Hatake Kakashi stared up at the bloody husk that was once Shimura Danzo hanging from a tree by the neck. Well, what was left of the neck anyways. It had been savaged viciously by having the entire weight of a tree being used to pull it taut. It was a wonder Danzo's whole head hadn't been removed.
"Damn Hatake. They never did anything this fun during my exam." Anko commented. He didn't bother turning towards her to see her shit eating grin, he could hear it fine in her voice.
Kakashi gave a hum of acknowledgment, he just didn't have it in him for much more than that.
"Who pissed in your cereal? They killed him. That's impressive!" Anko pressed.
"Too impressive. Danzo was way more powerful than they would have a hope in even surviving. When he found them he must have already been mostly dead. They were incredibly lucky, because if they met him one minute earlier he would have been able to take all of them out before anyone would have been able to do anything."
The worst part was that it was his fault. He hadn't expected them to be able to find him, since Masayoshi shouldn't have had enough training yet to be capable of tracking a target moving on the treetops like he had been. Sasuke's summon apparently had that spark of genius too. Still, he should have known that he couldn't dangle information about the death of Sasuke's family and just expected the boy to sit still.
This was on him.
Kakashi glanced down at his genin, who were all three debating with each other on what to do next. They hadn't gotten far into the debate either, meaning they'd probably arrived mere seconds after the brats managed to kill the S-Class shadow leader of a fanatical group of indoctrinated assassins, who was also personably responsible for ordering the massacre of one of said brat's family.
Not that Sasuke actually KNEW Danzo was responsible. He just thought the man he killed was profiting off their deaths. He got his vengeance and didn't know it yet.
Of the three, only Naruto seemed to be emotionally affected by the death they just dealt. Sasuke was arguing they should press forward, Sakura was saying insisting that they should send up a flare and let allies know where to find the body and mostly seemed to be trying to not look and macabre tree decoration, but it was Naruto that stared up at the body with a troubled look on his face, something clearly building in him as his teammates argued over what to do.
"Guys! He was still a person!" Naruto yelled angrily. "We should cut him down and find someone to take care of the body. It's...it feels wrong to just leave it hanging."
"Mah. Let's not get too touchy with him." Kakashi said after he leapt behind his students.
"Sensei!" The three yelled in surprise at his sudden appearance, well, except for Naruto.
"Wha- but it feels...wrong to just leave a person-" Naruto tried.
"He was poisoned with a powerful and experimental poison and there is a strong possibility he has suicide seals on him. Touching him is a bad idea." Kakashi interrupted.
It would likely be fine, but if the poison worked on those with enhanced healing then there was a strong possibility it would work on Naruto as well. He couldn't risk it. The warning was potent enough that all three kids took two large steps away from where the body was hanging.
"Though trussing him up in a tree? Fucking art." Anko commented as she appeared between Sasuke and Sakura and invaded their personal space with a hand seizing a shoulder each and pulling the two genin into herself.
"Wha-"
"Eek!"
Anko ignored their cries as her voice choked up, "It's just so beautiful. I finally have hope for the next generation."
The two genin struggled to get out of the woman's grip, which Anko allowed, but she didn't stop gushing. "A traitor, hung up by the neck from a tree, by genin no less! God damn poetry!"
Kakashi looked away from the spectacle and tapped the radio in his ear three times to signal to the others Danzo had been taken care of before throwing a shuriken to cut the ninja wire, letting Danzo's body fall to the ground.
"Sasuke." Kakashi called to his student before nodding towards the body. "Would you like the honors?"
The body had bits and pieces of his family surgically added to it. The boy was allowed that closure.
Sasuke looked back in question before a look of understanding crossed his face.
"Hey, what's going on? What's he doing?" Naruto began to ask, only for Sasuke to answer the question by running through seals and a ball of fire roaring out towards the corpse. "Whoa, what? Why did you do that?"
"The poison used on this body is dangerous. Too dangerous. We can't risk someone taking the body and finding a way to reverse engineer it." Kakashi answered. "Plus, Danzo was a very paranoid man. There is no telling what nasty surprises he put into his body to kill those that killed him."
"But we're still in Konoha." Naruto pointed out.
Kakashi considered that statement and he had to acknowledge that the kid had a point, but the events of the last few months had made him pessimistic about the likelihood of the body having some dark secret in it that would come to bite him in the ass.
Plus there was something very satisfying about watching the body burn, though perhaps that was a sign that he really did need to start taking a few more breaks. He didn't often feel this vindicated with the death of another.
"Why are the brats here?" Tsunade asked as she entered the clearing with gravitas and a boldness that felt very inappropriate for a woman that he just had to babysit for the entirety of the last battle.
"They killed him!" Anko shouted as she squeezed Sasuke and Sakura to herself again.
"Please stop touching me." Sasuke stated with the suffering of a wet cat.
"You're that old lady that kept meeting with the Pervy Sage!" Naruto shouted while pointing an accusing finger.
"I"m not old- wait, what the hell are you doing here kid? Aren't you supposed to be in the tournament!?" She demanded.
"Well we found out Kakashi-sensei was in trouble, so we had to head here and help, so I left." Naruto said with a simple shrug.
"God damnit!" Tsunade shouted and lashed an arm at a nearby tree, which exploded in a shower of splinters making the collected genin's eyes widen in shock. "I bet 300,000 ryo on you!"
The clearing got extremely quiet after the multiple tons of tree finished falling after the declaration. Kakashi couldn't bring himself to say that betting on Naruto was foolish, as the kid had a decent shot at winning the whole thing, if only because he had the sheer stamina and healing to be relatively fresh by the end of the tournament in comparison to everyone else. He was also the kind of dark horse bet that Tsunade was a sucker for.
Tadaomi entered the clearing with a statement that broke the silence.
"Karma." The quiet man muttered.
Tsunade shot the Sarutobi an angry look.
"Right, well it's time to face the music. I'll go take the kids in and explain what's happeneing. Someone stays here and makes sure the body stays burning, and Tsunade gets to explain to the Sandaime that we just murdered his oldest friend." Kakashi cut in as he began to gesture for the genin to follow him.
"Me? Why do I have to be the one to explain it?" She demanded.
Anko and Tadaomi joined in on staring Tsunade down.
"A MILD phobia?" Kakashi demanded and Tsunade had the good graces to look embarassed, even if it was only for a fraction of a second.
xxxxxxx
"You won't get anything out of me."
Yakushi Kabuto laughed at the irony, though his prisoner failed to find the humor. How could he? The man had very different ideas on why he was there.
"You sure he's one of them?" Nono asked.
"Yes-" Mother, Kabuto willed himself to say it. She was his mother and he wanted nothing more than to be able to casually call her as such in conversation. "Nono, I checked his tongue myself."
He mentally cursed himself for it, though his mother caught the hitch and knew why it happened. She placed an encouraging hand on his shoulder and gave him an encouraging smile.
He would get better at it.
Still, he had other things to focus on, like the man in front of him. The man was the very image of the phrase 'slightly below average'. He wasn't very good looking, he was just a little short, and his hair landed somewhere between black and brown. The perfect ROOT agent. He didn't stick out and was extremely forgettable.
It was too bad for him that Kabuto had many ways of sniffing out one of Danzo's hoard.
"He didn't have that seal when I was alive. How does it work?" Nono asked, making conversation. Kabuto personally knew for a fact that it had been explained to her previously but he understood why she asked.
She was trying to be social and enjoy the time with him. He appreciated it.
"The seal makes it so that the agent can't speak of Danzo or any of his operations. It can also be used to give debilitating pain. I am uncertain to the underlying mechanics though I do know that some documents stolen from the Hyuga on the Caged Bird Seal were used as the basis for the creation of this seal."
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"Really? I doubt the Hyuga will be happy about that when it comes out." Nono noted.
"Yes, though it is inferior in some ways, such as-"
The man in the chair suddenly flinched and a look of utter heartbreak crossed his face.
"No." The prisoner's words like shattered glass.
A smile graced Kabuto's face.
"Was that it?" Nono asked in interest.
Kabuto grabbed the man in the chair by his face and forced his mouth open to allow a view of the tongue and saw only a perfectly healthy and unmarked tongue.
"Yes. There is no seal now." Kabuto replied, as joy filled him. He rushed to Nono and enveloped the woman in a hug as they both began to bubble with laughter that drowned out the soft cries and denials from the man in the chair.
"He's dead!" Nono shouted triumphantly.
Finally. The man responsible for ruining both their lives had paid for his crimes with his own. The only way the seal would have disappeared was if the person who applied it died, and the two had been waiting for hours for confirmation on the death of the bane of their existence.
Kabuto practically skipped to the door to the door. "Come, I have some fine quality sake in my room."
"Can I even get drunk?" Nono asked as she gestured to the black eyes of her resurrected form.
He knew the answer was no.
"We can certainly try." Kabuto said as he offered an arm to escort his mother. He was so giddy he almost didn't ensure that the cell locked behind them as they left.
"How did you get yours removed by the way?" Nono asked him as they walked.
"Oh, you just have to cut that part of your tongue off and then just heal it afterwards." Kabuto said dismissively before an interesting question came to him.
"So do you think he died to the cancer or did they get him some other way?" Kabuto personally was hoping for death via the cancer slowly suffocating him, but he wasn't picky.
"I was hoping for rectal trauma personally." Nono offered.
"Interesting? Expound please." Kabuto encouraged.
It was important for family to spend time together talking about shared interests.
Besides, he'd had to skulk around at a fancy wedding all day, which meant having to wear layers upon layers of fancy kimonos and the layers that went with them. The wedding had been boring and his protection proved pointless. Not a single hidden village bothered to look in on the marriage of a minor nation's Daimyo and the son of another Daimyo. The most significant part of Orochitama's plan and no one even bothered to get curious.
He still wasn't certain he understood the woman, but he was confident of one thing; he served a frightening force of nature. Not just the wedding, but also helping to overthrow the Kage of a foreign nation while also ensuring that Danzo was taken care of, by his own village no less. Plus that lucky bit of lab work that had given Lightning and Cloud something else to worry about, but at the same time, doing so in a way that could have been exponentially worse. All of that with being secondary objectives? Secondary objectives that would have served a purpose to the plan even if they failed?
The most amazing part of all though, was that all through out it, he'd never once heard her lie. Oh, she would bend the truth or give the truth in a misleading way, but he had not once heard her give a direct lie.
That could all be to con him, but...
"Nono, would you regret being brought back if Orochitama did somehow have a dark alternate objective that she springs up down the line?"
Nono's face became granite as they walked. Kabuto let her have the moment to consider the question and the possible implications of his question, they walked side by side down the hall, content in the quiet and contemplation.
"No, I don't think I could regret it. I got to meet you, and I got to help all those children. I can't imagine I could be made to regret those actions." Nono answered in the echoing stone halls.
"Good. I'd hate to have helped cause a war today and have to face that future with regrets." Kabuto joked.
Well, kind of joked. The possibility that he just cemented what would initiate the next Great Ninja War.
"Don't joke like that." Nono chided, "It's still very possible that war will be avoided."
"I'm a bit of a pessimist on human nature. Particularly for those that wear headbands." Kabuto said with mirth. All it took was one major village acting in fear or anger at the wrong time and the whole edifice would come crumbling down.
"Oh, so you've come to doubt your master now? You have spoken so highly of her for so long I was thinking you not capable of it." Nono replied with equal mirth.
"She has won and pulled off amazing things," Kabuto acknowledged with an incline of his head, "but after winning so often, with such great stakes? An arrogance rises in you and you get sloppy. It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. Eventually, the various plots and plans will catch up with us."
Though if it did, Kabuto couldn't find it in himself to regret his decisions. He found his place and he'd ride it till the end of the line. The adventure would be interesting if nothing else.
xxxxxxx
A, the Fourth Raikage and leader of the Village Hidden in Clouds scratched madly at the itch on his back, though his back was only mildly less itchy than the rest of his body, his entire body covered in an angry rash that left small vibrant blisters over his body.
"Report." A ordered his underling.
"Sir! We're looking into it still, but our medics say that the outbreak appears to be a mutated form of Chicken Pox." The envoy from his medical division stated.
"I've already had Chicken Pox! Isn't that supposed to stop me from getting it!?" He yelled as he scratched harder.
"Yes sir, but this one is different, more contagious, and capable of infecting even those that had the disease before."
If it was infecting even those that should have an immunity then the elderly would be particularly susceptible to this disease. Doubtlessly many were already infected. The rash first started appearing the previous night and by lunch the following day half of the entire village was displaying symptoms. Of all the things that he had suspected might one day cause the fall of his hidden village he never once imagined disease to be what ravaged them.
"Casualties?" A asked.
"None." The man answered. "It's infections but it's not a particularly dangerous strain of the pox. Many of the first cases are currently being given clean bills of health."
A blinked in surprise. The last twelve hours had been nerve wracking as the leadership in Cloud realized the mounting problem and everyone scrambled to implement quarantines and began grabbing the medics necessary to study the samples and come up with a miracle cure to save everyone. He had felt so certainly that it was an act of malice or at least something that would cripple their village and make them a ripe target for an enemy to come wipe them out.
Now to find out that it was a mild illness that would result in the village just taking a 24 hour break left him feeling vaguely stunned and confused. It didn't feel right. How could something like this NOT have been a plot? Diseases do occasionally just happen but the level of infection shown felt so very targeted.
"What else is happening? What reports have we recieved?" A asked, not being able to shake the feeling there was something else here to find.
The ninja began flipping through pages to sum up recent events.
"Well, the Chunin exams happened. A genin from Sand won the tournament, the suspected jinchuriki that is the Kazekage's son. Iwa suddenly increased their border patrols but seem unwilling to cross the border. A shipping company announced the creation of a university. There was a wedding between-"
The door to his office slammed open.
"Hidden Mist had a coup!" The one of his messengers yelled as she ran into the room, panting and sweating. The woman had clearly been pushing herself to get the message to him as quickly as possible. "Yagura has been removed by a rebellion with assistance from Hidden Sound Village."
Sound Village? Were the events of that ridiculous fair an audition for the events of the coup? If they were willing to work against other major hidden villages though they could be a useful tool for Cloud. Though if Yagura was killed, there was a opportunity in the air.
"Do we know what happened with the Three-Tailed Beast?" A asked hopefully.
"We don't know where it is, but to our knowledge they haven't managed to reseal him into a jinchuriki." The runner panted out.
An opportunity was here. They could secure another tailed beast for Cloud and they were the ones to know how to help a jinchuriki reach their maximum potential. If they got the Sanbi then no other village could possibly hope to stand against them.
But, he had to consider the plague going on. What happened if the disease had something hidden still? What if other symptoms flared up after the initial ones abated? Not to mention, Mist would be on high guard looking for loyalists and people trying to take advantage of their shown weakness.
"Assemble a team, put them on ready status to move. Make sure that you put someone capable of sealing a tailed beast on the team. We will have them waiting to move at a moments notice." He would be ready to take advantage of the opportunity presented, but he wouldn't jump yet. There was too much going on for him to be comfortable with sending a seal master of the needed caliber out. "Also, take some people not displaying symptoms right now and have them begin patrols. I want the patrols tripled! Pay close attention to the border near Earth!"
"Sir!" The two acknowledged just as a third runner entered the room.
"The Daimyo is demanding to speak with you immediately!"
The Daimyo? A wanted to roll his eyes in exasperation. With so much going on it felt only appropriate that the Daimyo wanted to waste his time.
"Tell him I'll hear from him tomorrow." A said with a dismissive wave.
"I'm sorry, Raikage-sama, the Daimyo is demanding to speak with you immediately." The man said with a deep bow.
A grumbled but stood and went to have the call. If the Daimyo was this insistent it was likely at least mildly important, but the man likely didn't appreciate the other concerns that were far more pressing.
"What did he say it was about?" He asked as he grabbed the hat of his office and placing it on his head.
"He mentioned the recent marriage of Daimyo of the Land of Valleys to one of the children of the Daimyo of the Land of Hills."
Those small piddly nations? They were chosing now to start something? Annoying but he figured it shouldn't be anything too terrible.
xxxxx
Sarutobi Hiruzen walked home through the rain in his plain clothes, the hat and robes of the Hokage left in his office. A small part of him wanted to curse the position, the world, and subordinates that thought they knew better. He settled for blaming himself and Shimura Danzo.
It had started with Naruto skipping out on his match, something Hiruzen was sure the boy wouldn't do. It had made a sense of dread fill the rest of his day, culminating in a meeting that spelled out directly to him all his failures.
Mind control. Hiruzen was aware he wasn't perfect and he'd made misteps leading the people of Konoha, but to have cold hard proof placed before him showing that the trust that had been placed in him by his subordinates, the family that was the Hidden Leaf, had been stolen by the man he thought was his oldest friend.
The weather at least had the decency to appropriately match his mood. The rain came down in sheets while the sky lit up with choking fingers of light and sound. Such weather brought Hiruzen into a melancholy mood on an ordinary day and felt fitting with the numbness that had settled over him. The whole meeting went by in a blur, with him missing most of the reported facts in the face of the documents provided to him proving Danzo's manipulation.
Except for the fact that Naruto's team were apparently the ones to strike the last blow. Despite himself, he couldn't stop the dry humor that filled him at that team, of all teams, being the one to put the man down. It felt fitting, now that he knew.
He arrived into his home and felt his most loyal guards peeling away from him. His son's wife practically marching him to their bedroom with her aura of malcontent blazing around her. Apparently, she did not appreciate that Tadaomi hadn't brought her into the loop for the attack on Danzo.
The two had the most intense fights for a couple that refused to yell at one another.
Hiruzen went to his own room and shed his clothes, putting on his bed-robes and paying respects to the shrine of his late wife.
Biwako never had liked Danzo, and he remembered taking her advice to heart once upon a time.
"I'm so sorry. I should have noticed that I stopped listening to you." Hiruzen muttered as he lit a stick of insince and allowed himself some time to feel sorry for himself, though it was not long before his knees began to protest the position. He didn't even bother heading to his bed, he wasn't likely to get sleep this night.
He instead headed to his study, the same that Tsunade had met with him at recently. Even if it was now apparent that his wayward student had just been trying to check on his mental health after finding out about Danzo's actions. It was reassuring to know she still cared.
Hiruzen shook his head to rid himself of his thoughts as he reached his study and-
Someone was there. Someone had managed to get through all the security of his home and was in his personal study that was full of nothing but pieces of fiction and rambling thoughts Hiruzen had scribbled down on subjects ranging from statecraft and warfare to philosophy and gardening. Anything truly useful was moved from the room. It was a room dedicated to sentimentality.
He could only think of two people that had the ability and motivation to enter. One of his students had come to see him, possibly worried about him. A smile tugged at his lips as he opened the door and he prepared to greet his student kindly.
Instead the air was knocked from lungs.
Unnaturally pale skin, long black hair, purple markings surrounding the dangerous eyes of a predator. She turned to look at him and Hiruzen was surprised to note that the other had not, in fact, been messing with him and the woman did indeed have curves that sent lesser men to drooling, but it was a distant thought in the face of seeing the woman preparing his favorite tea and serving it with his favorite snack to be served along side it.
She wore not the uniform of a soldier, nor the dresses the reports indicated she so commonly wore, but instead she wore a sweater, denim pants, and a scared and apologetic smile.
"Sensei." She greeted. "Join me for tea?"