By the time they woke the sun had long since set. Through the porthole Kakashi could see the lights of Port Koizuko, like the haze of a distant galaxy, hovering on the black water.
"Mmm. Only another hour or so out. But I don't want to dock until almost sunrise, it's best if we don't try to get through that place in the dark. There's no point putting ourselves at a disadvantage, and we should give Sam a few hours to rest too."
Iruka sat up and wrapped his arms around him from behind. "Ok, I'll take a shower then take over for him." He blew into his lover's ear and whispered. "Thank you… for yesterday, you were incredible Captain Redeye."
Kakashi turned to press him into a long slow kiss. Who knew when they'd next have the chance to be alone? He closed his eyes as he ran the tip of his tongue around Iruka's parted lips in several long slow circles. At first touching just the sensitive outer skin, then moving in to the opening itself, then delving under, feeling teeth, gums and tasting the greatest concentration of sweetness. Iruka kept still, breathing shallowly through his nose, just enjoying, until all at once it wasn't enough. Then he pressed forward too, thrusting his tongue forcefully into the warm moistness that was Kakashi. The kiss became urgent, passionate, each of them gulping air, swallowing saliva, their own and each others, as they pushed to join themselves as close and a deeply as possible, for as long as possible.
In the end it was Iruka who broke away. He looked dazed, almost glassy-eyed, as he stumbled towards the bathroom. "Well I suppose I should get dressed.
Kakashi called after him. "Wait. Iruka, how many crew have you seen aboard?"
The teacher stood gaping and confused for a moment as he processed the question thrown at him out of nowhere. But just for a moment, Kakashi did that. He might accuse him of having a 'one track mind', but really it had so many tracks, so many layers, all working at once.
"Twelve. I count them whenever I'm on duty. Then there's the captain, or the boss as they call him. So that makes thirteen." He grinned. "Unlucky for them."
Kakashi didn't smile back. "There are seventeen people on this ship."
Iruka stopped. "What?"
"You, me, Sampo and fourteen others. There's someone aboard that we don't know about." He let a moment of silence hang in the air. "Wait for me once you're ready, we'll check it out before we let poor Sam off the hook."
It only took a few minutes to find her. Kakashi homed in on the human presence with relative ease, but he was shocked when Iruka opened the door of the tiny room below decks, to see that she was wearing a headband with a single note engraved on it. Surely Orochimaru must have made it clear that no one should capture his people, and that he wouldn't pay for them if they did. Or maybe sound wasn't behind this after all. Not only that but he wasn't feeling any chakra from the woman either.
Iruka was shocked too. The manacles she was chained to the bed with, were exactly like the ones they'd been using for their sex games, hours before.
The woman looked up as the light from the passage illuminated the room. Then Iruka recognised her… and she recognised him.
"You! The Konoha swordsman!" Her glittering insect eyes swept past him. "And that white haired bitch too. I swear I'll get free of these chains and kill both of you for what you've done."
"Excuse me… did you just call me a bitch?"
She pulled herself up as far as she could at the sound of Kakashi's deep baritone voice.
"So who are you? Her brother?"
Then she recognised him too. "Well I'll be damned, Sharingan Kakashi. What the hell is going on here? Looks like you're an even bigger pervert than they say."
Kakashi stood slouched in the doorway. He inched up his headband just enough to peer under it with the sharingan. As he had suspected she had no visible chakra at all, it must sealed pretty damn tight. He ignored the last part of her remark.
"I was going to set you free… but if you swear you're going to kill us, well…then that doesn't seem like quite such a good idea. I take it you're jounin rank?"
"I am, though I don't see what it is to you."
"Mmm, the pirates' 'customer' doesn't seem to be interested in anyone ranked above chuunin, too much trouble I suppose. But you've got good legs and a nice pair of tits. Maybe they hoped to sell you off to a different kind of customer. Iruka, search her. You're looking for a jutsu scroll, a small one, but don't touch it when you find it. Start with her shoes, then try the bindings."
She flinched as Iruka stepped forward. "Keep your hands off me you damn filthy pervert."
Kakashi didn't bother to suppress a lecherous grin as he left the room. Neither of the others would see it anyway. "No… as you said, I'm the pervert. I promise you're completely safe with him."
There was nothing in her shoes so Iruka started to unwrap the strips of cloth wound tightly around her chest and thighs. His total disinterest in her body didn't escape her. She did have a nice pair of tits, very nice, and she was rightly proud of them. But as they were exposed, by the last layer of cloth being peeled away, the Konoha guy didn't even give them a passing glance. It was as if he was a medic peeling the bandage off a broken finger.
"So are you gay or something?"
Iruka started to unwind the cloth from around her thigh, the one he had injured in their fight a couple of weeks before. "Yes."
She let the tension escape from her body in a loud peel of laughter. "Don't tell me. You're in love with Hatake."
He bristled slightly at the disrespectful lack of title. "Yes."
"Ha, so how's that working out for you, the swordsman and the pervert. Bet that white haired bitch was disappointed, even I could feel the hot vibes coming off her." Her intese stare became more intese still. "Where is she anyway?"
Iruka fought furiously to suppress his blush even as his irritation grew. She was a little too close to the truth for comfort, but then she was a jounin. "It turned out that you were right about her, she was evil. But she was my client and it was my duty to protect her, I'm sure you understand. Anyway, she's dead now, Kakashi killed her."
"Oh Kakashi is it? So I guess you have been crossing 'swords' with him? Or is he the kind to just stab it straight in?"
At that moment a strip of cloth fell away to reveal the top edge of a paper, pressed against her skin. Thank god. He was already reduced to using chakra to fight back his anger. "This must be it."
"What the… how the hell did that get there? What the hell is it?"
"I don't know, but obviously Hatake-san does."
Iruka allowed relief to wash over him, as he practically ran from the room, slamming the door and leaving her in the dark. He leaned into the cold metal wall, breathing hard. There were some women who just made him want to scream. It took him a few moments to realise that Kakashi was watching from the other side of the passageway.
The copy nin took a step closer, so that his presence filled the narrow space. "Did anyone ever tell you that you're beautiful when you're angry?"
If looks could kill it would have taken a week to scrub the blood off the walls. "Don't even start Kakashi. Where the hell did you go anyway?"
"Just to check up on things, Sam still has it under control. So did you find it?"
"Yeah, under the bindings on her thigh."
Kakashi opened the door and they re-entered the room. He wandered over to the prisoner casually, and ran his fingers over the paper stuck to her inner thigh. She squirmed, although she was obviously trying not to.
"It's a chakra seal, I'm sure you've noticed that you're as weak as a kitten. If I take it off you should be back to normal. So… I could do it now, or I could leave you here like this for a few hours until we dock. Personally I don't have a strong preference, but seeing you wandering around the ship completely free would piss off the bully upstairs no end, and I do rather feel like pissing him off. So which shall it be?"
"You can set her free." They both looked at Iruka, neither of them had expected him to speak. "She has no weapons on her and her jutsu uses dust." He kicked his sandal against the metal floor to indicate lack of said substance. "She won't be a threat to us even with chakra."
"Well if the good sensei says so…" Kakashi gripped the paper by a corner and twitched it free. The woman let out a deep orgasmic gasp, then sat up, breaking all the chains at once.
"Why are you doing this? Sound and Leaf are enemies, you should be killing me instead of helping me. What do you want."
Kakashi sighed. "Just don't get in our way. But if you want to do something for me then take this advice. Go back to where you came from, before you joined Sound. I've known Orochimaru my whole life, he was teammate to my sensei's sensei. And if I said he doesn't give a fuck about anyone but himself, I'd be lying. It makes him sound like a saint compared to the truth. To him you're nothing more than a third rate weapon that he's taken from his enemy. He'll use you recklessly, throw you out like trash if you're in the way, or melt you down without a second thought to try to make something else that he thinks will be more useful"
Her black eyes glared. "So now the great Sharingan Kakashi is giving career advice."
"I don't like to see good shinobi destroyed for no reason. I've told you what I know, what you do with it is up to you. And take a shower, you smell as if you've been chained to a bed for a week."
He took Iruka by the hand and led him out of the room, leaving the door open. He couldn't resist a little smirk under his mask as he rolled up the scroll, power sealed, it and stashed it away. That release as her chakra points opened had sounded pretty good, he was sorry he couldn't remember it.
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Naruto and Sakura were both surprised and impressed by the quantity and difficulty of Iruka's old missions. And those were just the ones they'd be given access to. Who knew that he'd done so many A class? They read through them carefully, eliminating those that were routine and trying to identify those that had led to conflict with someone who might seek revenge.
Deep in her heart Sakura knew that it was all a waste of time, a distraction. That whatever it was that had kept Iruka-sensei and Kakashi-sensei from returning home, wasn't going to be found in a dusty old scroll. But it was fun learning about her friend and old sensei, and it wasn't as if there was anything better to do. Naruto urged her on with demon enhanced chakra, collating, re-collating, cross-referencing, with speed and fervor that left her dizzy.
On the way home they met up with team Asuma, and casually mentioned what they were doing. So they were only slightly surprised when Ino, Shikamaru and Chou showed up to help the following day. By the day after, the remaining eight of the old rookie nine were all shuffling through old missions and reports in the filing space behind the mission room. Or at least seven of them were. Shikamaru spent most of the time lying on his back watching dust motes dance in the sunbeams streaming through the window.
"Do you all realise that there is just as much stuff in all the rest of the air in this room. This little bit of dust is only showing up because the light is shining right on it. Imagine what amazing things we must miss everyday. Things that are in plain sight but invisible, just because the light isn't shining on them."
As most of them had expected, Iruka's reports yielded very little. Beyond confirming how very badly they had all underestimated the teacher during their time at the academy. If they'd known then, that this was what he was capable of, they surely would never have risked angering him quite as often.
Kakashi-sensei's reports, however, were another matter. For one thing there were just so many. How on earth did he do all this, be two or three hours late for everything and still laze around reading his smutty books twenty-five hours a day? But what frustrated the little gang of investigators most was that more than half of his missions were classified. Surely that was where they should be looking. The more dangerous the enemies the more likely they would be to hold a serious grudge. And to have the ability to follow through with it. However they all resigned themselves to dealing with the papers they'd been given access to. They could work on getting hold of the others later.
ooooooooooooooooooooo
As the darkest hours gradually faded into dawn, the crew of The Mermaid became more and more restless. For anyone who'd spent any time at sea, there was something about being so close to port, but not allowed to dock that just rankled. Kakashi allowed the Boss to go about the ship freely for the first time since they'd come aboard. It was much too late for him to try anything, and if the pirate was going to lead them into the desert then he had legitimate arrangements to make. Besides, there was no one to keep tabs on him. Kakashi had no choice other than to stay on the bridge right now and for some unknown reason just looking at the pirate city left him profoundly unsettled. It made him feel an urgent need to keep Iruka close by.
Maybe it was because he was so on edge that as the sound jounin appeared out of stealth in the doorway, he sprang in front of the teacher, with a weapon drawn, the moment he felt the first hint of unfamiliar chakra.
"Relax, he's not much interest to me is he?"
She looked past Kakashi to Iruka. Then pulled a sword out of a large canvas bag. "Here, take it. It was with the weapons they took from me. I found it in that place near Waterfall, when I went back to try to track you down. I don't have any particular skill with blades, but it seemed like a waste to leave it."
She considered for a moment then emptied the rest of the bag's contents onto the floor. "Take the rest of them as well. I can tell by the way you're moving that you're both too lightly armed for a serious battle. I don't know what you're doing or where you're going, but it doesn't take a genius to know it's big."
Kakashi picked up a long tapered kunai from the pile of ninja weapons and fingered its edge. Taki craftsmanship by the look of it. Well used, but well maintained too, and first rate quality.
"Are you sure?" He indicated the grey outline of the city looming against the brightening sky. "You do know where we are, don't you? Port Koizuko isn't a place to take lightly."
She tossed her head cockily. "I've kept enough to defend myself. But after two years missing I won't get a very good reception in Cloud if I show up armed to the teeth. And I won't really need them." She shot a piercing glance at Iruka. "It's a dirty town and there's plenty of dust along the way."
Iruka held the sword in one hand and bowed deeply. "Thank you, they will be useful. You could have sold these for a decent amount of money in the port.
She glanced around at the pirate crewmembers in the room. Kamo in particular cowered at her dark glare, maybe he was the one who had drugged her and brought her in.
"I wouldn't want to risk putting good weapons in the hands of this kind of scum." She opened her eyes wide and thrust her hands in the air, as if she was about to attack. The pirates all ducked. Kamo fell off his chair.
"Get to the bottom of this Hatake-san, find out what that white-haired bitch was involved with, and why shinobi are disappearing off the streets and out of the trees. My only brother's been gone for more than three months, and unlike me, he's the most loyal ninja in Cloud." Without another word she disappeared in a puff of chakra smoke.
Getting into the dock took a lot less time than Kakashi had expected, obviously The Mermaid was well known in these waters, and no one wanted to get in her way. Less then three hours after first dropping anchor the unusual party, two ninjas, a monk and a pirate, was leaving the ragged outskirts of Port Koizuko and heading out into the open desert. They traveled much more slowly than Kakashi had on his own, and it was clear to the other three that the boss was slowing them down the most. True, they'd given him the job of carrying the two shovels from on board the ship, the ones used to bury the boxes in the first place. But he still seemed to be dragging his feet, as if he was waiting for something… or someone.
Kakashi walked alongside him, followed by Sampo, with Iruka bringing up the rear. The pirate didn't have the smell of blood that everyone associated with the blood mist seemed to be surrounded by, like a miasma. So maybe he wasn't part of it directly. But then neither did Iruka, at least not yet. However Kakashi knew better than to trust him. He was still pretty sure that there was more to this little exchange of favours than met the eye.
As they journeyed deeper into the sands, to where the dunes drifted in their slow parody of the ocean waves they superficially resembled, Kakashi changed their course abruptly to the east. The boss scurried to catch up with him. Waving the GPS device that he'd been using as a reference.
"Where the hell are you going? You'll take us miles out of our way."
"Avoiding Scorpion Gang territory, unless that's where you wanted to go?" He watched the other man's reaction closely.
"Damn. Yes, those stupid thieves. Good thinking, I'd forgotten about them. Though from what I've heard on the grapevine it'll be a while before they forget about you, eh? But you're right, best to avoid a fight if we can."
His relief seemed genuine. So that wasn't the trap, but Kakashi was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was late in the afternoon and the sun had tracked most of the way to the western horizon when the boss halted them.
"Ok ninja boy. We're pretty close, I think it's about time you made good on your part of the bargain."
Kakashi looked at him thoughtfully, while Sampo and Iruka watched with a mixture of curiosity and dread. Then he set down his pack and pulled out a blank paper and a pencil.
"Fair enough."
It didn't take him long to sketch out a surprisingly detailed map. Complete with compass points, notations for distinctive landmarks, and a big X marking the spot. As soon as he was done the Boss snatched it and looked it over.
"Damn, you've got some good memory."
Iruka shook his head sadly, so kakashi was going through with this. When he'd promised to show the boss where he could find his old victim, he had actually been telling the truth. "You have no idea."
Meanwhile Kakashi took Sampo aside and whispered in his ear. "Wait here Sam. If we're not back by sunrise, go on to Konoha without us. Tell them everything you know."
The monk nodded, lowered himself to the ground and started to set up his incense.
The pirate watched him prepare and snorted derisively. Then he kissed his paper, rolled it up, and tucked it into an inside pocket. "Well whoever's coming with me had better come, because I plan to leave on the morning tide."
However if he was in a hurry, it didn't make him quicken his pace as he led them further north into the desert. It was hot , damned hot. Kakashi wished he could pull down his mask. Sweat was running down his neck under it and adding to the wetness soaking through his shirt. Before he had been worried that Iruka had no armour, but now he envied him.
The sun baked dunes stretched to the horizon in every direction, decorated by little dancing eddies of sand where the hot breeze met hotter air rising up their slopes. Finally the boss halted them, checked with his GPS tracker then turned to face them.
"Ok, this is it, just the other side of this big one here."
But they could tell that they were too late as soon as they crested the dune. Two open pits scared the desert floor, already worn to smoothness by the gentle but constant wind.
Iruka stared in horror. "What…"
Kakashi couldn't even bring himself to be surprised that he wasn't surprised. He turned to their guide.
"They knew we were coming didn't they. That old sennin knows exactly where we are, from the blood. There's no way you would have risked your neck pissing them off by bringing us here otherwise."
Iruka felt his blood boil. The damn cocky evil bastard had tricked them. Even tricked Kakashi! He spluttered in fury as he held the point of a kunai at the pirate's throat. Despite his best efforts to keep his words slow and measured they still came out as a yell.
"Hand over that map you… before I take it from your gutted corpse.
"No Iruka. Let him go." Kakashi's voice was softer than the breeze blowing over the sand, but it seemed to resonate through the whole desert.
It was too much. Iruka turned his fury on the man standing slouched beside him. He was sure that he could see a half smile under the mask. And for a moment Kakshi felt a shiver of true fear, he almost believed that he was about to be torn limb from limb.
"Kakashi? You can't be serious! You'll let him take back that boy and rape him every night?"
"It wasn't rape. Not the way you mean. Let him go. A promise is a promise."
The pirate boss smirked. His sadistic streak had been roused and he wasn't about to let the opportunity pass to cause some pain. Especially to these two. It wouldn't feel as good as the kind of pain he'd like to subject them both to, but it would do.
Iruka was sill red faced but he seemed deflated, defeated. The boss stared him down as he addressed Kakashi.
"So you promise that this here map will lead me to someone who can tell me where to find Gep."
Kakashi's voice was as calm and neutral as ever. "Yes. It's on the very edge of Cloud Country, I met up with someone there who knows Gep's village very well."
"And you're sure this person will still be there?"
"As sure as anyone can be."
"So who was it? So I can track them if I need to."
"His cousin, she grew up with him. She was hiding out in a cave there, with her husband. The last time I saw them they didn't look as if they would be going anywhere anytime soon."
The pirate looked deep into the single blue eye. He knew enough about ninjas to know that they couldn't be trusted, but still, he could see nothing but the honest plain truth in it.
He turned back towards the port. "Well good luck with your hunt… I suppose."
They watched him go until he was nothing more than a wavering outline against the sky and an elongated black shadow on the dunes.
"Is it true kakashi? Will he really find that boy's cousin where you said?"
Kakashi pulled down his mask and smiled. "Yep, he'll find her there. Of course he can ask her where Gep is, but I'm pretty sure she won't tell."
Iruka's voice had lost all its volume. Coming out as something between a croak and a whisper. "He'll torture her, you must realise that!"
The copy nin shrugged casually. "Won't do him any good. She'd been dead for several days when I left, and that was… two or three weeks ago."
He saw the blow coming easily, but let Iruka hit him anyway. It connected with the back of his head and sent him flying across the sand.
When he rolled over Iruka was crouched above him on all fours. "Damn you Kakashi." He raised his hands to the sky as if in supplication. "Putting me through all that. I swear, if I didn't love you so much…"
Iruka grabbed the other man's face and pulled it up to his, to kiss him… hard. Kakashi let himself melt into it, enjoying it for everything it represented, an expression of this beautiful passionate man's overwhelming passions. He really was a damned lucky bastard.
oooooooooooooooooooooo
A/N Sorry if this isn't up to standard. Didn't have much chance for editing. I picked up an especially vicious little virus on my computer and it's taken almost a week to weasle it out. BTW that's also why this chapter is late---sorry.