February 19th, 2008
5:32 PM
Konohagakure

"And then he just left." Sasuke finished narrating the events of the second genin exam to Tony. "He didn't untie Naruto or tell us when to meet up tomorrow or anything."

"Did you untie Naruto?"

"He should know rope escape techniques from the Academy already."

"Sasuke."

"Yes, I untied him." Sasuke grumbled. "But only after he struggled enough for me to realize he actually needed the help."

"And the girl?"

"Sakura is… very affectionate." Sasuke said as diplomatically as he could. Tony wasn't fooled by it for a moment.

"Did you tell her the thing?"

"…No." Sasuke admitted as quietly as he could. "She's… it's weird. I know I'm stronger than her and that she's not really all that good at any of the practical aspects of being a ninja, but there's something about her that still scares me."

"As much as that Ino chick?"

"No, because Ino reminds me of Dr. Frost and that's even more terrifying." The Yamanaka as a whole were mind-readers and a lot of them looked like Dr. Frost, who was, in Sasuke's humble opinion, one of the scariest women he'd ever met. Ino was the only Yamanaka that he interacted with regularly, though, and she was actually one of the highest ranking students in the class, even if she didn't act like it. And she was interested in him. And that was all just… too much.

Sakura and Ino both had the whole "slightly aggressive fangirl" thing going on, and that would have been unnerving anyway, but Ino had the upper hand when it came to scary.

(He was going to have to introduce Ino to Dr. Frost one day, he knew. He was not looking forward to that day.)

"Well, you're starting missions soon, right?" Tony drew Sasuke back to the present. "That should be fun, right?"

Sasuke frowned. "You start getting twitchy whenever I mention missions, Uncle."

"I was given some very interesting information on that front, and also your Hokage put me into contact with your new teacher." Tony's voice was sunny, and Sasuke suddenly had a sinking feeling in his gut.

(The sinking feeling was proven correct when he found out what D-Rank missions, the standard fare for new genin, actually entailed.)

o.o.o.o.o

March 3rd, 2008
6:03 PM
Malibu

Sasuke's stories about his 'fun' as a genin were pretty much the biggest source of humor and distraction that Tony had these days. The stories tended to be silly, inane, or outright hilarious, especially when Sasuke tried to relate his ham-handed attempts at bonding with his teammates.

Tony needed that humor and distraction.

"Find anything, Pep?" He asked, looking over at where the woman in question was still looking through the files he'd handed her. They'd been working late for days now, ever since Tony had stumbled across a few inconsistencies that JARVIS couldn't find an explanation for.

(A decade ago, Tony might have overlooked such an inconsistency as a simple error by the sales department or something, but years of caring for a ninja and gaining ninja-style paranoia by exposure had made him a much more suspicious person.)

"Nothing. I made a few calls to General Ross, but I just got his assistant, and then it was just getting passed around from person to person as they tried to figure out what was going on." Pepper reached up to tuck a few escaped hairs behind her ear, and Tony's eyes followed the movement with a vague sense of longing. "I'd say that they're trying to fool us on purpose, but they wouldn't. Not now that we're in the final stages of the anti-Hulk equipment he asked us for. Same goes for SHIELD, if they want those quinjet prototypes done any time soon."

"So we have no idea where the weapons are?" Tony leaned back in his seat and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Everyone seems to think that someone else has them, or that someone else has an answer that can help, or that someone else was responsible for moving them." Pepper sounded almost as frustrated as Tony felt. "Nobody has any answers."

"Any word from Major Prentiss?"

"He says that there's no record of any shipment on that day from us." Pepper replied. "Similar stories with the others, where they never ordered in the first place, or they did but not as much as our records show, and so on."

"But we're still getting paid somehow." Tony finished. "Someone's still shelling out money for incredibly dangerous weaponry and we have no idea who."

Pepper shrugged. "Did JARVIS find anything?"

"Ghost accounts and shell companies, sometimes through the military itself, but not always. Most of the stuff with SHIELD checks out, at least." Tony dragged his hands down his face and groaned. "How the hell did we miss this?"

Pepper didn't say anything, and when Tony looked at her, it was to find that she was biting her lip and looking even more worried than before.

"Pepper?"

"I think it's an inside job, Tony." She admitted. "The cover-ups are too clean, and some of this couldn't have happened unless it was someone that had inside access and… and a lot of influence."

"So a member of the board, a department head, a liaison, that sort of thing." Tony felt like breaking something. "Do we have eyes in current warzones? The Middle East, anything? Please tell me we can find out where at least some of these are ending up."

"Nothing yet," Pepper told him.

Tony swore.

o.o.o.o.o

April 23rd, 2008
2:37 PM
Konohagakure

"I'm tired of these D-Rank missions, old man!" Naruto shouted at the Hokage, and Sasuke thought that, maybe, if he hoped hard enough, the floor would rise up and swallow him. Or swallow Naruto. Sasuke wasn't picky.

"Oh?" The Hokage was humoring the dumbass.

"Give us something cool to do!" Naruto kept shouting, and after a few more exchanges, Sasuke was introduced to his first C-Rank mission.

He wasn't super impressed.

o.o.o.o.o

April 24th, 2008
9:34 AM
Konohagakure

"I've just got a really bad feeling about this mission." He confided when Sakura kept asking about why he was acting so strange, half an hour outside the village. "Like something is going to go horribly wrong."

"What are you talking about?" Naruto butted into the conversation, "This is mission is gonna be awesome, dattebayo!"

Sasuke's eye twitched a little as Sakura started yelling at Naruto for interrupting her 'private conversation with Sasuke-kun!' Whether it was due to Naruto's interruption or Sakura's response wasn't up for debate, because the answer was 'both.'

It was a little sad, he realized, that the civilians he'd befriended acted more mature than the shinobi he was on a team with. After a few moments, he also realized he'd said this out loud.

Sakura seemed… hurt, to be blunt, while Naruto was already shouting at Sasuke for being an asshole. Kakashi's face wasn't betraying anything, but Sasuke would have guessed he was disappointed.

(Tazuna was still drunk, and didn't really seem to be paying attention.)

"I'm sorry," Sasuke said before it could go any further. "I didn't mean to say it out loud."

"But you do think it's true." Sakura pointed out after they all digested the apology that didn't really cover the part that had actually hurt.

"Well… yes." Sasuke looked away, "But that doesn't mean I should say it, since it's pretty easy to guess that it wouldn't make either of you happy."

"And you aren't going to apologize for thinking it's true or go back on your words, are you?" Kakashi asked, and though it seemed mostly rhetorical, Sasuke answered anyway.

"I'm not going to change what I think or lie to an ally just because it might save them some hurt in the short term." Sasuke tried to explain why he didn't want to take back what he'd said. He wasn't… he didn't want to hurt them, no, but the part he regretted was saying it out loud, not thinking it at all. It was true, even if it was unkind.

There was nothing wrong with thinking the truth.

"Wait, since when do you have friends?" Naruto demanded. "And civilians?"

"Since a year or so after I started living with my Uncle. He's a civilian, and so are a lot of the people he knows." Sasuke frowned. "And they're good people, even if some of them are really weird."

Not in the mutation sense. But in the 'Remy was probably going to burn someone's tongue off with the spices he stuck in his food' and the 'Ororo had all the Twilight books and actually liked them for some reason' and 'David liked jazz and trashy emo music and refused to listen to why the latter was a bad thing' sense.

"What are they like?" Sakura asked, as though trying to get her mind off of the insult Sasuke had leveled at her, or maybe just trying to figure out how a civilian could be more mature than a shinobi at that age.

"I…" Sasuke's mind blanked as he scrambled for a way to talk about the people he knew back in New York without breaking the NDAs he'd signed years ago. "David's probably the smartest person I've ever met, and I've met a lot of smart people because of my uncle. He speaks like eighteen languages and he's younger than us, and he's really good with technology, but he mostly just hides in his room. Anna Marie can read people really well, but her opinions on this show we watch are terrible. Kitty's good with computers and she's really… bouncy, I guess. Kur—Kerstin is the only one that's older than me, and she's really quiet a lot of the time, but… I think Naruto would get along with her."(1)

That was a bit of a scary thought.

"Yeah? How's that?" Naruto demanded.

"Kerstin and Kitty tend to play pranks. I'd assume that you three would either compete to be the best or join forces and accidentally destroy us all." Keep the tone flat, expression blank, don't let on that it's an exaggeration and maybe they'll understand that it's a joke.

Sasuke had been given advice on a lot of things from a lot of people over the years. Humor was one of them.

"You have friends that play pranks?" Naruto demanded, as though this information would lead to him reevaluating everything he'd ever known about Sasuke.

"I guess? I mean, I don't join in, but—"

This was the point at which a nearby puddle exploded into a pair of Kiri nukenin that proceeded to kill Kakashi.

o.o.o.o.o

(1) In case you forgot, Kerstin is one of the names that was brought up as a possible new name for Nightcrawler while transitioning to femme-presenting.

A/N: This chapter took me a lot of effort to do, because we're getting into canon now, and nothing is quite so boring to write as Stations of the Canon.