Author's Notes: Well, I can't say I'm thoroughly satisfied with the way this turned out, as it's far from the quality I was aiming for when I began. It's passable though... Heh. The story starts out in the rough 'present day' of the Naruto manga, than goes into the past. The earliest point is about six years before, and my Morino Ibiki took on his Gennin students two years before that. The war with Sand took a looong time in this story, with other Hidden Villages jumping in and out.

Disclaimer: Just about anybody and anything you recognize is the intellectual property of Naruto's creators. I'd like to think my characters are my own, but copyright law probably has something to saw about that. Whatever.

Full Summary: What does it mean to be shinobi? For each individual the answer doesn't diverge very far from whatever they are taught, yet each has their own view of their motivations and their own all-too-human emotions as they progress on a path that sometimes leaves very little room for such considerations.

Tangent 001: Morino Ibiki was not always the oft-misunderstood Head of the Hidden Leaf's Assassination and Interrogation squad. Before that he taught his own students and shared in the trials and tribulations of being emotionally attached to a group of children still in the process of learning in a dangerous age. They all survive, they are all friends, and from an objective view, his tale really isn't too important – but that doesn't mean it's not worth telling.

Tangential Musings

By Cynthia Chen

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Tangent 001.A

Morino Ibiki

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Morino Ibiki had only ever taught one Gennin team... and he knew if he had his way that was how it would always be. It was a duty required of all Jounin at some point, once at the very minimum, though he'd had thought he would have liked to avoid it for as long as possible. He'd been a green Jounin then, as inexperienced as they came – in a time where the ever-present threat of war was on everybody's mind they had promoted anybody with half an ounce of competence as quickly as possible.

He'd been a Jounin for a mere six months, nineteen years old, not paticularly distinguished, and raring to go on missions of the conventional sort... At that time, he was still years away from becoming "Special-Jounin-Morino-Ibiki-that-sadist-Head of the Konoha Assassination Squad-and-Interrogation Captain". (Yes, it was obvious to him that he wasn't quite popular, and that was how it ought to be. A man in his position had to be ruthless and without compassion, or at least perceived as such, for the good of Konoha... And the fact that he had overseen many of the less... pleasant aspects of their training and Jounin exams didn't help.)

Did he regret it? No... And I don't think I ever will. But the trials and tribulations of such a responsibility were rather – much. It was no wonder most Jounin only ever took on one team. To be so involved emotionally with three children whose futures were uncertain, with all the dangers in the world that could occur on even a C-class mission, he wondered how people like the Chuunin, Umino Iruka, could stay involved with the education of younger shinobi for the long-term. It was too much of an investment of emotion, human connections that he knew for an obvious weakness, a liability to be exploited.

It wasn't the same as putting every recently-made Chuunin or Jounin through a crash course in overseeing interrogations, resisting them, and the basics of an effective assassination, when the students were older they knew the life-or-death questions their commitment entailed. The same couldn't be said of children barely in their teens, with nothing but the sheltered enviroment of the Academy behind them – the only thing required of them to become Gennin was learning a basic Bunshin no Jutsu and a passing score on sundry paper tests, nothing that spoke of their ability to deal with the real-world trials of being shinobi.

Perhaps the life of a shinobi had not been as dangerous at that time as it had been while he himself was still a Gennin, but it had been dangerous nonetheless. It was not unheard of for a handful of each year's graduating class to fall in the line of duty before the next one passed through the Academy. Even D-class missions carried decidedly more risk than the average cut-the-grass-and-babysit-some-brat missions that were D-class-norms today. In times of war, the difficulty missions that people were willing to pay for inevitably went up, as did the amount of C-class-missions even as true D-classes decreased.

His own team as a Gennin had been very nearly decimated once or twise before their sensei nominated them for their first Chuunin exam. (The older Jounin had warned them all jokingly that they'd better pass – he was tired of being stuck in Konoha babysitting a bunch of rookies all the live long day.) Perhaps the man had been callous and occasionally insensitive, but Ibiki could analyze well how their teacher had come to put so much of himself in his team.

It had made him weaker, as a bunch of less capable tagalongs with an obvious connection to anyone more powerful could make any said individual weaker. Ibiki himself had sworn he'd never make himself vulnerable that way. For himself, he'd ended up breaking that promise, an couldn't imagine a world where he hadn't. For all that there was happiness in those days as well as a great deal of pain and hardship that he'd never endure again willingly for fear of cheapening the first time around. It was also those Gennin who'd done much to make him who he was now.

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Their second crack at the Chuunin exam was a good one for them – two years to the day when they'd first met Ibiki-sensei. Each one of them had passed. (Their first crack at it had ended in failure on the second test, when a paticularly malicious team of Hidden Cloud Gennin had found it amusing to go scroll-hunting on the last day. Their team had been waylaid and thoroughly beaten by an unexpected combination of multilayered Genjitsu shielding an elaborate trap setup that put them out of commission and without their gathered scrolls. Unswayed by their excuses and complaints, Ibiki-sensei had put them through a whole week's worth of training in resisting the seductive pull of Genjitsu... easily the most unpleasant experience any of them had gone through up to that point. Morino Ibiki could be very methodical, thorough, and somewhat sadistic in his creativity for devising training routines.) The final round this year had been very strenuous, but each Gennin there had managed to put on a good enough show that whatever judging committee had found them all worthy of a promotion.

Kawano Shuuko's teammate Shiba Keisuke had been in the finals, though he'd lost to the boy from Hidden Mist – Momochi Zabuza, often known as a 'devil' of sorts. She'd fell to the Zabuza boy in the first round, he was rather older than her own team, but 'boy' was a misleading term, she'd thought during the fight. It was rumored that the only reason he hadn't passed the Chuunin exam earlier was because it was so difficult to find a team that he was willing to cooperate with (he managed it with the 'Demon Brothers' Gouzu and Meizu this year) – supposedly he'd killed all of his graduating class in Hidden Mist's version of the Academy graduation tests. Shuuko wouldn't have put it past him, he'd have killed her if there weren't Jounin keeping a careful eye on the final test matches. At fourteen she'd never been so close to death, but for when that oversized meat-cleaver like sword, the Kubikiri Houcho was cutting downwards toward her neck as she struggled to get up, weak from exhaustion and some blood loss – she hoped never to come so close to death again. It wasn't a pleasant experience

As required of his job as the examiner; the Jounin from her own home village of Konoha, Hatake Kakashi had put a stop to it as Shuuko practically shook with fear at her own impending doom... To her the memory of that moment would be forever shameful, even is she had passed and become Chuunin. As the medical staff from the hospital came over to quickly take her away on a stretcher so that the final tests could continue, she'd watched Hatake-san and Zabuza the 'Devil of the Mist' stare each other down. Though one was a Jounin and the other a mere Gennin as of yet in official rank... There was no doubt then in her mind that if it came down to a battle between the two, the outcome could easily be in favor of either. She'd been reasonably satisfied with her own abilities before, as a Gennin, and only now she began to wonder how many people out there were much stronger than she was in a way that she could hardly begin to imagine – too many.

Ibiki-sensei and her teammates Keisuke and Naraki had come down as they were taking her out of the arena to see that she was alright – they congratulated her, even Ibiki-sensei who was usually such a harsh taskmaster... Saying that it had been well-fought. She'd smiled of course, especially at Keisuke, and thanked them though she thought she hadn't done so well, really. They couldn't follow her, since both of them still had to fight in the tournament-style test, and Ibiki-sensei had to keep an eye on the fights too, but that was alright.

She'd rushed back as soon as the doctor said she could in time to see Naraki's last round – he'd fallen to a fellow Konoha Genin, and also to see Keisuke fight all the way to the final round with Zabuza. They'd done well too, and at the end of the day it'd been announced that everybody in the finals had passed. Four teams in all, one from the Mist, two from Konoha, and one from the Hidden Cloud. Keisuke and Naraki were in the party now at a local restaurant-and-bar with all the Konoha-based-participants, their teachers, and anyone who wished to celebrate in a day and age where there was precious little of that. She hoped the older individuals there would keep the youngsters away from the alchohol.

Shuuko stood outside in the quiet street, staring at the sky, taking a quiet moment away from the raucous laughter and the impromptu talent competition taking place amongst the ones who'd managed to get somewhat under the influence of alchoholic beverages. The stars and moon smiled down with their silver light as they always had, the night sky didn't care that from today onwards they'd be facing more difficult missions, more dangerous ones. Chuunin could easily die in the line of duty. It wasn't as if Gennin didn't face the same risk to some extent, but their most difficult C-ranked mission involved little more than patrolling more-or-less friendly territory.

"Aren't you going to join in the party?" Ibiki-sensei, looking as imposing as ever with his stern visage and dark clothing, asked as he came out and stood beside here. "Naraki's singing some folk song so badly no one can understand the words, and Keisuke's exaggerating on his final round to some pretty girl or another – both will probably be thoroughly intoxicated sometime in the next hour, and I'll expect you to walk them home."

"Eh... I was there earlier, and I just came out for some air." She said, looking up at their Jounin-teacher. "And hey, you get to walk Keisuke home – he lives really nearby, and it's not as if I can babysit both of them when they're half-knocked-out."

"You guys did well, though." He said, also looking up at the sky, "Though there's room for improvement as always, I'm proud of you guys. How does it feel to be a Chuunin, though? It's a hard exam, and it only took you three two tries. You guys have beaten just about every other team from your graduating class..." A funny thing that now they didn't need a Jounin-teacher anymore, Ibiki-sensei was being talkative... he usually wasn't, so far as his students knew.

I'm cowardly and afraid of death, something that a good shinobi shouldn't be, I'm wondering if I deserve my rank after being so thoroughly thrashed by Momochi Zabuza, I'm wondering if we're only being promoted because we're at war with the Hidden Sand so that we can do B and C class missions even if we're not all ready... It feels just great to be a Chuunin, sensei. She didn't say what was on her mind of course. "It feels, no different. Say, what will you do now, sensei? You don't have to look after us anymore. And are we not going to be a team anymore, now that we've been promoted?" She'd miss Keisuke and Naraki if they weren't going to be working together from here on out.

He wasn't taken aback by the questions, whether he was expecting them or not – Morino Ibiki had that uncanny ability of never being surprised by anything. He was young for a Jounin, sort of, but in the last two years his Gennin team had learned that he was fully worthy of that rank on all levels. Gifted with an uncanny sense of perception and more than a passing competence in a very large variety of jutsus though he didn't use them all too often, while he wasn't as jovial as some other Jounin-teachers... Morino Ibiki was a sensei they were all happy to have had, a bloody death to anyone who suggested differently.

"Oh..." He paused for a while to think. "I guess I'll go back to running missions as a regular Jounin, what I was before being drafted into this by Sandaime-sama. And as for you guys... You'll probably work together some, but also with other Chunnin and older Gennin."

"M-hm." She said, focused again on the stars. Then she turned to him suddenly and bowed in a gesture of respect. "Thank you, Ibiki-sensei, for looking after us these last two years. My gratitude is with you always. I... and Keisuke and Naraki too, I think... We'll miss having you pound sense into our foolish heads." She smiled a little, using the rhetoric he regaled them with on the rare occasions they failed too badly.

He smiled somewhat – a rare expression for him. "You were... good students. It was hard sometimes, but I don't regret not failing you after the teamwork test in the beginning – I'd been planning on it. But you guys have done well."

= = =

Shiba Keisuke carried an unconscious Shuuko as he and Naraki leaped over tree branches and through the chill air of the late hour, fleeing for home. Damn it, Ibiki-sensei, you'd better not die until help comes – old bastard. This whole mess was more his fault than anything else, and now... Who knew, but Ibiki-sensei was and would be paying the price for his mistakes.

Beside him, Naraki was thinking the exact same thing – that it was his own fault more than anyone else's. In his arms and in fitful dreams, Shuuko had the exact same thoughts in her own head – her fault, no one else's. If anything, it was their fault, Ibiki-sensei's former Gennin team, all Chuunin put together under him for a four-man espionage mission gone badly wrong, and Morino Ibiki had given himself up to pay for it.

Some high-level and notorious Sand Jounin, allied now with the Hidden Stone apparently, had set up camp in a civilian town right on the Fire Country's borders, terrorizing the innocent inhabitants as they plotted something that none of them had figured out just yet. The Konoha team had been sent to find out said nefarious plot, infiltrating the place in disguise as they wound themselves in closer and closer to the loose coalition of enemy Jounin. Morino Ibiki had been sent to supervise them, as Naraki and Keisuke played the part of mercenaries and Shuuko went in as a courtesan... (Enemy jounin or not, their targets were all too human, as they'd found out when she'd gotten in closer than any of them.)

Never mind that they were young – it'd been barely two years since they became Chuunin. There were precious few shinobi from Konoha that weren't immediately recognizable by reputation – they were some of the very few deemed capable of this sort of long-term undercover spy work. (Sharingan Kakashi was obviously out for his distinctive hair, scar, and that which gave him his name, same with any Hyuuga, Mitsurashi Anko had the seal on her neck, Sarutobi Asuma was a strictly Taijitsu-using fighting-type, same with Maito Gai... The list went on that way.) Hokage-sama had been reluctant, but it was necessary... Though he'd sent Ibiki-sensei to supervise because this was something that would otherwise have been strictly for Jounin.

The mission had gone awry just now, nearly a month from when they'd began. At the end of the very stressful month, they'd each had a very long day – Naraki and Keisuke had been walking Shuuko back to her 'home' after work for each of them was done for the day (which for each of them involved things they didn't talk about with each other by silent agreement) and come across a paticularly dastardly Sand Jounin beating on a beggar. Keisuke and Nawaki both had reached the breaking point in terms of moral affront, and both moved to drag off the Jounin and kill him then and there though Shuuko bade them wait – she agreed with the sentiment, and had reached a similar breaking point... But this man visited the more exclusive places of business in this city's red-light district, on an almost like-clockwork schedule. She would handle him, she said, before he reached the place this night. And so it'd happened, and the enemy had found one of their own dead in a dark alleyway, killed by a handful of needles hit on the proper points for instantaneous death.

They hadn't been thinking, and Ibiki-sensei had been infuriated when they reluctantly reported this incident to them. Though he was as moralistic as the rest of them, on some level – all Konoha shinobi seemed to share in that trait in some measure, this had been stupid and unforgivably so. They would have to leave – no civilian had the capabillity of killing a Jounin of any sort, and it would have quite obviously been the work of a shinobi whether Shuuko had chosen to use senbon on her victim or not. True to form, Shuuko blamed herself most of all for the mission's going messily to hell, and it was the same for the rest of her team. Ibiki had sighed and given them you-idiot-student stares, though he'd refrained from too much lecturing.

Then it'd happened. Before they disappeared into the night, the enemy Jounin and their hired mercenaries had taken a large segment of the city's residents to the central square and made an announcement to the entire city by way of the proper sound-amplifying jutsus. That if the enemy shinobi they knew were there didn't turn themselves in, the slaughter of as many innocents as there were in the city would begin.

Before the announcement was half over, Shuuko had been readying herself for a hopeless fight with the more-than-half-a-dozen Jounin that were gathered in the city and their various mercenaries – arming herself with as much as she could carry and still use, but dressed without any identifying insignia to show where she came from. (There was no reason, she said, to give the Hidden Sand and Stone any excuse for yet more acts of war than they were already claiming... Konoha had enough troubles without one of there Chuunin going out like this. She wasn't famous by reputation, and no one ever would have to admit her origins lay with the Leaf if Hokage-sama didn't wish it.)

There'd been squabbling then, in their temporary base of operations in an abandoned farmhouse at the outskirts of the city... Naraki claimed that he should, and Keisuke claimed the same obligation – no one was to blame alone, and they'd dragged her into this. It could be said that neither of them were being quite as fervent as she was, by nature neither of them were accustomed to embracing the moralistic duty school-of-thought... But by the blood of all the Hokage before, if she was ready to die for the uncertain future of innocents, they would die with her.

Morino Ibiki had resolved the issue. He had moved faster than any of them had ever seen him move, knocking Shuuko out with a pressure point. Then he'd stated quite calmly with his unyielding authority as the most senior in rank and age here that, as the biggest fish here and the only one with tried and true ability for resisting interrogation and the deputy head of both the Assassination and Interrogation squads... His presence was the most convincing and he would be the least likely to become a liability. They were not to stay. They were not to return for him at all, without recruiting help of the Jounin sort – they would die within minutes against even a handful of Jounin. If Hokage-sama refused the rescue mission, they would follow their next orders and forget about him. Morino Ibiki, while he was the sort to give up civilians with little strategic value... would honor the fact that his students would die for said civilians – but from the strategic standpoint, since torture and interrogation was likely any of them constituted an unacceptable risk to the safety of the Hidden Leaf. He'd knock the rest of them out if they disobeyed. With that he'd disappeared into the night.

So now they were fleeing back, hoping that Hokage-sama would send a rescue team of ANBU, or anyone really, as soon as possible. Hoping against hope that Ibiki-sensei would not pay too great a price for their stupidity. The next time they saw Ibiki-sensei he would be bearing the screwhole scars on his temple that had him wearing the black scarf over his head all the time.

= = =

"Shuuko – aren't you supposed to be resting?" Her cousin Subaru was a Jounin and a member of ANBU, a stronger shinobi than she was on all levels. "You should go home, you've barely slept since you came back from that..." She was in full ANBU uniform, the mask ready to be put on.

It's been two weeks since Ibiki-sensei had given himself up for her folly, and Shuuko had been feeling much too guilty to sleep peacefully – every time she dozed off for more than an hour she work up with nightmares of what she knew must have been happening to Ibiki-sensei. He wouldn't break, not even when threatened with death – but what they'd do to him... He'd taught half the village's higher-ranked ninja about the intricacies of interrogation and how best to resist it – it'd been a very graphic, almost sickening lecture. Such things were worse then death.

"I... I heard... you're... Is it true?" Exhaustion had left her incoherent and shaking. "I thought... Hokage-sama wouldn't... authorize an extraction team at all... Because Konoha's swamped... with missions and all..."

Kawano Shuuko knew she probably looked like hell, and that was the least of her worries. For the last week she'd been crying half the time, silent the rest of it, wracked with guilt for what her own stupidity had wrought... Unable to sleep for very long, to eat... Because of the overwhelming guilt she couldn't help but take it too personally. Whether or not her relatives like Subaru loved her – and they did, she knew... They had to be disappointed that one of their own was such a horrible shinobi. I'm disappointing Ibiki-sensei most of all... Keisuke and Naraki have recovered from the shock already – after they went and yelled in front of Hokage-sama when he told them no extraction squad could be sent now, they bit their tongue, hid their feelings, and they're already back on missions... Only I'm a mess. The way of the shinobi is nothing like this – I'm being such a child. But they were all children really... barely seventeen or eighteen, each of them. Ibiki-sensei was barely twenty-five or something like that... His extraction team, if that was what Subaru's ANBU squad was going to do, barely older than that on average and younger for the most part...

"Yeah – get some rest now, okay kid?" Subaru said as she turned to leave.

"Who's... who's going?" Shuuko asked as Subaru opened the sliding door.

"Hm? Oh, just my squad – the usual guys, you know them. Don't worry, ANBU doesn't fail." And then Subaru had disappeared.

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More Author's Notes: Kawano Subaru is the mystery ANBU chick that we still don't know the name of. Morino Ibiki's possible OOC-ness I would justify by saying the majority of this story is long before he fully became what he is, and because the people he is interacting with are the only students he has ever really taught... Outside of any family and the comrades from his own generation that are left there really isn't anyone closer to him... And the Morino Ibiki of the manga doesn't seem like a person who's too close to comrades who are his rough equal. (His official age is around the same as the Jounin instructors', but they don't seem very close to him, just knowing him in the official capacity.) Eh, this story and the second part to 'Tangent 1' get a bit distracted from the point because I focus too much on his students, my OC characters. (Sorry, but my favorite thing has always been good OC-centric fanfiction in any fandom, though it's very hard to find.)

Oh, and the one mention of Kakashi is before he becomes Sharingan Kakashi... I see that incident happening considerably later, and probably buy into the fact that it was originally (Uchiha) Obito's. Even if that theory is not-really-substantiated... He gets it before the second flashback though (which comes before Itachi's massacre of the Uchiha clan). All this story happens about four to five years after the Kyuubi incident and Yondaime.

I'd like it a lot if people leave reviews of any sort. My ego likes being fed, but even more critical reviews are eagerly accepted.