Three more hours in the library hadn't proven to be as nearly effective as she'd initially hoped.

The genin blew a loose curl out of her face in frustration, biting her thumbnail in thought as she skimmed through the pages of yet another book, fighting the intrusive thought to brain herself with it. She snorted derisively at the mental image. Sat in her favorite poorly-lit corner of the empty library, Katsumi shifted in her seat, wincing at the creaking in her back, several joints popping embarrassingly loud in the stillness. She let out a long yawn as she turned a page in the musty tome, trying her hardest to focus through her fatigue. It didn't even have a table of contents which was making this take much longer than it should have in her opinion.

Across the room from her, the cheery brunette desk chunin slouched in her chair, as lethargic as she in the early afternoon. She lazily twirled a kunai around her pointer finger and blew bubbles with her pink bubble gum every so often, resulting in a soft pop. Every so often, she'd flash Katsumi a quick grin when they made eye contact as if she were encouraging her to keep searching for whatever she was looking for.

Katsumi appreciated the kindness, but her easy attitude was starting to grate on her nerves, likely due to her ever-present sleep deprivation.

Sleep wasn't as easy as it used to be, which, considering the job description, wasn't exactly unexpected; Katsumi wasn't even thirteen yet and she had a kill count nearing double digits, and, after ear-hustling around the mission desk, she found out something disquieting: that she was the first person in their graduating class to have a confirmed kill.

To be fair, none of the other genin teams she knew of had had the misfortune of going on a C-turned-A rank mission and had yet to be in any real combat situations; Ino's team had delivered a message to the Daimyo's court which had been, in her words, "a fuckin' cakewalk", while Kiba hadn't shut up about how much he'd hated the monotony of the border-crawl Team 8 had gone on a couple of weeks before the Exams. She didn't know much about what Haruno's team got into, only hearing rumors from Ino, none of which said anything about a particularly dangerous mission. But for whatever reason, she had killed more people than she's spent months being a shinobi.

She didn't know how she felt about that.

Katsumi didn't know how she felt about a lot of things anymore. She kept gnawing on her thumbnail in thought and turned a page.

Katsumi knew that trauma could cause lasting psychological and physical effects thanks to Inoka-sensei and she'd figured that she'd be affected somehow by her experiences, but the seemingly permanent loss of sleep was getting stale and fast. No one on her team had said anything about her constant exhaustion, likely attributing it to her recovering from her own hospital stay earlier that week, and that realistically could be part of it. However, Katsumi wasn't stupid; she knew that the nightmares, the flashbacks, the insomnia, they all came from the same place:

Orochimaru.

She couldn't get him or his poisonous words out of her head; her waking hours were spent keeping herself busy with messing with her boys, pestering Kakashi for more stuff to learn, and dodging Ino's attempts to try out her burgeoning makeup skills on Katsumi's less than clear face (stupid puberty).

Which was why she was here and had been for the past week or so.

And no, she wasn't hiding or avoiding or "trying to distract herself from actually unpacking and going through her emotions" as she'd heard her therapist hiss to Kakashi whilst her office door was cracked haphazardly. She was just… gathering information, gaining intel before she made her next move.

Nevermind the fact that she couldn't help but feel as though she was playing directly into Orochimaru's hands.

They'd still heard no word, not from Jiraiya-sama, not from Kakashi-sensei, and not from Asami-sensei either when she visited the hospital to see a recovering Sasuke. Not even Ino with her ear to the ground had heard anything about his whereabouts or why Team 9 was training with Kurenai "until further notice". It didn't take much to put two and two together, especially if Kakashi-sensei's increasingly sour mood was anything to go off of. Kisaragi-sensei seemed to be one of Kakashi's few friends, surprising both teams 7 and 9 with their casual informality when they happened to run into each other around the village. Katsumi was aware of the rumors surrounding the stocky red-head, how she was "allegedly" ANBU until very, very recently so it didn't exactly take a genius to guess why someone as capable as Hiro was away from her students during the off-time between the second and third stages of the Exams.

Katsumi didn't know if not hearing anything at all was better or worse. All she knew was that the Hyuga kept a disturbingly small amount of information about their clan in the library, enough for her pale brow to raise in suspicion when she noticed.

It was different than the Uzumaki's records; most of theirs had been destroyed or lost somewhere in the panic it took for the Uzushio refugees to emigrate across the continent to Konoha while the rest had been burned by their attackers or sunk to the bottom of the sea, thousands of years of priceless sealing knowledge literally thrown into the village's signature swirling riptides in some cruel cosmic joke, never to be seen again.

She remembers watching Naruto's face fall and harden when they were informed of this; not in the Academy, but by Kakashi-sensei two days ago while Sasuke was still on the mend after his treatment with Jiraiya. Her blond friend understandably felt the generational trauma that came with forced displacement due to genocide. But what he hadn't been aware of was what seemed to be a widespread, multi-village propaganda campaign to spread misinformation about the Uzushio genocide, known colloquially as simple 'The Terror'. His mouth had hardened into a firm line as the gears turned in his head listening to Kaka-sensei's words, already thinking along the same lines as her.

Sometimes, Katsumi had to question how much Naruto really knew about his past because, despite the cover story of him being given the Uzumaki surname to honor the founders of the village, when Kaka-sensei sat them down one day for an impromptu history lesson, he'd taken the decimation and desecration of the island incredibly personal. Namely the sacking of the Gilded Hall, the largest and most extensive collection of fuinjutsu tomes and scrolls in the world, some dating back to the time of the Sage of Six Paths himself. In its prime after the First Ninja World War, scholars from all over the 5 Nations, shinobi and civilian, would gather to learn; not just about fuinjutsu and various ninja arts, but the Hall hosted lectures about medicine, music, architecture, science, and so much more. The capital city of Uzushio was the mecca of knowledge and enlightenment before The Terror. She'd seen pictures of it before its sacking, with glimmering multi-colored labradorite spires towering to the sky surrounding the ginormous compound somehow entirely composed of lapis lazuli and quartz, it was truly a sight to behold, a paragon of Uzushio ingenuity and brilliance.

And it was gone: burnt, destroyed, or flat-out taken, pilfered to other Hidden Villages, or sold as rare antiques. With her jaw literally hanging open at the end of Kakashi's crash course through recent world history, it was a disgustingly bitter pill for both of them to swallow because you'd think something like this would've been brought up in the Academy, but all Iruka-sensei said was that the library and all its contents had been 'hidden by survivors' or 'repurposed' and left it at that. But that didn't stop Konoha from getting its hands on a bulk of the known surviving texts 'miraculously'.

Because that's not remotely suspicious, she thought sarcastically.

The more Katsumi learned about the village and its activities behind the scenes, the more it made her stomach turn.

After that particularly cheery lesson, Naruto threw himself into fuinjutsu with a fervor she hadn't seen before, her friend uncharacteristically solemn with a hard glint in his eye for days.

That's what he was doing now: working on new seals with Kakashi across town.

But it made sense why the Uzumaki didn't have many accessible records in the Konoha Library. What didn't quite add up was why the Hyuga didn't either. She'd been coming to the library every day like clockwork at this point for the past 5 days; the second she was cleared to go home the day after the second part of the exams finished, she dropped her personal items off at the apartment, showered with her products (that hospital shampoo did a number on her poor curls and they needed some TLC stat), and headed straight to the library on a mission to find out as much about the Hyuga Affair as she could.

Unfortunately for her, after almost two weeks since the end of the second task, she still had nothing.

And that was the gag, it really wasn't even her fault that she spent most of her time searching instead of researching: there was hardly any information about the clan. No clan records, no history of the founding, hardly even any newspaper clippings with the Hyuga name. And she looked. It made her hackles raise internally as she thought again back to the revelations they'd had about The Terror. Was it more misinformation?

Maybe they keep the bulk of their records in their compound.

She turned another page of the encyclopedia of recent important events in Konoha's history, looking for any information on the elusive Hyuga Affair beyond what she'd been told in school, and seeing as though the almost-victim of the attack was usually cowering in the back of their class during the best of times, it made sense at the time. However, Katsumi knew now that just because it was in the curriculum didn't mean the retelling was necessarily accurate or without motive. It felt silly now, silly how much blind faith she'd had in authority figures to tell her the truth about their world but damn, if it didn't still sting. She supposed maybe becoming jaded was a part of growing up.

Smacking an errant mosquito that had rudely taken up residence on her thigh, she kept thinking as she skipped past pages about the Nine-Tails attack. The only thing she found of the Hyuga were mentions in passing about how, despite having some of the most disciplined and skilled members of the Corps, many of them had refused to defend the village as a whole, deciding instead to barricade and defend their compound at the expense of the panicked civilians outside their towering pale gates.

Her brow knit together in disgust at that; wasn't their whole job to protect and help people who couldn't defend themselves? She rested her head in her palm, her vision going a little blurry with exertion and exhaustion. Her eyes were another issue as they were still bothering her after the Forest of Death. She wasn't exactly sure why she got mild migraines at least once a day and neither was Mei-sensei when she mentioned it in passing at a follow-up appointment, ignoring the slight tightening in cheeks bracketing her wide and reassuring smile, the tension in her eyes.

Another thing to worry about...

Katsumi sighed, rubbing tiredly at her eyes, and turned another page before stopping entirely, her previous lethargy gone and burgeoning migraine forgotten. She leaned forward, examining what was supposed to be the next pages in the encyclopedia, around 9 years ago but found the pages…

Cut out?

Sure enough, at the very base of the book, towards the spine, the next pages were carefully sliced out of the book if the jarring gap in topic between the remaining pages was anything to go off of. The text started talking about how the Winter Solstice Festival brought more civilian tourism to the village than ever, and then suddenly the following pages center around the birth of the Sandaime's grandson, a gap of 3-4 days if her memory served her.

Her eyes widened in poorly concealed shock, completely zoning out to think. It was a felony to deface the texts in the Konoha Library; that was the whole reason the eagle-eyed library chunin were there, to keep track of the books and to keep them in impeccable condition. The crime wasn't necessarily punishable by death, but a decade of imprisonment definitely wasn't appealing either. So how in the Sage had someone snuck into the library and carefully removed several pages towards the end of the book (two by the looks of the imperceptible edges of the pages in question) without detection? She ran her finger absentmindedly against the remnants, not caring if she risked a paper cut.

Immediately, her anxiety activated, thinking of Orochimaru and his involvement when the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

Whipping her head up to meet the black eyes of the library chunin standing right behind her, her narrowed gaze trained on the book.

Or rather what wasn't in the book.

"Excuse me," Katsumi asked, still craning her neck to look up at the woman, the easy cheerfulness from earlier vacant from her face. "But when was the last time this book was checked out?"

The unnamed chunin already had the book in her hand to get a closer look before the girl had finished speaking. She shook her head. "Nobody checks out the encyclopedias," she revealed, meeting her gaze before stalking back to her desk, book in hand. "They're reference materials so they have to stay here."

Doing her level best to hide her belatedly suppressed anxiety, Katsumi pressed again, scrambling up from her seat to follow her. "So, when was the last time this book was used for reference by someone other than me today?" Coming up to the desk, she was a little thankful for her relatively short stature, making her look much more unassuming than she was. Kami, she didn't need this lady thinking that she was the one who took those pages. First of all, she would never dream of defacing a book in general, let alone one from there.

As if reading her thoughts, without even glancing up from studying the book with a handy little spy-glass to look closer at the damage, she replied, "Don't worry, I've been watching you. I know you didn't steal these pages but…" she paused, looking closer at the book with a furrowed brow. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave," she decided finally, looking up at Katsumi's wide eyes.

"But I-"

"We need to close early for this to be investigated," she explained, shaking her head. "I need to call my boss." The previously sunny woman pinched the bridge of her nose as if to stave off a headache. "This is a—" and she stopped as if remembering she had company, placing her left hand back on the desk and plastering a carefully bland expression on her face as she started ushering Katsumi towards her table, presumably to retrieve her things. "The library is closed at least until tomorrow," she stated finally.

The journey to the table was quick but the trip to the front door was much faster. "You can come back then if we're open."

Katsumi knew when she was getting dismissed and she knew that whatever had this chunin shaken about this couldn't possibly be good.

Especially if now she was caught up in it.

Katsumi inwardly groaned, shouldering her bag on the steps of the library, squinting in the bright early afternoon sun before glancing back at the cagey library chunin. The chunin leveled her a look, one that leeched some of the warmth from her skin despite the heat and humidity of the Hi no Kuni summer. "Tell no one about this," she warned, her steely gaze making Katsumi nod automatically.

The woman smiled brightly, though this time it didn't quite reach her eyes.

"We will be in touch."

And the door swung shut with an inaudible clang that still rattled her bones.

Well, that couldn't have gone worse, she thought fighting the chill that had filled her bones as she gracefully descended the steps. She narrowly dodged a civilian baker as she walked down the packed road, trying to keep the emotions off her face.

She couldn't tell anyone? Not even Kaka-sensei?

Not even Sasuke? Or even Naruto?

Katsumi shook her head before deciding to cut through an alleyway to take to the rooftops. It was entirely too crowded on the street for her liking despite the heat of the day. Konohans loved them some sunlight and they weren't ones to shy away from it, not even in late July. As such, it seemed everyone and their mother was outside today. She shimmied up the surprisingly-sturdy drainpipe the old-fashioned way, relishing the opportunity to use her muscles after a near two weeks of no real physical activity. She still wasn't cleared to train (at least, not in the way she wanted to), but that would change tomorrow when she brandished that slip signed by Mei-sensei saying she was good to be tortu— trained by her instructor once more.

Naruto had been complaining about being lonely without his genin teammates to train alongside, as he and Kakashi had been doing one-on-one independent study type training. Katsumi knew that that was just code for him missing other people taking the edge off Kaka-sensei's intensity which she's sure had only increased with Orochimaru's infiltration of the village.

That name made her stomach drop as she hauled herself up and over the ledge guarding the rooftop and started making the trip back to their home with steady feet. Katsumi had a sinking feeling that this was connected to Orochimaru in some way. It had to be. Kami, he was the one who sent her looking for the information in the first place. From the relative privacy of the roof, she groaned audibly, unable to help herself.

And now I've been roped into this godsdamned mess, she thought, nerves filling the pit of her stomach. But what could she really do? Break protocol and a direct order from a superior and tell Kaka-sensei? Then he would ask her why she was researching that stuff in the first place and the rest of Orochimaru's message to her would inevitably come out into the light which was what she'd been avoiding in the first place.

But, if she withheld the information, what if she got incriminated for the vandalism and theft? And who was the mysterious library chunin's boss? How many more people were going to know about this and what did that mean for her, a genin nobody who officially knows entirely too much?

It wasn't like she could breathe a word of this to Naruto or Sasuke even. They would immediately get defensive and it would be almost impossible for them to hide the fact that they knew she may or may not have been embroiled in a conspiracy by none other than Orochimaru of the Sannin.

And then they would ask her what she had been doing researching something seemingly so benign.

She didn't have powerful people backing her, at least not enough to go against the Konoha Library if it came down to it, which meant she'd simply have to make herself useful. She had to make herself dangerous.

Information gathering. Right.

Suddenly she didn't quite feel like sitting around her apartment doing nothing when she clearly needed more intel if she was going to be tangled with this kind of stuff. If she was going up against the big boys, she'd need some leverage. Pivoting on her right foot, she altered her course, heading due north instead of northeast.

She had a field trip to make.

Gritting her teeth past the distaste, she set course for the Hyuga Compound.

It was about damn time Katsumi got some answers and she knew just the person to give them to her.

A/N: … hey. I'm not dead. I'm also a senior in college now lol. A lot has happened, but long story short, after rereading this fanfic, I realized I couldn't just leave it unfinished. I'm sorry for my inconsistency in the past and my inconsistency moving forward, but right now, I'm inspired and I think I know where I want the story to go, FINALLY. So welcome or welcome back. I hope I'm not typing to the void but goddamnit, Katsumi is my brain baby and she deserves this story so here I am and here I will stay for the time being. Issa lot easier to write when I'm on summer holiday too so look forward to chapters as I write them tbh.

Again, not beta'd.

And thanks to those who still hadn't given up on me and sent me reviews and comments about how y'all love the story even though I was AWOL for over two years. Y'all deadass brought me back so this is for y'all too.

And after entirely too fuckin long, I shall say:

ONTO THE NEXT!