After a particularly long session buried under drifts of paperwork, Naruto left the admin building with less than the usual spring in his step. He brought both hands up to scrub at his eyes and cheeks as he lost himself in the crowded street.
Kiba kept watch from in front of him, moving over the rooftops easily. I remained on the opposite side of the street, a few yards behind.
Naruto made it to the end of the street before pulling up short and staring to his right, down the connection byway.
I sent a questioning signal to Kiba, who signed 'stand down' in reply.
Sasuke crossed the street with a flood of pedestrians, head hung low and black hair in his eyes. His hands were shoved deeply in his pockets, and he was trying and failing to walk with an air of nonchalance. Somehow, they both sped up or slowed down to match the other's speed.
The kikaichu I had placed on Naruto's clothing picked up their conversation. The blond said merrily, "Didja hear? I'm gonna be Hokage!"
"Of course I heard, dobe. I'm ANBU. I knew before you even left."
They were quiet for a few seconds. The far-off Sasuke that I could see let his shoulder hunch involuntarily.
Naruto brushed this off. "So. Itari seems as chipper as always."
"Yeah. I guess. Fucking Jata kinda mellows her out."
Naruto laughed, throwing his head back and showing his throat. "What the hell?"
Sasuke wasn't as amused. "Part of our deal, after…Mikoto was born. Holidays and birthdays, I sleep in a cold fucking bed and Itari's at Jata's doing some of the pretty weird shit she's only just heard of and always wanted to try out. Says it's fun, not a love thing. A best-friends-that-screw kinda thing."
"Jata does seem the type for kinky stuff."
"She doesn't fucking care what my wife does to her. Always been a bit pissed about me and her. Loved Itari since she was fifteen, that's something like ten fucking years."
They were entering the crowded central plaza. Naruto asked innocently, "Then why did she mind so much about me?"
Sasuke's dark, bitter voice was more forced and uncomfortable. "Because it hurt Itari. Even if it helped Jata's cause, it hurt Itari, and that's not okay."
"I see."
They were at the center of the plaza, a small square with benches and a few bricks with memorial plaques on the walkway. The mountain of faces, soon to include Naruto's, rose above them.
"Hey, teme. You remember that big hoopla where you raped me?"
Sasuke froze in place. The crowd parted around him.
Naruto looked up at the sky and nodded to himself. "That was pretty fucked up."
"Naruto-"
"It would've been fine. Dandy. You just had to say do not want, and I would've left it. Was ready to leave it. I wasn't asking anything of you, I was just saying a fact and you went utterly batshit crazy."
"I'm-"
"And then four years passed and I don't love you anymore."
A deadly, dead silence. The figure of Sasuke at street level fell back onto a bench. "I didn't think you would."
"But I don't…hate you." Naruto was tasting the words before he spoke them. "I don't. It's weird."
"I'msorry."
Naruto went on as though he hadn't spoken. "But it doesn't make sense, you know? I should despise you. Right after, for a couple of months, I would wake up in the middle of the night and remember about Jata and wonder if she killed you and think to myself I hope she did because you are such… an… ass."
Sasuke was breathing heavily enough for my kikai to hear.
Naruto reflected on his words for a little while, and then finished happily, "So anyway. I was thinking. You wanna get some ramen?"
The Uchiha choked. "What?"
Naruto started to walk toward Ichiraku's. "Said I don't love you, teme, not that I don't want to be your friend."
Kiba and I shadowed them as they went. We had no choice.
Sasuke started a pointless argument, then, and seemed to become more comfortable as it spiraled in circles over and over again.
Naruto walked amiably down the street for a few seconds, and then, without missing a step, his hand went up to his head and short, spiked, blond hair fell before his dragged fingers.
Naruto didn't do this unless he was completely satisfied, usually after stuffing himself to the eyes with ramen, or when Hinata was with him. However, Kiba ran his hand though his hair more frequently, when he was angry or upset.
It was a panic signal. Something was troubling enough that Naruto had the presences of mind to communicate in highly specific gestures.
Within ten seconds of the signal, the loud sirens mounted every half-mile throughout Konoha began to blare out the lockdown tone. Every citizen over the age of three knew the standard drill, shinobi or civilian; travel directly to the nearest shelter and await instructions. There were twenty underground shelters, and each had successive security measures that guaranteed any invader would face several waves of ninja guards before encountering civilians, the presumed targets.
There was a separate area for the Hokage, closer to the monument that sported the busts. Only ANBU operatives knew the exact location, but Kiba and I had been given a briefing. The entrance sealed itself five minutes after the lockdown alert, to keep enemies out. We were on a timer.
The crowd's pattern of purposeful chaos had collapsed into a two-part structure; civilians, genins, and chuunins moving north to the local shelter, and ANBU or jounins moving toward assigned lockdown positions. Naruto stayed still, peering at faces, expression serious and almost nervous. Then Kiba was standing with him, and then next moment they were both on the roof with me.
I asked, "What's wrong?"
"The assassin. I sensed his chakra. Creepy, black, malcontented. Yeah."
Kiba leaned over the edge to see into the street. "So, he could be one of those people?"
"I dunno." Naruto leaned over with him. "I don't feel him so much anymore. But, whatever, right?"
"Sure, chibi. Let's get you to that bunker place. Shino?"
I started running as I said, "Four minutes left. Hurry."
They followed after. Naruto took the time to retell a story about Tsunade; did we know, there was another entrance into the bunker? Only the thing is, no one knows how to find it except older ANBU, since Tsunade doesn't even make it private knowledge anymore…
Yes, we had all heard before.
The entrance was no more than a round hole, three feet in diameter, covered by a heavy, unobtrusive concrete lid. After Kiba dug his claws into the crack and pried it up, I was the first to start down the ladder into nowhere. The room was warmer and smelled of earth, all dirt and decaying leaves. I couldn't see as far as the walls.
Naruto came down after me, accidentally stepping on my hand more than once in his distraction. Judging by their conversation, Kiba was avenging me with alacrity.
We all froze when we were interrupted.
"Oh, good, you're exactly as predictable as I had hoped," a condescending voice said from the darkness.
Kiba took the last step down from the ladder and drew in toward Naruto's opposite side, trying to see. "Who's there?"
"I mean, really. You didn't even change your guards, after I very clearly knew who they were."
Naruto lowered his chin by degrees, and said, "Yeah. It's that jackass. The assassin guy. He beat us here."
A weak light flickered into life above us, and my spine stiffened. Kiba snarled, venomous and violent, "FUCK."
The space of the shelter was much larger than it had felt without light, the air warm and smothering. Koburon Gyo, the jounin we had worked with in Bujitaihei and Kiba had faced in our jounin exams, stood several yards off. He wore a uniform the dried grass, a hitai-ate secured at his left shoulder. The metal shone brightly in the gloom, picking out the grooves of three flattened ovals, linked in the shape of clouds. Behind him lay a still and silent shape…
Kiba barked, "Traitorous sonuvawhore."
Shiki. That was Shiki, buried in his overlarge jacket. There was a glint of silver at his neck, a senbon. My son lay tranquilized a few feet behind a traitor, a defector.
Undesirable.
Naruto glanced at me, and then demanded, "Why?"
Gyo shrugged. "Because the people here are arrogant and weak. Because I, personally, won't be taking orders from a demon."
Naruto bristled, his face twisted with a very real blind rage.
"Or maybe just because Kumo pays better."
Kiba's voice was beatific, conversational. "You're an idiot. Dick move, man. Shouldn't've pissed Shino off. Really fucking dumb. Now you're gonna get dead."
"Yeah. Sure." He ignored me and pointed at the next Hokage, who tried to launch into a battle. When Kiba dragged on his collar, he roared and gave off bursts of chakra at random intervals. Gyo railed on, unperturbed. "Let's get down to business, okay? Aburame has a choice: the monster, or the kid. I'm gone kill one of them in about thirty seconds."
Naruto yelled, "I'd like to see you try!"
Kiba was furious beyond anything I had ever seen from him. His voice was rough and pained as he asked quietly, "Shino?"
My shoulders were beginning to ache with the tension. "Take Naruto away."
Kiba gripped Naruto's arm and fell back a step, but his eyes were steady and wide and fastened onto the side of my face. He had to leave, immediately. Our charge was staring at my son and falling into a defensive stance and Kiba needed to find a safe place before we failed again, more permanently.
"Go," I ground out through clenched teeth. There wasn't time to explain if he didn't understand. "Get out."
He ran, dragging the Sixth Hokage kicking and snarling back to the ladder we had used to come into the shelter.
Gyo wasted no time flapping one arm, a weapons summon scroll unfurling with a sharp snap. As he bit his thumb for the blood that would complete the jutsu, I had already thrown a kunai and severed the scroll below the first character. He looked up at me as though he had dismissed my presence as an inconvenience.
"My son."
He glanced down at Shiki, and the small silver dart in his exposed neck. His chest barely moved as he breathed.
"Fine," Gyo drawled, one corner of his lip lifting in distaste as the cover slammed closed and an scroll-based jutsu of sealing was triggered. He slid his feet apart and sighed, humoring me. "We'll fight, if you feel compelled."
It was dark in the small underground cavern and the red and white mask restricted my vision.
Coccinellidae, Shiki had said. Daddy, you look like a ladybug.
I didn't hesitate before taking the mask off with one splayed hand and getting it out of the way, skipping and skittering into the shadows. This was not a fight between an ANBU and an assassin. The stiff body armor was like a second skin, only noticeable when my breathing opened hollows under it.
My right arm reached up and back, and the katana came out of the well-oiled holder without a sound.
Gyo stepped forward and straightened his legs, arms hanging loosely and carelessly at his side, lax and defenseless and unprepared for an attack.
They taught this at academy. Give the Enemy an opening, but make sure you know exactly what that opening is. Lure him wherever you want him and then strike.
A small platoon of kikaichu chewed their way out of my heel, where the black sandals left a gap. I would have to rethink my battle strategy; my arms were fully exposed and my legs and torso covered too snugly for a single kikai to escape. There could be no cannon-like effect as my jacket created, hiding the kikaichu until there were enough outside to strike.
He would be able to tell. We could both see well enough in the pale, weak half-light.
The kikaichu scuttled along the concrete floor, clicking to each other too softly to be heard by a human. They were going around Gyo in a wide, circuitous path, wandering toward my son and their own relations inside of him.
I wouldn't move first. I was replaying the short battle I had observed four years ago. He was a weapons-summoner, like Tenten. But I hadn't sparred Tenten – or even seen her in action – since before I made jounin. And after the battle it had been out altogether.
He clicked his tongue against his teeth and moved too quickly. He seemed to have grown an extra arm; suddenly he was halfway through a major summons jutsu and a blizzard of senbon needles were flying at me.
I cut them down with the katana, and they split easily. Wooden. Probably poison; wood soaked up and stored liquids more effectively than metal. The halves spun away harmlessly. But then, I was immune or resistant to most common poisons, and he didn't know –
He knew. I was poisoned on the mission in Bujitaihei, he had been there when it took thirty-six hours for my body to react as it should have within ten minutes. He knew that the kikaichu made me more confident, less attentive to minor injuries that healed within seconds because of the kikai inside my body.
He was a proctor in the jounin exam. He had had access to my file, my records, the transcript that Jata had written. He had come here knowing that I would fight him, because he had my son. He was prepared.
I had seen him pitched against Kiba for a five-minute match in which he was forbidden to kill.
Fuck.
No. Now that I had leapt that far, there was a horizon; If he thought he knew my style so well, he would be less careful, he would expect my attacks. There is a danger in knowing your opponent's attacks before he does, because then he might not have been informed of his own plans.
I just had to actively battle a traitorous Konoha shinobi while second-guessing my entire, bred-in-the-bones fighting instincts.
The floor was disappearing under my feet, and my katana aimed for the vulnerable underside of Gyo's chin, but failing that I would settle for cutting a few tendons in his right arm –
– Was he right or left-handed? –
– and then I would dodge whatever he was pulling out of that scroll –
– A kwandao? Long shaft, wicked blade, eight-foot reach, designed specially to disarm the opponent from a distance –
– and there went the standard-issue katana, torn from my hand and arcing in the air toward some distance wall where it clattered and fell.
We both paused, the kwandao parallel to the floor and making a bridge. I was out of its range.
He slowly swung it down at a diagonal and behind and up over his shoulder, building momentum because it was impossible to fight at shinobi speeds with such a heavy, difficult weapon.
I could get inside it easily and he knew that, he was a weapons-summoner, of course he knew every advantage of every weapon he would use, he knew exactly where his opening was.
I couldn't fight like Aburame Shino; therefore, I had to fight like someone else. Worse than the second-skin of the armor, harder to assume and maintain. I didn't know any other way to fight.
No one's fighting style was suited to this. Tenten won almost every sparring match, by dint of turning every target into a pincushion…
…But Kiba had won.
I cast a genjutsu to change my appearance to Kiba's. Somewhere behind him, the hundred or so kikaichu near Shiki took the chakra I fed them and grew to resemble the hulking mass of Akamaru. It was automatic; I hadn't considered it for more than the time it took to run through my mind. My stance changed to Kiba's standard one, a hip thrust out and my weight shifting eagerly.
Gyo, very little more than a white face and uneven yellow stalks of hair, rolled his eyes. "Right, Aburame, as though I'm going to fall for that."
Kiba. I knew how Kiba spoke and acted. I growled derisively, "You think I wasn't mimicking Shino? Goddamn, I've know the guy longer than you've been fucking Kumo on your days off."
The disbelieving grin vanished and he snarled, "You aren't going to fool me. Aburame wouldn't just leave his son here."
"He didn't. I'm here to get him back."
"As though he would trust something like this to someone like you."
"Why wouldn't he?" I was watching the short blade of the kwandao. It was slowing in its path, describing smaller and smaller circles in the air. Gyo was distracted.
"Because he doesn't care about you." Gyo, despite his claims, apparently did believe, if he was trying to attack Kiba at an emotional level. "I've read his file. Married five years, one son, one father. No major emotional attachment to any of them. It's just a rock-solid sense of duty. The guy's a fucking wasteland."
I judged my timing and tried not to hear Father's voice. You were raised to obey my orders and maintain a distance from all others.
"I've been with him for years. Of course he cares." Kiba's mannerisms came more easily, the body language training I had done with him returning with practice. Drop the shoulders forward and in, whine slightly, put one foot backwards. Self-doubt.
The false Akamaru growled, like stones rolling against each other.
Gyo moved further from my son, until he could see both of us.
I manipulated my chakra, changed the Kiba-mask I wore to a half-feral one and the Akamaru doppelganger to match me, like Kiba's half-man, half-beast trick.
Gyo had faced this much before. "I've seen your files, too. It doesn't matter." But it did. The long, unwieldy kwandao was useless against two opponents dead set to get inside its range. He would have to choose another.
The clone and I rushed him, switching places back and forth, sometimes slow enough to see and sometimes too quickly, so that he would think he knew which was real, but he actually wouldn't. Just like Kiba did, except that Kiba did this with his Gatsuuga technique, and that took massive amounts of chakra that I simply couldn't match.
He pulled another scroll from his jounin flak jacket and wiped his blood on it. His thumb was bleeding freely. What he acquired were twin blades, short, ferocious, curved, and flipping through and around his hands.
He watched us coming and shouted brightly, "There's a very simple test – to see which you are!"
I was upon him, kunai in either hand aimed for the muscles in his shoulders to disable his arms. The right one sank in and struck home, the left one glanced off as his right arm moved. He was right-handed, after all…
A cold, burning sunrise of pain grew in my side, and then something popped loudly and I was out of breath as if I had just run too far too fast.
Armor is an interesting thing. It is designed, as is everything with a curve, to displace weight and pressure. A sword will not only slide away and find no purchase, but the force of the strike will not shatter the shielding material because the power was absorbed by the entire structure at once, like an eggshell. However, if pressure is applied to a single point, the material will be pierced.
For example, a concealed kunai going through armor and the fifth and sixth ribs and puncturing a lung.
The kikaichu clone was a few steps behind me, and the kunai was exchanged for the short sword and the clone was slashed. There was a short rain of round, hard kikai shells – those still alive crawled into any patch of my skin they could find – and I let the Kiba-henge drop.
Gyo smirked at me, skin bunching under one nostril. "You are Aburame. Well, you've certainly impressed me."
I was half-leaning on his shoulder, and he shrugged me away, hissing at the kunai lodged there. I fell boneless to the ground.
Punctured lung.
Every time I breathed in, my chest was lopsided and there was an ominous sucking, bubbling sound from the wound. My kikaichu were wiggling under and around it, increasing the ache of pressure. As though a building was crushing my chest.
Shiki was twenty yards away. His hand twitched, but he wouldn't be awake for a very long time.
My diaphragm spasmed when I tried not to use it and I thought I felt one of my ribs crack. A black kikai lit on my cheek and burrowed down into my mouth and down again into my tongue. The message it held was: Shino. Kiba told me. I will retrieve Shiki if you have not.
I closed my eyes. Father. Coming here to save the day…
I opened them. My side still crackled and spat with every shallow breath.
Gyo had somehow jumped to a point halfway between my son and I, and a medikit was open next to him. He was taping a square of white gauze over his shoulder.
I blinked again. My breath was coming more and more slowly. A large clump of kikaichu were fighting to plug the hole in my lung.
Father was standing close enough that I could have touched his leg if I could move my arm. His jacket was missing, and he wore his old ANBU gear.
Protection, my mind supplied unsteadily. Kiba must have said something about the weapons-summoning.
Gyo was kneeling next to something pale and limp and threatening something important. I couldn't think.
Hypoxia. Drowning in my own blood. A knot a moving insects, just right exactly where I was in the most pain.
Blink. The world skipped.
Father dodging some projectile weapons and deflecting others to keep them from hitting me.
Blink.
Father and Gyo grappling. I was awed; I had never seen Father so active, even while he trained with me.
Rolling around, one winning and then the other, and then Gyo pulled a overlarge shuriken from somewhere and they broke apart, blood dripping from mouths and shallow cuts and scratches.
…Blink…
The pale and limp pile from before was deposited in front of me, over one useless arm. There was something very important about the fact that it coughed and inched closer to bury its face in my neck.
Father turned away to square off with Gyo again. He was grunting every other second, blood flowing out of a rent in his thigh.
I forced my eyes open, didn't want to
– Blink. The world came into focus with sharp clarity.
There was a small lump that seemed very, very much like a blond head. A few feet away lay its body.
Father was sitting near me, unstrapping the ANBU armor and showing all of the holes in him. I could see his yellowish intestines through the largest of them. His glasses were gone somewhere.
He looked at me and smiled. "You're awake."
I coughed and the pain was muted and dull. My chest wasn't lopsided, though my left lung felt less…spongy. The wet sound of air going through a knife-wound in my side had stopped. I bent my arm up at the elbow and it tightened around the warm and alive shoulders of my son. I croaked, "Father."
One hand waved to Gyo's medikit. His voice was thin and uneven. "Your kikaichu had already repaired most of the damage. The traitor wished an exceedingly slow and painful death on you, and it saved your life."
"You saved my life." I could move, now, but even my skin was too heavy to bear. I rolled my torso up until I was sitting, Shiki curled in a ball over my legs. "And his."
He considered this and looked at the steadily oozing hole in his middle. Occasionally, a black spot would surface and then kick its way around, but there didn't seem to be many of Father's kikaichu left. His arms were shaking, barely holding him up. "A fair trade."
I didn't say anything, but stared at him. Anything I could see in the poor light. The dark, bluish shadow of his facial hair, the silver on his head that hadn't been there before now, the color draining out of his skin, the moving black of his our? eyes reduced to flecks of dark on a blind, white canvas. No kikaichu…
…No life.
"Father." What did I plan to say?
He swung his head from side to side slowly, drowsily. "Kiba brought Naruto home. Our home. Not sure why. He told me about – this. Should still be there. There was a small invasion force, no more than two hundred, and their only real focus was to kill Naruto or the Hokage. Everything has calmed down, now; the all-clear went off a few minutes before…" He moved his chin, indicating the decapitated body. Then, by degrees and with dignity, he lowered himself to his elbows and then laid himself out fully on the cold concrete.
"Thank you."
"Worth it. A fair trade," he huffed, looking at me with a dissociated interest.
"No. Thank you. All of this, everything you've done. I regret nothing. Thank you."
His throat seized, and he coughed. He repeated, "Worth it."
I was frustrated, because he couldn't possibly have understood what I was trying to push into too few words. "Father-"
"I love you, too," he said warmly, with that same smile that was so alien on his face. His pale eyes drifted from my face to Shiki's, and then away to the right somewhere.
In death, his mouth relaxed into something more solemn, as if he had just realized that this was a grave occasion.
I stayed there, down in the dark, with my family.
When I could walk, I went to the ladder and had to leave my son on the floor for a few seconds as I climbed first to move the heavy stone cover out of the way. Then I went down and back up into the sunlight with my son. I began moving through the village, primarily by rooftop and using no stealth techniques at all.
Father was dead…
Some jounins and mostly ANBU ruled the street-level, as shelters disgorged their charges and all civilians needed to be tallied and accounted for.
…That meant that I was the head of the Aburame clan…
Shiki woke when I was within a block of my home, and beamed at me.
"Daddy! Did you save the day?"
"Not me, Shiki. Your grandfather."
"Oh. Where is he?"
…I let my kikaichu run over the raised characters of the nameplate outside the gate. They were no different than ever before, but this time they were undeniably…mine.
Er. This is the penultimate chapter, you may have guessed. The next is the resolution..