o-o-o

o-o-o-o

o-o-o-o-o

The Inuzuka clan wasn't considered one of Konoha's "noble clans", although they could claim many different ties to the actual noble clans if they wanted to, given how the Inuzuka women often went looking for suitable sires. It wasn't the smallest, the richest, the loudest, or had the lousiest survival rate of all clans (although that one might be contestable), but it was the only matriarchal clan that was also strictly female.

Because the Inuzuka clan techniques and secrets relied heavily upon their sense of smell and aggression, it was decided many generations ago, before the founding of Konoha, that the men were too dangerous. To be fair to the clan alphas and elders who made this decision many generations ago, the men were notoriously aggressive with their fighting and raping, and had posed a great danger to the very Pack they were supposed to protect. Since then, Inuzuka women notoriously kept their daughters, and then foisted their male offspring off onto the fathers. If there had been no fathers, especially in the time before Konoha's founding… well, the woods were usually empty, dangerous places that took care of unwanted sons. In this day and age, at least there was an orphanage that knew well enough not to ask questions, if the sires refused to claim the male offspring.

It was impossible to tell which came first – the doglike qualities of the Inuzuka, or the humanlike qualities of their ninken. It was known that they had the noses like a dog and matching ninken personality traits. It has been said that the Inuzuka barely qualified as housebroken, although they were very likely to break a house.

They weren't a secretive clan, lurking in shadows and very obviously covering up secrets - not like the Uchiha and the Hyuuga clans, who hadn't quite seemed to figure out the more you pretended that nothing was there and that even if there was it was none of your business, the more apparent that there was something going on. What was known about the clan was known by all – but the Inuzuka clan kept their secrets (and the secrets of everyone else, such as who slept with who, who went where at what times, and all those other nitty-gritty details of shame that people didn't like advertised) carefully shrouded behind a façade that was loud, brash, and distracting.

oOoOoOo

Tsume was ten years old when the heavy diaper bag was slung from her neck like a noose and the baby was dropped naked into her arms, still covered with patches of white fuzz and sticky mucous, and stinking of birthing fluids. "It's a male," her great-grandmother said with a sneer. "Take it to its sire." Tsume saw the stricken look on her older sister's face, reddened and sweaty from the six hour delivery, before Grandmother Shinzou slammed the door shut with more force than was warranted.

The sound of the slamming door made the baby's arms and legs snap outward like a scarecrow dancing in the wind, and then he cried. Tsume expected his cry to be robust and loud. It was actually kind of weak and pathetic, she thought, like a newborn puppy.

Assuming that sire meant father… "Who's his dad?" she yelled over the crying.

No answer was forthcoming. She pressed her ear against the door, and heard Hidarime-chan weeping and Grandmother's slightly-insincere platitude of, "Don't worry, my dear, there will be other chances for a girl in the future."

Well, there was more than one way to find the father. Tsume sniffed, and then made a face. "Good grief, you stink. I'm not carting your smelly little butt all over Konoha like this. Come on, Kuromaru."

The baby's cries, Tsume was pleased to note, sounded much stronger after she had scrubbed him down thoroughly (she hadn't initially realized that cold water would do that, before thinking that maybe babies weren't supposed to look so blue), and then wrapped him up in one of the blankets she scrounged up from the kennels. Now he sorta smelled like one of Inuzuka ninken, and that was far more favorable to her nose.

Except the baby kept crying.

"Do you think this means he's hungry?" she asked Kuromaru. He agreed that yes, it was most likely that the boy was hungry. She remembered when Kuromaru and his littermates had been born, and how all the puppies had cried and cried until they found their mother's teats.

She searched the diaper bag and found formula. And diapers. Diapers would be good. And she really thought the baby onesie with smiling yellow ducks was adorable. So she stuck a diaper and the yellow ducky onesie on the baby after observing that male genitals looked funny (like a sock, she thought, or maybe a turtle, because she had never seen a non-canine penis before), and then she added a rather dashing bright yellow cap to keep his head warm. He only had a tuft of silver hair there, anyway.

Tsume carefully followed the directions printed on the back of the formula container to prepare a bottle. She had to ask Aunt Natsumi what the more complicated kanji meant, but Aunt Natsumi was used to Tsume's reading difficulties, and was still patient and kind even though she was in a hurry to leave Konoha to obtain another summon she had managed to procure, following of a nervous-smelling jounin and his genin team who obviously hadn't been expecting an elderly companion.

Trying to get the baby to successfully suckle was a frustrating exercise in futility. Tsume took baby and bottle back to the birthing room.

"You're still here?" Grandmother Shinzou loomed angrily over Tsume as she exited the room. Grandmother was covered with blood and birthing fluids, and stunk worse than what the baby had. Apparently having babies was a messy business. "You don't need me to repeat myself multiple times again. I told you to get that the damn runt off the Inuzuka compound – take care of it. We do not claim males!"

"But-"

"Are you deaf as well as stupid, girl? Go!"

Tsume and Kuromaru both ran in the direction that Grandmother Shinzou pointed, before Grandmother could follow through with a slap. Tsume was as alpha as her great-grandmother and older sister, but she wasn't being groomed for leadership ("Why do you bother asking? You don't have the brains for it.") and therefore had no place to argue. "Sheesh," Tsume muttered as she exited the compound, resentfully kicking at a clump of dirt. "Just 'cause she didn't get the precious girl that precious Hidarime-chan was supposed to have doesn't mean she can take it out on me."

That's right! Kuromaru declared in loyal agreement. Tsume was as aggressive as her older sister was subtle, and only stored pertinent information in her brain, which wasn't exactly her fault since her brain didn't like to remember things. Boring things like lovers and pregnancy and sex went in one ear and out the other with the least amount of effort, because it never occurred to her that it was pertinent to know the father of Hidarime-chan's baby.

After all, if it was a girl, the clan would keep it, and if it was a boy – well, she was now a participant to that development. And she had known it was going to be a boy – she would've said she could smell that the baby was male, but no one asked her.

No one ever asked Tsume, not since she was six years old.

And now she had to go looking for the sire. Tsume decided that she was going to do a better job at remembering stray comments that people made, 'cause apparently you never know when you're going to have to deliver a man's baby to him, and Ninja Must Always Be Prepared.

By now, the baby had fallen asleep. She hoped that meant he wasn't going to starve to death. She really hated the idea of having to explain to the baby's father that she had killed his son. Tsume resentfully suspected that some of the leadership grooming that she wasn't allowed to receive involved the Proper Care and Feeding of Babies. She sometimes felt really lucky that the clan taught her so much about the puppies – but they kinda had to do that anyway, since she was an Inuzuka. Or at least that's what Aunt Natsumi always said.

Times like this had long convinced Tsume that she wasn't exactly the clan favorite, like Hidarime-chan, or the clan sweetheart, like cousin Shinchuu. But at least she wasn't the clan pariah, with that particular distinction belonging to whacky Aunt Natsumi.

So, armed only with the knowledge that Tsume's older sister's lover was affectionately known to her as "Fang-chan" and the scent of the baby that coincided with the scent that often clung to her sister, Tsume upped the chakra in her nose and raised it in the air. The world of Konoha was such a big, beautiful place with all kinds of little stories you could lose yourself in – she dreamt of one day leaving the great wooden walls and venturing forth to see what other stories the world beyond could tell, especially when their scents hinted at the tip of her mind and imagination when the wind blew just right.

When a fifteen-year-old Hidarime taught a six-year-old Tsume how to channel chakra to better sniff out her surroundings, Tsume had kept pushing and pushing the limits to know more and more. Grandmother never forgave her for that… and Tsume never tried pushing the limits again, not when it took her so long to relearn numbers and the names of everyone around her, and how she wasn't allowed to enter the Academy until she was at least eight years old because she couldn't remember anything, even after being told again and again and again.

She followed the scent – disturbingly old, by at least a week, and not very well, because she still hadn't figured out the mechanics of which part of an old scent was newer than the rest of the old scent – around the compound, in and out of the market, through some of the training fields, the Hokage's tower, and two restaurants (Tsume swiped a complimentary bun off an empty table because all this searching made her and Kuromaru hungry).

Tsume finally arriving at what was apparently one of the top secret internal offices of ANBU. Everyone else had been friendly when she stopped and talked with them. ANBU weren't really friendly, and they were downright hostile when you entered their place unannounced. She refrained from naming them just to make sure they recognized her, because ANBU were also never happy when you revealed their Super-Secret Ninja Identity. (Really, she only did that twice anyway. Er, that she could remember…)

"Gosh," she said to the multiple weapons pointing at her and the many painted masks surrounding her, "this is really awkward." Kuromaru hunkered down between her ankles and growled as ferociously as a sixteen-week old puppy could.

"Really?" a dry voice asked. Weapons dropped and the people parted to reveal a man who had to be at least as old as dirt, but still younger than her great-grandmother. His was the only bare face in the entire room, though it was lined with a few deep wrinkles and his chin was scarred like an X. He waved the ANBU further back with a languid flourish of his arms. "Stand down, men. I'm sure our enemies haven't yet reached the point where they've successfully managed to invade our headquarters with a prepubescent decoy armed with a newborn."

"Hi," Tsume said. "Do you know where I can find Fang-chan?" And then, because it really was a pressing issue, she added, "And does anyone know how to bottle feed babies? This kid's really incompetent." Tsume was secretly glad that there was someone else out there who didn't get things right the first time – or the third, or even the seventh, as the case with her may be sometimes – even if that someone else was less than a day old.

The man's expression was carefully blank. "As young as he looks, I imagine it's not something he's had a lot of practice with."

"My puppies managed it no problem, within minutes of being born, and with their eyes closed, too! He's at least an hour old."

We're smarter than humans, Kuromaru added snidely.

At that moment, the baby began fussing again. Tsume supposed that was a good sign and meant she hadn't damaged him yet. She pulled the bottle out of her pocket and waved it. "I'm serious. I don't know how to feed the baby." No one moved or responded. She pulled a face at them. "You all suck, you know that? You can all kill a grown man at least seven ways to Sunday, but now you're all scared about feeding a baby?"

"Scared?" The unmasked man was looking down at her with surprise.

"Hell yeah. I'm an Inuzuka and I can smell their fear! Except yours. Your scent is actually really dark, but it's not like fear."

The man's slow-forming smile was dangerous and feral. He crouched down so he could look her in the eye. "Are you sure it's the baby they fear?"

It couldn't be her – she wasn't due to graduate from the Academy for another seven months… Oh. Their fear had spiked the moment he smiled at her. Which probably meant that he was, like, the boss-man. And bosses were supposed to know things. "Do you know how to feed the baby?" Tsume offered him the bottle and gave him a smile of her own. His smile fell away – his eyes reminded her of a lizard, all flat and reflective. He straightened upward from his crouch and loomed like a deadly thunderhead. "Look – if the baby dies 'cause he didn't get fed, I'm telling Fang-chan that it was your fault."

"Who's Fang-chan?"

"Baby's sire, I guess. I dunno. Grandmother just handed me the baby and told me to take it to its sire. I'm still sniffing around."

Kuromaru eagerly wagged his tail. And I'm helping, too!

The man's eyes were still flat, and his face could've been carved from stone. He turned his head slightly. "What are you all staring at – work doesn't cease for foolishness. Rabbit-kun, you have children – figure it out."

One figure managed to blurt out "Y-yes, Danzo-sama!" before the man left for the upstairs of the building.

Rabbit-kun was really actually Hyuuga Masaru, who had three young children with seals on their foreheads, and the only reason Tsume knew him was because his oldest daughter was one of her classmates. But she was careful not to say his name – he was easily embarrassed.

Tsume spent the next hour, watching and listening intently as Rabbit-kun instructed her on childcare. It was more than she felt necessary, since she really only wanted to know how to feed the baby, but it turned out that said baby had a high palate that made suckling rather difficult. This required some creative finger poking and bracing and lots and lots of practice to help maintain suction, and it was a very time-consuming process. Tsume was also bored, and Rabbit-kun liked talking, so she practiced her remembering skills even though it gave her a headache.

That creepy old man Danzo was back just as Tsume was practicing the not-so-fine art of baby burping. "Almost done here," she told Danzo, who smelled of impatience and anger. And then she made a face at the mess the baby made all over her shoulder. "Ew." She pulled the baby back and glared at him. The baby looked remarkably smug.

"You should've left long ago – this is not the place for little girls."

Tsume puffed her chest out as Kuromaru barked. "I'm an Inuzuka – and I'm going to be a genin when I turn eleven!" It wasn't as impressive a record as some she knew – especially when her sister had graduated when she was nine, but Tsume was trying really hard to beat the four years that Hidarime had been in the Academy, even if it was only by a few short weeks. "So I'm not a little girl."

Rabbit-kun made a display of standing, waving his hand somewhere near his waist, and then comparing it to the top of Tsume's wild hair.

"Be that as it may," Danzo's voice was as cold as his expression, belying the heat of his hidden emotions, "you have no place here. You've learned what you needed, and now it's time to leave."

"You're a butthead," Tsume grumbled as she gathered up the scattered supplies from the diaper bag.

There was a wave of something cold. Oddly enough, it smelled even hotter than his impatient anger. "Excuse me."

His scent wasn't nearly as ugly as her great-grandmother's, especially when he lacked Grandmother's gut-wrenching malice. Tsume struggled a moment not to say another word ("Your mouth is too big for your own good, child!") and then said, "You don't scare me."

He loomed over her as his voice whispered like a distant thunderstorm. "Don't I?"

And then her cousin Oyubi was there in a flutter, face hidden behind a porcelain mask painted like a fox's, whispering rapidly, "Please, Danzo-sama, she's not normal. I beg forgiveness for this simpleton's ignorant slights – Tsunade-hime said she couldn't heal everything… " Oyubi was one of the few clanswomen who was genuinely fond of Tsume and even occasionally protective, so Tsume knew she didn't really mean to say that Tsume was a simpleton. Maybe. Oyubi always took offense when people – especially outsiders – called her mother, Shinchuu, a simpleton, so it seemed strange that she would call Tsume the same.

Tsume shouldered the diaper bag and slipped away with dear Kuromaru at heel, not wanting to stay and watch the results of poor Oyubi crossing that cold man's path. She sensed it would be even worse than when Hidarime-chan crossed paths with Grandmother by getting pregnant by a man that Grandmother had wanted no part of.

(What was normal, anyway?)

Once outside of the ANBU building, even though she could still smell the rising anger, fear, and panic, Tsume resumed her hunting. The baby was quietly asleep in her arms again, but his novelty was wearing off and she was getting bored. So while she continued to track Fang-chan's scent all over Konoha, she pretended that she was also a great and mighty ninja, like Tsunade-hime, creeping quietly through enemy territory. In her mind, the baby had become a precious scroll that she had to protect at all costs. She ducked and weaved through passersby and crowds, hid beneath the gutters, and ran along the rooftops.

The illusion was shattered a few times when the precious scroll required feeding and changing of icky diapers. The fun resumed when Tsume realized that she could wage biological warfare against her Uchiha enemies with said icky diapers, and she even managed to dodge the ones trying to stick her with tickets on littering and being a general public nuisance. Success!

Tsume finally managed to find herself at a small house with a very overgrown yard where Fang-chan's scent marked it as his den. "Hi," she said in greeting to the dark figure that was lurking on the roof, out of the line of her vision, but not her olfaction.

"I was wondering if you'd actually make it here." Danzo dropped down to the front steps beside her.

"Are you stalking me, Shinobi-san? That's super creepy." Something flashed momentarily across his face, as if she had poked him with a big stick and he didn't know if he should take it away from her or not. It was kinda fun, actually, metaphorically poking him with a big stick. "Grandmother told me to watch out for pervy old farts like you-" She squeaked and clutched at the baby as the wave of killing intent, dark and menacing – blood kill die you stupid bitch – washed over her. She tried to breathe despite the smothering intensity and its stench, not knowing why her body wouldn't move. Kuromaru's tail tucked between his legs as he wet himself out of fear. The baby flailed his arms and legs like a scarecrow again, and wailed louder than he normally did. The startled cry shook her out of her frozen state. "Look at what you did!" she cried, shaking her finger at him. "I just had him sleeping!"

Danzo pulled back most of the killing intent until she could smell just a hint of it simmering beneath his own unique, dark scent. (His dark scent smelled, she thought, like old exploding tags and rusting kunai that had accidentally been left out in the rain.) Then he reached out and touched her carotid artery – her pulse wasn't pounding. His hand was also large enough to completely wrap around her throat. "Fox-san reported accurately when she said you couldn't experience fear."

Tsume bobbed the baby up and down in her arms and swayed and cooed, like she had seen one of her aunts do when cousin Yami-chan was just born. She was glad to see that the baby was swift in quieting. She sat down on the steps and rested him on her knees, after first covering Kuromaru's puddle with the welcome mat. Kuromaru whimpered and hid behind her.

"So… this where the father lives?" Danzo asked. His voice was back to being blank. He sat down beside her, and blocked the sun.

Butthead, she thought resentfully from his dark shadow. "It's Fang-chan's den."

"Are you sure?"

She glared at him. Even despite a brain full of mush, her clan never questioned what she reported with her sense of smell. Tsume faithfully obeyed their orders that she never push the limits again, staying well within the normal confines of what never caused the world to tilt on its axis or funny lights to dance in her sight or blood to dribble out of her ears, but she got the feeling that what she could do was still more than what others did. Nagumi told her that, and Nagumi would know. Ninken were less inclined to lie, not like humans who lied all the time to her. "Absolutely." Danzo had been waiting for her for some time, so he had to know something. Stupid adults and their stupid secret-keeping – why did they always think they could fool her nose?

"And you know this man to be the baby's father because…?"

Tsume shrugged. "They've got the same smell." It was the same sort of smell that all the Uchiha-born had, or all the Hyuuga-born. Every family had a unique sense of smell – every species of plants and animals, too – and then every individual had their own unique smell within the family smell. The same sort of smell everyone in the village shared. She always knew when someone was an outsider, because they just didn't smell like Konoha or the Fire Country, and had done her best to study certain outsiders and returning shinobi to figure out which countries went with what scent.

"Have you ever met him?"

"Nope. But my sister would smell like that, after she came back from having sex."

Danzo was silent, studying Tsume like he wasn't sure what to do with her. Was she being too blunt? She vaguely recalled Aunt Natsumi telling her that adults didn't like to hear children discussing sex. "Aren't you going to knock?"

"Nope. He's not home." She tapped her nose. "The nose knows these things, see." She also knew he hadn't been there for a while, but she couldn't really distinguish between one week and one month. Something to do with how stronger senses magnified things, but that just made her think of math, and Tsume didn't like math. Stupid little numbers, always scrolling around and not coming out as the right answer, no matter how many times you added or subtracted them the same way.

"So you're going to sit out here and wait until he comes back."

"Yup."

"Why?"

"Because he's the sire."

"He is Hatake Sakumo, the White Fang of Konoha."

The name sounded familiar – it did seem right to think of this Hatake person as a great shinobi. And something about lightning? She wondered if it was one of those names she had such difficulty remembering, or that she just didn't know much in general. But Danzo was clearly expecting her to respond to this revelation. She looked down at the baby. "So?" she asked finally.

Danzo's eyes picked her apart, like she was a complicated little bug. "The Inuzuka clan manages to breed successfully with the White Fang of Konoha, the last of the Hatake clan, and you're throwing the child away?"

It was what it was. "That's right. We don't keep males."

"Hmmm. That's odd."

Well, not really. She knew this wasn't the first boy her clan had dismissed in the last year. There were even a couple of unclaimed male cousins attending the Academy right now, and her first two years in the Academy had overlapped with her older brother's last two years. "What's odd?" she asked, just to keep the conversation going. When Danzo didn't answer, she attempted to poke him in the side to make sure she wasn't forgotten. He immediately dislocated her finger.

"Gah!" Kuromaru was swiftly between her and Danzo, growling ferociously as he clamped his teeth around Danzo's arm and shook. Danzo easily pried him free by the scruff of his neck – "Wait – don't hurt Kuromaru! Give him back now!" – and inspected Kuromaru's underside.

"Odder and odder," Danzo said disdainfully before he stood. He dropped Kuromaru on top of Tsume's head as she lunged for him. Puppy, girl, baby, and diaper bag tumbled into one gigantic heap. The baby started crying again, and Tsume wanted to do to the same, because she had jarred her poor finger while protecting puppy and baby from harm. Danzo loomed over her again. "You are a reckless, overemotional girl. You have no fear, no self-preservation, no sense of personal boundaries or respect, no subtly worthy of speaking, no forethought, and you hope one day of becoming a kunoichi?"

She glared up at him resentfully. She didn't like the way his scent had shifted – and didn't understand the emotions she could smell. At least he hadn't tried the killing intent again. "Sure. Why not?"

Danzo sneered down at her. "The Hokage calls the children the hope of the future, and then turns you all soft through his Academy in this time of war. I only see the doom of Konoha when I look at you. Your clan puts its ridiculous traditions above the needs of the village, carelessly making enemies of one of our strongest shinobi by abandoning his son to the whims of an ignorant ten year brat and her puppy. A son who has the potential to be greater than all of your clan combined."

That… that was way too many words for Tsume to absorb all at once, even if she knew that her clan was getting insulted. Besides, she didn't have to discuss clan matters and tradition with an outsider – especially when the outsider was a male butthead. (She sometimes quietly stalked the man she knew to be her sire – their scent was too similar for it to be anything but – from a safe distance, and wondered if he would ever call her a simpleton or stupid or worthless, like Grandmother did all the time. Her sire seemed nice enough, especially when she sort of-maybe-kinda-accidentally dragged his son into trouble those first two years in the Academy.) "The Inuzuka clan doesn't keep males."

"But your puppy, Kuromaru, is male – why did your clan claim him?"

Something clicked inside of Tsume's mind. Her thoughts took the path of least resistance, and the answer was so simple that she suddenly wondered why no one had thought of this before. "That's right – this is a puppy!" Danzo looked startled at her outburst. "Puppies are babies, which makes this baby a puppy, and my puppy is male – this is a puppy!" She scrambled away from Danzo, intent on getting back to her clan with her newly-discovered revelation.

oOoOoOo

Tsume sulked as she hid in the kennels that night, carefully nursing both her sore cheek and the baby as she pressed against Nagumi for warmth. Nagumi was Kuromaru's mother, so she was amiable towards the unexpected visitors, even if the human wasn't on the Queen Alpha Bitch's current list of 10 Most Liked Family Members. "She didn't have to hit me," she grumbled. "I could hear Grandmother the first time." Grandmother hadn't been pleased with Tsume's revelation, and had made it quite clear when she struck Tsume across the face.

("Men are brutal and selfish monsters that rape anything with a hole!")

Kuromaru just whined with sympathy before he left for his dinner of kibble. Tsume's resentful sulk was interrupted, first by Shinchuu, and then by Hidarime-chan. Shinchuu had brought Tsume a dozen freshly-baked butterscotch cookies – Tsume's favorites. Oyubi's mother always made sure that Tsume never lacked cookies, ever since the whole near death in the Nara Forest experience. It was also the only food that she was going to get for dinner, so Tsume immediately ate eight cookies, smug about not having to share them with the baby.

Hidarime-chan looked younger than her nineteen years of age, stricken and vulnerable in her simple white yukata, and she hovered at the entrance of the large room, unwilling to come forward. She smelled of pain and loss and afterbirth. They were sisters, borne of the same mother, but had different fathers. Their shared physical appearances consisted of the same dark hair, olive-toned skin, and sharpened teeth and fingernails. Where Hidarime was tall and slim, Tsume was short and solid (if slightly bony, given her age); Hidarime's hair was smooth, and her eyes large and blue. Tsume had wild spiky hair and small, beady dark eyes.

"Do you want to hold him?" Tsume asked after a moment of staring. Hidarime-chan stepped forward gingerly, and knelt down. Her reach stopped just before she could touch the baby, and her hands trembled from exhaustion and reluctance. Tsume attempted to shove the baby into Hidarime-chan's arms, but Hidarime-chan flinched back, and then retreated like a wounded, wild animal. "What's wrong with everyone?" Tsume demanded hotly. "He's… he's just a puppy!"

"He's male," Hidarime-chan muttered, face filled with shame as she stilled near the entrance. Her face was turned away from Tsume and her shoulders were stooped as despair and pain colored her scent.

"Yeah, but so's Kuromaru."

"You wouldn't understand. You're too simple." Tsume flinched, though not as severely as Hidarime-chan did. That's what Grandmother had also said after she struck Tsume. ("I drown simple puppies like you, because they're too stupid to breed and aren't even useful mea tshields.") Hidarime-chan sighed. "Being simple isn't such a bad thing, Tsume-chan. Simple is more peaceful, like Shunchuu, and I hope you never lose that."

Tsume just wished that Hidarime-chan would convince Grandmother of that. Not that Grandmother liked Shinchuu anymore than she liked Tsume – Grandmother never liked the fact that Shinchuu got pregnant, and made sure that Shinchuu would never have any more children after Oyubi's birth.

Before Hidarime-chan left the kennel, she added, "Sakumo-san's father's name was Kakashi. I… I think it's a good name for the baby."

Tsume studied the baby after Hidarime-chan's departure. "Scarecrow, huh? Well, you've done a pretty good job jumping at noise just like you are one, so I guess it suits you."

oOoOoOo

Tsume spent the next two days hanging around the doorstep of what she now considered to be the Hatake Den. She only tried once entering through a window because Sakumo-san probably had a nice mat she could sleep on while waiting, but after the firetrap singed off her eyebrows, she figured it was safest to remain outside. The next two nights were spent sporadically sleeping in the kennels, with little Kakashi and Kuromaru tucked close to her side beneath an old wool blanket, in a bed of straw that Nagumi kindly shared. Tsume was always careful to stay out sight of her great-grandmother and sister. She also played hooky from her Academy classes, but mainly because the teachers were completely unsympathetic to her plight.

"If you can't be here with the baby, then don't be here at all. Does this look like a free babysitting service?" one teacher had asked Tsume in irritation, before she turned around and yelled at the Akamichi boy for attempting to swing yodeling from the overhead fan.

Babies, Tsume thought, might very well be another type of puppy, but they sure were boring. All they did was poop, pee, eat, and sleep. Kinda like regular puppies did, before their eyes finally opened. Kakashi's eyes were open though, and sometimes he watched her quietly. His eyes kinda looked like hers, Tsume thought, all small and dark and beady.

On the morning of the third day, tired and worn out from having to wake up multiple times during the night to feed and change the fussing Kakashi, the wind shifted, and she caught a new scent. "Yay, he's almost here!" she told Kuromaru as she gathered everything up and followed the fresh trail. She bounced across town, humming under her breath, before finally approaching the northeast entrance – a small open door that was only manned by four ANBU. At least these ANBU didn't seem to think her much of a threat, and spent most of their time ignoring her.

She sat down beside a rock just inside Konoha where she could see the door, and waited patiently for about an hour. After that, bored and restless, she carefully bundled Kakashi and rested him in the shade of the diaper bag – light from its diminished supplies; she had a feeling that Grandmother wasn't going to be so generous if Tsume ran out before Kakashi's dad finally made it back – so she and Kuromaru could attempt tree-walking. It looked really easy and kinda fun when she saw her older cousins doing it last week with their ninken, and Grandmother wasn't around to forbid it.

After falling out of the tree six times and landing once on Kuromaru, Tsume managed to wheedle one of the snickering ANBUs into giving her tips. The ANBU relented, mostly to get rid of her as soon as possible, and also because Tsume reluctantly bribed the man with her last butterscotch cookie. She then resumed, struggling to remember half of what was explained to her. This whole channeling chakra steadily to her feet sounded a lot what she did with her nose, but she couldn't quite get the hang of splitting the chakra equally for her feet and her nose.

When dusk fell, she had managed to make it mostly up the tree (Kuromaru had made it entirely to the top, happily telling her that he was smarter than all humans, and also more talented, and better-smelling too!) once she figured how to channel to her feet without disrupting the chakra levels at her nose, and decided that was good enough for the day. Tsume played a small game of fetch with Kuromaru in the waning light, but soon grow bored with throwing the stick. "Why can't you throw it, and then I fetch it for once?" she asked Kuromaru, who stared intently at the stick in her hand.

She was hunkered against the rock, stiff and sore, just after night had fallen. That was when Jiraiya, Tsunade's younger brother, and Danzo arrived. The only reason Tsume was acquainted with the likes of Jiraiya was because he was Tsunade-hime's teammate. He had often accompanied Tsunade-hime to the Inuzuka compound for treating Tsume's head regularly for two months following the whole overwhelming-the-brain incident. Jiraiya had always been kind with her, and she remembered (somewhat fuzzy) the puppet plays he would put on for her from the foot of her bed, his two large hands stuffed into a pair of Hidarime-chan's socks. They had a simple relationship – Jiraiya could tease her, and she could freely insult him without repercussion. Tsume adored Jiraiya for it.

Senju Nawaki smelled so alike Tsunade that he could be nothing less than immediate family. Danzo just ignored her.

"What are you doing here?" Jiraiya asked with a friendly smile and a welcoming scent; Nawaki watched silently, somewhat shy.

"Waiting," Tsume grumbled. She had draped Kakashi's baby blanket around her shoulders and tucked Kakashi inside her shirt, because the early autumn night air was cool enough to make her shiver.

"For who?"

"The White Fang-chan-person-thingy. Kakashi's dad. He's coming from that direction." She pointed at the open doorway and wished she could remember the exact name of Kakashi's dad. She ignored the way Jiraiya exchanged looks with Nawaki, and the way Danzo turned to watch her with a face as cold and as unsettling as the Great Monument behind them. The moonlight seemed to make him look older.

Jiraiya looked down on her with interest. "How did you know… Ah, Inuzuka, right." One of the ANBU broke from his guard position long enough to whisper in Danzo's ear. Tsume wondered if she should increase her hearing like her smelling, and then decided not to. Loud noises always made her head hurt worse. "So, kid." Jiraiya squatted beside her and grinned. "What else do you know, huh?"

She sniffed. "I know that you've spent a lot of time recently at the hot springs. On the woman's side." The man's grin fell of his face, and he nervously looked around. "With two women, actually, including one who works at the barbeque pit over by the Uchiha District." She made a face. "Oh, eeeewwww, and you did it in the hot springs too? I'll never bathe or eat barbeque again!"

Jiraiya waved her quiet with his hands, looking nervously at Nawaki, whose ears had gone bright red. "Shhh. Just – yeah, Inuzuka. Of course you're going to know. So then you must know who's going to be coming through that gate, there."

"Yeah. Kakashi's dad. He's the White Fang person, see, and I've got Kakashi right here." Jiraiya, after asking for permission, peeled the blanket back and lifted her shirt to look at the baby. "But Kakashi's dad is moving kinda slow – I guess that's 'cause of his injuries." The other shinobi froze at her announcement. A few leaves rustled across the ground as the wind blew.

Jiraiya slowly rocked back on his heels and studied her for a moment – like she was an interesting bug of some sorts. "What else do you smell – from Hatake Sakumo?"

She wrinkled her nose at him. "I smell lots of things. Like how he's with eleven other people, ten of which aren't from this village although I don't think that one of the girls counts because Kushina's in the Academy like me, and they're coming from a really swampy, salty place – Whirlpool, I think. Kakashi's dad isn't the only one who's wounded though, and six of them are really, really young."

Jiraiya's expression was odd as he coaxed more details out of her; he said it was because he had always been fascinated with how the Inuzuka nose worked, "Which yours does quite brilliantly."

Eager to please anyone who called her brilliant instead of the various names that her great-grandmother seemed fond of, Tsume was happy to tell Jiraiya about how the group of twelve was a party of five females and seven males, that one of the females was menstruating, that four of the males had been wounded and that Hatake Sakumo needed to go straight to the hospital "because the wound smells like really foul meat, and so does the rest of him, too." She was also able to tell Jiraiya the mixture of cotton and leather clothing and armor they wore, that human blood stained their weapons, they were out of exploding tags though the tags had been used recently, and that the last thing the group had eaten was a shared can of pickled herring. "They're going to be hungry when they come in," she added.

"Even what they last ate… Fascinating," Jiraiya muttered. "And here we didn't even know how close they were until the runners reported not ten minutes ago that this group is approximately eight kilometers from the village."

Tsume tried to imagine the distance of eight kilometers. "Is that far?" she asked.

"Tell me, you've been waiting here because you can smell Hatake Sakumo coming from this direction. How long have you been waiting?"

"Since this morning." She couldn't tell if the look on Jiraiya's face was good or bad. "That's when I first smelled him, see, when the wind shifted. It wasn't blowing from his direction, before then, and I hadn't been trying to catch his scent." Oh, the look on Danzo's face made her want to hide behind the rock.

Jiraiya handed her an apple from his pocket. "What can you tell me about this?"

"It's not going to be very sweet." She sniffed. "You bought it at Juro-san's market earlier this morning when the dew was still on the leaves, and then…" His eyes were wide and surprised as she retraced his steps from the apple stand to where he was standing now, including the various people that he met – if not by name, she was able to identify them by clan or occupation. She was careful not to admit to cheating – she was able to pick most of the scents off his hands and clothes, rather than the apple, which mainly smelled of his pocket and the other apples it had been with. She supposed, if she tried with extra chakra boosting her sense of smell and if Jiraiya asked, she could tell Jiraiya which orchard the apple originated from.

"How come no one's ever told me the Inuzuka can smell this much detail?"

"Because they can't," Danzo replied cooly as she handed the apple back to Jiraiya.

"They can too!" Tsume snapped. Just… not all the time, like she could.

"You sure? Excuse me, I'll be right back." Jiraiya muttered as he hurried away, juggling the apple between two restless hands. Danzo turned away to speak to the ANBU again before also departing.

Kakashi began fussing. Since Nawaki volunteered, Tsume was quite happy to show him to feed Kakashi. She rooted around through the diaper bag and made a face when she realized she was down to her last two cans of formula. She showed Nawaki how to mix the formula with the water jug she also carried, and then demonstrated how to hold the bottle to make up for Kakashi's high palate.

"Wow," said Nawaki as he stared down at the squirming bundle. "You're really good at this, Tsume-chan."

She flushed with delight, enjoying the warm tingle in her chest, and fought down the desire to do a triumphant fist pump in the air. Two people thought she was doing awesome! Three days of taking care of a male pup with virtually no adult supervision had left her tired and often wondering if she wasn't secretly messing up the poor kid, but it made her feel better to know she was doing something right. As Nawaki attempted to burp Kakashi, Jiraiya returned.

Jiraiya sat cross-legged in front of Tsume. "Okay," he began, handing her the apple, "I just spoke to Inuzuka Oyubi – and she said that you're still in the Academy. When do you expect to graduate?"

"Next year, sir."

"Do you think you'll be able to? Your memory is a weak point of yours."

"Of course!" If she could just remember all the stupid different Shinobi rules.

"Come find me then, kid."

She grinned. "Shouldn't be a problem. South wall of the hot springs on the woman's side, approximately every day about two unless you're out on missions?"

Jiraiya quickly shushed her as Nawaki went bright red again – but it wasn't soon enough.

"What's this about the hot springs?" A busty blonde loomed over Jiraiya, killing intent spilling around her. Jiraiya immediately disappeared in a poof. Nawaki attempted to look very innocent as his patting increased against Kakashi's back. Tsunade's eyes shifted from person to person, and then she knelt down in front of Tsume. "Dare I ask? No – don't answer that. I'll just kill him the next time we spar. Well, since you're here and I'm here, let's see how Tsume-chan is doing."

Tsunade was as brisk and blunt as Grandmother Shinzou, but her hands were gentle as she cupped the back of Tsume's head and applied enough pressure that Tsume tilted forward. Tsume's vision was filled with cleavage – glorious, lovely cleavage. Someday, when she was a fully-mature adult, she would have magnificent breasts like Tsunade-hime and cousins Tekubi and Oyubi, and she wouldn't have any qualms about showing her bodacious boobs to the world… The questing chakra that invaded her skull was cool and impersonal. She felt it sliding and probing, and knew better to fluctuate her chakra. After a moment, the questing chakra mostly receded – she felt a few patches of it remaining, and knew they'd stay there for the next few days.

"Well, looks like there's still ongoing headway being made with your long-term memory." Tsunade tapped Tsume's forehead. "Which I'm sure will please your grandmother. Unfortunately, the recovery of the analytical processes stalled, and the amygdala's damage is permanent." At Tsume's confused expression, Tsunade translated. "It means you'll have a better time remembering your continuing bouts of fearless stupidity."

Oh goody – hopefully that meant Tsume wasn't going to commit as many social faux paux, like blunder thoughtlessly and insult the First Hokage's granddaughter by asking three different visits in a row, "Who's the busty broad stinking of incense?"

"Thank you," Tsume said to Tsunade's bust, giving it a forlorn and envious look as Tsunade straightened upward. Nawaki was looking everywhere but at them, rubbing Kakashi's back in tight little circles instead of patting.

"Who's this?" Tsunade asked as her eyes gleamed.

"Hatake Sakumo-san's son," Nawaki replied. He didn't protest when Tsunade took the baby and gave him a sharp once-over. Kakashi whined and squirmed at the feeling of her questing chakra.

"Bilirubin is high," Tsunade said. "And a bit dehydrated. He should be fed more often. How old is he?"

"Okay," Tsume said obediently. "And he's three days old." Tsunade's gaze was sharp as it turned on Tsume – then her eyes widened in horror.

"Don't tell me – you've been taking care of the baby since he was born?"

"Well, yeah. Someone had to until his sire gets back home, and Grandmother picked me." And probably the only reason Tsume had been picked was because she had been eagerly standing outside the birthing room, ready to meet Hidarime-chan's baby, and was therefore the first person Grandmother could pawn off the unwanted bundle of joy.

"Inuzuka Shinzou expects you to take care of a newborn?"

Tsume bristled and hurried to blink away tears of frustration. It was warranted, she supposed, because Grandmother's opinion of Tsume was so low that she often had to dig deep holes to find it. But just because her brain wasn't the best out there didn't mean she was incompetent. Sure, she sometimes had problems remembering when she last fed Kakashi, but it seemed like she was always feeding him until all the moments blurred into each other. The pleasure she felt when Nawaki complimented her was still there and she was going to hold onto it forever and forever.

Taking care of Kakashi was the first time she had done anything without someone hovering all the time, ready to nitpick and remind – even Kuromaru came with constant instruction and supervision the first six weeks. All of Tsume's first attempts at anything ended in miserable failure – just like her tree climbing and trying to see how far she could push the limit of her sense of smell – but if little Kakashi was still alive and unharmed by the time she was able to deliver him to his father, then that would mean that she was able to do something right the first time she tried it.

And no one – not even the great Tsunade-hime – was going to make her feel otherwise.

Tsume grabbed back Kakashi and cuddled him and Kuromaru close in her lap, drawing her knees up to her chest like she was trying to shield herself from the world. After a moment, she said, "You need to be checking on Hatake-san. His smell shifted – I think he passed out." Tsunade glanced sharply at Nawaki, who stood immediately. "Yeah, definitely passed out. I smell a lot of panic right now."

Tsunade glared down at Tsume. "If this is a lie… Well, I'll just let your grandmother know. Nawaki, go tell Jiraiya and Dan to meet up with me with the incoming Uzushio refugees."

Tsume curled tighter into a ball, and tried to ignore everything but her two little boys, who seemed to be the only creatures out there that had no expectation but love and food from her. My puppies.