Chapter 15: Team Training Arc: Three

Disclaimer: Still don't own Naruto.

On a chilly winter evening, Muta invites us back to his house in the Aburame Compound, including Ensui-sensei, who begs off to go elsewhere. Toku and I tag along though, and I think about if I remember what the inside of the Aburame Clan Compound looked like, or even if it was featured in the anime at all.

I draw a blank. The Aburame were known to be insular, withdrawn, and stoic. They aren't actively feared, but the civilians within Konoha did find bugs distasteful and tended to avoid the Aburame as a general rule of thumb. So the fact that we'd been invited to visit at all despite it being nearly nine months since we'd been teamed together is actually a larger success than I thought would be possible.

"My parents are eager to meet you both." Muta says, his expression placid. "And my little sister would very much like to meet Hana-chan especially."

Toku grins. "Not me, Mu-kun?" He slings an arm over Muta's shoulder in a casual gesture of good cheer. "After all, everyone knows that I'm devilishly handsome."

I snort and punch him in the shoulder. "You mean, you're an average Hyuga clan member with disconcerting white eyes and an ever stiff and formal manner."

Toku smirks at me. "And you're the unfocused girl from dog hill."

I shrug. "We are what we are."

We walk onward in companionable silence.

Aburame Nao and Aburame Shoko are welcoming, if a bit stoic enough as to be nearly impenetrable. They are perfectly polite, and perfectly complementary moving with gentle synchronized grace, but if I thought I was accomplished for being able to read Muta, I deserve to be smacked upside the head. Muta is positively exuberant when compared to his parents even back when he was acting guarded.

We eat dinner with polite, courteous conversation and Hisae chatters at me nonstop about what it means to be a konoichi, her kikaichu humming as I speak to her.

I tell her about the long days in the training fields underneath the baking summer sun, then again in the chilly wind of autumn. I tell her about searching for kunai in manure piles or the one flower in a field that had Sensei's chakra imbibed in it. I tell her about the only C-rank mission that we've completed so far, and why Sensei let us wait so long before we went on it. I tell her the importance of working as a team and how much fun I've had with her brother and Toku.

It's a warm experience to be able to talk about my life, all it's upsides and it's downsides with someone who is happy enough to listen.

At the end of the night, Nao-san invites us back for monthly visits and Muta smiles at us. "That's the most Okaa-san and Otou-san have spoken in one night in living memory."

I blink at him. "How did you learn to talk if no one ever talks to you?" I hear Toku howling with laughter behind us and I grimace. "I'm sorry, Muta-kun that's just rude."

He smiles at me again, twice in one night, which must be some kind of record, and shakes his head. "I don't mind, and yes, Aburame children do tend to also speak less than Inuzuka children."

I take the stab at my clan with good grace, as I had certainly been rude to his just moments before, and drift on homewards.

I'm awoken in the middle of the night two months later by Kaa-san shaking me. "Your idiot sensei wants you for a mission Hana-chan."

I jerk awake. Ensui-sensei wants us now? It has to be time sensitive. "When?" I ask as I start throwing on clothes. "How long?" I ask, reaching for a pack while attempting to strap on my kunai pouch at the same time.

"It's a chase. An infiltrator's gotten out of the village, and they need a tracking team to run them down."

I nod. "No pack then. Just kunai, shuriken, soldier pills, and the Triplets."

Kaa-san pats me on the head. "This is one of the most important missions you'll take as a genin, Little Nose." She crouches down to look me in the eye. "They reserve the bigger fish for the Hunter Nin Squads in ANBU, but this one your idiot sensei must have thought was your skill level." Kaa-san ruffles my hair. "Out and at 'em. Get 'em good."

I smile at her. "It's what we do best." With a whistle for the Triplets I race down the stairs, three sets of paws thumping along after me into the night.

Sensei is standing on the porch with Toku. "I told Muta to meet us at the west gate." He says by word of greeting as we run through the streets. "There's been a chunin plant from Kumo who left the village earlier tonight. She should be about two hours ahead of us."

"Mission parameters, Sensei?" Toku asks as we approach the gate. Through the looming darkness I see Muta's high collared outline. As we get closer, a single kikaichu settles on each of us, and the Triplets break formation to come stand, one beside each of us.

Ensui-sensei tosses a kunai holster stained with what must have been blood at them. "This is the target's pouch. The gate guards were able to take this off her during her escape." He then turns and hands Tokuma a picture. "This is what the target looks like." The woman is unsurprisingly not distinctive. Dark brown hair down, at shoulder length. Dark brown eyes, oval face, her face is generic enough that unless she is singled out, no one would pay much attention or recall seeing it before.

The Triplets sniff at the pouch, and then Ichi turns to me. "We have the scent."

I nod. "They have the scent, En-sensei."

Beside me, Muta's kikaichu are buzzing louder than usual. "And my kikaichu have the chakra signature of the target as well."

Ensui-sensei nods. "Our parameters are capture, live or dead. Preferably we keep the plant alive so T&I can get what they learned from the village out of them, but failing that, if it's a necessary kill, I will do my best to take care of that." With that dose of sobriety, we leap into the trees, Ichi taking point.

"I found the scent!" Ni cries. "I found it."

After that, we race through the forest following the scent track that he'd found.

We'd been running for what seemed like forever, the sky lightening more by the minute when Ichi suddenly backtracks into Ni and San. "TRAP!" He barks and I scramble to inform everyone else.

"Trap." I make the two requisite hand seals as everyone else realizes that there is something deeply wrong, and replace myself with a log. The ground where I'd been standing explodes outwards and Sensei scoops all of us up and leaps into the trees. It's only there that we realize we'd messed up more badly than we'd ever thought.

It isn't just that we'd walked into a trap and nearly got blown to kingdom come. It's that Sensei is clearly injured, having taken the brunt force of the rubble we would have been pelted with, and that we were not alone.

"All of you..." Sensei rasps. "Pay attention and remember the mission directive." He has his hands held in the rat seal, but the sun wasn't entirely up yet. Whatever shadow possession technique sensei had, it would need more light to be effective. Knowing that, I reach for the bottle of soldier pills, and slide one into my hand. San growls, as two opponents appear before us.

"Let's finish off the brats before we leave." The woman is clearly the mission target...the man with her wearing the Kumo headband...probably backup. My mind supplies as Sensei rises to his feet, still swaying. The tree trunk he'd been leaning on is stained with blood, and for the first time since I'd tied on my headband, I knew we might actually die here.

"You'll get to my students through me." Sensei replies, and the man scoffs.

"What, you're half dead already. Maybe I'll finish you off" He's moving before he finishes the sentence. I don't have time to glance at either of my teammates. We just scatter in different directions. Tokuma and I end up in the same vicinity as Sensei clashes blades with the Kumo nin. Our mission target though, she'd gone after Muta. And he is blocking her tanto strikes with a kunai, his arms shaking with the exertion. A strike gets past his defenses, and he's suddenly on the ground as he holds his head.

San leaps in front of him and growls. "Not my pack." San is still growling when I toss him the soldier pill.

"Muta! Get out of the way!" With blood still roaring in my ears, I close my eyes and match my chakra with San's. We open our eyes and the enemy is in front of us. Caught between us. We leap. She's fast enough to evade us, because we aren't fast enough and we slam into a tree, but we're better than we were before, and we have our teammates right behind us. The tall white eyed one is using his fists and hands to defend the one with bugs. We are supposed to take out the target.

They'd made Sensei bleed. They'd make us all bleed if they could.

We couldn't see anything else. We are angry and we leap, this time not caring to spin. We had claws and teeth. We'd shred them if we could. Our jaws close on the target from behind and there's a tearing, a ripping, and a scream that cuts off in a gurgle and Tokuma's got his hands raised at the level of the woman's throat and I am not San and he is not me, but there's blood in my mouth just as I'm sure there's blood in his. Muta's kikaichu rise from the woman's hair, they must have been sucking chakra to slow her down, and the body thumps to the ground. I stare at Tokuma and Muta, and they stare back. We've just killed someone.

"You bit her. With San." Toku says.

I crack a smile, and wipe the blood from my lips. The taste is still on my tongue, metallic enough that if I swallow, I'd gag on it. "You went to close the tenketsu in the throat, and Muta went for the drain chakra until she stops moving or dies."

Muta looks down at the body with wide, wide eyes, blood trickling down the side of his face. "Well, we have to make sure that the rest of our team's alright." In the absence of any sort of normality, we defaulted to the team rules. Never leave a teammate behind.

We look back to where we'd left Sensei. He is slumped against the tree holding a kunai to his own throat. The attacking man also had a kunai to his throat, but his mouth is spitting poison.

"Hanae's certain to have finished off those brats by now." Sensei's head is bowed, and his hair's come out of it's high tail so that it falls loosely around his face. I attempt to lunge at the man, but my left leg gives out on me as a stabbing pain shoots up my side.

"Hrrk." I collapse onto my knees and Ni comes to support my other side. There's a long gash up my calve that I hadn't even noticed, and it is dripping blood into the dry packed earth.

"Don't either of you move." Toku says, glancing back at Muta and me. "I'll take care of this." He determinedly gets out a kunai and holds it in front of him even as his hands tremble and his teeth chatters in his head. "You both are injured. I'm not. I'll take it."

"How long do you think you can keep holding this?" The man asks Sensei, and Sensei raises his head for the very first time since we had enough time to pay attention.

"Longer than Shikaku when the lives of my students are on the line." Sensei smiles sardonically at the man. "How long did you think your companion needed to kill off those brats of mine?"

Tokuma strides forwards, his hands still shaking, but his mouth set in a hard, hard line. "Those brats aren't dead." He raises the kunai and stabs it into the back of the man's leg, just behind the knee. A scream rises into the air, and Toku turns green but he pulls the kunai out and stabs it into the man's other knee for good measure. Then he very carefully sealed on the tenketsu in the man's arms and punches him once on the temple. The man is unconscious before he hits the ground. Sensei lowers the kunai at his own throat and looks back at us, all three of us. Muta and I having staggered back into the clearing.

Tokuma drops to his knees and starts retching although nothing comes up.

I want badly to join him, but Muta's shaking hand is offering me a canteen. "To rinse out your mouth with, Hana-chan." And I take it, and try to wash the taste of blood out of my mouth. It doesn't work, but it's the thought that counts.

Sensei doesn't rise, and I don't believe that it's because he's lazy. At important times, Sensei has never failed us, so I can only assume that it's because he can't.

"Status report?" He rasps, his head resting against the back of the tree, his eyes closed.

"The target is disposed of." Muta replies his hand still gripping the back of my shirt.

Tokuma coughs once. "The target not in the mission parameters is neutralized for the next half hour or so." He dry heaves again, and crawls over to us. "Sensei, what do we do?"

"There are bandages in my pack." Sensei gestures. "Look to your injuries."

Something in my heart screams in protest at this. "Ensui-sensei, what about your injuries?"

He opens an eye and glares at me. "They'll keep." And then his head slumps forwards and we know he's completely out of it.

I turn to Ichi. "Run back to Konoha to ask for back up." He looks at me, still cuddled between Ni and San and turns tail and races back in the direction that we'd come.

"How are the injuries?" Tokuma pulls out the rolls of bandages stored in Sensei's pouch.

"We should look at Sensei first." I offer. "He's the one that's passed out." Yes, there's still blood trickling down my leg, but it's not that bad of a wound now that I had time to think about it. It didn't sever anything major and it wasn't deep enough for me to see my bones. The fatigue is mostly from chakra exhaustion. The tight feeling in my chest because I may have been the one to just strike a killing blow, it was a team effort but no one really knew, and I had taken a bite out of someone, an enemy yes, but oh Kami.

The thought turns my stomach and I finally retch, as with Tokuma nothing comes up and I give myself half a minute to stop dry heaving.

We examined each other's injuries, and found Muta slightly concussed, and scratched by the woman's tanto, but neither poisoned nor in too much danger. Tokuma's mostly shaken, has some bruising from the blast, and is slightly in disbelief with his own violent conduct in an attempt to save ourselves and Sensei. I'm bruised, a little battered and chakra fatigued with a long scratch on my leg, but I'd also live without immediate medical attention. The real problem is Sensei.

We'd turned him over to find that not only had his back been burnt by the blast, but also that he is low on chakra, low on blood, and possibly poisoned by whatever weaponry the Kumo nin had managed to stick him with as his breathing is shallow and his pulse is irregular.

He needed help, and fast. We dressed and bandaged his visible wounds as quickly as we could-the effort mostly undertaken by Tokuma and me as Muta sits in a corner with his eyes closed trying not to pass out-in an effort to make sure that he didn't bleed out before help arrived.

The morning sun just makes everything seem more gruesome, our blood starkly painted against the backdrop of our pale faces and clammy hands.

Ichi bursts back into the clearing with footsteps on his heels. "Help is here!" He barks and then collapses in the dirt beside me, panting.

I pat his head. "You did a good job." The ninken that enters the clearing after Ichi though, that is truly surprising.

"Yo." I looked at the small pug, Pakkun it had to be Pakkun, in front of me with what must have been an unwelcoming face, because he looks distinctly annoyed. "You should feel my paws, they're very soft."

"I don't want to feel your paws." I grit from behind my grinding teeth. "Sensei is possibly dying, I just bit someone who is now dead, would you please just let your summoner know that-"

"Your team was the one assigned on this mission?" I look up to find Kakashi, well, I assume it's Kakashi, he has spiky silver hair and wears a hound mask, looking down at me as other ANBU fill the clearing.

"Yes. Now someone please help Sensei." Why wouldn't they just listen?

Kakashi scoops me up. "I'm assuming your partners can still run by themselves." Through the corner of my eye I see the rest of his ANBU team gather up Sensei, Muta, and the prisoner as well as the dead body while the ANBU supported Tokuma.

"They can." I reply, relaxing slightly now that it is certain we'd get back into the village in time to make sure Sensei didn't die.

"Was the mission a success?" He asks as we fly through the trees far faster than I could even hope to imagine for myself.

I glare at him. "I ripped a chunk or two out of her, Tokuma sealed a tenketsu point in her throat and Muta drained her chakra. I don't think she's alive anymore."

Kakashi stiffens. "Oh."

Nothing more is said even after we pass the gates of the village and Kakashi disappears as the medics roll Sensei deeper into the hospital. The rest of us, our injuries are the work of a few minutes and we are sent off to write our mission report.

"I-" Tokuma looks around the table at Muta and me. We're sitting in Mufu-an again, without Sensei, because he's still in the hospital. "I feel happy that we killed the person. I was viciously satisfied stabbing that man." He runs his hands through his hair and shudders.

"Well I was perfectly fine with ripping the woman apart with my teeth if it would stop her from killing you two." I offer, as internally I scream and wonder what I'm becoming. How was I possibly satisfied with death? How? Why?

Granted, the alternative would be to have my teammates and myself dead a few hours out of Konoha, but still.

"We're shinobi." Muta says, and prods his dim sum with ill grace. "We were always going to have to kill someone."

I swallow, and taste blood on my tongue. There's no blood there, but I taste it nevertheless. "Do you think Sensei will be alright?" I ask, and we turn towards that topic of conversation instead. No one wants to think about who had actually struck the killing blow. We want to think about something else.

"The medics did say he wasn't poisoned after all, just exhausted." Muta says. "They told me so while fixing my concussion."

"We could visit him with flowers?" Tokuma offers and at the word flowers I think of Kiho-baachan.

"Maybe we should go check on Kiho-baachan." I say and we look at each other, trying desperately hard not to see where blood had been just hours before, and get up to go.

"That's a good idea." Toku's subdued and without his usual energy.

Muta nods."Yes. That's a good idea."

We walk down the street, shoulders brushing with the Triplets behind us, and do not think about what had occurred. We'd talk it over another time.

A.N. So first kill is over with, and a mission went kind of bad. (Not Team Seven levels of bad, but bad enough.)

Thanks for Sis, the Guests and Sam! Your reviews made my day!

As always, I'm open to your thoughts.

~Tavina.