[ Hospital, General Ward No. 8 ]
Hiruzen, lowering his hat, stood in silence, looking at the beds that now held the village elite.
Hatake Kakashi - one of Konoha's strongest shinobi, known as Kakashi the Copy Ninja. After Danzō's death, Hiruzen had spent a long time weighing whether to dissolve Root or find a new commander. Releasing former ANBU-Ne members back into the wild was out of the question, but he also hated the idea of purging so many capable shinobi who were loyal to the village, even if that loyalty ran first through Danzō.
In the end, he chose someone who could "reform" them and lead them going forward. A more perfect candidate than Kakashi was hard to imagine. He was loyal to the village and had served years in ANBU; his strength, skill, and intellect were beyond dispute.
There had been a fleeting thought to ask Jiraiya, but Hiruzen quickly dismissed it - his student would never accept. So Kakashi was chosen - and now lay pale, hospitalized with exhaustion.
Might Guy - the greatest taijutsu master, a man who had forged his body to such heights he could stop a kunai strike with muscle alone. No chakra needed. He lay on the next bed over, in even worse shape. His face was mottled with hematomas, and his eyebrows had been thoroughly singed off, along with a portion of his hair.
On the third bed sat a shinobi no less powerful in potential - Yamato, the only Mokuton user since Hashirama. An ANBU with a notably calm demeanor. Unconscious.
"What about that spy?" Hiruzen asked, turning his head to the side to address the ANBU captain.
"The status of the second reconnaissance squad?" he asked again, catching himself and clarifying.
"Two sustained concussions, one has a shallow cut; the rest received only superficial injuries," answered a young woman whose face was hidden behind a crow mask.
"Good," Hiruzen nodded, his gaze drifting over the ward with a pensive air. "And what about Akira? Still not found?"
The ANBU captain shook her head, then reported evenly, "We don't have his location yet. According to several witnesses, he was heading toward the Land of Wind."
"I see… Find him today and submit a full report on what happened," Hiruzen ordered, a trace of weariness in his voice.
"Hai!" The woman gave a short bow and vanished.
*To think… how did they even manage this?* Hiruzen mused as he left the hospital. That night, some of Konoha's strongest shinobi had suffered a stunning defeat. The enemy, as always, proved unpredictable and merciless.
*You were right, my friend - we should ban strong alcohol for our jonin,* he thought, adjusting his hat again as he headed back to his office.
****
"M-m-m, what a strange dream…" Cracking his eyes open, Akira stared up at the wooden ceiling, trying to recall the little details of those psychedelic images his subconscious had tossed at him.
"I… think I was watching TV on a couch with a woman, and then her daughter came home hungry from school. I can't remember their faces for some reason. What then… Ah! I had to pick up bread for dinner, and I volunteered to run to the bakery." He frowned, trying to recall how he got to the bakery, but it was all fog.
"Then, as soon as I bought two loaves and stepped out of the bakery, I vanished with a pop - like a reverse-summoning. Heh, funny - in that dream, my summoning beasts were green kangaroos three meters tall, boxing with humanoid pineapples for the right to possess purple mushrooms. And for some reason Patrick from Spongebob was there, with a long gray beard and a wise look, whispering that I should grab the mushrooms while they fought, then eat them and attain the Dao…"
Akira chuckled under his breath, remembering those quickly fading dream fragments.
Turning his head to the side, he was surprised to note he wasn't sleeping alone. Long dark hair, a delicately arched back, a slim waist. What lay below was, regrettably, hidden by the blanket.
"Mikoto? When did we even…? Last night I…" The woman beside him stirred, turning over while tugging the blanket up to her chest, neatly preventing any appraisal of her bust size.
"Not Mikoto… Too young, but… the face is familiar. Yes, I've seen her somewhere." The girl rubbed sleep from her eyes with one hand, then smiled and asked in a soft voice, "How did you sleep?"
"Go-od…" Akira drew the word out, mind racing for a tactful way to ask who she was.
"Clearly there's a reason we're naked in the same bed, which makes it extra awkward not to know her name," he thought. Seeing she wasn't offering any hints, he decided to flank the problem.
"I might've overdone it last night… Would you remind me of your family name?" He gambled on narrowing things down: unknown given name + known surname.
"Just call me Haku."
Akira's expression changed instantly. Dropping all pretense, he grabbed the blanket and yanked.
"NO, NO, NO, PLEASE—" Just as the blanket was about to slip off Haku, the world went dark.
****
"No!" Akira jerked upright with a shout.
"That was a dream - actually, a nightmare. Perfect," he thought, mentally making the sign of the cross three times. He looked around and was surprised to realize he wasn't at home, nor even in a bed. He was in a small space… that shook from time to time.
"In a wagon?" The steady clop of hooves, the bumps that occasionally jostled him, and the wide blue sky visible through the uncovered back gave him a pretty solid hint about his situation. Fortunately, it wasn't a kidnapping - otherwise there'd be ropes, at minimum.
And besides, the previous day's events were coming back to him bit by bit. He shifted to get more comfortable so he could think, and realized he wasn't alone. In the back corner of the wagon, two figures dozed sitting up, huddled together on sacks: a woman and a girl.
"A woman with red hair, and a girl with the same - but with glasses…" Akira froze for a few seconds, and when understanding hit…
"Oh… fuuuuuck." He slapped a hand to his forehead and let his head hang.
"You're awake?" The driver, alerted by the noise, glanced back while keeping a grip on the reins of two horses. "There's water in the box in the corner."
Thanking the stranger and steadying himself against the sway, Akira half-crawled to the box. Inside lay a canteen of water and some light provisions.
"Remind me… where are we headed?" he asked as soon as he'd wet his throat. He hadn't forgotten last night - not the important parts, anyway. In books and movies, after a wild bender, protagonists often "forget everything" and then piece the night together by calling friends - and then blush over tales of how they sang Eminem naked on a table. In reality it's different.
Sure, you can have blackouts like "no idea how I got from the bar to my bed," but the big beats - the brain keeps those. He wanted a plain answer from the driver so he wouldn't have to rummage through memories; the rummaging itself was triggering a slicing headache.
"Where else? To Konoha, of course. You hauled me out of my house in the middle of the night with an offer I couldn't refuse."
"How much couldn't you refuse?" Akira asked. He didn't recall that particular deal at all.
"Ten thousand!" the man declared solemnly.
"Well… ten thousand it is. Even if he's bluffing, I won't go broke over it."
"For the record, we've already passed Tanzaku. We'll be in the village in half an hour. Don't try to bolt on me after, I've got acquaintances in Konoha. Though…" The driver cast a quick eye over Akira's kimono which, though hardly pristine after the road, still spoke of a well-off owner. He dropped the point. "What do you do for a living?"
"Painter," Akira answered curtly. Seeing his passenger slip back into thought, the driver gave up on small talk.
****
"Halt!" Two gate sentries stopped the wagon at the entrance.
The standard ID-and-intent check ground to a halt the instant Akira hopped down from the wagon. In a blink, ANBU operatives materialized out of thin air on three sides.
Realizing he'd stumbled into trouble, the driver started loudly distancing himself from the situation with the sentries, swearing he had no idea who he'd been transporting and that he was a victim here.
"There's a woman and her daughter inside. Assign someone to escort them to the hospital," Akira said to the ANBU first, flicking a glance at the wagon. He took a step forward - and was stopped by the operative in a monkey mask.
"Zoldik Akira, we must insist you come with us."
"Fine, I'll walk," he sighed, forming a hand seal. The ANBU ringed around him tensed, palms dropping to sword hilts. They watched him with full focus, keeping the two shadow clones in their peripheral vision as they calmly approached the wagon.
Once they realized the clones weren't going anywhere but straight toward the village - carrying two unconscious civilians in their arms - they relaxed a fraction. Akira wasn't a declared criminal, after all. Their orders from above were simple: if found, escort him to a specified location.
When they turned off the main street into a deserted alley and began weaving, Akira knew where this was headed.
"Please put this over your head." One of the ANBU held out a sack, and any lingering doubt evaporated. They were taking him to the Interrogation Department - in parentheses, the Torture Unit.
"One way or another… this was to be expected," Akira thought, cursing himself silently as he pulled the sack over his head and let them guide him "by the hand." They led him for several minutes through a warren of alleys until he felt the ground slanting downward.
"Stairs," one of his escorts warned, and sure enough a few steps later he felt the void drop underfoot.
"And here I thought Torture and Interrogation was somewhere in the cliffs - turns out it's underground. Makes sense: near-perfect soundproofing without even needing fūin," Akira mused. He was fairly calm; for everything he'd gotten up to last night, a fine seemed likely. A little scare to keep him from forgetting his place, a reminder of who's boss in the village - that felt like the aim.
At the fifth door they opened for him, the sack came off.
The room was around twenty square meters, its walls plated in iron, a single table in the center and two chairs.
"Hmm. Looks like the kind of interview room from American cop movies with the good cop and bad cop. Guess dragging me to a 'real' chamber felt excessive," he thought, giving the room a quick once-over before pulling a chair to the table and settling in to wait for whoever wanted a chat.
Whether they were trying to grind him down psychologically or they were simply swamped with cases, Akira couldn't say. Either way, they made him wait half an hour.
The interrogator's footsteps rang in the hall, echoing off the walls in advance of his arrival. Poorly oiled hinges screeched as the heavy door dragged open, revealing a tall, familiar man in a dark cloak nearly to the floor and a bandanna with Konoha's protector sewn in.
Unlike Anko, Morino wore something that read as more official under his cloak: loose dark-blue trousers and a plain shirt whose length and belted waist made it look a bit like a Slavic kosovorotka.
A girl slipped in behind him soundless as a mouse, two heads shorter. Seeing Itachi, Akira smiled for a heartbeat.
"Yeah… Ever since my first arrival in Konoha, I'm no longer a civilian you can just push around. At minimum, I'm an adviser to the Uchiha clan," he thought, ignoring the piercing stare of the head of the Interrogation Unit as the man slowly scraped a chair up to the table.
Itachi stood a few steps back, a clipboard and pen in hand.
"Is she really going to take notes standing?" Akira flicked a glance her way, then extended his left hand and, without any superfluous movement, unsealed a chair from his personal storage.
This chair, unlike the folding ones in his scrolls, was special - exceptional materials, exceptional comfort. The back was so well designed that a tired person might doze off in it by accident. Akira kept this one close at hand - in the spatial fūin on his arm - which said everything about how much he valued it.
Itachi didn't stand on pride. She accepted the… unconventional gesture of care without fuss and sat.
"It's ironwood… Spirits, that would look perfect in my office," Morino thought, mentally shaking his head as he imagined the chair's price tag.
"Let's begin with introductions. I'm Morino Ibiki, head of the Torture and Interrogation Unit. Zoldik Akira, do you know why you're here?"
["I won't say anything without my lawyer," Akira wanted to quip, but alas - no one here would get it.]
"I assume…" he began, settled himself a bit more comfortably with an elbow on the table, and continued, "it's not to pry the secret sauce recipe from my restaurant."
"No," Morino replied flatly - though Akira noticed the man's temple throb for a split second. "I want to hear in detail what happened last night."
"Ah, I see, well then…" Akira slipped smoothly into the role of entertaining narrator. "Ahem, ahem. The morning the ancestors sent me dawned quite ordinarily. Gentle light from the west spilling over my windows, a slightly cracked pane letting in fresh air laced with the scent of herbs, and the sounds of the forest… That dawn chorus, Morino-san - your ears would rejoice to hear it…" Warming up, Akira was ready to describe how he savored the trees from his back patio over a cup of tea, when Morino cut him off:
"By last night I mean the evening, during your drinking."
"Now, now." Akira raised his index finger toward the ceiling and waggled it twice. "Not drinking - cultural recreation."
"And how do you connect 'cultural recreation' with beating people up?" Morino shot back.
"Because it was cultural! Not…" Akira waved a hand, searching for the word, "… peaceful!" He brightened when he found it. Morino remained skeptical, waiting for the actual story. "All right, it started with…"