Venatori

Summary: Kankuro was a few minutes too late, and Kiba died. Now, Shino and Hinata work to ensure that no more traitors get away alive. Divergence from chapter 212.

The Laughing Phoenix does not own Naruto and makes no profit from this work, other than her sense of accomplishment.

WARNING: Character death. Blood, gore, and questionable use of medical knowledge and techniques. Some OOC-ness. Language.


Konoha's Dogs

"I don't like this," Ryouken told the Inu. They were in his office, the Inu sitting attentively across the desk from him. "I attempted to get the Hokage to change the parameters of this mission, and if I had any other choice it would be going to senior hunter-nin who have more experience with this kind of thing."

"We will do our very best," Shiroi began, and Ryouken held up a hand to forestall her.

"I have every faith that you will, but you need to know that I expect this mission will be outside your comfort zone. As far as I'm concerned, your primary tasks are to keep yourselves and each other safe. If you have to choose between protecting yourselves or each other and completing any other aspect of this mission, you will protect yourselves. That's an order. I'll take responsibility for any repercussions. Do you understand me?"

The Inu exchanged a long look, then turned back to Ryouken and nodded. "Yes taicho," they chorused.

Ryouken hoped they'd do as ordered - if the Inu had one fault, it was their perfectionist tendencies. They were so determined to be the best, to adhere to whatever doubtlessly high standards they'd set for themselves, that sometimes they took risks in their missions that other hunter-nin would not. So far it had paid off.

"Good," he unrolled a map of the Hi no Kuni/Kaze no Kuni border. "We've had reports of a gang of rogues setting up shop along the south end of the border. There are a handful of chuunin and a couple of jounin among them. They've gotten bolder recently - they attacked a large merchant's caravan two weeks ago. The problem is that they're particularly good at border-jumping. They hit a target on our side of the border and vanish across into Kaze no Kuni or vice versa. We don't have sufficient intelligence or, frankly, manpower to find them on our side before they hit a target, so this is going to be a joint-village mission."

The Inu looked up from the map, heads cocked at identical angles. "With Sunan hunter-nin?" Kuroi asked.

"No, as it happens. The Kazekage's designated a team of three - a jounin and two chuunin. They'll be your primary contacts. You're due to meet up with them in a week's time here, at midday," Ryouken pointed to the relevant location on the map. "You'll share information, find the trail, and split up to pursue. Try and stay within hailing distance of each other, but nobody particularly wants you in constant contact with them. You'll check in with each other when you cross the border near Suna's patrols so that this doesn't become an inter-village incident, but other than that keep your distance. You're expected to eliminate the missing-nin as a single team. Seal up any Konohan rogues for transport back here, the Suna team will take their own. Questions?"

"Any missing-nin that don't belong to either of us?" Shiroi asked.

"Vanish the bodies, you know the drill."

"Do we know who the Suna team will be?" Kuroi began, then tilted his head and went on, "conversely, do they know to expect hunter-nin?"

"Yes and yes," Ryouken reached for the dossiers. "The jounin is Baki, you've seen him before. The chuunin are Kankuro, the Kazekage's brother, and Tsubusa." He tilted his head to one side. "I know that you are both familiar with Kankuro. Will this be a problem?"

"No taicho," they said in unison. Ryouken fought back a sigh. More and more the Inu had been responding as a single entity, moving and speaking in weird synchrony. He'd be wondering if they'd done something stupid like attempt to link their minds via jutsu, but he'd had sufficient access to their training to know that this was cultivated. At some point since they took the mask one or both of them had noticed how much people twitched when they did something in tandem, and they'd been practicing ever since.

It was funny at first - thanks to Jakkaru, he'd sat hidden up a tree near their usual training ground and watched as the pair mimicked each other, faltering when Kuroi's longer stride had him a half-step ahead of Shiroi or when Shiroi's superior reaction time left Kuroi lagging a hair behind. Now they had the basic hand gestures and head movements nearly perfect. Ryouken applauded the concept in theory when they started working on it, but now he wasn't so sure he liked it in practice.

He'd have to address it later, there wasn't time to talk it over today. "The mission scroll and the intelligence we have on the rogues," he said, handing over the scrolls. "Stop by requisitions before you leave and make sure you're fully stocked. Good luck, and good hunting."

The Inu took the scrolls, bowed, and left. Once outside their commander's office, they split up, leaving to retrieve their packs and make the necessary arrangements for their absence. Shino rescheduled an experiment he'd planned to do with his father in two weeks, reasoning that they'd likely still be on the mission. Hinata dropped by Kurenai's apartment, leaving a key so her sensei could water her plants. By dawn the next morning they were back in headquarters, making one last check of their supplies.

"Ready?" Kuroi asked finally, sliding his pack onto his back and adjusting one of the straps.

"Ready." Shiroi tucked away the last of her senbon and straightened. Shoulder to shoulder the two left the building, then bounded away into the trees.

When they stopped for the night, Shiroi eyed their chosen campsite with something approaching smugness. Tucked up near a bluff, it was as defensible as anything got in the field and possessed its own water supply in the form of a small spring that burbled up from a sandy crevice and fed a small stream. "If we set enough traps," she told Kuroi, "we might be able to forego the watch rotation for a few hours, get some extra sleep."

Kuroi shook his head. "If you need an extra hour, that's fine, but I'd just as soon keep watch."

Shiroi cocked her head to the side, then shrugged. "I may take you up on that extra hour, if you're sure. Please don't let me sleep too long." Hinata would have asked if there was something she could do, if perhaps Shino would like something to drink before he went to sleep. Shiroi took it as read that the mission had Kuroi feeling antsy, and he'd tell her if it got to be a problem.

The next morning they broke camp leisurely - the meetup was still five days away, and the site was just under a day from their current location. Instead they put their heads together over the information they'd been given. One of the recent raids had taken place a dozen kilometers from their spot, and they elected to stop there first, to see if they could pick up anything of interest.

Despite their best efforts, the Inu found nothing. While they were willing to admit it had been something of a long shot, Kiroi in particular was still disappointed. For the rest of the day they finished their preparations for the hunt, perhaps going a little overboard in anticipation of the Suna-nin. Shiroi sorted through her stocks of poisons, coating and re-coating a double handful of senbon and a few kunai in interesting combinations. Kuroi spent the time laying out seal matrices on the blank scrolls he'd brought to transport any corpses, rationalizing that if he happened to make extra, well, they'd still work in a month or six if he did them right.

As night settled in, both the Inu studied the dossiers and assorted intel they'd been given. Shiroi took the performance evaluations and lists of known skillsets, looking for known techniques they might encounter and gaps in their defense. An hour later she had a long list of techniques they could expect, heavy on the doton and kaiton with varying levels of taijutsu. There was a single ranged weapons specialist with the group.

Staring at her notes, Shiroi sighed. What she didn't know, what could make or break the Inu's plans, was how well the missing-nin coordinated. While any Konohan team would make a point of knowing each other's weak points Oto-nin were terrible at it, and she didn't know where on the spectrum this batch fell. She'd have to discuss it with Kuroi.

Meanwhile, Kuroi took their behavioral analyses and went a little deeper, trying to read between the lines and find a hint of the personalities behind the lines of ink. Every hunter knew that shinobi went rogue for a multitude of reasons, and those reasons could be amazingly petty. Jakkaru had once told them of a target he'd once chased who'd gone rogue because he wasn't given any missions higher than the odd B-rank. (That particular target's skills had, by Jakkaru's telling, not matched his sense of self-importance.) If Kuroi could figure out why they left, he might find some interesting sore spots.

The data was sparse, frustratingly so, but Kuroi stuck gold on the two jounin - one Sunan, one Konohan - and a Konohan chuunin. The first two had left of their own free will, although it was suggested that a number of minor crimes (a few thefts and a couple of counts of fraud) could be laid at their feet. The chuunin had fled half a step ahead of his fellows after assaulting two civilians, and had only gotten away because Suna and Oto's attack on Konoha had almost immediately distracted everybody. To Kuroi, it looked like the standard motives of greed and the urge to demonstrate power over something or someone were informing their ties to the larger group. No vendettas and no fanatics, which simplified things.

Kuroi laid out his findings for Shiroi, who compared them to the information she'd compiled. The few reports they had from eyewitnesses backed up Kuroi's analysis - the chuunin, at least, had been conclusively identified in one. He'd been brutalizing a merchant, demanding any last caches of money not yet surrendered, when his fellows called him away. The witness had survived. The merchant had not been that lucky.

For the next three days the Inu split up, examining other ambush sites attributable to the group and seeing if they could find anything resembling a trail. The results were mixed - the older sites in particular had little to say, traces since erased by wind and time. There were some leads though. Shiroi stumbled across a cache that had been recently emptied, except for one lone gold piece nearly buried in the dirt. Kuroi found trails leading away from two of the sites and followed each of them for an hour or so, marking them carefully on his maps.

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The day of the meetup the Inu made a point of being in place early, settling down just far enough away from the site and apart from each other to make ambushing them difficult. The Suna team arrived as the sun inched to its zenith, clearly on the alert and hands near weapons. When the Inu moved into the open Shiroi squashed the urge to laugh at the breach of standard protocol, but she made a mental note to mention it to Kuroi later.

Baki hailed them. "You'd be the Inu?" When Shiroi and Kuroi nodded in unison, he dropped his hand from his kunai pouch.

"Baki, Kankuro and Tsubusa of Suna, correct?" Shiroi asked. At their nods, she dipped her head. "Pleasure to meet you, I hope we won't see you too often."

"Let's get our business done now so we can ensure we won't," Baki said. "Our targets hit a caravan on our side of the border three days ago and made a beeline straight for the border. We think they're on your side."

Kuroi reached for the map he'd compiled, Tsubusa's hand falling to his kunai as he did so. "Do you have an exact location?"

Baki rattled off the coordinates and Kuroi quickly added them. "The fastest route to the border from that point is due south," the jounin added.

"You're in luck, Baki-san," Kuroi told him, showing the edited map to Shiroi. "We examined some of the other attack sites."

"We think we know where they're headed," Shiroi said, drawing a rough circle on her own copy of the map. "Do you need this?" She rolled it back up and held it up, offering to toss it over.

"We have our own maps, if you could give us an idea of the coordinates," Baki said.

"Of course," she rattled them off.

"We'll make our approach from the northeast," Kuroi told the Suna nin as Kankuro edited his map. "If you head in a more westerly direction we can cover more ground."

Baki nodded brusquely. "We'll check in with you in a couple of days or when we hit the border, whichever comes first."

Bowing in unison, the hunter-nin turned and vanished into the trees.

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"Well that was pleasant, if a bit odd," Kankuro mused. The Sunan team was sitting around a smokeless fire, having stopped to eat something and catch some sleep. "The meetup with the Konoha-nin," he elaborated at Baki's raised eyebrow. "Are they all like that?"

Tsubusa snorted. "Konoha's shinobi are odd in general, you know that - don't you have a Konohan pen pal?"

"Unlike Kiri or Iwa's masked squads, Konoha's ANBU seem to make a point of civility when forced to directly interact with other shinobi," Baki said, giving Tsubusa a quelling look. "Kumo's behave similarly - their manners are as pretty as a courtier's."

"I suspect they're trained that way," Tsubusa muttered to Kankuro.

"Suna does not have the manpower to allow for the sort of extensive specialization found in other villages' ANBU," Baki said. He paused for a minute, and Kankuro braced himself for yet another lecture on how variable resources had shaped the different villages, but history didn't appear to be on Baki's mind tonight. "Be wary when interacting with them - Kiri's Undertaker Squad are more brutally efficient, but it is hard to beat a Konoha-nin for sheer tenacity."

Tell me something I don't know, Kankuro thought.

Almost as though he'd heard his thoughts, Baki obliged. "I suspect these particular ANBU are new to the mask," the jounin murmured, eyes trained on the fire.

"Huh?"

"They're young," Baki pulled his cloak around his shoulders, "It's difficult to tell exact ages, but if they are much older than you, Kankuro, I will be surprised. Sarutobi declared that underage shinobi could no longer join the ANBU over five years ago - the Uchiha massacre left its mark - and I can't see Tsunade making exceptions."

"So they probably haven't been ANBU for long," Kankuro followed his sensei's train of thought to the logical conclusion.

Baki shrugged. "Three months? Six?"

"Don't underestimate them," Tsubusa told the younger shinobi, "ANBU are crazy and young ANBU are a special kind of crazy."

"You would know," Baki drawled.

"That was an honest mistake!" Tsubusa yelped.

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The relative sanity of the hunter-nin aside, Kankuro marveled at how little of them they saw. When they hit the border again two days later, it was to find one of the Inu, the girl, waiting for them. "Ohayo," she chirped, "how's the hunt been?"

"Uneventful," Baki told her. "You?"

"Mmm, we picked up recent traces of activity some distance north of here." She settled into a crouch on her branch and pulled out a scroll. Kankuro tensed, then felt a bit foolish when the scroll turned out to be a map. "My counterpart is pursuing a promising track - we hope to have something more definite by noon tomorrow."

"We'll expect you then," Baki said.

"Shall we say by this stream here?" Inu rattled off a set of coordinates. "I'm told the fishing is particularly good."

Baki shook his head and offered a different location.

Inu sighed, then shrugged. "As you say. We'll see you then." She flipped off the branch and was gone, vanishing in the underbrush.

"We move northward, then?" Tsubusa asked.

"Along the watershed," Baki agreed.

Off the Suna-nin went, working in near-silence. Kankuro quite literally tripped over a trail in the late afternoon, suddenly glimpsing silk threads caught on a bush. Turning to follow it, Tsubusa found first a set of scratches in some downed wood marking the path of a group of shinobi, then a small chakra burn on a nearby tree trunk. He rubbed a finger across it, and the soot left streaks on his skin. "This is fresh. Two days, three at most."

"Can't be far, then."

Turning from the water, the team struck out along the trail, pausing frequently to check for chipped bark or loose threads. It was Tsubusa who turned up a scrap of brocaded silk, clearly torn from a formal kimono - not the sort of attire a shinobi would be tree-hopping in, at least not without quickly finding some place to change their clothes. "Didn't one of the merchants have a shipment of silks from Yama no Kuni?"

Baki nodded, then stood and considered the sky. "We've got maybe two hours left before we need to turn north if we're going to make the rendezvous. Move carefully."

The Suna-nin searched in silence for a while longer, but apart from a few damaged twigs and a set of scuff marks found little else.

"Should we push on ahead?" Kankuro asked at one point. "See if we can't get closer to the missing-nin, maybe catch one for questioning?"

"Not this time," Baki said. "If we attack now they'll scatter, and chasing them all down one by one would be an exercise in frustration. We wait for Konoha's dogs to add to our numbers."

To that effect, the trio of Suna-nin left the trail and made for the rendezvous point. They were early, arriving, so far as Kankuro could tell, before the Inu did. When the hunter-nin appeared, materializing from the shadows of the trees like inquisitive ghosts, the Suna team was waiting impatiently.

"How'd the lead pan out?" Baki asked.

"Not bad, not bad at all," the male Inu said, sounding pleased with himself. "Three caches, one still in use, and the campsite they were using five days ago. Can't be far."

"We picked up a trail a few klicks south of here, headed west north-west. Three days old at most."

One of the Inu, Kankuro couldn't tell which one, made a satisfied humming noise as they leaned forward together, right hands coming forward in parallel to brace them in their crouch. "We've got them."

"A touch overconfident, aren't you?" Tsubusa muttered.

The Inu ignored him, addressing their question to Baki. "Was there any sign of injury? Missed steps, traces of blood?"

"Not as I recall," Baki said slowly.

"There was a half-empty crate of medicines in the cache, and it was opened within the past couple of days, a week at most," the female Inu sounded satisfied. "One or more of them may be injured."

Kankuro wanted to ask how she knew that, but kept his mouth shut. Baki asked the question on everybody's mind. "When do we move?"

"We've narrowed their location down to a square mile," the Inu chorused.

"Everything we know about them suggests they break camp and move with false dawn," the male Inu went on.

"If they're intending to move far, or if they've got injured, they're probably bedding down not long after dusk," the female Inu said, then hummed consideringly. "They'll have sentries, but," she and her partner shrugged eloquently, heads at parallel.

Baki favored them with a long look, but must have seen something he liked and nodded. "Strike at midnight, hard and fast?"

"Put as many as you can down silently first," the male Inu agreed.

"Tsubusa-san," the other Inu said, "perhaps we could prevail upon you to put your excellent trap-making skills to use? Between the three of us bottlenecking the targets should be simple enough."

Tsubusa considered the matter a moment, then nodded. "Sounds good to me. Did you have anything specific in mind?"

"Whichever of your most lethal traps you can set up the fastest," the Inu shrugged. "The more ground we can cover, the better."

"Tripwires with poisons it is."

Baki and the Inu went over the plan once more, laying it out in broad strokes. It was not, as shinobi plans went, particularly complex - there were some, Kankuro knew, who would sniff derisively at any battle plan with less than two access routes and three methods for getting away in a hurry. The shinobi lifestyle, at least at the upper ranks, favored those in the habit of planning for contingencies, layering plans within plans like the rings of an onion. That was simply the nature of the beast.

At the same time, Kankuro figured it was probably better to keep things simple, if only because in his experience missions tended to go sideways if you got too nitpicky about them.

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Moving as silently and carefully as they could, damping their chakra, the teams approached the camp. Tsubusa split to the south, Kankuro on his tail to provide his own personal, poisonous touch, while the Inu fanned north to lay their own traps. That part of the operation done, they settled in to wait.

Apparently fate felt like proving Kankuro's point about missions going sideways, however, because at least half an hour before they'd planned to strike, one of the younger missing-nin got up and stumbled his way to the latrine pit. On his way back to his bedroll, he stumbled over a tripwire - and the Inu dropped as silently as owls. Kankuro didn't see which of them struck the killing blow, because Baki took the Inu's move as his cue and waved the Suna-nin forward.

The missing-nin came awake fighting. Kankuro managed to slam one into Kuroari and unleashed Karasu on a second, but then was forced to yank his puppets in closer to block a third shinobi in a nightshirt, wielding two kunai like a man possessed. After that it was a whirlwind of battle in the dark, and Kankuro couldn't spare more than half an eye to keep track of his team.

Baki whirled through the missing-nin with the speed of a Kaze no Kuni sandstorm, displaying just as much mercy. Kankuro was holding his own, and Tsubusa lurked around the perimeter picking off any who managed to bypass the traps, so Baki threw himself into the necessary work. In perhaps half an hour - a lengthy battle by shinobi standards, if not samurai's - the only individuals standing in the clearing wore intact Suna hitai-ate.

Turning away from the corpse of his opponent, Baki went in search of his team. He'd gone about a hundred meters when he came across traces of a pitched battle – kunai were sticking out of trees, and there were shuriken hiding amongst the scraggly grass. Following the scattered weaponry, he came across another body, that of one of the two jounin-ranked nin his team had been after. Two steps past the body, the man they'd pegged as the leader of the band was fighting the Konohan hunter-nin. A crumpled form at the other side of the clearing marked where another missing-nin had fallen.

Baki stayed out of the way of the fight as he circled around to check the fallen body, but kept half an eye on the proceedings in case he needed to intervene. He had to admit, he was impressed. The hunter-nin, although far smaller than their opponent, were tag-teaming him brilliantly, darting in and out of his reach as they did their damage. Kankuro came up next to Baki as, moving as one, the hunter-nin drew kunai and stabbed their target, one slitting his throat, one plunging their weapon into his chest.

There was a moment of stillness, then the two hunter-nin disengaged, pulling their weapons free and allowing the body to sink to the ground. Baki raised an eyebrow. "Nice to see Konoha's dogs have fangs." He muttered as he stepped into the clearing.

Behind his shoulder, Kankuro grinned. "Konoha's dogs with fangs…I like that," he muttered to himself. The teams worked together to sanitize the site, both sides removing and sealing up their particular targets. The Inu took the lead on disposing of the shinobi not affiliated with Suna or Konoha and the few civilians, destroying the corpses faster than the Suna-nin could. Tsubusa was disgusted, Baki wary, but Kankuro found himself fascinated, both by the techniques and the ease at which the Inu functioned together.

Eventually the task was done, and the teams stood on opposite sides of the last clearing, watching each other. Baki broke the silence. "I believe this mission is complete," he said, "and that it has been a success."

"We'd concur," one of the Inu said.

"Then we'll part ways here," Baki told them. "Good travels."

"And to you," the other Inu replied.

The two began to turn away, and Kankuro spoke up, hurriedly. "Hoi, Fangs, I mean Inu," the hunter-nin turned to him, heads cocked at the exact same angle, and Kankuro rubbed the back of his head embarrassedly. "It was nice to work with you guys."

"You too," the male Inu said slowly, somewhere between bemused and amused.

"Always nice to work with professionals," his partner chimed in, decidedly on the amused end of the paradigm. They turned and were gone, vanishing into the trees.

Baki raised an eyebrow at Kankuro, who shrugged. "What? Just making nice with the neighbors."

"Nothing," Baki smiled a little.

Back in Suna the trio delivered their scrolls to the morgue and left the corpses in the hands of the attendants on staff before going to fill out their reports. 'Konoha's Fangs' went into Kankuro's report in place of 'Inu' twice, and Gaara left it there when he sent the abridged copy to Tsunade.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

When she finally returned to her apartment, Hinata set her pack down by the door and threw herself into her post-mission ritual: house-cleaning. The pack was disassembled - weapons set to the side to be examined and cleaned or sharpened later, along with empty or low jars of poisons and antidotes. Clothes were sorted into the laundry basket, and after a quick shower she threw her towels in on top of them, dressed, changed her sheets and added them to the pile, shaking out the quilt and hanging it on a laundry rack. Laundry set by the door to be taken down to the building's laundry room, Hinata collected some rags and a few other supplies and tackled the rest of the apartment.

The bathroom was scrubbed until it shone, the bedroom and living room/kitchen dusted and swept. She emptied the refrigerator and cupboards, discarding any rotten or expired foods and cleaning out the spaces before she put things back. The counters got their own scrub, as did the sinks and windows. Everything else done, she gathered up her laundry and her detergent and went downstairs. By making use of two washers and dryers, she managed to get everything washed, dried and folded in the span of four hours, with the exception of a few things she couldn't send through the dryer without destroying. Carting it all back upstairs, she put everything away and finally allowed herself to collapse on to her bed. She'd walked through her door seven hours prior.

Across Konoha a few hours later, Aburame Shibi startled awake. It took him a few minutes to identify what had woken him, and then his hives thrummed, reacting to distress from their cousins in the bedroom down the hall. Shibi turned, staring in the direction of Shino's room, listening carefully. There was no danger in the house he could sense - Shino was not facing an external threat.

Shibi had just gotten out of bed with some half-formed idea of waking his son when he sensed Shino's hives whir into sudden activity before settling. Shino had evidently woken himself with his hives' distress and was taking steps to calm himself. Shibi 'listened' a little longer, considering. Shino seemed to have the situation under control, and he was both old and independent enough to resent his father's knocking on his door in the middle of the night. The older Aburame went back to bed.

Shino did not go back to sleep that night.


A/N:

Next Chapter: Pitfall

This chapter was a bear and a half to write - the only character in a cooperative mood was Ryouken.

For those keeping count: Baki underestimated the Inu's experience by a long shot - at this stage, they've been hunter-nin for a year. The poor man got tripped up by their ages and Konoha's reputation: he'd never believe Konoha's ANBU inducted a pair of fourteen-year-olds.

Have I ever said how much I love you guys? I'm determined to finish this fic because it insists on pestering my muse and I refuse to leave it undone, but I'm excited and inspired by the incredible support you give me. I'm not fishing for reviews or comments or compliments, I just wanted you to know.

Thank you.