Five Things That Didn't Happen in Canon, and One That Still Might--Part II
LEAVING
“Whaaat?” Naruto cried, voice hitting octaves that Tsunade personally thought should never leave a male’s throat, no matter what his age. “Five months?"
“That’s what I said,” Tsunade responded, hearing her voice go so dry it practically crackled. “B-rank mission, information gathering, five months, under the command of jounin Hatake Kakashi. Should I spell it, brat? Did you follow me that time?”
“But but but…” Naruto looked honestly distressed, as though she hadn’t just handed him the type of mission that young shinobi usually salivated over. “But what about Sakura-chan?” he wailed.
“I decided that this mission didn’t require Haruno Sakura’s particular skill-set,” Tsunade answered wryly, mentally adding because your sensei says that she doesn’t really have one. Kakashi, leaning back against the wall near the door with his arms crossed, coughed. She ignored him.
“But we’re a team,” Naruto insisted, looking between his sensei and other teammate for support. He failed to catch either person’s eye, mainly because Kakashi seemed to be pretending that he didn’t know the kids in the room with him and Uchiha Sasuke was attempting to be nonchalant about looking at everything but Naruto and her. She promised herself she could bang her head against her desk once she finished here.
“I’m temporarily attaching Jiraiya to your squad as a freelance informant,” she told him, and continued to talk over Naruto’s exclamation of ‘that pervert…?’ “He has an extensive information network which should benefit the mission.” And if he doesn’t have to report what he finds to someone other than me, he’ll only tell me what he thinks I need to know. Or spend more time in brothels than actually gathering information… “You ship out this evening. Go and get ready.”
Naruto stared at her for a minute, looking honestly upset, and then his mouth snapped shut, eyes sharpening to edges like a newly-honed kunai and jaw firming. He pulled himself up to his full height (which even for his age wasn’t very impressive-seriously, who was in charge of feeding him?), and opened his mouth again to say something completely inappropriate for a subordinate to his commanding officer…
“Naruto.” Kakashi’s voice cut through the tension quick as a blade. “You do not argue with direct orders from your Hokage.”
Naruto spun towards his teacher, anger and frustration and something that looked just a little too much like betrayal written all over his face. Kakashi stared back levelly. It was a mark of just how much Naruto had come to respect Kakashi that he only rested on the verge of arguing with him for about a second, in the end stomping out of the room without looking back, slamming the door behind him.
“I apologize on behalf of my student,” Kakashi said in the wake of that truly amazing show of maturity. Tsunade waved him off.
“I know Naruto,” she assured him. Not an excuse for his behavior, but an acknowledgement of the fact that Naruto didn’t observe authority or the chain of command because he didn’t really understand it-a side-effect of growing up almost entirely without either. “Have a word with him.” Kakashi nodded-no salute, but he was a jounin and had learned how useless standing on formality was by now-and followed his student out the door in a much less obtrusive manner. Uchiha made to follow them.
“Shinobi,” she said, leaning back in her seat and resting her elbows against the armrests of her chair, fingers folding neatly in front of her. “I’d like a word with you myself.” The brat stiffened, then turned back towards her, legs akimbo and hands down at his sides where she could see them-a ninja at-ease. It was another formality Tsunade hadn’t seen very often since taking office. As a rule, shinobi really stopped seeing the point of at-ease as they became more experienced and realized that there were ways to hide weapons even when they could see your hands.
She hadn’t really doubted that Kakashi’s second orphan would know the meaning of authority. She remembered the Uchiha children, back when there were almost as many of them as there were children from the other clans. Always too quiet and too respectful and too isolated from everyone but each other, and she really needed to stop thinking about this or she’d welcome Uchiha Itachi back with open arms and award him a commendation for services to humanity.
Still, that didn’t mean she’d let his kid brother get away with attempted treason. After all, there was a difference between understanding authority and deciding that it applied to you. She eyed him up and down, and let the silence stretch into ‘uncomfortable’ before she spoke.
“I didn’t hear you complaining about leaving your teammate behind. Surprising, considering you two were apparently having midnight meetings,” she said blandly. Uchiha flushed a little and scowled, but didn’t contradict her. Well, at least he wasn’t stupid enough to talk about considering defection with the Hokage… “I admit I’m curious as to your thoughts on the matter.”
Very curious, considering he’d roused her from her bed at Oh-God-Shoot-Me o’clock last night, his teammate in tow, to tell her about top secret information that she already knew, but that they certainly should not have (and that reminded her, she needed to have a little chat with Mitarashi Anko and Sarutobi Asuma later about their conversation topics and the chosen venues for them…). Not to mention the kid’s uncanny knowledge of where exactly she could find five of Orochimaru’s top agents (teenagers, all of them, and wasn’t that just typical of her ex-teammate…), and was carrying a traveling pack. Tsunade was in her fifties. She wasn’t stupid.
“It’s better if she stays,” Uchiha informed her. A pause, then he unclenched his jaw enough to add “She’d only get in the way.” His eyes flicked uncomfortably to somewhere over her left shoulder. Tsunade hadn’t been fluent in too-cool-twelve-year-old-boy for a while, but she was pretty sure that translated into human as “she could get hurt.”
“I see…” she murmured, relieved despite herself. One less person thrown into the line of fire to appease a pre-teen genin.
As much as she hated to admit it, the brats’d had a point about Naruto staying in the village. With Uchiha Itachi on the team, getting into Konoha was much easier for Akatsuki than she was really comfortable with. Add to that the fact that most of the civilian population (and a disturbing amount of the shinobi population) was stupid enough to think that Uzumaki Naruto was anything but pure, unadulterated, under-socialized 12-year-old… Well, it was really obvious that Naruto was safer away from here and on the move.
Uchiha Sasuke needed to get out of the village for reasons very similar to Naruto’s. Sandaime had promised to keep this boy safe, from himself or anyone else, and she intended to, on pain of Uchiha Itachi’s not-unsizable wrath. If Orochimaru’s men had broken in to approach Sasuke once, they could do it again. Plus, the fact that he’d been all set to go the first time meant not only that she couldn’t vouch for his staying power next time, but that people who would object to a potentially traitorous Uchiha would have a damn field day once they found out. She didn’t doubt they would, sooner or later. This was a shinobi village. People gossiped like it was their job (in many cases, it was).
She’d wanted to send them off in different directions, but the fact of the matter was that there was no point in saving this kid from Orochimaru if he would just go himself. Unfortunately, if she’d read the situation correctly last night, that’s exactly what he’d do if he wasn’t allowed to hang around Naruto despite affiliation with Konoha.
“I don’t think I have to tell you that once out there, you are expected to report an enemy sighting immediately,” she told him conversationally. He startled a little at the abrupt shift in topic (Damn, but this kid was young…), but rallied faster than she thought he would.
“Yes, Hokage-sama,” he murmured. His voice was sarcastic enough to qualify as insubordination, to her intense amusement, but she decided to let it slide this time. She’d just told him he was on probation, after all. She could probably cut him a little slack. He’d at least realized that that was what she was saying, which was more than most kids his age would have managed.
And anyway, she thought she could come to appreciate an Uchiha who had some backbone in the face of authority.
“Good. Dismissed.” She leaned forward and pretended to read the papers in front of her until he left the room and started down the stairs. She smirked, then called a courier and gave them orders to bring the mission scroll to Hatake Kakashi, and then to summon Anko and Asuma to her office. Too bad she wouldn’t be there to see Hatake’s face when he read it, but she had bigger fish to fry.
* * *
Mission Rank: B
Duration: Five Months
Objectives:
- Obtain intelligence on whereabouts of Akatsuki and Oto bases in west Earth Country.
- Distract Jiraiya-preferably without actually reading any of the drivel he writes. You are on a mission, shinobi.
- Teach your brats better intelligence-gathering and subterfuge skills. The show they made of them in the last 24 hours was embarrassing.
Back to Part I
Enjoy, everyone! Part III as soon as my muses decide to come back from their lunch break and tell me what the heck is going on already...