter into a hallway with windows lining the walls, depicting bleak images of padded cells and chains on the other sides of them. I shiver, bad memories resurfacing once more.
"Why do you have it all linked up like that? Couldn't you just shunshin?" I ask to take my mind off the old memories and the new ones laying just beyond the glass panes. The old man pulls down the brim of his Hokage's hat, shadowing his eyes, and his smile turns mysterious.
"Sometimes doing something unexpected is more valuable than doing something a bit more practical. A Hokage can not afford predictability." He doesn't elaborate past that, so I let that sit as we walk past the cells of Konoha's worst and most disturbed.
We've nearly reached the end of the hall when a familiar face catches the corner of my eye, and I jerk to a stop in front of one of the windows. I stare at the girl chained up within, manacles clapped around her wrists, ankles, and neck. She's sitting down, unconscious, held up only by the chains connecting the manacles on her wrist to the ceiling. Her head hangs low, ragged, dirt brown hair falling down around her face in a disarray.
"What the-" I turn to the old man, who looks back at me with a grave, knowing look in his eyes. "What the hell is she doing in here, old man?"
"I'm afraid that while you were gone on your latest mission her condition took a turn for the worst," The old man says quietly. "We had to move her here for the safety of herself and those around her."
"That's garbage," I snarl. "What could she have done between now and last week that was so bad? She wasn't even awake when I left!"
The old man sighs, looking away from me and through the window. "Two days ago Tenten tried to kill one of her doctors."
I open my mouth, close it, open it again. "She what?"
"She attacked them in a blind rage one day while they were tending to her IV, and refused to respond to any of our questions after she was restrained," he continues. "Eventually it had become too dangerous to feed her, and she was making the other patients around her nervous with all the noise she was making trying to escape her bonds. So she was moved down here."
Tenten's shoulders rise and fall slowly, her face twitches in discomfort, and I can't help but wonder if maybe the old man is lying. There's no way this girl could hurt anyone. She looks far too tired to do anything but hang there on the wall.
It's been two months since my first mission, and two months since Sakura and this girl inside the cell were ambushed by a nukenin that I never got the name of and had his Bijuu memories shoved into their heads. My teammate, thankfully, was able to save herself- from what I still don't know- with a seal that broke a lot of rules and sealed the memory away. Tenten wasn't so lucky.
I've been visiting her room in the hospital as often as I can since then, sometimes once a week, sometimes daily, depending on whether or not I have a mission. And always with a scroll on Fuinjutsu tucked under my arm and the scroll containing Sakura's outline seal in my weapons pouch. Sometimes I see Lee or Gai in there and talk with them for a while, but it's usually just me, Tenten, and my scrolls.
I had thought that her suicide-induced coma would keep her under until I managed to figure out why Sakura's damn memory seal wouldn't work, and how I could fix it. But now, according to the Hokage, I was wrong.
"Did they do anything to her before that?" I ask the glass quietly. I'm fishing now, but I still can't believe it.
"No. My specialists have yet to figure out your teammate's seal."
That day when I visited Sakura in the hospital, after I'd left her room, I'd gone straight to my apartment and drawn up as accurate a copy of her seal outline as I could. Then I handed the original over to the old man, along with all of the information I'd gotten orally from my teammate. I didn't have any illusions as to my skills with Fuinjutsu- if I wasn't going to be getting any guidance from Sakura, I wasn't going to be any better with her seal than one of the village's various specialists.
As it turned out, I hadn't arrived a moment too soon, either. The old man had been just about to interrogate her on the seal when I barged in. If I hadn't let him know just how tricky the situation was with her forced amnesia... well. Tenten might have happened.
"Can't you..." I struggle for an alternative to this situation, a plan of action, words. "Can't you make her more comfortable, at least?" Whatever that thing has done to her, she doesn't deserve this.
"Once she's deemed capable of handling a more lenient environment," The old man says. The beginnings of a snarl pull at my lips, but when I turn to lay into the Hokage I find him walking down the hall. "Come now, we have work to do." He looks over his shoulder at me and smiles in reassurance. "She's in the most capable hands I have to offer, Naruto. Don't worry."
I press my hand against the glass until my fingertips bleed white, staring at what Sakura could have been, then push off and stalk after the Hokage.
"See, I told you he'd be here," Hatake's cheerful voice sounds from the doorway to the Hokage's office a couple hours later, disrupting my concentration on the balloon in my hands just long enough for a strand of wind chakra to slip free from the ball I'd compressed it into. The latex bulges, I scramble to contain the strand, and the balloon gives with a loud pop.
I curse, sinking back into the couch I'd settled into and shoving the broken balloon into my pocket. The old man chuckles merrily from behind his desk, the jerk. "I almost had it that time, too."
"Really?" Hatake asks, cocking his head. "How far did you get?"
I cough, averting my eyes. "Two minutes."
"Ma, at least you're making progress," he drawls, eye curling. Prick.
"Why didn't you meet up with us at the training grounds?" Sasuke cuts in, having moved into the room from around Hatake. He's got a familiar look in his coal black eyes- the "I'm curious and you're going to sate my curiosity or else" look.
"I had a meeting," I say simply.
"Ah." And that's enough. He and Sakura both know all about my status as a potential sleeper agent. It had been required that they be briefed on it before we went on another mission. I wasn't anywhere near happy about it at the time, feeling almost ashamed that I hadn't been able to prove my innocence, but I'd calmed down about it after my teammates had assured me that they wouldn't treat me any different because of it.
"Yeah." Kakashi slouches into the room then, revealing my timid teammate standing in the space behind him. I grin. "Hey Sakura! How was your day off?"
"Fine," she says to the floor. My grin slips.
Ever since the incident two months ago, Sakura has been... strange. Not as strange as she was with the planted memories wreaking havoc in her head, of course, but still different. She's shut herself off from me and the others even more than when we first became a genin team, becoming twice as timid and skittish. She works with us just fine during training and missions, but aside from that it's like we're strangers to her.
At first I thought it was just awkwardness over me having seen her naked- it was definitely awkward for me for a few days- but things have yet to change. And it drives me up the god damned wall.
"Since your next mentor team has yet to arrive, would you like to debrief now, Kakashi?" The old man asks mildly from behind his desk, breaking me from my frustrating thoughts and the no doubt awkward silence that had fallen upon the room.
"That would be fine, Hokage-sama," Kakashi says, nodding.
"Very well." The old man sits back, steepling his fingers, and a familiar and pressing weight bleeds into the room. It's Hokage time now- protocol is protocol, and debriefings require the utmost seriousness no matter the mission's difficulty. "Begin."
"Eight days ago, at 0900 hours, Team 7 and Team 14 left the village boundaries from the southern gate," Hatake drones. "We traveled southeast for two days until we reached our target, the lumber town Koki." It goes on like this for a while, standard protocol dictating an excruciating amount of detail for a mission that only really amounted to us taking down a minor crime lord and saving the asses of our mentor team when his hired samurai almost killed them.
Honestly, how a heavy assault team tries to get by without a single close combat specialist I'll never know.
"Hey," I murmur, nudging Sasuke. He raises an eyebrow a centimeter, keeping his gaze firmly on the Hokage and Hatake. "I had another dream."
His eyes flicker towards me. "Already?" He asks, voice just as soft.
"Yeah." I hesitate. "... It was different again."
"Like the last one?"
"That, and something else." He glances at me again, eyes sharp. "Someone else, actually. There was this guy that I was talking to. I couldn't see him, but somehow I knew he was bad news."
"What did you talk about?" He asks.
"Some sort of plan to stop something evil. It was weird."
Our conversation dies off there, our focus returning to Hatake's debrief. The silver-haired jounin meanders through the details of our initial assault on the mansion the crime lord- I never bothered to learn the scumbag's name- had commandeered when he came to the city. Minutes pass, Hatake finally get through to our trip home, and Sasuke nudges me.
"Are you sure it was a crimson dream?"
I don't even have to think about it. "Yeah." Sasuke frowns, staring pensively ahead, and our debriefing comes to a close.
The old man nods from behind his desk, stamping a sheet of paper in front of him detailing our mission for approval, and flicks a small slip of paper at Hatake. All thoughts of crimson dreams or the unused balloons in my pockets disappear from my mind, replaced with a single, gleeful realization.
Slip of paper means payday.
"Ah ah ah," Kakashi chides, holding the paper up out of my reach when I grab for it. "Wait until we get our next mission, Naruto. This won't do you any good until we get downstairs." I pull back with a huff, grudgingly acknowledging his logic, and sift through my many pants pockets. Broken balloon, broken balloon, scrap of paper, broken balloon- there we go. I pull a virginal bit of latex from my pocket with a triumphant grin, and set to work blowing it up.
Depending on the kind of mentor team we've rolled for this mission, I might have a few minutes or an hour to work on my exercise. I used to think Hatake was unreliable when it came to showing up on time, but some of these veteran genin teams are ridiculous. You'd think that after a few years they'd have gotten the hang of showing up for their missions on time, but apparently not.
Thankfully it looks like we lucked out, as a scant few minutes later there's a knock at the door.
"Enter," The old man calls, glancing up from a slip of paper likely pertaining to the very security of the village itself. Or maybe the reconstruction of that one bath house down the street from my apartment. Well, probably not the bathouse. His crystal ball's nowhere in sight.
The door swings open, and in walks the very last team I was expecting.
Team 9 enters the room cloaked in an aura of grim determination, the air of a broken soldier on his first day back in training hanging around them. The boisterous presences of Lee and Gai are gone and Neji's expression is even darker than the last time I saw him. There is no third teammate.
They step up to the Hokage's desk side by side while we watch them from the positions we've taken up around the room, and bow as one. "Team 9 requests a joint mission, Hokage-sama," Gai says.
The old man looks them over, his eyes flat. "I see you've ignored my suggestion of finding a temporary third member." Lee flinches at that, looking down. Neji just glares at a spot above the Hokage's head.
"We would never ignore you, Hokage-sama," Gai declares firmly. "We have taken your opinion into account, but we have decided that it would not be right for us to replace Tenten, and trained accordingly to fill the hole in our team." The old man raises an eyebrow at that, leaning further back in his chair and humming. Neji and Lee tense up, so much that I'm surprised they don't snap then and there.
"I'll allow it."
The two veteran genin sag, and Gai smiles gratefully. "Thank you, Hokage-sama-"
"However." All of a sudden subtle, uncomfortable weight in the room magnifies ten fold, pressing down on all of us. Sasuke grunts in surprise beside me, and I quickly reach out to steady Sakura, who's stumbled forward a step, forcing the hitch in my throat away as I do so. "If there is another mistake made in the protecting of your rookie team like your last mission, you will not enjoy the consequences. Am I understood?"
As one Team 9 lower their heads and murmur a "Yes, Hokage-sama." I almost do it myself, and I'm not even the one he's is mad at.
Say what you will, but the old man is damn scary when he wants to be.
"Good. You will be paired up with Team 7 again for this mission. Here." He pulls a bulky scroll from a pile off to the right side of his desk and hands it off to Gai. "The mission is straightforward. A man and a group of his followers from Taki have been causing problems in our outlying towns, inciting riots among other things. Your task will be to find and terminate them."
He leans forward now, folding his hands in front of him. His Hokage hat dips, darkening his usually warm features. "You have two weeks to complete this mission, and I expect minimal casualties." He stares intently at the three of them. "Do not disappoint me. Dismissed."