Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
"But I have made a vow,
I won't live the life you made me choose.
We're players in a game,
That I don't intend to lose."
-Beth Crowley, "Gone"
"Ensui-san!" Harada hurries in from the outer office. Nara Ensui sets down the cipher he'd been working on. Kami. If you don't have anything to say this time, you better shut up because there's been a massacre happening in Kiri, and I needed to get the intel to the Sandaime to yesterday.
"What?" He barks, and pulls the next sheet toward him. "This better be important, Harada."
Harada stands, his hands on his knees gasping for air. "Inuzuka Kaito's dead."
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. The sound of his heart is the only sound in the entire room. "What did you just say?"
"Inuzuka-" You're incompetent.
"I heard that. I want to know details, Harada!" He moves across the room to pull the man closer by his shirtfront. "How did he die?"
He's gone on no out of village missions. He's been in RnD all week. His death makes literally no sense.
"There was an explosion in RnD in the ninth ward. Inuzuka was caught in the blast." He'd been researching the explosion release, accidents do happen. But Kai-kun's the most careful person I know.
"And he died in the explosion?"
Harada has the good grace to look shiftily around. "That was yesterday, Ensui-san."
Ensui feels his glare intensify. "What did you say?"
"He died this early morning, but you said yesterday not to disturb you unless the sky was falling..."
"You are incompetent, Harada. Go collect your belongings. You don't belong in Crypt." I need to find out what actually happened.
"So you're telling me that there's nothing you could have done." He's cornered the nurse who'd worked primarily on Kaito's case in the hospital, but the woman doesn't have much to add.
"By the time they got Kaito-san up here from the ninth ward he'd lost too much blood, Nara-san. Most of his injuries were below the waist though. His chest and face was untouched."
If he'd been leaning over the blast it would have blown his face off. If he had dropped it on his lap though...oh who am I trying to kid, Kaito wouldn't have been so stupid. He's a careful man by nature.
"Thank you for your time." Nara Ensui's prodigious brain is churning, outcomes and possibilities are percolating. Someone's making this death look like an accident. It's no accident.
But who would have this sort of power? The Hokage? His council members? A foreign plant?
"Sembei, can I have a moment of your time?" He catches his cousin, Head of RnD, Nara Sembei, on her way out the door as the sun's about to come up a week afterwards.
"Yeah, Ensui? What's happened?" She flicks a piece of dark brown hair out of her face and turns around to look at him.
"I was wondering if you had Kaito's research papers." He keeps casual pace with her despite his lack of sleep. He'd been thinking all night, these past few nights, turning memories over in his head, looking at old photographs.
"He didn't have any." That's a lie.
"I knew he had a research project going on. I want to give his papers to his widow, is that so hard?"
Sembei stops in the middle of the early morning bustle. "I'll tell you something, cousin." She leans in close to whisper in his ear. "Don't get involved in this. It'll kill you." His blood runs ice cold in his veins. So it's not a foreign plant then.
This has to do with the Hokage and his Council.
"Thanks for the warning." He steps away from her as they enter the compound. "I'll think about it." But he won't really, not in the way that he's implicitly promising her.
She says nothing more.
Later that same week, he pays a visit to the archives. Idate...Inuzuka...Inuzuka Kaito.
The file that he finally pulls from the shelf is incomprehensibly thin. There's no death report in here. What the hell is going on?
The more he looked at it, the more it seemed like the Hokage himself wouldn't be able to distance himself from the murder. He'd taken to referring to it as a murder in his head. It makes things all the more real.
Very carefully, he puts his friend's file back into the shelf. If this is a set up by the main administration, then I do need to watch my step.
If they'd been willing to murder Kaito for something, and at this point he didn't know any reason his best friend might be murdered beyond having been born in another village, then it would be simple for him to also have a small 'accident' and die with no one the wiser.
It's unlikely that the Hokage ordered the death, but nothing goes on in this village without the Hokage's knowledge. It has to be the Council's doing then.
He leaves the archives, and heads back to his desk in Crypt.
But there's someone he's got to watch out for now. His best friend had a daughter that he'd adored. Don't you worry, Kaito. I'll get you the justice you deserve, and if I can't get you that, I'll make sure your daughter wants nothing.
Even so, he has enough self preservation to realize that charging into the Hokage's office baying for blood is the worst thing he could possibly do. They are watching him after all. Waiting for him to give up what he knew.
I have to stay away until this gets a little distance, sorry Kai-kun. The last thing I'd want to do is draw attention to your family.
They think your death was accidental, but oh Kami I know better. Sembei's warning echoes in his mind. Don't get involved in this. It'll kill you.
Who am I kidding? I'm in too deep.
"You've been investigating something." Shikaku crosses his arms over his chest in Ensui's small living room. It's September, and there's a bite in the air, Kaito's favorite season had been fall, and Ensui can't find it within himself to care what Shikaku wants.
"I don't really know that it's much of your problem." There's been a storm brewing with Shikaku ever since April and now he knows that it's coming, long at last, to a head.
"Troublesome." Shikaku mutters, but the scars on his face stand out starkly in the morning sun as he stares hard at Ensui. "You're going to bring the wrath of the Council down on you, Ensui." He takes a step forward. "No matter what you believe, you've got to stop."
It's a choice then, a choice between loyalty to his friends, or loyalty to his clan.
"I don't have to stop." You want me to make a choice? I burned that bridge in April. I'd have burnt that bridge in an instant after the hell I went through with Kaito in Kusa. Where were you then, Cousin?
Who among the Nara was with me then? He stalks off towards his bedroom and starts throwing his personal effects into a pack. "You can't make me stop, and I don't have to put up with any of your shit."
He blows past a stunned Shikaku with the force of a thunderstorm. "I'm leaving. Think about your choices, Cousin."
"And Team 6 will be-"
"Hyuga Tokuma, Inuzuka Hana and Aburame Muta under the leadership of Nara Ensui." Ensui drawls while shoving his hands in his pockets. There's a long night ahead of me if I've read Hokage-sama's mood correctly. Let's just hope it doesn't get me in hot water.
Daikoku Funeno splutters. "Nara-san, that messes up the rule that we've kept for years! Inuzuka-chan has already been assigned to Team Two with Uchiha-kun. She's this year's top kunoichi. Aburame-kun and Hyuga-kun should be on a team with Shinko-chan." The academy teacher stops to stare at him. "And none of the senseis listed happen to be you."
Ensui slouches even further. "I don't give a damn." You owe me old man. You owe me because I've not thrown a fit about the man whose murderer you're hiding.
"Ensui." The Sandaime exhales a cloud of smoke. "I know you care about those children." Well no shit, I care. That's why I can't stand by and watch as you shove Hana-chan into a team that'll blow up on their first real mission out of the village with a Sensei that'll get them all killed by his stupid jealousy. "Would it be an acceptable compromise to team Inuzuka-chan, Aburame-kun, and Hyuga-kun led by my personal guard, Hatake Kakashi?"
Ensui doesn't trust the Hokage's personal guard much further than he can throw the boy. Shimura Danzo had his eye on Hatake Kakashi.
"With all due respect, Hokage-sama, you do that and you won't have a head of Cryptology by this time tomorrow morning." The air grows cold.
"Ensui."
He covers up a yawn with the back of his hand. "No offense, Hokage-sama, but Hatake isn't fit to teach children. He's barely a teenager." He also has an entire empty house worth of problems that he prefers to stay far far away from.
I'd like him to stay far far away from my future students to be honest.
"Ensui." The Hokage sets his pipe down. "This childish fit of temper isn't like you."
"It's not distemper. I'll have this team the way I want it, or I'll go civilian." He straightens slightly and looks the Old Man under the hat in the eye. "I'm not joking, and most of the time, I don't ask for much."
The old man regards him for a very long time, and no one dares make a single sound. "You'll work double time for this Ensui. Cryptology is still your duty."
Oh shit. He runs a hand through the end of his high tail. "Yeah, yeah." It'll be worth the work.
His genin team would be the death of him. He knew it after the first week of teaching them. Oh, they were good kids, he'd known that when he requested them, but he didn't know how much he would care.
It's been a long time since Nara Ensui has tumbled into such complex platonic love after all. Not since his academy days has he so involuntarily decided that there were some people who deserved to be shielded from as much harm as is within his power.
"You look like you're in love, Waste of Space." Kiho sets her hands on his shoulders and whispers in his ear. "Should I be jealous?"
He laughs. "Will anyone ever be more important to me than you?" Both of them know that even just after a week, those three children could in fact give her a run for her money.
Not yet. But I won't have to choose.
She giggles, a hand over her mouth as she walks over to sit down on the wooden floorboards before him, and props her face up on her elbows on the low tea table. "But I haven't seen you this happy in a long time." Not since Kaito-kun died, goes unsaid between them, but it hangs in the air like a spider web in the morning sun, beautiful and painful, an entrapment.
And we both know you're not over that.
"I think I might've figured out why Kaito so dearly loved his Sprout." His hands slide into the thinking seal. "There's a good chance if we meet an enemy out there I'll be the one who won't come home."
And out there is just beyond the walls of our house, darling.
She wraps her hands around his, and looks him in the eye. "That's okay." She brushes his bangs away from his face. "I'd forgive you." And that's what it means to know, through the ease of long acquaintance, how acceptance and unity works.
He hugs her, a hand tangled in her long blonde hair. "I do not deserve."
"Hush. What you do and do not deserve is not for you to decide."
He precedes his cute minions out the door, hides in a nearby alley, and makes sure that they're off to a good start. It is only their first C-Rank out of the village, and even though it's fairly tame, he can't quite put down his worries. As soon as his fears had been soothed he's slouching off towards a nearby tea house.
Sho-an...Sho-an...there it is. He steps in.
"How may we help you?" He's greeted by a petite brunette woman.
"The thunder clouds are cold in the morning." Jiraiya-san has such stupidly poetic meeting codes.
The woman blinks. "Oh, come right this way." He's ushered into a private room. The Toad Sage is already in attendance with a buxom blonde.
"Ahaha, I've got work to do now, darling." The woman's sent on her way quickly, but the sight's still enough to leave a slight edge of bitterness in his mouth. You don't mix work and play, Jiraiya-san. And you don't try to replace your genin teammate with a prostitute. Honestly.
"I was told there's some time sensitive interceptions you made on the border to Iwa?" He sits down, taking care to avoid anything the woman's touched. I do not fancy swapping spit today.
"Yeah." Jiraiya flips a stack of papers over towards him. "There's some sort of dark force moving in Iwa, but I've yet to understand where it's coming from."
"These aren't the right ones, Jiraiya-san." Ensui tosses the stack back at him. "This is your...research."
"I double encoded the stuff, Ensui." Jiraiya takes a sip of his tea. "Gotta keep up appearances you know."
"Mmm..." Ensui glares balefully in his direction. "You know I don't have as much time as I used to." I've got three children to teach and a quiet investigation to conduct after all.
There's still at least one person who hasn't been prosecuted for murder yet.
"Yeah, a genin team right?" Jiraiya grimaces. "Hope they don't turn out like us. Flaky and awful."
Not everyone's team ends like yours, you know. "Nah," Ensui stands up and tucks the paper into the front of his flak jacket. "They're good kids."
Taking his genin team out on that Search and Capture mission was a supremely bad idea, he thinks, when he wakes up in his hospital bed. Thank goodness, we all made it back alive.
"What the hell were you thinking?" Ah, and there's my overprotective brother-in-law.
"What did I miss?" He asks while checking that his limbs are still connected and listening to his demands. They did, but with more effort that he would have liked.
Inoichi levels a furious glare at him. "You bet your life on a group of genin?!" Eh, not that really.
"Ino-niisan, I bet my life on my students. Three genin that I've taught for a year now." He raises an eyebrow at Inoichi. "Surely that has to mean something to you." It's not enough. By the set of his lips he is still ridiculously angry.
"What were you thinking? You could have all been killed. How could you have let something this stupid happen? I thought you had a brain Nara! Use it, or you'll leave my sister a widow." And he is convinced that he's going to be on bed rest for far longer than he is currently slated, because doesn't Inoichi look angry.
But then Kiho appears just in time along with his three students, and Inoichi is shoved, for a brief moment, to the sidelines.
"Kakashi's team picked us up." Hana-chan comments guilelessly, and his mind goes into overdrive. She calls him by his given name. How does Kaito's Sprout even know the Hatake Prodigy? How close are they?
What does Shimura Danzo want?
A conversation later, his wariness sharpens his resolve into something sharp and hard. I need to have words with the Hatake Boy about acceptable manners.
His shadow sneaks out and tags one of the ANBU flitting about on the roof as he sits in Cryptology late at night. "We need to talk, Hatake."
"I'm giving you face just by staying still, Nara-san." Comes the blithe response. But then, given that he is an ANBU on duty he shouldn't even have opened his mouth to talk except to the Hokage or when it is absolutely necessary. Somehow, this conversation is probably not absolutely necessary.
Ensui grits his teeth. "Come in." The nerve of him, honestly.
"What did we need to talk about?" Hatake enters, but doesn't take off his ANBU mask, or move that far into the room.
Ensui's hands slide into the thinking seal. "You know one of my students. One Inuzuka Hana-chan. How?" If you answer wrongly I swear I will gut you with this stack of paperwork. I don't care if the cipher gets ruined.
"I don't have any clue what you mean." It would help just a little more if Hatake happened to be a little more animated, and a little less bland.
"She knows who you are." Hatake opens his mouth to respond, and Ensui continues on, without listening to what he has to say. "And if you ever harm a hair on her head, so help me Kami, I will end you and no one will find your body."
"I wasn't planning on it, Nara-san." Hatake disappears out the window, and Ensui can feel a headache building in his temples. Why. Why do I care so much?
The answer's simple though. She's Kaito's daughter. I'm supposed to be her fun uncle, not her sensei.
And not for the first time, his mind turns back to the list of people he had personal business with because they'd taken that chance away from both of them when they took Kaito.
They will live to regret messing with a motivated Nara.
And now for the next one. He looks around at the large field around him. Where to put the kunai...where would be the most humorous place?
There's a tree, well, many trees, and a field of flowers...and at one end, a rather large pile of manure. There's the best spot. A quick Doton jutsu later the tagged kunai is buried under the pile of manure.
I have to watch them attempt to dig this out.
"Sensei?" Tokuma-kun tugs on his sleeve. "I've located the last kunai." Aha, so it begins.
He turns to his three (adorable) students. "So you've located the last kunai. What seems to be the problem?"
"It's under the manure, Sensei." Muta-kun comments, and Hana simply stares off into the distance.
"And?" Ensui raises an eyebrow, and watches as their proud expressions turn into ones of shocked horror.
"You don't mean we have to dig it out?!" They shriek in unison, even Muta, and Ensui allows his inner self to cackle evilly. Indeed my adorable students. Dig them out and give entertainment to your Sensei!
"What did you do with the other sixteen?" He gestures to the pile. "You retrieved them, didn't you? Well, what makes this one different?"
"But it's manure, Sensei!" Tokuma-kun fidgets. "Won't we get dirty?"
"Well, are you willing to fail?" He checks an imaginary watch. "Because if you don't dig it out within the next five minutes you will fail and I will find a women's bathhouse to stick eight kunai in during the next run."
"That's not fair!" But his cute students get straight to work digging anyway. He just can't wait to see their faces when they realize later that Doton jutsu work much better than their hands.
But for now, he just really wonders when Tokuma-kun will notice that he has manure in his hair.
He's sitting at the bedside of one of his students for the second time since these thrice damned exams began. Nara Kasuga will be dying a slow death indeed, but there's still a small ember of frustration with Hana-chan.
Why, why, why, did you have to go after that girl? Yes, one of her dogs had gotten hurt, but did she not notice that the other kunoichi had managed to stab her through the abdomen during their grappling match? Did it not matter if she got hurt?
Did she not think of what else would have happened to her teammates if she'd just snapped?
And the victorious howl right after ripping out someone's throat with her teeth wasn't human. Is Hana-chan even fully human?
Do all Inuzuka's have this problem? He'd too many questions, and not enough answers.
But he'd made a promise to care for her, and so he kept sitting, listening to the beeping of the monitors and watching her chest rise and fall with every slow breath.
"Oh, come in, Ensui." He's been working a late night down in Crypt again, but there's a code he's cracked that can't wait until morning. The old man really ought to have gone to bed by this point. He's not as young as he used to be. But an instant later he quashes his empathy. There's too much anger at the Hokage's careless attitude regarding Danzo for him to really be empathetic.
"You know we've been intercepting messages from Kumo recently." The careful interception and copying and then returning the hawks to their normal flight patterns is a difficult and dangerous job reserved for a certain blonde Nara's infiltration team. I do love when Kiho can work with me. Intel's such a fun job to play with.
He slides the abstract of his analysis across the table to the Sandaime. "They're looking to take samples of our kekkei genkai, but we haven't caught anything to say when or how they're going to do it. "
The Hokage sighs "I need you in Crypt more than teaching a genin team." Oh no. Hell no.
"You know I can't have that." And yeah, he hasn't been sleeping much recently,, but those children need a Sensei, and he'd be damned if he let anyone else near them with a fifty foot pole. Who knows who'd get their claws in them if they aren't under the tutelage of the Head of Crypt?
He'd been hearing rumors. Inoichi had confessed something quite disturbing about Council Elder Shimura regarding how easily his ward, Fu, had been taken from him and not yet returned. Shibi had been tight lipped about his own ward, but it's easy enough to connect the dots.
Based on the patterns that had been arising, his Hana-chan is a prime target for the ANBU draft, and his other ducklings are not far behind. And I'd say if I thought Danzo was capable of working years in advance, that Hana is in fact a reason for Kaito's murder. But none of the children selected had teams or jonin sensei. None of them were formally ninja even if they had the potential to be. And even if he's not a frontline specialist, he's still Nara Ensui, Head of Cryptology. There has to be a measure of protection in that.
"You'll need a third person for your genin team. Aburame-kun's just graduated." The Hokage steeples his fingers together over the abstract.
Now that's unexpected and abnormally irritating. "I thought Muta-kun will still be running missions with us?"
"He's applied for the Tracker Squad in special training. You'll need a third member." And he has to acknowledge, that in fact the Sandaime still has a great deal of clout. Are you shielding Shimura Danzo on purpose?
Or are you really selectively blind?
"As long as it's not Nara Kasuga." He shoves his hands in his pockets and slouches forwards. "I'd kill him in a week."
"No." The Hokage's face is wreathed with steam, and he's so terribly old. "You'll be taking Uchiha Itachi."
Are you putting me under surveillance with the Uchiha now, Hokage-sama? Are you in league with Danzo?
"Yeah, yeah. We'll go pick him up tomorrow." He waves half heartedly as he heads out the door. "I get it."
I've learned to be patient, Hokage-sama. I'm not a child. I can play the long game.
A.N. A peek into the head space of our resident Nara-sensei. Now that I think about it, Nara Ensui is actually a revenge driven maniac who loves his children and would like nothing more than to see Danzo burn and dance over his grave. Not sure if he cares much about the Sandaime either...
Nothing more scary than a motivated Nara to be honest.
And thanks to Sis, Alizay, Al, and Born to Sleep for reviewing! Yes, Danzo's motivations for Kaito's murder will become clearer as time goes on. He didn't do it because he woke up one morning and thought it would be fun. Danzo's evil, but he self justifies as it being good for Konoha.
There's a thought process involved, but none of the characters who have so far had a point of view reveal knows exactly what that is.
Thanks to everyone who favorited and followed! Honestly you guys are the best.
~Tavina