Thanks for waiting, sorry for the delay...I have been avoiding the more graphic details in the relationship here, and I am undecided if that is adding to or taking away from the story. Opinions?

Chapter 8

Mizuki did have more than just a knack for chemistry. He produced a few flashy, impressive disorientation gasses right off the bat to give his senpai at the lab something to account for his time and ingredients. His true formulation, an attempt to perfect a temporary enslavement drug, was starting off with a bang. He smuggled some out in a vial and introduced it into a mixture of fruit juice and bourbon, preferring the dark alcohol as it covered up the odd colors in his potion.

Iruka drank it down, reluctantly obedient as always, and promptly fell in a heap. Okay, much too strong, he was looking for something more gradual, and he would prefer unaware as opposed to unconscious. Still, he didn't want to waste this time. He took Iruka by the vest and hauled him up into a tree, concealing them with a jutsu inspired by the one Iruka had used here long before.

Waking up in one of the walk-in medical facility's cots was becoming embarrassingly habitual. This time with a dislocated shoulder and a horrible lower back ache, because his friend had discovered him on the ground, presumably after he had fallen out of the tree again. Mizuki helped him make up stories to cover up his ineptitude, else he might be held back from the genin promotion so close to happening now. Heck, he'd hit his head so hard he didn't remember himself what happened. He wondered if he might be giving himself permanent brain damage from getting knocked out so often.

"What's wrong with me, Ki?" Iruka asked Mizuki, greatly discouraged after his latest injury. "I get so confused sometimes. This just isn't right."

"Ru-kun, you're just stressing over nothing. Everyone spends their genin years beat to crap. It's part of the training, it makes you stronger. The other kids just have homes to recover in and parents to make their excuses for them. It's…it's just like the thing with your torn clothes. Everyone tears their clothes now and then during training and all, don't you think? But do you ever see any evidence of it on the others? Of course not. You're tough, you're doing great! No matter what happens, you bounce right back." Mizuki tugged his ponytail playfully.

"But…these things don't happen while I'm training. They happen at night."

"You're just thinking that. I'll bet most of your injuries happen during the day and cause the things that happen at night. You wouldn't fall at night if you weren't hurt and exhausted from your training during the day. And if you were one of the other kids, your fall would be no more than a short tumble from bed to floor. Not everyone sleeps out in the woods where anything can happen; I'll bet not a one of them has every tried to spend the night in a concealment jutsu up high." Mizuki was on a roll, coming up with glib answers for all of Iruka's concerns. "We could resolve that, you know. If I can keep getting steady missions, I'll be able to afford to get my own place. Then you can move in with me. No one has to know. And most of those problems you're having will resolve themselves."

Iruka nodded slowly. It did sound like a solution to this very worrisome problem; it was beginning to weigh on his mind constantly. He had been trying to figure it out on his own; but his options were limited. Mizuki was already helping him more than he could really ask for; and going to any of the adults with this was just asking for trouble. Without Mizuki, he would be at their mercy.

"You always have to bail me out," Iruka said quietly. "I don't thank you enough."

"Ru," Mizuki pulled him close into a rough hug. "You know you can always trust me. We're a team. No thanks are necessary. Your loyalty is enough. We're there for each other."

"Yeah," Iruka looked up, and his smile seemed to make the whole world brighter. "Each other."

He returned the hug and they sat together for some time, each grateful in very different ways for their close alliance.

0o0o0o0

If he didn't have Mizuki there to save him, he'd have been done for long ago. The more they were together, the more inseparable they had become. The other kids in Iruka's classes were hateful and mean, cruel in the ways they made fun of him; at least that's how Mizuki interpreted every exchange he'd ever heard about between Iruka and the others. He warned and advised Iruka on how to get even, keep them at bay so they wouldn't be so hurtful, and to avoid spending time with them outside of class. He helped set up pranks, some almost dangerous, instructing him how to make it look funny and conceal the very serious nature of some of the basic set-ups. By the time genin promotions were upon them, Iruka had a reputation as class clown and madman prankster. Some kids had received minor injuries from some of his stunts, but under Mizuki's watchful glare declined to report it. With that image, it was no surprise he still had no friends at school. Only admirers and critics.

Sandaime was at a loss to understand how this boy had changed so drastically, yet looked and seemed to be so much the same as he was before when he talked to him one-on-one. All the reports from the academy, Aburame-san, and the local patrols painted Iruka as a near-delinquent or mal-adjusted, lost soul. There was some of that lost soul in those sincere brown eyes. But he detected none of the evil spirit that was being attributed to him. He was a very sad young man behind that defiant smile, but that was to be expected. He had an odd way of lurking around the memorial, afraid to be seen, that disturbed the Hokage most of all. To pay respects at the memorial was a noble and honorable act. The need to hide it in what appeared to be shame or fear was just not right.

Sometimes he would see Iruka, in person or once in a grand while in his crystal globe, moving about the memorial area. Sandaime would take time, if he could, go run into him 'accidentally' on purpose.

It was odd to see the boy who had been something like a fan of his as a youth cower in his presence and then become defensive and silent.

Try as he might to get Iruka to come stay with him, he refused. He could have ordered it, he supposed, but that would be a smudge on the boy's reputation that might not ever be erased. A couple of times he had succeeded in getting him to join him for a walk in the courtyard, but never would he enter the Third's residence. Even when he explained things as best he could, about the righteousness of mourning at the memorial and the wisdom of accepting love and support from others, of rejoining the human family as a whole, Iruka ended up running away from him.

He seemed to have his own path, and with a brief meditation on the problem, Sandaime decide to let the boy seek his own answers. It was clear that he understood that the door to the Hokage residence was always open to him, any time, now or in the future. Iruka would always be able to change his mind. But no one should do it for him.

Mizuki had been aware of the exchanges between the powerful, wise man and his little Iruka. It was a problem he was reluctant to deal with. That man was smart enough, and had powers of observation well beyond the common nin. Too much time around him, and the days of Iruka as constant companion would be numbered.

"You should be wary," he informed the tired brunette, who was worn out from attack relays and laps around the village. Iruka had been ordered to do the extra drills as a penalty for some bit of vandalism that was never made clear to him. It didn't sound even vaguely familiar, but he took the credit and the punishment for the act anyway.

"About what?" He stretched and rolled on his side, shivering a little. The cold weather was coming upon them now, making harder to enjoy the time by the riverbank.

"Sandaime. You best not tell him you're anything but perfectly happy. He's thinning out the herd, Iruka. The orphans, the older ones are becoming troublesome. The ones that don't shape up are being farmed out to civilian families for adoption. They aren't allowed to re-enter the academy, and they're stripped of their status. Too many young men died in all the destruction of the demon attack. They need strong backs to work the farms, to tend the crops that feed the village. If you don't want to end up in the fields you better steer clear of him. He must already have you in his sights. Just be careful, if he ever asks you to stay with him. If you agree, it's a sign of weakness, and he'll wash you out of the shinobi program!"

"He did," Iruka gasped. "He did ask me to stay with him!" And he had been tempted. It would have been a home, with a fatherly man he had always known, and somehow, inside, his ungrateful, cowardly heart still seemed to think he needed a safer place to stay.

"No! Shit, Iruka, what did you tell him?" Mizuki feigned alarm, smiling inside. Iruka bought his story hook, line and sinker,

"I told him no!" Shock was evolving into anger. How evil of the old man to play on his homelessness like that!

"Well, then, you have nothing to worry about. Just stay away from him, Iruka."

"Yeah, no kidding. No way would I let him do that to me!" His fine jaw was jutting out in determination.

"Right. Settle down, you'll hyperventilate. Let me see those bruises again, how the heck did you manage to get so banged up, and there of all places?"

"Unh…oh, you don't …you don't need to look again, it's okay. I'm not sure, I must have landed wrong somehow doing the rappelling…I don't remember it hurting, but I get bruised real easy, I never remember how I get them."

"Let me look, just to be sure." Mizuki took a quick look, admiring his collateral damage from the night prior. Good thing Sandaime hadn't seen it. "Looks fine, I bet you're right, looks like you landed too hard against a branch or something." Or banged against river rocks while being dragged across them on the way back to your bedroll, he shrugged. Same difference.

Iruka rubbed his backside gingerly. "It sure hurts now, though."

"Yeah, you do bruise funny. You need more vitamin C or something." He patted that soft brown hair and smiled, getting a warm look in return. His latest formula was working much better, and once he got the recipe down pat there really wouldn't be a need to keep working at the lab. Life was damned near perfect outside of work. It was time to make all of his life complete. Iruka was genin now, working up to chunin rather quickly, but Mizuki had been turned down in a bid for jounin status again. He wasn't going to give them much longer to come to their senses. But now he'd need to make sure that when the time came, if he were to leave the village, Iruka would go too. He needed to slow Iruka's ascent up the ranks.

Slowing him was a challenge. Iruka was good at all of the basics. He had advanced tag skills, and he was deadly accurate with projectiles. He was an efficient blend of dedication, courage and tactical savvy, tempered with a warm personality and emotional intelligence.

Most of those attributes needed to be squashed, at least for now.

There wasn't much Mizuki could do about the marksmanship or the tag skills. But the confidence and the courage were just waiting to be tweaked down. Now that the enslavement drug was showing more promise, the erosion of those traits would be a side benefit to the new level of fun he had already planned on having. It needed more testing, but there appeared to be a great deal of subconscious residue from the events that took place under influence of his potion. Iruka's subconscious reactions to receiving the drink already directly correlated to the last experience under the influence. If it had been mere sex, there was a light blush and a little shy unwillingness to take the drink. If it involved injury or psychological distress, he resisted stubbornly until asked several times.

He simply needed to crank up the severity of the inflicted traumas. And the word or two to he'd had with the medical staff the last time they were there should have had a domino effect. He'd suggested gently, out of Iruka's hearing, that the boy seemed a little, you know, unstable. That he seemed to have these 'accidents' when he was alone. That if he wasn't so well acquainted with Iruka, he might think that he was hurting himself. Perhaps his instructors should know, so they could observe him more closely, since they were older and wiser in the ways of human behavior.

The medic-nin had nodded, somewhat interested at least. Mizuki couldn't tell if concern or sloth was going to win out on that one. It was more paperwork and effort to send the referral to the training office than to just ignore it.

Iruka and his contemporaries weren't in the traditional three students to one jounin sensei apprenticeship regimen. There simply weren't enough jounin sensei to go around. They went on all D ranks and select lower C ranks without any supervision, not too different from when they were genin. But mid-C to lower B ranks were often performed with only a chunin as the ranking team member. Group sessions with the jounin doing critique provided them with direction in between missions as they self-taught in the field; the sparring and physical training was done in class-size numbers as well. The genin were selected in random order for the tasks, seldom teamed with the same peers. The usual team comradeships were not formed through the training sessions. Iruka's tight and rather exclusive friendship with Mizuki, despite his higher rank, was not seen as remarkable at all under these conditions.

When the head of training received the note from the infirmary, he had to wonder. Iruka had been a real troublemaker in the academy. Since promoting he seemed to have settled into the training and missions; whether because of maturity, or the removal from the classroom setting, or a combination of both, it was a big turnaround for the boy. He was beginning to outshine the rest of the group, to show some definite talents and abilities befitting the son of two well-respected, powerful jounin. But he did seem a little soft at times.

And he certainly had more than his share of injuries and trips to the infirmary. Just two weeks prior, he had passed out on the training field shortly after the day's training started. Two of his classmates had carted him to the infirmary under orders from the day's training sensei and dumped him off; no word had come back as to what the problem was, and by noon Iruka was back, slipping into line for the relay they were in the midst of and grimly toughing his way through the rest of the day.

Something like this might not be so serious in a D or lower C rank mission. But chunin level? He would be at risk, and a liability to his teammates.

The training coordinator tapped his pen on the roster, vacillating. Umino had been showing steady improvement, and nearly a dozen months had been invested in the kid already. It was just a suspicion. He could just keep an eye on him and decide later.

No, if he waited, he might forget, might overlook too much. But for the boy's sake, for his future, he had decided not to put any of these damning doctor's suspicions in writing. He scribbled a rationale about past delinquent behavior and made a mental note as well. Umino was off the two-year track for chunin promotion. He would not be able to promote automatically at any age. He would have to pass the jounin-panel administered tests with a ninety percent or higher score to move up.

It was for the kid's own good. If he had the right stuff, he'd still make chunin eventually. And short staffed as they were, watching over people for individual problems simply took too many man hours.

He went to the file and pulled out the notice, distinct on its yellow paper. The completed form was tucked in an envelope and sent with a messenger to be delivered to the cot in the boy's ward room.

o0o

He found the notice on the floor, the envelope already ripped open and left on his bed. Two older boys sat snickering at him as he picked it up and read it, eyes welling and heart pounding.

Off track? He'd been so diligent, so good…he had stopped pranking, letting the insults roll off his back these days. It had been getting easier, and there were far fewer put-downs once he started to outshine his colleagues.

Now everyone would know. Possibly, they all knew before he did. It had been two whole days since he last showed up at his spot in the ward – he only came by to do laundry. How long ago the notice had been opened and who all had read it was unknown.

"Hot shot," said the taller boy, swinging a leg over the side of his upper-berth bed. "You'll still be genin when you're a grandpa."

"You're wrong. He'd have to get laid to be a grandpa. That ain't ever gonna happen," laughed the other boy.

Iruka's anger and devastation waged war, and in the end, he walked away. He felt like he could have killed them both, or walked away, and there was no middle ground. It was a flip of the coin in his head.

He'd been almost halfway into the accelerated training, and the blow was devastating.

"I tried to warn you," Mizuki said, stirring the surface of the stream with a dry branch. "You keep running into the bugman, and you don't hide fast enough from the Sandaime. I don't know which one, but I'll bet one of them put in the bad word. What else could it be? You've been perfect. This village is like that, Ru-kun. You're either in, or you're out. Just try not to take it too personally. They treat me the same, jounin selections are coming up again, but do you think they'll do the right thing? We just can't let them get us down."

Iruka stared at the motions of the stick in the water, numb now after the first shock and pain.

"I only had another year to go. Now, who knows? I'm like an anchor. A dead weight."

"Ru-kun," Mizuki said in a husky, subdued voice. "You're none of those things. You're my partner. We'll be fine, because we're a team. No matter what. Why, if they sent you to the farms, I'd go with you. Seriously. We'll stick together to the end. And together, we'll make our own rules someday. Their petty judgments of rank and such are meaningless. I know who you are, and how much you're capable of. Hang in there a while longer and try not to get too discouraged. Learn from the training and prepare yourself for whatever might come. Trust me, there are other options out there beside their precious shinobi rank and file."

Even in his depression, that last statement stuck in Iruka's head. He had been totally focused on becoming a jounin one day. What if he didn't? What if he failed? Or, unexpectedly intriguing – what if he, himself, voluntarily chose another path?

He'd never considered it. Never checked the side branches to his bull-headed career path. He never seemed to fit in with the other students – could it be because he truly was misplaced?

He remembered being puzzled when one of the students left shinobi track to study as an apprentice to the armament specialist. He would not be a true ninja, although his title would have equivalent rank at the end of his training.

Some of the kids had been dismissive, but a number had been jealous of the unique, valuable skills they would never attain in their own track. The boy had been selected because he had voluntarily assisted the specialist on his own time and was best-qualified when the opening came up.

Iruka hadn't even been aware that there was such a job as armament specialist until someone else had landed it. Swayed by the way this latest blow to his confidence seemed to echo the doubt in his ability that his parents had embraced as they went to their graves, he decided to place his name on the list to volunteer for collateral assignments as soon as he returned for training the next day. After all, what did he have to lose? It was the only straw he could think to grasp for; at least it was a way to try and buoy up his sagging spirits. The small hope skirted the edge of his mind as he embraced his partner's offer of comfort for the night.

tbc