Chapter 24: I'll Stop The World (And Melt With You)

It was Shikaku's turn to stop and rub his eyes. This just didn't make sense. Something wasn't adding up here and it really bothered him. Normally his friends teased him about being the laziest jounin around but this was a problem, a puzzle he couldn't let go of, couldn't stop working on. The puzzle had too many pieces and yet he felt like he was missing a key one.

Rubbing his eyes, then his temples, he leaned back from where he had been hunched over the table, studying all the data in front of him. Lacing his fingers behind his head he stretched his arms back, thinking idly back to what… just a few weeks ago when he had done this same thing and Tsunade had started to rub his shoulders.

It seemed like an eternity.

He looked over at her, absorbed in her own notes.

"Let's go over it again…," he began.

"We've been over it and over it!" she snapped back.

He scowled. Bite his head off, why didn't she? For a moment he wondered if Tsunade even had a softer side. He'd certainly never seen it. Then he had to correct himself – yes – he had seen it – with Jiraiya at breakfast that morning. He'd caught a glimpse of it with both Jiraiya and Orochimaru that day at the field, too. Idly he wondered if Dan ever saw it, or did he just inhabit some safe middle ground with Tsunade, not too sharp and not too soft but never really knowing what she was capable of at either extreme. He didn't know the man well but he knew enough to know he must be quite a tool if he was using Tsunade as a stepping stone to be the next Hokage.

Finishing his stretch and realizing there was no backrub forthcoming he turned once again forlornly to his data sheets.

There was a drug…

There were at least two if not more genjutsu users dead from the drug in Amegakure…

There was a virus…

There was one kunoichi dead from the virus…

There was one dead asshole who had had the virus on him…

Had he been the one who had killed Miterashi? What had Yoshino said about that night?

He and Tsunade had turned their findings over to the police, the military police, he corrected himself. The official position had been that Tsuyoshi had been the one who had killed Asako. Their murderer already dead, they considered the case closed. Pretty convenient, Shikaku thought. And to be honest, he himself hadn't considered it implausible until now. Now that he needed the missing piece to finish his puzzle.

He racked his brains. He couldn't remember precisely what Yoshino had said. It had been her first trip to Wave. She'd been fond of the woman, distraught when she'd died. He remembered going to the memorial service with her but he couldn't remember the sequence of events she'd related to him about that night.

And somehow that seemed to be the crux of the matter.

Rising from his chair, he addressed Tsunade, "Can we take a break? I need to see Yoshino and ask her something."

Tsunade smiled up at him then. "It's a little early for lunch, isn't it Shikaku? Or do you need a long lunch with Yoshino?" she teased.

Shikaku actually felt himself blush. It was really rather awkward having the star of your first wet dream tease you about your love life. "I, uh…I need to ask her about that night when Asako Miterashi died," he responded truthfully.

Tsunade was still smiling as she waved a hand at him, "Oh, go on. Come back in a couple of hours. I'll go see Orochimaru."

They left together, Shikaku realizing that he at least got to see the friendly-soft look in her eyes himself that she had for her two teammates that day in the field.

He first stopped by the Hokage tower, thinking Yoshino was still staffed to Koharu's office but to his surprise he was told she was at the Academy today. Swinging by there, he found her on the training field with Kakashi's class.

"What are you doing here?" he asked in surprise as he greeted her with a fairly chaste kiss, uncomfortable with all the students in the area.

"Babysitting!" Yoshino hissed, glaring at Kakashi who was a safe distance away on the opposite side of the field. "Jiraiya had Inoichi check his memories to see just how much is still in that addled little brain of his about what happened last week. Most of it just comes out as sounding like it's something right out of a kid's vivid imagination anyway, so Jiraiya thought it would be safe to let him go on back to class. I'm just here today 'helping' their instructors so that I can keep an eye on him."

"Uh, can you get away for lunch?" Shikaku asked.

She shook her head. "I don't think so today. Is something up?"

"Yoshino, I need to ask you. I know you don't want to think about it. But it's really important. That night when Asako died, what did you tell me happened that day? Where were you two that day? When were you together? When were you apart?"

Her brow furrowed, Yoshino tried to remember even though it was very painful for her. "She and I were shopping most of the day, from about ten in the morning until well past lunch in the afternoon. Maybe five?"

He nodded. "Then she took guard duty and…"

Yoshino tensed. She didn't want to remember the rest of that day. She swallowed hard and nodded herself. "Yes. We, um, got back and um, she said she'd take guard duty first so that…." Yoshino was holding both of Shikaku's hands now, squeezing his fingers as she went on, "so that we could go to dinner. We left about six and got back about ten. She was already complaining about not feeling well by ten. Why?"

"All right, just one more question. When you changed, was she with you or with…him?"

"She was…with me, just outside our tent but with me, within earshot. He never came to our tent. Why?"

"I don't know. I need to think about it some more." He looked at her, she was pale now and he regretted having to ask her to remember. Pulling her close, not caring that a bunch of little kids were watching them now, he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her on the top of her head. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I had to ask you to think about that again. But I really needed to know if he was alone with her at any time."

Yoshino nodded her head against his chest and then straightened up. "It's okay. I'm okay. I should get back to work."

Shikaku kissed her once more, and watched her go back to her charges. Realizing he had a couple of hours to kill since he wouldn't be lunching with Yoshino and Tsunade had left for Orochimaru's, he headed off for his favorite meadow to try to think things over and assimilate the new information he had.

He lay on his back in the grass looking up at the clouds. Asako had been with Yoshino the entire day. She had been fine that entire day too, only after Yoshino returned from dinner was she ill. And from the description of her symptoms, she was pretty far into the fever by that point, too. The fever acted so fast, Tsuyoshi wouldn't have been able to inject her – he had no time alone with her when that could have happened. Yoshino was with one or the other of the two all day that day.

So someone else had done something to her, unobserved, while Yoshino and Tsuyoshi were at dinner.

But who? And why?

What could have been so important in a few tool cribs that Asako was guarding that would cost her her life? She must have seen or heard something in those few hours that Yoshino was gone. Whatever it was it couldn't have been so blatantly obvious that she herself would sound an alarm, or even tell Yoshino about it after dinner. And she obviously hadn't even known she'd been injected. What was it Yoshino had said earlier – the mosquitos at the coast were really bad, Asako had warned her about them. But Asako still must have seen something that somebody went to the effort to have her killed before it went any further.

What was so important about a few tools?

And the building materials they were bringing back?

He shook his head. They'd already been down that path. Even though it had seemed like a worthwhile avenue to pursue, the genetically modified trees that they'd seen in Wave were fascinating but not the source of the drug. He had a sinking feeling that both the genjutsu-enhancing drug and the virus were going to lead back to one place – Amegekure as their point of origin.

But what if there was something else in the wood. Maybe a component they didn't even know to look for earlier. Like the activator chemical that modified that common childhood illness into its more virulent counterpart.

Shikaku sat bolt up. They wouldn't have tested for that before. When they came back from Wave with Yoshino after Tsuyoshi died, he and Tsunade had tried to isolate any of the genjutsu drug components in samples of that bio-engineered wood but kept coming up empty. But they'd never looked for anything else – never knew to look for anything else.

Hurrying back into town, Shikaku checked the time – Tsunade still wouldn't be back probably for at least a half hour. He wondered if he could find Jiraiya in that time. Because if he were right, then there were three locations of interest – the one in Amegekure that Orochimaru had been to with Tsunade, the fields in Wave that he and Chouza had checked out and Tsunade's lab here in Konoha which unfortunately now held a nice cache of the virus courtesy of some test animals. Could that have been someone's goal all along – to manage to get a supply of both the virus and the chemical into Konoha at the same time? Shikaku didn't like that sound of that at all.

And based on what he knew from Yoshino's involvement with Koharu's forensic accounting, the facilities in Amegekure and Wave probably "officially" existed for one purpose but were actually used for a secondary purpose. Like all black projects, the problem being a lack of oversight.

Shikaku blanched – the only way to clean up this mess as Jiraiya seemed to want to do, would be to destroy the facilities in all three locations – including Konoha.

This was not good. This was really not good. Plausible deniability ran rampant – all three governments could swear up and down that the purposes of each location were peaceful – just look at Tsunade's lab. Indeed, the governments may genuinely not even know the nature of the under-the-table projects going on, funded by black budgets.

Shikaku sighed. Teams could easily be inserted into Amegakure and Wave to take out whatever they needed to take out – it's what ninja did after all, stealth and all that.

He imagined that if it would get Tsunade out of the moral dilemma she now found herself in, Jiraiya would have no qualms about dispensing with the lab in Konoha either.

Problem was this was a good way to start a war.