Chapter 38: Team Leader Arc: Three

Disclaimer: I own no part of Naruto.

Nara Kasuga is a problem that refuses to leave my mind the farther we travel away from Konoha. Oh, he's been doing a wonderful job of staying away from my presence, but that doesn't get rid of the responsibility I feel towards him. I'm still his team leader, and yet I can't even talk to him.

Akimichi Chikai has no compunctions about speaking to me though. "I hear that something happened in Iwa." She remarks one day as she flips a piece of red hair out of her face. "Something bad."

"Well, fights don't grow on trees you know." I mutter. There's no way that I am going to tell her about everything that went down in Iwa. How could I tell her anything about what had happened with Sensei? How could I tell her anything about Itachi?

We didn't even know each other really well.

"Well, aren't you the friendly one." She looks at me with an amused expression, the corners of her mouth tilting down, but laughter sparking in her dark eyes. "And here I thought that all Inuzuka were a friendly folk."

"We're a family oriented folk." I clarify. "Most of my clan find the entirety of Konoha to be more or less their family. I've learned better." They lambasted Tou-san easily. They did not accept him. I haven't forgotten.

Perhaps a normal child would have forgotten in four years how they looked and whispered behind the backs of their hands at her father, but my memory is long. Longer than most.

"Hmmm." She nods. "Well, I know your hobbies, did you want to know anything else about me?"

"What happened to your teammate?" I ask before I can stop myself. What's wrong with Nara Kasuga?

"San-kun?" She asks and tilts her head in my direction thinking. "There's nothing wrong with him. He's working in T&I right now, why?"

"I didn't mean that teammate." I throw up my hands. "I mean the one that's currently under my command."

"Kasuga?" She takes a step back. "I wouldn't know. I've always been closer to San-kun than I was to Kasuga, and I haven't seen him in more than a year. How would I know more than you?"

That's...cruel. For the first time I realize that there might not actually be that many people who liked Nara Kasuga and the thought eats away at me all day. Chikai doesn't speak with him. His sensei has clearly stopped being Sensei. And now he's looking so weird.

"Nara-san?" I make sure to sit next to him when we stop for camp and hold a ration bar out to him. "You haven't been eating much, lately." And really, he hasn't.

He shrugs. "Don't call me that, Inuzuka-taicho." Taicho? Captain? I suppose I am, but still.

That it is Nara Kasuga who first calls me taicho and means it is strange. The other members of the Genin Corps are older, and they listened to Chikai, who is closer to their age much more than they listened to me. And perhaps that is fair, but I am her equal in duty, and the slights frustrated me.

"Why shouldn't I?" I ask.

Behind me Ichi growls. "We shouldn't pay attention to him, Hana. He hurt you."

I push his face away. "We cannot look away from suffering even if other people will."

"He hurt you, and we couldn't help." Ni nudges my hand. "We can't forget." I can't forget your blood out in the noonday sun either. No one's forgotten anything.

"But we can forgive." I say, finally. And I find that it's true. Whatever's going on with him, it's eating him up from the inside, but I've got no permanent injuries from the encounter. "It's time to forgive. We've held a grudge for a year already."

He's edged away from me and the Triplets while I am discussing our next course of action. "I just don't want you to call me that when it isn't going to be true for much longer."

What? "I don't understand what you mean." He's a member of the Nara Clan. What isn't true about that?

He chuckles and it sounds like he's dying inside really. "You don't know how much your Sensei loves you."

"What does Sensei have to do with anything?" Sensei's an invalid. He's got to be careful even inside Konoha, or he'd get sent out on a mission and then he'd die. His position with the Hokage is already shaky. I worried for Sensei, even here, at a peaceful border station, on a routine patrol.

If Sensei made the wrong move, he wouldn't be there when I get back.

"He is still a Nara even if he lives outside the clan compound." Nara Kasuga is looking at his hands. "A year ago he submitted a petition regarding me. At the time, Shikaku-sama wasn't about to consider it, but now..." Now he's part of the genin corps. He isn't a student of the elder son of the Hokage anymore. He's part of the Genin Corps and that's a dead end job.

Sensei's words come back to me. I will personally oversee his punishment...by the end of which he will wish he'd never been born.

Sensei couldn't have. He couldn't have submitted a petition to strip a boy of his clan name. Not if they are a part of his family, part of his blood. But even as I protest it, I know in my heart that it is exactly the type of thing that Sensei would do. He would, because Sensei has a cruel streak, and he is fiercely protective of his children.

Sensei is perfectly capable of an immense and almost immeasurable cruelty towards the ones that he finds to have wronged his people.

Nara Kasuga is proud of being a Nara, like any other clan child. And Sensei knew this because Sensei is disturbing good at reading people. Sensei knew exactly what would hurt him. He knew exactly what would break him.

And now it will be like he'd never been born. Disowned. Stricken from the records. Nara Kasuga will be erased forever.

The thought that his existence, the very last thing that he is proud of being stripped from him because he'd made a mistake turns my stomach. That Sensei is doing such a thing because of me is horrifically beyond belief.

"No." I stand up. "It won't happen." I turn to him. "When did they say they were going to do it?"

"Why does it matter to you?" He sounds tired. "It is for you that Nara Ensui wants such a thing to begin with."

"Why did you do it?" I had always wanted to know why.

"Is it so strange to expect that I might not have expected either of you to end up being people I had to fight?" He's staring with dead eyes into the firelight. "I'm no good in a fight. Is it strange to think that I didn't want to die?"

What did Muta do to make him think he was about to die?

"Perhaps if you didn't use me as a shield he would have just beat you up instead of sending you into a three day bed rest period." I say mildly. "When are they going to announce your predicament?"

"Just call me disowned and be done with it!" He spits. "It will have already happened by the time we get back anyway." His cheeks glisten in the firelight.

I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. No matter what he'd done, I couldn't imagine what being disowned felt like. Didn't know how to react.

"I forgive you?"

He laughs, the sound a shattered mirror. "Good to hear, Taicho." He turns those dark eyes at me. "You're too forgiving."

And suddenly his predicament is my responsibility. "Better to forgive sometimes." I hold the ration bar out to him. "If I am your taicho, then I ought to feed you, and you ought to listen." First, we make sure that he survives to see getting back to Konoha. We can worry about his metaphorical cessation after we make sure that his literal existence is ensured.

Chikai's team splits with mine at the checkpoint on the border. "Well good luck, Inuzuka-chan." She waves at me and I wave back. I'm heading up the north fork of the Naka River along the Konoha-Taki Border, with Kasuga and Ito Fujio. The Triplets, as ever, are tagging behind. Her team turns south.

"So, Taicho." Ito-kun begins. "How should we go about patrolling?"

I raise an eyebrow at him. "The obvious way one goes about patrolling the same mile long stretch of river for two full weeks." I turn back to the newly vacated watch cabin. "By walking along it at given intervals of, oh, say every two hours or so."

Ito-kun is not convinced. "But Taicho." He helpfully points out. "There are only three of us. How will we manage two hour shifts?"

He's just trying to be troublesome, isn't he.

"The same way that all three man teams have been managing this stretch of river for years, Ito-kun." I comment mildly. I have to keep a lid on my temper. I have to. This is no place to break down. "Someone, we'll say me, will take tonight's night watch. You'll take tomorrow's day watch. Kasuga will take the next night watch. I'll take the day watch. You'll take the night watch. And we keep cycling." The corners of my lips tilt down. "It's standard procedure, Ito-kun."

He frowns but doesn't say anything more. In anticipation of tonight's watch, I go to sleep.

The border between Konoha and Taki is...for lack of a better word, seriously boring. Luckily, I do have a timer set for every two hours, and taking a mile run at each interval isn't extremely taxing. Most of the time though, I sit and read Tou-san's rudimentary notes on the Explosion Release.

His first page is a warning that failure to be in full control of the technique at all times is liable to cause explosions of unknown size and severity. Which...sounds like something I do not want to try while at even a peaceful border not a stone's throw away from a foreign nation.

He does however, recommend that I practice chakra control, because that is the first part of understanding how to combine two chakra natures.

Seeing that the Explosion Releases's other chakra nature is lightning, I'd also packed a scroll on rudimentary lightning jutsu.

The Lightning Bolt Jutsu is the first one on my list. Being able to shock people out of the ground is useful, and it's only a D rank technique with three hand signs. Snake. Horse. Monkey.

I gather chakra, and the electricity practically sizzles away from my fingertips, and rams it's way straight into a tree. Scorch marks appear, and the tree smokes slightly. That...I check my chakra levels.

They are practically unchanged.

It might only have been a D-rank Jutsu unlike the C and B rank Dotons that I enjoy using...but, still. That was weirdly efficient. And strangely easy.

I turn to the next Jutsu on my list. C-Rank. Bird Swarm Technique. Four hand signs. Monkey. Rat. Dragon. Snake. The air fills with the humming of about three birds. They too, ram themselves into the focal tree.

The tree looks decidedly worse for wear. My chakra levels have dipped, but nowhere near what they would have for even a Mud Wall.

At this point I suspect that my first elemental nature isn't Doton after all. I've never been able to use a Doton correctly on the first try. I've just copied the hand signs of two Raiton jutsus out of a scroll and somehow both of them worked more or less like how they should've.

Then again, I'd never checked what my primary chakra nature is, and Sensei had taken my understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses at face value. I sit down on a tree stump.

Why did I think Doton is my primary chakra nature?

Tou-san had left me a scroll for Doton Jutsu, but that didn't automatically mean...I turn back to the list of jutsu that I'd compiled. What else can I learn?

By the end of the first week, Ito-kun is really becoming an annoyance. "Why must I be the one to patrol the river today, Taicho?"

"Because it is your turn on the rotation, Ito-kun." I raise my eyes from the chakra control papers that I'd been perusing. "And because Kasuga really needs to sleep, he looks half dead right now."

"Can't you go by yourself, Taicho?" Ito-kun crosses his arms over his chest. "After all, you are the chunin among us." Ito Fujio is at least ten years older than me, and it shows in the way that he stands defiantly before me.

"And as I am your superior officer, and you acknowledge as such, you ought to follow my orders." I comment. I could feel the tension in the air building to a head, but there has to be a clean slate. There has to be a new start or else I'd be living forever without the respect that I'd come to think of as my due. I might only be nine years old, but honestly, you've been very rude this entire time.

"If you beat me in a sparring match, I'll acknowledge you as the rightful leader of this team." Ito smirks at me. He knows a team leader would never seriously fight a subordinate on the border. It's so beyond the proper mission protocol. He wants to push me up against a wall. "Unless of course, you're scared."

I can't fight him on the border, but I have three wolf dogs who'd been dying to tear a piece out of him ever since he'd started being unpleasant and unresponsive. I whistle, and they come running. Three to one, they make short work of defeating Ito-kun.

I smile politely at his fuming face. It might not be the best way to wield power, but I'll take what I can get to make him go at this point. "I'll leave you to your border patrol then." He turns and stalks off.

There's a clatter, and I turn to find that Kasuga's tripped over a chair. I offer him a hand. "You know, you shouldn't push yourself this much."

He's still thin, and depressed looking and his diet of soldier pills and ration bars has done nothing for his well being. I suspect that his depressed state over his impeding doom has something to do with it.

"Thank you, Taicho." He mutters as he collapses onto the bed.

"It's Hana." I tell him, but he's already fast asleep.

Ichi troops in. "To be honest, he's much more bearable like this."

I raise my eyebrow at him. "So are you willing to forgive Kasuga for his mistakes now? He wasn't purposefully trying to kill me."

Ichi nods very seriously. "You've chosen a deputy. That's very important."

"He's a member of the pack." San whines. "And if he's pack then he's important."

That's not what I was going for, but alright. If it works, it works.

Our trip back to Konoha when the next team relieves us is as dull as the time we spent on border patrol to begin with. Ito Fujio is not walking with Kasuga, the Triplets and I, instead he prefers to lead the way.

Perhaps it makes him feel like he is the one leading the team, but no matter. No matter at all.

I have bigger fish to fry, and a Sensei to question.

We pass the village gates, and Kasuga makes to head off to elsewhere before I grab his hand and tow him along with me.

"Where are we going, Taicho?" He'd still been unable to call me Hana, but the mission's over now, so he should be alright with it now.

"It's Hana." I correct absentmindedly. "And I have a Sensei to visit to make sure he rescinds that submission of his."

Before learning the truth of what Sensei has done to Nara Kasuga, I hadn't thought that his love could be problematic, could be so brutal and could make him so calloused regarding other people.

I'd lived in the center of his love for over two years now, and it had become as simple and unalterable as much as the summer sky is blue, and summer grass is green.

But for the first time I have to realize that while it sounds good that Sensei's willing to end lives to ensure my happiness, I didn't want him to do it.

"I don't think that's a good idea, Taicho." He's protesting, but he isn't forcing me to use chakra to drag him along, so I manage to very easily persuade him that going to Sensei, and Kiho-baachan's house is a good idea.

Or at the very least, I make sure that he's still with me by the time that I arrive.

"Kiho-baachan!" I call out across the darkened living room. There's no reply from her, but Sensei himself does appear from beyond the doorway. He carries a cane with him, and I can hear its tap all the way across the room. "Sensei." I begin, and he notices the person standing behind me.

"Aren't you supposed to never return to my house?" Sensei sits down on one of the low sofas, and glares at Kasuga with undisguised hatred. "I'm sure that only my family members have the right to wander into my shadowed property." It would be a valid threat if you could actually manipulate your shadow, Sensei. At the moment, you can't. Nobody knows that beyond Team Tan, but if you keep acting like this, someone will find out.

"Sensei." I say again, more frustrated than ever. He's acting exactly the same as if he's in peak condition and not in conflict with the Hokage. He's acting as if he still has the power to back his words, and that is a dangerous game to play. "Why did you ever submit an application that strips a clan son from the clan?"

Sensei shrugs artlessly, and Kasuga shrinks into himself. "Well, Hana-chan, if they hurt my children then they will pay the price, both the boy and the clan."

I walk over to sit next to him, because while Sensei's still as prideful and as independent as ever, as that is the reason he carries a cane instead of using a human walking stick, he's still not normal. And I worried for him.

Crippling Chakra Exhaustion, that was in the note that Mu-kun sent me after he'd found out the official name for it.

In many cases, Crippling Chakra Exhaustion is just that, permanent, irrevocable, crippling.

Sensei tells us two years will be enough for him to return to his peak condition, which we'd never seen before, because he'd always been tired while being our full time Sensei, and full time Head of Crypt. I don't know how it is possible though. Sensei's still the same as when I'd left two weeks ago. And back then, he'd been just about the same as the two weeks before.

At least his shadow has returned to it's normal shade of black.

"What if the boy has apologized and been forgiven?" I ask.

We regard each other neither willing to give in, and he traces a finger over the red fangs on my cheeks. "You really are Inuzuka, Hana-chan." He smiles ruefully. "Far too forgiving. And you're Inuzuka in the ways you'd least expect of Kaito's daughter." He glances up at Nara Kasuga. "I'll let you go for now, Kasuga-kun, but remember who bought your life for you." Sensei runs a hand through my hair and pulls me close so that he can shield me with his own body. "Your loyalty is to remain Hana-chan's until the day that you die. You'll live for her. You'll die for her. You'll do as she says."

"Sensei-"

He cuts off my protest with two fingers over my mouth. "It is a cross that he deserved to carry, and you have removed it for him. He needs a new cross."

"I intend to." Nara Kasuga replies. "She will be my Taicho until the day I die, I promise you." He looks at Sensei, tears burning in his eyes. "Don't erase me, Jisan. Please."

Sensei inclines his head. "You've been pardoned, Kasuga-oi. I'll speak to Shikaku."

But I remember now, what makes Sensei different from a tyrant, what makes him so lovable, and so generally human and not evil. Sensei's willing to listen. And Sensei's willing to change his decisions based on a request.

It is more than one can ask of most vengeful men.

A.N. Hana realizes that En-sensei is indeed a human, and a rather vengeful and somewhat cruel one at that, at times. Nara Ensui has his faults, but she still loves him dearly. And at heart, he's a good human being who has his own flaws. Also, this chapter establishes that Kasuga is in fact Ensui's nephew.

Thank you to WhiteFang001 (We will indeed find out what happened to Cousin Gaku, but that takes a while longer.), Fuchslady, (Welcome to Bloodless! and yes, Nara Kasuga is a child, and he was primarily motivated by fear. Hana learns this, and attempts to be forgiving.), rickrossed (Hana knew most everything that occurred until the Five Kage Summit, and some facts that most fans of Naruto can find on the internet, however, Hana's been forgetting things because no one can carry a story that big around in their heads and she didn't think to write it down. There will be consequences.), Guest (Rest assured, romance is a very small part of this story, and will actually occur at a normal time in life, not for many, many years yet.) Born to Sleep (There will be Kasuga, Chikai interactions in the future, but not at this juncture.), Alizay (Hana's mission is about as successful as border patrol can get when one is nine years old and both your teammates are much older than you. But hey, at least Kasuga got somewhat better.), CannibalisticApple (Thanks so much for offering! I'm honestly blushing so much because of that.) Ghostly Guest (Welcome to Bloodless, I hope you'll enjoy the journey!), Sis (Why thank you. I couldn't do it without you.), libraryrockerr (I'm so glad you like it.), and May525 for reviewing!

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~Tavina.