Kanae, as she was prone to do, walked Asuka down to the main gate.
"You don't have to keep doing this, you know," he said.
It was early morning, hours before the gray light of dawn would come. The village was silent, and the sound of their footsteps against the dirt path was the only noise that could be heard.
"I have to," Kanae replied.
"It's embarrassing." His protests were half-hearted.
Waiting there already were two other chuunin that Asuka had occasionally seen around the mission office – Izumo and Kotetsu, he thought their names were – and a man wearing a bandana that had to be their team captain. Before Asuka could greet his team, Kanae put a hand on his shoulder. Then she pulled him to her chest and crushed him with a hug.
"Come back to me, alright Asuka-chan?"
"I will, Baa-chan."
The jounin captain rolled a senbon around in his mouth, the edges of his lips quirked up wryly. One of the other chuunin snorted. Asuka felt his face flush. "She worries a bit. I'm perfectly competent."
"I think it's adorable," cooed Kotetsu, and Asuka distinctly got the impression he was being mocked, "Grandma sending her deadly little baby off to her first A-rank."
"This isn't my first A-rank." Asuka grumbled.
"Now that we're all here, we should be heading out," said the jounin captain.
"Yes, sir!"
They took off towards the trees.
Everything had been explained in the mission scroll. They were headed to Iwagakure to rendez-vous with a spy that had information on some major Iwa military plans, as well as forbidden jutsu. It seemed fishy, but Asuka was assured that this particular spy had been feeding them intelligence since the end of the Third Shinobi war. They were to meet up at a tea house in a town just outside of Iwagakure's borders.
"Here's the plan," the jounin, Genma, said. "We have a pass code with this particular spy to ensure that he hasn't been compromised. It's essential we slip it naturally into a conversation so we can tell if it's really him, due to the sensitivity of this mission. I'll take the lead; the info will be in a scroll. The three of you will transform into unassuming customers and secure the perimeter while I make the exchange with our spy."
Asuka nodded an affirmative. So did the other two chuunin.
Get the information and get out. Sounded easy enough.
Though he had to wonder why this wasn't a solo mission, why Genma-san required so much back-up…
(Kanae would've never let him set foot out of the gates if she had known Asuka could be in so much as a hint of danger…)
Asuka chose to hold his tongue.
All he was here was a shield to his comrade. Someone who could help provide an opportunity for success of the mission if their captain fell. Asuka figured in one way or another, everyone was everyone else's tool.
He was fine with that.
He'd rather die here than wasting away in the village. At least, here, he would be able to say that he had accomplished something–however minuscule– during his life. At least, here, he felt, rather ironically, quite alive.
This mission, to put it kindly, was a fucking disaster.
Their squad had entered the tea house in disguises. Staggered, so not to be suspicious. Genma, transformed as a graying old man, met their spy as planned. They were transformed to look like an elderly lady.
From an outsider's point of view, it had looked like a violent fight that surely spelled divorce began to transpire. Team Shiranui knew that they had been betrayed and their spy compromised.
(They weren't the only ones transformed in the tea house. Hilariously, it appeared that every single patron was a shinobi– either Iwa or Konoha– in henge.)
A brawl broke out. Chairs were thrown. Tea cups were shattered. The floor became ruined through the penetration of earth shield jutsu and flashy water jutsu. The tea house's rice paper walls caught ablaze with a badly aimed fireball jutsu.
And in the pandemonium of the ensuing scuffle, the betrayer dressed as the old lady made his escape through a hole in the roof.
It took Asuka a sum total of half a second to think "fuck it", and propel himself through the hole after him.
The fight between them was a rather short one.
The spy, being an Iwa-nin, tried to use the rocky surroundings to his advantage, and created mountains as shields and turned packed earth beneath their feet into ravenous quicksand. Asuka, a lightning nature shinobi, deftly changed the nature of the chakra he pumped into his feet.
Walls crumbled into dust. The ground hissed with black smoke.
The spy screamed in pain as Asuka's enhanced kick connected with his ribs.
Dumb luck. That's all it really was.
Dumb fucking luck. That's all any of this shit ever was.
"Why did you betray Konoha?"
"Betray Konoha?!" an abrupt bark of insulted laughter shot from the man's throat. "How can I betray somewhere I was never loyal to?"
The spy was bound to a tree with ninja wire. Asuka had rigged a trap so that with the slightest hint of movement, explosive tags woven through the wire would go off. The man's eyes were venomous.
"Okay," Asuka said, cocking his head, "Why Iwa though?"
" What do you mean–"
"Why Iwa? What caused you to defect? I'm curious."
The spy glared at him, the man's nose scrunched up and his mustache flattened out like a bow wrapped far too tightly on a present.
"The 'why' doesn't matter, brat-!"
"It does, though," Asuka cut him off. "If there's something you hate so viscerally about the village that it caused you to defect, I feel like we ought to know it. The branches of even the greatest tree still need to be pruned once in a while, hmm?"
"Konoha isn't a great tree of any sort! It's a stump infected by termites–rotten to the very core!" the spy snarled.
"Yeah, but why, though? And why Iwa? You remember the third war, don't you?"
"I remember my sister," the spy said. "The whole clan mourned her disappearance. We thought she was dead– it's been eight years! I've been undercover since before the start of the Third Shinobi war." here, he scoffed. "I'm so deep into my cover I can't even remember the way the streets of the village look. A few months ago I heard something from one of my contacts. About a sort of shadow ANBU that do the jobs too vile even for regular ANBU. They don't report to the Hokage, but to that crusty old war hawk, Shimura Danzou."
"What? How would that even operate without the Hokage's direct approval?"
The spy's thin lips twist into a cruel, birdlike smile. "He is aware of this organization. ROOT, it's called. He doesn't give a fuck what it does as long as it's out of his sight– even if that's vile shit like kidnapping clan children and indoctrinating them to become heartless murder machines!"
…
Seconds passed.
That… was a lot to take in.
Asuka opened his mouth, and shut it, just as a kunai flew lodged itself in the spy's throat. A flash, then he was covered in bright red human detritus.
"Good job on securing the traitor, Nohara-kun," said the captain. He looked a little worse for wear. His bandana was singed at the edges and he was covered in mud. Izumo and Kotetsu were bloodied but not as bloodied as Asuka himself. They too were muddy. Kotetsu had many small splinters sticking out of random places in his hair.
Stupid, moronic, impossible luck.
The spy's betrayal had undoubtedly upgraded the mission's rank due to the fear of leaked information getting into the wrong hands. The peace they had been enjoying for the past six years was still relatively unstable.
"Taichou."
Genma let Izumo and Kotetsu take the lead in setting the pace in their run back to the village.
"What is it, Nohara-kun?"
"Have you ever heard of an organization called ROOT?"
Officially, Nohara Asuka remained listed as a chuunin. All official records stated that Nohara Asuka went on C-ranks, B-ranks, and the occasional A-rank, and that he was frequently out of the village due to being a highly popular shinobi to request for courier missions.
Unofficially, he joined ANBU Spider's classified capture and interrogation squad.
Sure, the ANBU were an open secret.
Some ANBU's identities were known by the rest of the village. This wasn't a problem for these particular individuals, as they were so deadly it didn't matter if kill squads were sent after them.
But ANBU was primarily an organization focused on Espionage.
That suited Asuka just fine.
He had never had a problem with lying to Kanae before.
It was stupid luck he'd bumbled his way into somewhere he could be useful for the village and make something out of himself… whatever he was. Whoever he was.
Rabbit, they called him. Monotonously, authoritatively.
Rabbit.
Asuka-chan, dolefully called out to him in the saccharine voice Kanae always used when she saw ghosts, she was useless. She could only help Kanae with the laundry, the garden. She had a curfew at seven. She always brought her grandmother hot lemon tea when she'd collapse at the dinner table in the witching hours of the night with that empty look on her face.
Rabbit, who's pulse beat rapidly when he dodged shuriken rigged with explosives whizzing past his head. Rabbit, who often had the rotten scent of blood drying somewhere odd in the inside of his mask. Rabbit, who during his first month, had one of the highest success rates of any ANBU at extracting information from their targets.
In some cultures, the foot of a rabbit is considered a lucky token.
Asuka felt like a rabbit with its leg caught in a trap.
Another instance, he thought, glaring at his captor, where everything happened not because of a reason, but because of dumb fucking luck.