As soon as the sun had disappeared completely from the sky, as well as the last residual rays, the shinobi moved in on their target. Kakashi had found a way for all of them to get in, and their first task would be to remove all hats from the residence.
Of all their D-ranked missions where they cleaned up garbage and rescued cats from trees and baby-sat brat children and walked dogs for the Inuzuka, the two jounin and three chuunin had to admit to themselves that stealing hats of all things, had to be the dumbest thing they had ever done on a mission.
Hinata was the first one to head in, her task was to hit the pressure points and chakra pathways on every body she saw, human or otherwise, putting them into a state of unconsciousness that only another touch from her, or another Hyuuga, would be able to reverse. As the only Hyuuga in the area though, it was a fairly safe bet that she would be the only one to be applying such a touch.
When that task was completed, Shikamaru began the retrieval of the hats, and Fukurou burnt them, quickly and silently where she waited on the roof, where Sakura had set up a genjutsu so that they would not be spotted. The fire spell that she was using had to be very powerful after all, and they didn't want to cause alarm to any of the locals.
Once all of the hats had been found, removed and burned – and a thorough sweep had been made to confirm this, even the night-caps and joke hats from old party crackers had not been spared – they would all head in.
This important task done and completely assured that no one would wake, Kakashi slipped in and withdrew his sword as he considered all of the sleeping figures in the house.
"That's him," Fukurou whispered, having come in with him.
Kakashi saw that she was pointing at one old man with a white beard so long the man had tucked it into the belt of his sleeping robes.
"That's Albus Dumbledore," she confirmed.
Kakashi moved the ridiculous beard aside and cleanly sliced through the cervical vertebrae, as he would execute a man who knelt before him committing suicide with a ceremonial dagger – as was the samurai's way, rather than the shinobi's. Still, he had such experiences in his past, all of them memorable and none of them pleasant.
"Nice," Shikamaru said softly from where he and Hinata were waiting at the window.
"Very nice," Sakura agreed as she slipped in before bringing her hand, glowing with healing chakra, to the bared flesh where she re-grew skin over the open flesh so that it was completely tidy.
"Scourgify," Fukurou muttered, pointing to the man's sheets, which had been tainted by and with Dumbledore's blood the instant Kakashi's sword had bitten into his flesh.
"Who did that?" a voice asked, and Fukurou recognised Dumbledore's voice.
"Hello Albus," she said, as the old wizard's ghost rose from his body.
"You look like Miss Granger," he observed.
"I was her, once. My name is Owl now," she told him.
"I suppose it was you and your company that killed me, hmm?" he asked. "I'll have you know I have ways of coming back."
"All of your horcrux are destroyed Albus," Fukurou answered, arms folded. "You will have to content yourself with merely haunting places."
Dumbledore's ghost frowned at that.
"And I would appreciate it if you would leave Harry, the Weasleys, Remus and Severus alone," she added. "I think their lives have been altogether meddled with quite enough. If I hear about you giving them trouble, I'll find a way to kick you off the ethereal plane you inhabit now."
Dumbledore sniffed at the idea.
"How did you get in?" he demanded to know. "And how did you not wake up everybody?"
"Actually, it wasn't that hard. We found the place, we broke through the wards and the illusions, climbed in a window, put everybody under, and here we are," Hinata answered, quiet confidence and a certain measure of amusement ringing through her tone.
Fukurou was so proud of how far Hinata had come from being that timid and green little genin she had first met. She had grown so much, they all had.
"I'll give them all a sleeping draught, and then Pearl will undo what she did to everybody, that way they will all sleep until morning, and we can be miles away when they wake up, feeling unaccountably hung over," Sakura said, holding up a beaker of one of the many potions she had learned how to make from Severus between arriving and finding Moody.
"Congratulations, you have spontaneously lost your head in the night," Shikamaru said, smirking.
The shinobi turned from the spectre and went to tend to his foolishly loyal followers, the people he had manipulated like puppets for so long that they had truly, willingly, lost their own will to him without even having been aware of it.
The shinobi pitied them that loss, and hoped that they never had to suffer like that, or that their Hokage became so much of an issue in their village as Albus Dumbledore had here.
They left the house as the first grey light of dawn began to lighten the edges of the sky, but the sun had yet to reach the point of providing any luminous colour to the panorama.
"Job well done everyone," Fukurou told them happily.
"In, out, no one knew we were there," Kakashi added in approval. These three were excellent shinobi, perfect little shadows at work when the task required them to be.
The three all beamed under the praise of their superiors, even Shikamaru.
"Now, back to camp, and we can do some meditation and taijutsu training until the others get here, and word gets out about Dumbledore dying, again," Fukurou said, smiling happily at her team.
General approval of the idea rounded the group, and they sprinted through the light scrub until they got to their tents. Fukurou smirked as she considered how incredibly out of place their camp site would be if they had been at a camping site favoured by the magical population of England, or indeed of a good deal of Europe. Two canvases, strung up and pegged down into triangular shapes, open ended so it was possible to escape and/or attack quickly if an alarm-trap when off, and a pit fire lined with small stones so that it could all be scattered easily and hide any evidence of camping at all. No castles made of canvas or things that were bigger on the inside than the outside, just two stretched canvasses and a fire pit, with five thick blankets lying where the shinobi had while they caught a few quick winks between finding Dumbledore and assassinating him.
~oOo~
It was at this camp that the wizards found the shinobi. Team 9 were meditating upside down, standing on their hands, while Kakashi was doing push-ups with Fukurou sitting cross-legged on his shoulders, also meditating. Something was boiling over the fire as well, and it smelled delicious.
"What the bloody hell?" Ron said, not at all used to this. This was even more bare than the camp his dad had set up when they went to the Quidditch Cup, and he could see that these tents weren't like the ones his dad had brought. He also had no idea what these foreign people were up to.
"Team 9," Fukurou's voice broke the silence, though she had not opened her eyes. "Finalise your thoughts and welcome our guests. Wolf, that is five hundred," she said, unfolding one leg and getting off his shoulders before stretching the other leg down to join the first.
The younger ninja pushed off their hands and landed on their feet, one after the other, without a sound.
"Good afternoon," the girls chorused.
"Hey," Shikamaru added, raising a hand lazily.
Kakashi stood and put his shirt back on before turning around, displaying his rippling shoulder and back muscles, as well as a couple of scars, to the magic users.
"Mine," Fukurou warned possessively when she saw the female's jaws drop slightly and their eyes widen, though she smirked as well, so there would unlikely be any cruel punishments for them if they did something.
"Oh, definitely," Kakashi agreed, pulling her over for a kiss before he adjusted his mask to be comfortable on his face and finished turning so that he was facing everybody.
"Smells like lunch is ready," Hinata said, checking the pot. "Looks like it too."
Sakura fetched out bowls and chopsticks, handing around the latter while Hinata filled the former.
"Shouldn't we be doing something about Dumbledore now that we're all here, rather than sitting and having lunch?" Harry asked, confused as he was handed a bowl of noodles in soup with vegetables and some meat. His confusion increased when he tried to handle the chopsticks. "How do these things work?"
The shinobi chuckled.
"Like this," Sakura demonstrated, showing the wizards how to hold the chopsticks, how to operate them and finally how to eat with them.
"As for Dumbledore," Fukurou said once everybody had at least managed to swallow their first mouthful. "We killed him last night."
The complete silence of utter shock lasted for exactly four seconds before Ron broke it by choking on his food and spluttering.
"What? How?"
"We are shinobi," Kakashi said, as though that explained everything. To anybody who knew what shinobi were, it did. Most of the wizards and witches did not know.
"Shinobi guard, deliver, capture, retrieve, defend and assassinate. It is who we are and what we do," Fukurou said, adding to the explanation.
"We are shadows," Shikamaru added.
"We are disciplined," Hinata continued.
"We are the best," Sakura finished firmly.
Silence, shocked, confused and unsure, radiated from the wizards.
"They are also, frequently, expensive," Snape added flatly as he shook some of the soup off the noodles he currently held in his chopsticks before he brought them to his mouth. He was the only one of the magical community present who hadn't needed to watch the lesson on how to use the chopsticks before he started eating with them.
The shinobi openly laughed at that.
"Yes," Fukurou chuckled. "Though it does depend on the job we're doing. Missions that are outside of our country, like this one, or high risk, will generally cost more to the client."
George and Fred looked at each other.
"Since we asked you to come," Fred started.
"Does that make us the clients?" George finished.
"Normally, yes, it would," Fukurou answered. "Except that you made your request to me personally, and not the village, and as I brought the mission to our village leader, then I am the client who is paying for this mission."
The twins paled. They hadn't meant to do that to her.
"How much?" George asked.
"We'll pay you back," Fred added.
Fukurou calculated the conversion of currency between the two worlds, and then started considering out loud.
"Foreign, retrieval and destruction of items considered dangerous to the population due to connection to dangerous individual, assassination of said dangerous individual, assigned a three man cell of chuunin, also two jounin, time duration of, what, two weeks we've been here?" Fukurou asked.
"Eleven days only so far," Kakashi corrected mildly.
"Eleven days, also included capture, interrogation, and extensive healing of a prisoner to gain needed information," Fukurou pinched her nose and closed her eyes, tilting her head back. "That's an A-class mission, easily, possibly S-class. If I deduct the value of the thestrals from the final price, then... I'd say twenty galleons even on provision of another pair of thestrals in five years, so that I can introduce new blood to the herd I intend to build," she said in finality.
"That's a very good price," Snape advised. "Owl is paying for this on her village records, so your debt is owed to her. That she is requesting most of her payment in the form of an animal most in our culture fear and dislike is a very good thing."
"It's a deal," the twins said together, sticking out their hands to shake on it.
Fukurou slapped her hand into theirs and gripped from the other side as well, so that she had skin-to-skin contact with both brothers.
"Twenty galleons now, two thestrals in five years," she said firmly.
They shook on it.
~oOo~
In the house on Quirn Street, there was an initial fuss over a hoard of missing hats, and then another when Albus Dumbledore was found with his head separated from his neck. Clearly by process no wizard in history had previously used, and further more that the neck was healed over so that, even if stitching was done and his soul called back into his body, it would not be able to knit the flesh back together.
The complete strangeness of his death confused his followers, and as puppets whose strings have been cut of their puppeteer, they did not know what to do but wait for the puppeteer to return and fix them, continuing in the mean time as they had done when they had not been consciously following the man's directions. Though for Molly and Arthur Weasley, their decision to believe and follow Albus over Harry had irrevocably torn the younger children from them. The Burrow would never again be filled with all of their offspring.
The wizards and witches returned to their usual residences once more. Harry was living in the house left to him by his godfather, Sirius Black, on a day-to-day basis. Ron and Ginny had moved in with him, permanently. In one part because they worried for his mental health after the whole thing. The other reason was because Ginny had it bad for Harry, who was getting a clue and beginning to return the feelings, and Ron was the permanent chaperone for his little sister and his best friend.
Lupin returned to his little house in the country with Tonks, where Fukurou had first found them only a short month ago, just before the chuunin selection examination had begun, and asked for his help with the map that was hanging in her office pretending to be a piece of poetry.
Severus and Minerva had their duties at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and so returned there, sending out letters to those who had not yet heard that Dumbledore was once again and finally put to complete rest.
The Daily Prophet had a field day, not being able to find the people who had committed the actual deed, and couldn't pin it on Harry and his friends as they all had a large amount of witnesses stating that they were no where near the place when it happened.
It had been so much easier than fighting Voldemort, and Harry knew it was because they had all learned from fighting Voldemort. Well, that and Dumbledore hadn't really been big on the muggle terrorising, which helped. The old headmaster was manipulative and conniving, a person who had once been good and then slowly rotted, but he was not evil. He also had tried hiding his horcrux in plain sight, entrusting the knowledge of where and what they were to his best friend, believing – in fact knowing – that Alistor Moody was able to withstand torture spells for long enough that most wizards would give up trying to break him.
It also seemed that shinobi were simply better at dealing with a situation like this one than a wizard would be, and far superior in their methods of interrogation.
~oOo~
Fukurou sighed. If only she'd handled the whole thing like a shinobi, rather than having to pretend to be a regular student, all those years ago when she had been given the mission. Voldemort would likely have been a lot easier to kill if she had, but Harry and Ron wouldn't have become so tough, even if they were still, comparatively speaking, complete wimps. If only their little advantage over the rest of the wizarding world hadn't also meant that they would get that little bit full of their own greatness.
She decided to sit them down with Moody before she left, and have the man tell them everything that she and her team had done to him. It might put some fear of the world back in them, and remind them that it had not been them who had defeated Dumbledore, the only wizard that Voldemort had feared. What good was magic, after all, if they were walking down a London street and they got shot? Not a bit, and as she prodded Moody with a kunai, they learned that.
From the ashen green looks on their faces as they listened to the man and looked back and forth between him and Fukurou, they learned that very well.
~oOo~
Fred and George were returning to the apartment they lived in above their shop, and the shinobi went with them. Fukurou had to get her money from them after all, and get it exchanged at Gringotts into her own currency. Then would come the part that Kakashi was looking forward to the least, as well as the rest of Team 9.
The portkey home.
Seeing their faces when she told them that as they walked towards the wizarding bank with the money from the Weasley twins, Fukurou sighed and divided it up between them. Five galleons to each member of Team 9 and to Kakashi may or may not go very far, depending on what they bought, but she was pleased to see all four of them go weaving through the crowds in search of a second hand book shop. She followed them in when they finally found one.
Sakura picked out a couple of books that were filled with healing spells and potions, moving quickly to the man at the counter to begin the process of haggling down the prices of her purchases, which had Fukurou just about beaming with pride in the girl. She would make an excellent medic-nin, did already in fact, and she would only get better.
Hinata, Fukurou observed, was drifting around the books that explained charms, transfiguration, and runes. She smiled and went to help her pick out the most comprehensive and helpful book on each of those subjects before sending her to get Sakura's help with haggling down the price. It seemed that their pinkette had quite the gift for driving prices down. Just like her old sensei.
Shikamaru was looking at potions books, which surprised Fukurou a bit. She wouldn't have picked him as a potion sort of person. Then the boy turned around and started looking at the next shelf, which had books about magical creatures, arithmancy and divination along it. When he pulled down a slim volume on magical creatures, and a thick one on arithmancy, Fukurou smiled. He'd just been making his way through systematically until he found something that caught his eye it seemed.
Kakashi was browsing the old diaries of dead wizards, occasionally taking one down and flicking through it, and replacing it again.
"Anything interesting in those?" Fukurou asked, tucking her chin over his upper left arm so that she could try and read over his shoulder.
"Some interesting discoveries, a few adventures, mostly nothing though," he answered sadly, putting back the last one he had been holding. "I hope that you don't think that I didn't notice how you didn't leave yourself with any money when you decided to treat all of us as a pay-off for sending us through portkeys," he added, turning slightly and looping his arms around her.
"Did that make sense?" Fukurou asked, laughing quietly as she spoke.
"I noticed that you kept no money back for yourself," Kakashi rephrased, though he knew she had gotten the meaning perfectly clearly the first time he had said it.
"Hm, and what are you going to do about it?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Buy something for you instead," he said firmly.
"Well, there's a potion in one of those books over there that I'd like to learn how to make," Fukurou said, jerking her head in the direction of the shelf filled to slightly overflowing with books of potion recipes.
"Go and get it then," he ordered gently, brushing his masked lips over her forehead tenderly.
Fukurou chuckled and, when he released her, went to do just that, searching thoroughly before she finally found the one book with the greatest number of potions that she wanted to learn how to make contained between its covers.
When she got back to Kakashi, he had also picked out a book, one that looked to Fukurou like it belonged in a regular, muggle-world book shop than one in the magical world, so she had no idea how he had found it here. It said on the cover Caring for Your Horse.
"I thought you might be able to apply some of the principles to your new thestrals," he suggested meekly, noticing that she had seen the book he was holding. He hadn't actually looked inside, but he still figured it couldn't hurt.
Fukurou shook her head at him tenderly and drew him into the magical beasts section of the book shop, where she scanned the titles until she came to one that said, very clearly Thestrals; History, Habits, and Needs. This book she took down from the shelf and presented to Kakashi with a tender, loving smile, pleased that he had thought of her when he was looking through the books.
"They are pretty, aren't they?" she asked quietly, turning to an (unmoving) artist's rendition of the creature – photography, even and perhaps particularly wizard photography – was unreliable for these animals.
Kakashi nodded his agreement as he ran a finger along the neck and back of the creature in the drawing.
"There's no creature like them in the Elemental Countries," he said. "There are going to be some people who are very scared of these," he added, and there was a chuckling smirk in his voice.
"Yeah," Fukurou agreed, somewhat dreamily. "Isn't it wonderful?"
Kakashi laughed, quietly as they were in a book shop, but he laughed all the same.
"Who are you hoping to scare my love?" he asked.
"Hyashi," she answered instantly. "And maybe Ibiki-sensei as well. If I can ruffle Ibiki-sensei then I'll be very pleased with myself. Maybe I'll finally give the Hokage that heart attack at last too."
Kakashi laughed again, shaking his head as he took their books to the register to haggle and pay for them.
