Summary of this part : "A quiet sunday, and a calm monday morning too. Why did the rest of the day and of the week till Thursday went this poorly then? A least there was a dash of Iruka on top... even if it was more Iruka-mysteries."
A shinobi is a high school student like another- 9
‘don’t look away. I need to know if this is real.
Don’t look away. I need to know- when will this end?’ - Thursday, ‘The other side of the crash/over and out (of control)
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Sunday went uneventful. Except if you call a day that you spent running behind a loud and hyperactive blond kid eventful. Sara had decided to kidnap her idiot of a husband for the day, leaving me their kid in the process.
Sara, yeah, Sara, the only woman out there who's brave enough to have married my sensei and to have had a kid with him, and who still got the guts to support the two of them. Well, okay, sometimes, we wonder if Sensei doesn't come to the HQ just to escape her. She's a great girl, a real iron hand in a velvet glove. It's no wonder she ended up getting herself a high political place - she literally squishs her oppponents...
Hey, while I'm thinking about it, she had worked several times in circles very close from Fugaku Uchiha, 'big chief' of Internal Security for many years now; I'll make sure to point this out to her when they'll come back to pick up their personnal tornado - their orange-clad tornado. I'm wondering if she wouldn't have some kind of problem with this color since she buy so much orange clothes to her child. Poor brat's gonna end with a color-trauma.
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Ah, the (in)famous Monday morning and its double French class... I had arrived at school early, ten minutes before the first ring - this was surprising enough to be noted. I found Zabuza in front of the still closed classdoor, and Umino - no, Iruka, came in a few moments after, a hat pulled on his face almost to his nose. I smiled. The weather had gone suddenly cold; snow was waited for soon.
Zabuza dug out from a pocket a slip of paper that he handed to Iruka.
"Haku wanted me to give you that."
I briefly saw numbers. I narrowed my eye.
"That doesn't bother you that Haku give your number like that?"
"Bah," made Zabuza while shrugging an half-shoulder. "As long as he let me sleep on the doorstep."
Oka-ay... He was definitely not of the jealous type. I theatracically put a hand on his shoulder.
"My couch is yours if you need."
"Thank man, you're a real bro."
"Well, I could have said 'my bed', but I wasn't exactly feeling like having a mad Haku on my case too early..."
I avoided, chuckling, the blow he send me. Iruka was looking at this amazing display of maturity without seeming to be disoriented. And, suddenly, the gears clicked and his lighting bulb switched on. I admit, this is a bit malicious, but it's so fun to witness, particulary when it's Haku we're talking about.
"Hey, wait, wait... 'He'?"
And then, at this exact moment, the bell rang. As a result, Zabuza and me spend the all class snickering while the poor Iruka was plunged into the depths of doubt. I'd like to mention I'm rarely this cruel, but it was too fun to be missed. 'Tain, the face Iruka had pulled between his hat and his collar... good enough to eat - Hey, from where does that come ?
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Ah, the (in)famous overcrowded corridors... It was clear that winter and the cold temperatures that comes along with had settled for good. All the high school animal life was fighting to get a warm place - warm as used here is a very relative concept. It was more 'body heat' than 'radiator heat'.
When you could get between the half-knocked down lockers that were taking half of the corridors and the animals known as students while having stepped on the feet of only three people, you could consider yourself happy. It was basically the same in the canteen. We were almost sitting one on another, not that the food was extraordinarily good - it was canteen food, enough said.
I carefully touched with the end of my fork what was annouced as 'turkey's escalope'. This was rather an example of the famous urban legend called Mystery Meat.
Iruka dropped on the last seat available in the whole refectory -no need to precise it was the seat in front of me.
"Can I?"
"...go on..."
He began to pick at the content of his plate. I hadn't seen him this morning after the " 'he'?" thing before the frst class, and I hadn't seen him from this close. He had circles around his eyes. And he generally didn't looked all this good.
"You don't look okay," I commented on, giving up on my examination and my meat.
"It's nothing..." He frowned. "I hadn't seen you eating here before."
Me neither. Hey, how you think I managed to be on time this morning, seriously? ...I jumped the 'breakfast' square.
"I forgot to eat this morning."
Iruka went back to his plate. I had a quick glance at my surroundings - the four other people at the end of the table were talking very animatly of the european soccer championship and weren't giving a damn about the two other individuals present, namely, us.
No one was giving a damm about us. Time to go. I would be finally able to get sure about a little something that was bothering me with the guy in front of me.
My plan of action was to get the hair out of my eyes for a second, just the time to get a glance at Iruka's chakra path, if chakra there was; and for this, I had to model a timy amount of my chakra.
My plan stopped at the model step; hey, I didn't even had begun to gather some chakra that Iruka had grimaced and winced with pain, clenching his head in his hands. My hand crossed the narrow table to land on his shoulder.
"Hey, Iruka! Are you okay?"
"It's nothing, it's nothing..." he said, breathing deep and slow. "It happens all the time..."
I had seen enough to recognize a relaxation/pain-killer technique when I was seeing one, and Iruka was using it with the ease born from repetition. This was really happing often to him.
"Geez man, don't scare me like that!"
He moved his hands out of his face just enough for me to notice his smile. I couldn't help but smiling back. My hand left his shoulder, as with regret.
"Don't worry about that."
And, with that, he was gone. Oh, I had forgot to ask about his uncle's restaurant. The rest of the day wasn't of the exciting kind.
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Excitment could be smelled in the air. At school, you could smell in the vitiated air breathed by a thousand chest that the snow would be falling down soon - just like the holidays. I was sincerly feeling sorry for the teachers. Everyone was tired but nervous, excited, and irritable.
The atmosphere was the same in the HQ, but for different reasons.
One, our Info members were ready to pull their hair out, for who had some left. All our informations and documents were incompletes. As in "intentionally incomplete". The important parts weren't where they were supposed to be, some parts were plainly missing. All the files in our possession had been very carefully gone through and meticulously earsed. This had been done by professionals. If we hadn't begin to look into our files for links between the Uchiha and the Mitarashi, we would have had little chances of noticing this. Either our corps had been 'mole-ed', or there were some smart Alecs who had put their payed noses where they shouldn't have.
Anyway, I wasn't giving much of their hides. Ibiki had been given the job of finding them by a very worried Sandaime.
He was worried by the 'Two': the boss of the most powerful local drug cartel - powerful to the point it was beginning to put the 'old' european drug cartels in the shades, the same ones which were the current masters of the Konoha underground - wanted to talk. He wanted just a nice and gentle little meeting to talk between bosses. Yeah, that's it, and I'm Terminator, nice to meet you Sarah.
And Sandaime had asked my sensei to go, escorted my the people he seemed fit. It was just as if Sandaime wished to show to all the undesirable fauna out there that when he would stand aside, he had some serious reserves ready to take over.
Yondaime had took me apart to talk to me about this. He wished for the whole 'Infernal team' to go with him, more some others. He wished for me to go, along with Zabuza, just for showing off, and to show we were combing as wide as the cartels for our recruitment. Until this point, I was okay.
He also wished for us to go in 'full ninja' mode. Understand for me, with my face in the open. Well, okay, just a half of my face; just my eyes. I really said my eyes, as in one and two, two eyes. No way in hell. When it would be pretty fun to make the vilians piss in their pants from fright, there was no way in hell that both of my eyes would be in the open as sensei asked. Please note that he asked, he didn't ordered me anything. He could have. But by refusing, I was following the orders which had been issued to me three years ago now, the same order which had become a part of my life and a personnal choice: 'Top secret' first, then 'Minimum living wage of people knowing'.
I would go with him. It wasn't like I could possibly let the guys go without me. But I would go along with my mask firmly secured on my face.
All that -HQ and school- was seriously dampening the general atmosphere; Haku, Zabuza, Genma, Raidou and Rin were feeling the aftereffects of all this jazz too. A chance our nights were calm for the most part.
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Thursday morning. The air was seeming to be even heavier and thicker with tension. From time to time could be heard some shout that was covering the student background noise -a shout that was often sounding like "just two weeks to go before the holidays!". The tension and the excitation were rising with the approach of the snow; the Forecast Weather Channel had announced it for the following week.
I was waiting for the lunch break to end, seated alone next from my following class's door. Zabuza had his class somewhere on the other side of the building, and the others members of the human race weren't counting.
I was killing time observing from behind a book the masses moving in the relative space of the corridors. I saw a well-known brown head heading in my way, passing through the corpses launched on unpredictable trajectories. Iruka.
Strangely, I seldom had had the time to catch him after Monday lunch – well, okay, I had dropped the whole ‘no breakfast’ idea to get at school in time too. We didn’t really had a lot of classes together. I had however managed to chat with him once or twice, without trying my chakra trick again. He was… okay. He was maybe more okay than anyone else I had put under the ‘okay’ category. Hell, he was definitively more okay than anyone.
Iruka was almost in front of our class door when the ‘incident’ happened. Remember what I said earlier about our corridors? About the lockers which took half the place, and about the crowd that invade said corridors once the temperature threaten to drop below freezing? And that walking without walking on someone’s foot was impossible?
There, suddenly, there was a large free space in the middle of the corridor, less than two meters from where I was standing. And in the middle of this space, were Iruka – and another guy. I quickly recognized him. Benjamin Ford, aka ‘Benji’, member of the Itachi’s Loonies sect – a hefty guy, one you would tag as a jock, or as a bully; the kind of guy to go out only with cheerleaders and to be in the first rows of the football match, of the drinking contests and of the fights -most definitively in the first rows for the fights.
He was cornering Iruka against the lockers, blocking every withdrawal and insulting him at point-blank range.
“Shut up fag! You almost knocked me down, I ask for amends fucker! You got something to said against that queer?”
And no-one around was lifting a single finger. I moved trough the crowd, who, as a good crowd she was, had gathered in a circle around the event’s epicentre, waiting for blood to be shed.
I put a hand on Benji’s shoulder – he was still towering upon Iruka, nearly crushing him with his presence. Iruka wasn’t saying anything, his eyes locked on the floor, away from the mastodon who was dying with the desire of embedding his fist somewhere – and preferably somewhere which would make his victim fall down and humiliate himself. Benji was this kind of guy. I was even wondering why Itachi was keeping him around.
“Eh, keep it cool Benji, there’s not enough place in the corridors to keep from bumping into each other and you know it….”
‘With the space you take in the corridor, you were bound to get bumped into someday’ sounded kinda good too, but I quickly figured that it wasn’t that well adapted to the circumstances. Iruka suddenly lifted his head, and stared at me with wide eyes. Benji jerked my hand away with a violent shrug.
“Well well, seems that you can talk finally? Came to rescue your girlfriend?”
I wasn’t liking Benji’s face at all. I had to expect the worse. Think like a student, not like a combatant, think like a student, not like a combatant… I nodded to Iruka, praying he would get the hint and get the hell away from here.
“Calm down man, you’re just asking for troubles.”
Fuck. This was definitively not one of the best sentences to say right now. The crowd gasped. Benji’s hands shot suddenly to grip my collar, banging me the lockers. My head made a very nice ‘BANG’ against the metal. Think like a student, not like a combatant, think like a student, not like a combatant… My hands went to encircle his wrists, but not tight enough to let him go.
“Yeah, exactly – and I got troubles with who I want junkie. Bad luck! Today’s your and your little friend turn.”
Fuck, where are the competent authorities when you need them? Think like a student, not like a combatant, think like a student, not like a combatant… Benji’s left hook was administered with an ease that spoke of regular use – spreading itself comfortably on my right cheekbone, and causing my head to bang once again in the metal behind me. The crowd whispered, took a step back, moved forward, bloodthirsty.
Ouch, that hurts son of a bitch!
Iruka had stepped back, but the curious were blocking him the retreat path. Without letting me the time to catch back my breath to control, or trying to control, the pain that was erupting from my eye to the corner of my mouth, Benji was chasing down again his first prey. He has just seized Iruka, that an aristocratic hand was holding his fist back.
“Stop that Benji, no need to continue.”
The Godfather, in flesh, in blood and in hair had talked. Benji literally deflated. He send one last hateful glare at Iruka, then glued himself to Itachi’s heels, the crowd moving apart before them, and closing itself behind them, as if they were swallowed by it, making them disappear without a noise, without a trace.
Iruka came toward me, and get down to my level – I had slide down on the floor when King Itachi had appeared. Benji had definitively one hell of a punch. I was quite sure to end blue-faced by tomorrow.
The crowd was thinning out, gossiping out loud and playing again the scene that had happened before them, again, and again, and again.
Iruka was looking at me in the eyes.
“You didn’t have to do that…”
He stretched an hesitating hand to my badly red cheek.
“It seemed a good idea?” I said, trying to attempt a lopsided smile.
He smiled back, an half-smile that was hiding so much things – and strangely, I wanted to discover those things, those secrets, to discover and to share them with mines.
“Thank you.”
And this thank you seemed to mean much more than just ‘thank you’.
A supervisor showed up suddenly, as if he was jumping out of his box. My ass, I bet he had quietly waited behind a corner of wall for the show to end to come out picking up the bits and sweep the floor. It’s Itachi and his gang that ‘make’ the law in the student sphere here.
“Umino, Hatake!” he barked. “In the headmaster’s office, now!”
There’s no justice.
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alexiel_neesan- alexiel is close enough from my real name...