Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 32 - Layers
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4,588
Summary: AU. Sakura gives up on Kakashi as a teacher after Team 7 falls apart. Too bad fate, enemy ninja, and sheer bad luck have other plans.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 32 of ? Unbeta'd.
Ino doesn't know how long she's been not-crying and emptying her guts one heave at a time but slowly and surely her senses come back to her.
Oh. Not her mind, not her bloodline, but-
She can think.
And she has to trust that, had anything required to react earlier, then she would have. That training would have kicked in. She shuts that vulnerability away, something to stare at later, when she knows for sure that she's safe, instead of in a bathroom that no one has happened to have checked.
She staggers a little as she pushes herself away from the counter and then, grimacing, turns back to it.
The water runs cool and sharp and takes away the acid of bile in her throat and makes her red-rimmed eyes a little less noticeable. Her face is pale but, as she combs through her hair with damp fingers, her fingers are steady.
How long has it been? Way too long to blame it on a bathroom break by now, right?
It must have been, judging from how red her eyes were, how puffy her face feels. Ino knows how she cries and it takes her time to get this dishevelled. But if it has been too long for that excuse to hold then Sakura should have come looking for her. Her and Hatake-sensei.
Distantly, part of her wishes she could be a fly on the wall for that conversation (imagine, had it only been a toilet problem or a… that time of the month issue)-but. But. If it had happened, then they'd have been there by now. Sakura would have pressed the issue. Hatake-sensei places their safety over almost all else.
Yet, she's alone.
Goosebumps trace down her arms.
Sakura and Hatake-sensei were fine when my mind tried to sort what was going out, she reminds herself. Everything else about here was strange, but they were fine.
It's hard, when the last thing she wants to do is dwell on the last moments before—
Anyway. Ino frowns as she pushes her stiff, cold body through stretches, the bathroom barely large enough for this, and makes herself sort through those memories, pinpointing to the best of her ability where and 'who' had been in the Main House. She blesses Hatake-sensei for his relentless drills on location and spatial awareness.
So. Neither of them seemed weird, though everything else did. If that's the case, then why haven't they come to find me? It's been…
She…
…a while.
Losing track of time isn't good but Ino shoves it to the side because it's not important right now either.
I'll bring it up with Hatake-sensei when I bring up both what I did and what happened because of it. He'll know how to get better at estimating how much time has passed.
He's not going to be happy with her, but she trusts that he'll hear her out and that whatever he punishes her with, he'll also work with her to make sure it doesn't happen again. Despite how awful and empty and (alone) complicated she feels, she takes a moment to revel in that simple fact.
Hatake-sensei will help her.
Though Daddy's going to have to get involved if this doesn't fix itself before we leave here, she thinks soberly. And Daddy is going to blame Hatake-sensei for this since, as my sensei and commanding officer, it's technically his fault, even though it was my actions.
Ugh.
I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, she decides, knowing that she's just wasting time now. And it's not like I'll let Hatake-sensei walk into that unaware. I don't think I could keep this from them for very long anyway.
It's too-integral. She's never been out in the field without her bloodline to back her up, except for here, on orders, and even then…
I could drop my barriers whenever I wanted. I had the choice.
With a shake of her head, Ino sighs.
I keep cycling back. I need to work on my self-control some more. I'll add it to the list. So. Where should I go when I leave here? If Sakura hasn't noticed I'm missing yet, then something is up. On the other hand, there's more people in this building than there should be and, as far as I know, I'm the only one of the three of us that knows that. Hatake-sensei wouldn't be so calm if he knew for a fact that other people were in here.
Who they are is, of course, important. But I think the more important questions are: why are they here and how did they get in?
…
… And what should I do about it?
That's the real question, here and now, when she knows that she's already going to be in trouble for ignoring Hatake-sensei's orders regarding her powers.
And I'm not sure if I can get close enough to where Sakura and Hatake-sensei were without them noticing me. It would be hard to stay back and observe them to see if I can determine what's going on.
On the other hand, her going alone to scout out the other people in the Main House…
On the surface of it, that's a terrible idea. It could get me killed. It is also further going against Hatake-sensei's expectations that I come back as soon as I'm done in the bathroom.
But…
But I don't know enough. I know that I don't know enough. If I get overpowered, then it's a problem. But Hatake-sensei and Sakura might have already been compromised as they haven't come looking for me and that's a huge tell that something is wrong. Really wrong. I knew something was wrong with Hatake-sensei before I came here, this just furthers that—
But it's not conclusive. What's wrong with him, I didn't get a chance to figure out. There was too much going on. He'd seemed fine, in the split-seconds I had to notice him with my mind, but when I was in his presence it was all wrong…
I need to make a choice. I can't hide in this bathroom for forever. Think. Where were the other minds? Was there anything that indicated what they were doing?
Ino closes her eyes, gingerly probing her memories, skirting around the raw edges of loss, seeking out the emotional undertones she'd picked up but hadn't had a chance to examine yet.
I think. I think two of them were heading for where we put the shards. That they're important somehow.
Her eyes pop open.
That's easy enough to check. If the shards are missing, then I know that whatever is going on has something to do with it. If they're where we left them, then I'll know I can't trust what I gleaned from them. I'll do that and then decide further.
It's something like a plan, which means she can get moving now. That's almost—that's almost the best part about having made a decision, it really is.
She rolls her shoulders, shaking them out, and frowns at herself in the mirror. Then, as she watches herself with careful scrutiny, she pulls good humour over her expression, smooths away her worry, and smiles.
She's still a little too pale but pinching her cheeks is too obvious and she's not going to waste the chakra to circulate the blood in her face a little faster to give herself more colour. Besides, if she does this right, no one is going to see her at all.
But just in case… and when she rejoins her team…
The shadows of the house will cover me. I'm supposed to be avoiding windows anyway.
It's not perfect. Hatake-sensei is a genius at seeing underneath the underneath and Sakura knows her better than most people do, but it'll have to do.
And Suzume-sensei always said I was good at this sort of thing, Ino thinks, double-checking her weapons and then—and then she leaves the bathroom.
Suzume-sensei and the Academy seem so very far away but Ino draws strength from that fact, that Suzume-sensei, who had been notoriously hard to impress in the kunoichi-only lessons had said she was good at that sort of thing. Faking a smile and making it look real. Lying without ever seeming like she's lying. Answering questions without actually answering them.
Little games that don't matter much in combat but that can and will make the difference during infiltration missions where they're forced to interact with the people who actually are meant to be where they are.
Like a balm for a sunburn. It doesn't fix anything but it's nice anyway, a little bit soothing.
It's strange being on full alert and meaning it, in this house they've spent so much time searching through and practicing maneuvers through each room. They hadn't been playing, it had been training, and good training, but all the same, the fact she's doing it for real, on her own, adds a spice to it that—
Maybe, if she'd had her powers, she'd have thought it was exciting.
Instead, it's deeply nerve-wracking because out of habit, out of training, she keeps reaching for her bloodline abilities and it keeps on not being there. It's like she's stabbing herself over and over again despite her best efforts to turn her senses outwards, instead of inwards, and focus on all the ways she's learned in the Academy, from Asuma-sensei, and mostly from Hatake-sensei about slipping through a building containing hostile people who may or may not be enemy ninja.
She slips down hallways, quieter than she'd been two weeks ago, her chakra muffled down until, if anyone notices, she might be thought to be nothing but a rat. Keeping her eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary, she takes a different path through the Main House, avoiding the hallway where Sakura and Hatake-sensei are supposed to be waiting for her, even though that's the most direct route back to the servant quarters.
But there's always another way.
Especially in a house like this, one that sprawls out in wings of rooms, segmented in purpose but together in form. There are backways and discreet doors all about the place and she knows where they are—in this part of the Main House, at least.
Despite listening for it, she doesn't hear anything out of the ordinary. No scuff of a boot, no swish of fabric, nothing that sounds like a low voice or a careful caution. No sound of steel being drawn.
Which… on one hand, is a very good thing. On the other hand, she has no idea where the enemy could be and that's dangerous.
Focus on the mission.
Because that's what this has become. Self-assigned and likely to backfire but—
As far as I know, I'm the only one operating uncompromised. I'm not even injured, not really. So, no matter how I feel about… it… I've got to figure out what's going on, if it's something I can fix on my own, or if I need to get out of here and get help.
She does really hope that she doesn't have to do that.
When she reaches the servant quarters, Ino slows down even more, taking extra caution with every half-open door she passes. She's both grateful and irritated at her and Sakura for having left the doors that way. It had made sense for searching but now, now it means she's got to treat every single door like there's a threat right inside, ready to move in if she's not careful.
But nothing and no one attacks her. There's nobody in the rooms. Even the sake bottle is right where they'd left it, unwanted and abandoned. The rugs layered out over one another. They reek and she grimly acknowledges that if there were any scents she needed to be aware of, she'd probably miss them.
Maybe that's one of the reasons Hatake-sensei hasn't been helping much with this wing.
Ino begins to file that thought away as unimportant before she frowns, hesitating inside the room with the rugs.
He was fine when we got here this morning. Sakura was fine until I excused myself to the bathroom. When, exactly, did Hatake-sensei get—compromised? If he was. When did he start being weird?
Ino throttles her fear that she left Sakura to an enemy's clutches all unaware. She can't think like that, not right now.
Sakura's smart. Crazy smart. I bet she noticed that Hatake-sensei wasn't being quite himself too. She wouldn't have been taken completely unaware.
It's not much, cold comfort if that, but Ino accepts it, acknowledges it, and tucks it away.
I didn't say anything because I didn't know. Hatake-sensei could have been just having an off day because of where we are.
That was what she'd expected, truthfully, when she'd dropped her shields.
And I couldn't have said anything anyway to Sakura, not right in front of him. If she'd wanted to come to the bathroom with me, he'd have waited outside the door, and with his senses, he'd have heard anything we'd said. I'll apologize to Sakura, later, once this has all been figured out. She'd seemed okay before I got tangled in the other mess.
And Daddy says you've got to trust your team, so I've got to trust that Sakura is going to be fine. That she'll be smart and clever and absolutely fine.
Ino slips across the hallway once's she's determined that, as far as she can tell, there's no one lurking around her. Her fledging sensor abilities are untrained but even before they'd ever been discovered, Ino had always been good at sensing chakra signatures.
She'd always thought it was part of her bloodline powers, since a human's chakra signature so often came with their mind not far behind, unless it was a bunshin, but—
But I can still sense chakra, no problem, even though I can't sense minds.
The room where they'd left the shards is unoccupied but—
Ino swears.
The shards are gone.
We don't even know what they are but if someone broke into a blood-warded estate for them—that's bad. That's really bad.
On the heels of that thought is:
I need to locate where the other chakra signatures are. That will tell me where Sakura and Hatake-sensei are and then, then I can gauge their situation.
Ino glances up, speculatively.
And I can do it from the rooftops. None of the minds I felt were outside.
It's tempting, so tempting to rush, but she takes her time to get to a room a few doors down, one with a window.
I'll just make sure not to look at the sky. I can't afford to zone out right now. I might not ever zone back in, if someone finds me.
And that would just be the absolutely worst way to go, it really would be. Embarrassing and shameful.
But there's things worse than embarrassment, Ino scolds herself and slips out the window, into the cool, clean air. And that's not looking after my teammates when they need me. Get to work, get to work.
It actually feels good to have a job to do.
Better than paying attention to the echoing emptiness of her own mind, something she's acutely aware of in all the worst ways.
Kakashi wakes abruptly, all at once, with his head screaming at him, an agony that he has to scramble to remember where and how it had occurred. The kitchen, he recollects, and—
There had been no fight. He hadn't been expecting it or braced for an attack. Despite being on alert he had been caught unawares. All around him is nothing but darkness, not even a line of light to give away a door. He breathes deeply around the pain, scenting the air with a touch of chakra to extend is already sharp senses a touch further.
Lemon, old and dusty. (Lots of dust, in fact, but that doesn't help narrow anything down, not here, on the estate.) Rags slowly falling apart. The sharp, deep scent of bleach and the odd fibers that make up sponges.
I'm in a closet. And, deep down, beyond the more important, analytical devotions, part of him is amused. They stuck me in a closet.
And left him bound and bound well. No work of amateurs this, nor Sakura and Ino's work, which he knows better than most at this point.
But these bindings are made in Konoha; I recognize them by feel. Which means either whoever did this is from Konoha, they've thought ahead enough to use products made here to engender confusion, or—they've taken it from our supplies.
He stretches out, seeing how much room he has to maneuver, how much give he's got to work with, and is honestly, genuinely surprised that—
They've left me my weapons.
He's not the kind of shinobi to overlook an advantage like that but it's confusing, all the same, because the people who got him, the people who bound him, they know what they're doing. Why this misstep?
It takes some finagling, the closet is small and he's a full-grown man, so the angles he needs take some work to contort into, but in short order, he's freed. The closet door is locked but it's barely worth noticing and then he's out, stepping into the hallway, narrowing his eye as he fishes out a painkiller for his head, which throbs.
I wonder what I was hit with. There was enough force to knock me out, and he had a significant goose egg coming in, tender to the touch, but his skin is unbroken. Enough force to knock me out but not enough to kill me.
That's also strange.
He can't think of any good reason off the top of his head to take him down, stick him in a closet, and then leave him alive to escape.
Unless they want me to escape. But then why would they have captured me in the first place?
On the heels of that thought, comes another, grimly:
Because they wanted me out of the way.
Which means the mystery of who did it comes secondary to locating his team. Anything that can take him out means his girls…
Three Genin are meant to be able to take down a Jounin, with luck and cleverness. And they're both incredibly talented—but they're not good enough, not yet.
He follows his nose, ears alert, chakra sweeping out for anything.
It was early when I was taken. It's been hours.
Because of how much time they've spent in the Main House, Ino and Sakura's scents crisscross the place.
The kitchen has been entered several times since he'd last set foot in it, though he hesitates a long moment before deciding that, frowning slightly, then shaking his head. The tea pot is stone cold. He follows Ino's scent when it breaks off from the other two—and it's strange because Sakura is with him according to his nose.
Impersonating me?
Likely.
But why am I alive then?
It's a puzzle he can't focus on, especially not when he finds the bathroom that Ino had spent some time in.
Vomit and tears. Panic, fear, and determination.
It's not comforting, not exactly, but she wasn't injured. No blood had been spilled here.
But she was—she was beyond upset, in a way that Ino doesn't usually get. Ino is more likely to get angry than cry. Sakura's the one prone to tears of the two of them. Something happened here and it sent my practical, rational student into a tailspin.
He follows her trail through the backways, taking a route that he hasn't walked through with them but one that—
She put this together, after spending so much time here. She knows where she's going and she's avoiding any chance of being seen in the main hallways. Something was wrong and she was aware of it.
Kakashi pauses, lingering in the doorway where several carpets are layered out over each other. The reek is terrible but he can work around it.
I was here.
Except that he hadn't been.
But that was before Ino came back here. And there's other scents here, Ino and Sakura, not quite the same, and another—I don't recognize them, not right off the bat.
The newest scent, Ino alone, however, goes across the hall, into a room that's clearly been searched and searched thoroughly. There's a spike of anxiety in Ino's scent here, one that he doesn't like, and he lingers by the table, looking down at it.
Why would the girls have taken the fragment they found with them?
Unless it hadn't been them who had. Was that what this was about?
Kakashi smiles faintly when he realizes that Ino's scent isn't heading back down the hallways—instead, it heads out a window.
Good girl, he thinks, glad she's removed herself from the Main House. The freedom of being outside will give her extra advantages.
Though now he has a choice to make.
Do I go after her and find out what's going on from her—or do I pick up Sakura's trail and see where she's gone?
Sakura watches as Ino disappears down the hallway, heading for the bathroom, and feels oddly… uneasy, standing here with Hatake-sensei and the large silence of the Main House. She glances around, not seeing anything that could explain the creeping feeling of…
I think I'm being watched, she realizes. And not by Hatake-sensei.
If he's sensed anything, though, he hasn't mentioned it.
But then, he wouldn't, not right away, Sakura thinks, following her thought to the end and finding logical sense at the bottom of it. We don't know what it is or if it's harmful or anything. If all they do is watch, are they really any different than the birds and bugs outside? We know we're the only people in here…
"Hatake-sensei," she says. "While we're waiting for Ino, can I get a drink?"
"And then you'll have to go to the bathroom," he says, a slightly teasing note in his voice.
She grins up at him. "Probably," Sakura says, a bit impudently in a way that she'd never have tried with Kakashi-sensei, not this mix of joking around and honesty.
He shifts a little, not quite a shrug. "Alright, that's fine." He glances down the hallway, where Ino had gone. "I'll come with you. We should get back at about the same time."
Sakura leads the way, though she's quiet now, and keeping her senses stretched as far as she can, in hopes she can spot something, sense anything, to explain why the hairs on the back of her neck keep rising.
She allows herself to wish, desperately, that she was a sensor—for one brief moment. Then she locks that thought away, buries it under grim determination, and focuses on what she can do. She's no sensor, but she knows Hatake-sensei's chakra and he is a soothing presence at her back as they spill into the kitchen.
Stretching her chakra out, paper-thin, she thinks she can feel Ino, too, and counts it as a victory even though the sense is so faint it might as well not exist. They're supposed to be keeping their chakra muted, after all, and Sakura might have better control but Ino has been doing that sort of thing longer than she is.
But that's all she feels—just herself, Ino, and Hatake-sensei. That's all she consciously senses, too. Unconsciously, however…
Something is wrong, she thinks, drinking cold water from the tap, using her cup from earlier, since it's the closest.
"Where is this thing you've found?" Sakura asks curiously, wracking her brain to try and think of anything, anyway, to make a code that Hatake-sensei would understand to ask if he's noticed anything.
Which is stupid, she realizes, the moment she thinks it—of course he has, why else would he have come with her to the kitchen instead of waiting in the hallway in case Ino came back quicker? And, too, when she looks at him over the rim of her cup, there's a tension in his shoulders that, most of the morning, hadn't been there at all.
Weirdly or maybe not, that makes Sakura feel better. Whatever's odd, he's got an eye on it.
As she drifts over to the window, finishing her drink, she casually looks outside. There's a thin beam of sunshine breaking through the clouds and no matter how useless that is, Sakura also takes comfort from that too. She's been a ninja long enough to know that shit can hit the fan whether the sun is shining or not but—
Feelings are incredibly illogical and this one is absolutely useless but…
She'll take it.
"Wait for Ino to get back," Hatake-sensei chides her.
Sakura shrugs a little, casting her gaze downwards, to see if she can spot anything (or anyone) hiding right under the window (oddly, it really is one of the best places to hide around windows; people don't like to look down) but she doesn't spot anyone. "She'd try if I wasn't around."
Hatake-sensei huffs something a little like a laugh as Sakura turns away from the window and puts her cup back on the counter.
"Are you sure you can't tell me anything?" Sakura wheedles, not really expecting this to work but taking the time to say it anyway. "Not even one little, teeny hint?"
"No," he says, as they leave the kitchen. "You're not even trying to be sneaky now."
"I mean, you're already on your guard," she says casually, like all of her hasn't mentally tripped over itself because that sounds an awful lot like the code she hadn't been able to come up with herself. "So why bother sneaking around?"
She hopes she's doing this right, they haven't really covered this, though Iruka-sensei back in the Academy, a million years ago (not even a year ago) had made them work at it during the teamwork modules.
Sakura had thought it was kind of a fun, silly game back then. It's much less silly now, much like almost everything in life.
It's so simple, a verbal round robin, testing to see where it goes wrong and who missteps by deflecting the wrong part or—expanding what shouldn't be expanded upon. Hatake-sensei smiles at her, the curve of an eyebrow more than anything else and that gives her a little more confidence as he nods.
They wait for Ino, once they're back in the hallway, in silence but this time, it's watchful instead of peaceful and while they're both doing their best to look casual (Hatake-sensei is better at this than she is, even she can tell) they're on alert.
It's why, when Ino comes back, the first thing Sakura notices is that Ino is a few shades paler than she ought to be. In the uncertain lighting it's almost impossible to miss—
Except, Sakura knows Ino. Knows her better than she knows almost anyone else and they've been on this mission, no one else, for days and days and she's paying attention.
Sakura bites down the urge to ask Ino if she's alright. Ino is moving like she's fine and—if there's anything wrong, they can't let the enemy know.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Ino says cheerfully and Sakura smiles at the fact that, yeah, Ino is also better at playing casual than she is. "Where are we off to?"