A shinobi is a high school student like another - 24

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I was... well, not okay, just like the present situation. My right elbow was throbbing badly enough for me to have to force myself not to moan, and my hip was decided to be remembered.

But to tell the truth, I wasn't thinking about anything there, frozen into place. For a moment, I could only hear my own heart beats. There was only one thing on my mind.

Itachi leaned a bit more, his bright red eyes framed by his hair.

Sharingan.

The set switched back to normal speed, and he grabbed me by the collar before I could do anything, dragged me up and slammed me violently against the wall, not leaving me anything moment to react - a bit further on the right and I would have ended impaled on the doorknob. My battle-honed reflexes had deserted the ship; maybe it was a good thing right now.

My left eye, hidden under bandages and hat, was pulsing. I didn't know if it was normal or not - after all, Obito had been the first in what was left of his clan to possess a developed Sharingan since the end of the wars. Two Sharingan had never meet face to face lately as far as I knew. I had to be the one to pass the crash test.

"I'm rather curious Hatake... and I'm also rather protective of my friends."

The pulse in my eye was keeping me from focusing, but not enough not to have heard his words. I gritted my teeth.

"Strange conception of friendship you have here, don't you think? Cut all kind of relation you can have and watch it from afar?"

He grasped my right wrist in answer - hard. Tsunade had sped up the healing process as much as she could, but the parts of healed skin were still thin and fragile under the dressings and the clothes. I bit my lip, and the pain increased - up and up, to the tears in my eye. Itachi was strangely focused on my face as he was steadily augmenting the pressure, just like a brat would have been while ripping the wings off an insect - curious, coldly calculating. As if he was seeing things for the first time.

A new pulse in my eye put things back into perspective - and made me realize it was indeed the first time. My first - and badly upsetting - time seeing with the Sharingan was still fresh in my mind, no matter how much I wanted to forget it. I could remember perfectly to see, to feel like I had been really seeing for the first time, to have to many information at the same time, too fast. Obito had had a full Sharingan.

Itachi was seeing for the first time, and I was the insect. He tightened his hold around my wrist, turning it, putting literally his face into mine. I didn't made a sound. A line of hot liquid slided from my lip to my shin. The skin had broken under his hand and the clothes. My knees weakened, and I was standing just by the hold he had on my collar. I closed my eye and bit my lip some more.

"What's your interest in Iruka, Hatake?"

I would have had some troubles to align words, even if I had wanted to. Itachi's expression didn't change, but he stepped back and let my collar go. I slided down with a skeleton's grace against the wall, sprawling at his feet, panting under the pain shooting from my arm.

His Sharingan had two commas in each eye. And then it faded out, his eyes going from sharingan blood red to their more normal black.
Itachi blinked, frowning, before going back on the bone's bag at his feet. His gaze was... not totally cold, but calculating; not innocent, but haunted. His eyes were swollen too, as if he had cried recently. If there had been more joy in his gaze and a smile on his lips, I could have took him for Obito's brother.

Itachi Uchiha was not a happy person. This thought came out of the blue, and I remembered that Carrot top had asked for a close watch because he was afraid Itachi might do something extrem - or stupid.

He threw a last glance at me before leaving the room, closing the door behind him. I tilted my head back, breathing heavily. Impossible to know if my eye had stopped throbbing or not - my wrist was short-cutting all other sensations.

Heh. Tsunade was going to kill me.

I stayed motionless against the wall for a while. I could feel something hot soaking up my sleeve, but I wasn't in any hurry to see the disaster. I stood up slowly with the help of the wall, my right arm securely tucked around my middle.

The urgency of the ten minutes before this had multiplied tenfold. 'Itachi like us' wasn't just an info anymore, it was suddenly a confirmed reality.

I got out of the school, my phone in an awkward hold in my hand - it was really not the time for him to have been called away, I'd have been in the impossibility to walk till the HQ, even to just ride the bus. Thanks the kami, the person at the other end answered quickly.

"<Kakashi? Something wrong?>"

"I need to be back at the HQ asap, can you pick me up?"

"<You're still at school?>"

"Waiting on the car park."

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The wind was sharp and cold. I was barely feeling it at all. I had other things on my mind, such as "does someone in the HQ knows about Iruka and had put a watch to confirm it and it's all?". But I perfectly knew it could be that - Sensei was the one to authorize the watchs, and since Zabuza and me were the current high school agents, he would have warned us. The only other possible explanation was "missing-nins are on his heels". There was an even worse alternative to this, "those missing-nins are Shigeru's".

I thought about the last ten minutes too, about the closely seen Sharingan of Itachi, about his expression - rather his lack of expression, and what I had thought about it 'Itachi Uchiha was not a happy person'. And with all the surveillance they had stuck to their damned heels, how was it even possible that we've missed this?

I was shaking a bit - normal physical reaction before the mental and physical stress. I could feel my sleeve sticking to my skin or whatever the hell was my wrist now.

My heart was beating too loud. Because of fear?...

Raidou arrived a few minutes later - and his face took immediately an expression of surprise-not-in-a-good-sense and worry. He started his engine back as soon as I climbed in.

"What happened to you? -I'm taking you straight to Tsunade."

"No!"

"Kakashi, you look like hell and I can feel you shaking from here! That an o-"

"Don't finish this Rai'. I have to see Sensei now."

He glanced at me, opened his mouth, closed it, focused back on the road. He didn't say another word during the ride. As soon as he parked, I jumped out of the car - I unbuckled my belt, opened the door, I got out, and I escaped the meeting between my skull and the ground only thanks to to Raidou's arms who had shot out of the car like a devil.

"Low blood pressure," he annonced. "I'm taking you to Tsunade" he said, taking a hold of my right arm to put it around his shoulders for me to stay up. I nearly passed out on him.

"Hey hey - what the...?"

He sat me back against the car, and pulled my sleeve up. I weakly turned my head to the other side - it was as if all was spinning around me. I didn't want to see what it looked. Raidou took a loud breathe next to me.

"Rai', I really have to see Sensei - that, that can wait..." I protested weakly, trying to deter him from taking me to Tsunade first.

"What happened?" he asked again.

Things were beginning to stop spinning around me. The car park was full enough to burst - every last car of the staff was there, but no sign of human life. The concrete was iced beneath my ass, just like the car behind me, and I could see my breath forming little white clouds before my face. Our voices were reverberating under the low ceiling.

"Drag me to Sensei's office and you'll know."

He frowned, put back my sleeve into place, and helped me stand more carefully than earlier. My legs trembled under my weight, badly enough to not protest when he kept my arm around his shoulder and his around my middle.

"Two clues," I went on, aware that he only wanted to put me back into Tsunade's care as soon as possible. "One: Not Good. Two: Not Good At All."

"Something to do with the actual situation?" he asked me.

I mentally sighed. I didn't knew exactly what was the situation, but it couldn't be in better shape than about two weeks ago.

" 'fraid so..."

Sensei's office was closed. Raidou knocked, but no one answered. One guy from Info passed by, but Raidou managed to make him stop long enough to ask where Sensei was - in one of the meeting rooms downstairs, with all the others department's heads. We went that way, and fell face to face with Sensei as he was stepping out of the room, Raidou still half carrying me.

"Kakashi?! What happened?"

"Later Sensei, I've got news."

He made a sign for us to enter an unused room down the corridor. I slumped on a chair, Sensei staying up and Raidou off his way in a corner to find a first aid kit - basic feature of every room here.

"You're off duty until you're cleared by..."

"I know!" I rubbed my face. Why had I so little control over my mouth today? "Sorry..."

Sensei took a chair and sat in front of me, frowning.

"Does a watch-out for potential nin have been asked recently?" I started more quietly. And then I hit myself mentally 'cause it wasn't exactly that the most important but, yes, it was, because if someone had been keeping an eye on Iruka lately, this someone could have noticed Itachi - and... I breathed deep and slow to try to calm down and put my thoughts into place.

Sensei frowned some more, surely trying to see where my question would lead. "No, the last one was three years ago..."

"Then we have a chakra-sensitive guy getting followed by missing-nin," I threw.

Raidou jerked his head from the first aid kit he was opening next to me. "Missing-nin or...?" There was no need for him to finish this phrase. There was a chance on a billion that the missing-nins around weren't following or associated in any way with Shigeru. Asking "missing-nins or Shigeru?" was asking twice the same thing.

"You're confirming this guy's abilities?" asked Sensei.

"I suspected so since November, it got confirmed this morning."

"Okay, I'm putting someone on-"

"I'll take care of this - he'll listen to me," I cut Sensei, raising a hand. My effect was a bit spoiled my the trembling of said limb.

I had promised, I had promised him to tell him everything and I wasn't about to let anyone else but me to take care of this. I owed him this. I had no right to keep all of this from him - all of what I was. I.. I'd call myself happy if he swallowed my story - if he didn't took me for mad - if he accepted only to look at me after this.

Raidou had began to pull up my sleeve and undo the mess of bloodied skin and dirty dressings. He leaned his head on one side, cocked an eyebrow, cast a glance at me. "This guy, it's the one who came with you at Rin's before Christmas, isn't it?" he said.

I just nodded in between hissing air through clenched teeth.

"Okay, so now, what's this?" made Sensei with a nod to my wrist.

"Itachi Uchiha and a in-developpement Sharingan."

If Sensei had been drinking anything right now, he would have spat it all back in a big mess. Raidou froze suddenly. The air in the room seemed to freeze too. I maybe should have said it another way, maybe a bit less, well, directly. Not that it mattered much.

"Confirming information?" said Sensei, still a bit shook.

"Visual confirmation approximatively forty-five minutes ago. Sharingan development at level four."

Four for four commas. The maximum was level six, like me - complete Sharingan. To tel the truth, the maximum was level M - 'M' for Mangekyou Sharingan, the legendary ultime level of Sharingan development. The only four known cases of M Sharingan were lost between myth and reality. The little part of Uchiha's archives that the HQ had barely spoke of this stade - and I could understand why, given what one had to do in order to obtain it; or so the archives were saying.

Sensei's eyebrows were nearly meeting each other.

"How that is possible...?" he muttered to himself. "Zabuza knows?" he asked me, staring me in the eye.

"Normally yes - but I wasn't the one to deliver the information."

"Who then?"

"The chakra-sensitive guy."

He raised an eyebrow, then just decided to drop it - the detail of the story weren't the most important right now. He got up quickly, probably to go take care of our new Uchiha's problem.

"Kakashi, I let you handle the chakra sensitive guy, do it your way. And also do so as to have him in here as quickly as possible - but before anything," he then adressed Raidou, "take him to Tsunade."

Raidou nodded and me too, and Sensei left, vanishing quickly in the maze-like insides of the HQ.

I dropped my head back against the high back of the chair. Raidou, silent, closed back the first aid kit. It made a little clic sound, suddenly very loud in the large quiet room. There was only the sound of our breath for a moment, then he breathed more deeply.

"Kakashi, about this morning... you should..."

I closed my eye and swallowed, my jaw set. Now that I had been sitting for a while, I was feeling better, but I could feel a bit too much the sugar I had missed this morning. I had no idea how I was about to do it - especially with Tsunade - but I needed to be at Iruka's at the earliest, as soon as school was out, even if I had to crawl for it. I most especially didn't need to scratch back the crusts left open by this morning's slips of tongue.

His voice faded out in the calm. It wasn't silence - the HQ is never silent, and there's always the buzz of neons lights above our heads. He finally stood to put back the kit where it had came from, walking without a sound as we all learned to do. We were back to back , him in a corner of the room, me in the chair, the chair used by Sensei left in front of me, when he continued.

"I... Just think about it. About talking about all that to someone, someday. Don't let it eat you."

There were things in his voice. Raidou is only six years and some dust older than me - but he's been doing this job for as long as me. The skeletons in the closet and the monsters under the bed, he knows all about them. Some stories I know, I heard of them or put back together enough pieces. He just want to help, as would do a teammate, as would do a friend, as would do the big brother I once had and lost, but now I had another, a different one, that I always had in the end.

I was tired and I would have wanted to not feel anything for a while to put myself together. I was feeling like there was a guinea pig on speed between my ears which was turning, and turning and turning and I couldn't stop it.

The guinea pig shrieks 'Iruka Iruka Iruka' with its little guinea pig voice.

"I'll think about it," I answered Raidou.

I rubbed my eye. When I opened it again, he was there in front of me, his hand outstretched to help me up. I took it.

I spare you the detail of the screams Tsunade made when she saw us. Very quickly - too quickly -, I was back on the bed I had left a few hours earlier, my wrist patched up properly by her magic hands. I didn't protest, even when she insisted on putting back an IV into me.

I felt asleep as Raidou was still in the room. I would have wanted to speak about Iruka and that I had inside something that tasted like fear and I knew why and I didn't at the same time. I'd have wanted to tell about Itachi who looked like Obito without a smile, and that he wasn't a happy someone...

It wasn't to Rai' I could have said all of that, it was to Iruka if only he knew. And he was about to know, even if... even if....

When I woke up a bit later to go back to sleep for a few hours, Raidou wasn't there anymore, and there was a giant caffé Moka and a sandwich on the night-stand.

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