Chapter Text
Iruka hadn’t set foot in the orphanage since he had left on a rainy autumn day at the age of twelve. All his worldly possessions had fit into three cardboard boxes, taped at the worn corners to hold them together, and a couple of friends had helped him to carry them across the village to the rundown apartment he still called home. It wasn’t a great apartment – it was tiny and the walls were too thin and prone to mould – but it had felt palatial after the orphanage, where he had shared a room with three other boys and the bathroom conditions didn’t bear thinking about. Once he had finally broken free, he had sworn never to return.
Yet here he was. The building had barely changed in the last four years. There was the same faded green carpet, the same whiff of dirty socks, and the same tired faces of the staff. Probably some of the kids would be the same terrors he’d played and bickered with, but it was a school day and only the youngest children were around. He’d heard their voices from behind the playroom door as he’d passed, but had bolted up the stairs before anyone could try and drag him in to say hello.
Now he stood alone in an empty bedroom. It was for the younger children, the ones who weren’t yet able to climb in and out of a bunk bed, and so the room was crammed with four small beds, two to the left of the window and two to the right. Iruka stared from bed to bed, taking in the stuffed animals propped against the pillows, and wondered which was his bed. It should have been obvious; there should have been some tell to give it away, and yet nothing revealed the resting place of the orphanage’s most dangerous inhabitant.
Iruka jumped as the door opened behind him, but it was only Asuka, who stepped inside and shut the door behind her with a click. She was carrying a stepladder, which she propped against the wall without comment, ignoring Iruka’s questioning glance.
“Let’s get started then,” she said. “Remember, you are here to observe, not to touch, not to make suggestions, and certainly not to distract me.”
Iruka, who had heard these commandments many times before, rolled his eyes.
“Got it,” he said.
Asuka turned to her bag, which Iruka had dumped on one of the beds, and clucked her tongue.
“You could have at least unpacked,” she said.
“I thought I wasn’t meant to touch anything,” Iruka said, which earned him a very flat look. He sighed, and when Asuka unzipped the bag, he helped her arrange the contents on the bed.
Once they had unpacked the necessary materials, Asuka took stock of what lay between them, muttering under her breath. There were four scrolls, rolled up now, but Iruka had seen them stretched out in Asuka’s workshop, complex seals painted down the centre of each. Beside the scrolls sat a calligraphy set: a brush and a bottle of ink, both hidden within their ink-stained wooden case. There were also several blank slips of chakra paper, two seals textbooks, and a book of Asuka’s handwritten notes, all bristling with the receipts, takeaway menus, and torn strips of paper she’d used as bookmarks.
“Right,” Asuka said when she was done assessing her materials. “Let’s get started then.” She pulled back her hair, which had been almost totally dark when Iruka had started his apprenticeship but which was streaked with white now, and fastened it into a ponytail at the base of her neck.
“Why aren’t there wards on this room already?” Iruka asked as she picked up one of the scrolls. “You know I used to live here, right? You’re telling me Naruto could have gone full monster mode when I was sleeping down the hall and no one thought to do anything to stop that?”
“He was too young to be much of a threat,” Asuka said. She made a few hand signs above one of the scrolls and then picked it up. “Children don’t generally awaken their chakra until they’re five or six.”
“But he’s got a whole ass demon fox inside him,” Iruka said incredulously. “You really thought he was going to be typical?”
“Well, he has been,” Asuka pointed out. “And we had other priorities after the kyuubi attack.”
“Seriously? There were things more important than letting it happen again?”
Asuka sighed loudly.
“Could you stop fretting over calamities that didn’t happen and pay attention? I thought you wanted an introduction to complex wards.”
“I do,” Iruka said at once.
He shut up for the next part. Asuka opened the stepladder between two of the beds and climbed up with the scroll in hand. She pressed the scroll to the centre of the wall just below where it met the ceiling, and Iruka jumped as the scroll unravelled itself with a hiss of unspooling paper, each end snapping against the wall and sticking fast. The effect was almost decorative: a long strip of paper stretching across the length of the wall, the seals stark against the white.
“Now I’ll put up the other three,” Asuka said, gesturing at the other walls, “and activate them. They’re primed to respond only to the kyuubi’s chakra. If the levels of chakra in this room rise above a certain level, the whole room will go into lockdown, and only ANBU will be able to break in to contain the situation.”
“It can’t be full lockdown,” Iruka said. “I mean, the other kids will need a way out.”
Asuka didn’t say anything, but the look she gave him was tinged with pity. Iruka understood with a jolt of his insides.
“You’re not giving them a way out?” he demanded, gesturing to the other three beds. They were so small. “But they’d be trapped in here with the kyuubi!”
“It’s unfortunate,” Asuka said. “But any weakness in the wards could allow a creature that strong to tear its way out, and the children would still likely not survive.”
“But what about…” Iruka trailed off as he had a second realisation, then started again. “But we’re not just putting wards on the bedroom. We’re putting them round the whole orphanage too. Do those go into lockdown as well? If the kyuubi breaks loose in the playroom or the dining room or walking down the hallway, then everyone will be locked inside with it?”
“Yes,” Asuka said simply. “It’s the only way.”
Iruka remembered those first few nights he had spent in the orphanage. How he had lain awake, trembling against the sheets and waiting for the screams to start again. The fires, the buildings torn apart like tissue paper, the bodies in the rubble. He hadn’t known then that the kyuubi had been sealed inside a baby, and that baby was lying down the hall, crying fitfully into the night because the staff were too afraid to touch him.
“I lived here,” he said again, and there was accusation in his voice this time.
“No one said it was fair, Iruka,” Asuka said. “And no one wanted to do it this way. But if all goes well, the wards will never have to do their job, and the children here will never know what could have been. There are seals on the boy too, and they act as a very powerful ward.”
“But it was trapped in a person last time,” Iruka said. He wasn’t entirely sure who or why; Asuka hadn’t told him, though he was sure she knew. “And it got free somehow, so those seals are clearly bullshit.”
“They are some of the most complex and powerful seals this village has ever produced,” Asuka said sharply. “But the kyuubi is one of the most powerful beings this world has ever known, and it doesn’t take kindly to our experiments. Do you really think it would be safer for me to meddle with the boy’s seals when the kyuubi is waiting for its chance to break free?”
“Why do we have to seal it into a person at all?” Iruka asked, throwing up his hands. “Why did anyone ever think that was a good idea? Just make a sealed prison for it, then you could add all the wards you like. If you can ward a whole orphanage to keep it contained then surely you can do that without also using the kid.”
“These wards,” Asuka said, pointing to the scroll stretched out across the wall, “are theoretical and untested. And the only reason I have confidence in them is because the kyuubi is vastly weakened by the seals already on the boy. These are supposed to contain the kyuubi if it exerts control over him. If it rips its way out of his body then the wards will be useless. You might as well try to catch an elephant in a spiderweb. There are no other seals that can hold it, Iruka.”
It wasn’t often that Iruka heard Asuka admit there was anything she couldn’t do. Now that the Yondaime and his wife were dead, Asuka was the most powerful seals master in the village – a fact that she wasn’t modest about. It had taken Sandaime himself to persuade her to offer Iruka an apprenticeship, although she had since warmed to the idea of teaching Konoha’s next great seals master. Often, Iruka baulked at her high expectations, but sometimes, especially when faced with rules and restrictions, he found himself thinking that he could do better than Asuka – than even the Yondaime – if he were only allowed to try.
“I want to learn about the kyuubi seals,” he said, and Asuka let out a surprised bark of laughter.
“Maybe in twenty years,” she said. “You barely have a fraction of the training needed to even comprehend them – and less than a fraction of the clearance. So let’s agree to shelve this discussion for at least another decade.”
Iruka would agree to no such thing. He eyed the seals painted on the scroll, none of which he understood. They were a class of wards so far above his level that he felt like a stupid child. Asuka had brought him here to learn how to place the seals, the hand signs she used to activate them, and some of the theory – but not how to make the seals themselves. He wasn’t ready, but when would he be? His studies suddenly seemed so slow and the need to progress incredibly urgent.
He watched in silence while she warded the rest of the orphanage, but the conversation wasn’t over. Not while he could imagine the screams of the children trapped inside.
Iruka was wandering home from the orphanage when he spotted Naruto. He’d assumed Naruto was playing downstairs with the other children, and so at first he didn’t even notice the small blond boy on the other side of the street. What drew his attention was the teenager holding Naruto’s hand.
Iruka didn’t know Hatake Kakashi, but he felt like he knew him at least a little. He was the subject of more than his fair share of gossip, although Iruka didn’t know which of the rumours were true. He was only three years older than Iruka but had graduated the Academy before Iruka had even started and so they’d never formally met. Iruka saw him around the village a lot; often enough to wonder if Kakashi knew his face, if not his name.
Today Kakashi was wearing a tank top, and it was his shoulders that caught Iruka’s eye. They were nice shoulders, not broad but the muscles flexed beneath the skin in a way that made Iruka’s mouth feel dry. He let himself linger, watching Kakashi slowly walk beside another boy, a brunet closer to Iruka’s age. Finally, Iruka’s gaze dipped low enough to notice the small blond boy on Kakashi’s other side. His hand was clasped firmly in Kakashi’s so that each time he tried to wander off, Kakashi gave him a little tug back without pausing the flow of conversation.
Of all the rumours about Kakashi, it was the ones about his relationship to Naruto that intrigued Iruka the most. He didn’t think they were related. Certainly, Naruto didn’t share Kakashi’s surname, although he had heard talk that Naruto was the child of a secret Hatake cousin or some such nonsense. Iruka didn’t buy it. So why did Hatake Kakashi, the former child prodigy and famous Copy Nin, take such an interest in a nobody orphan child? Because Naruto was the kyuubi vessel? That seemed more reason for Kakashi to keep his distance than to get close to him.
The three of them turned off the street, into a park, and without making the conscious decision to follow them, Iruka found himself changing course. There was a knot of anxiety pulling tight in his stomach, and even though he knew Kakashi was ten times stronger than him – probably more – he couldn’t shake the fear that if he left them together, here outside the protection of Asuka’s wards, something bad would happen.
Kakashi made a beeline straight for the children’s playground, and Iruka followed at a distance. Once they were close enough, Kakashi let go of Naruto’s hand and let him rush over to the slide. It disturbed Iruka to see how much of a child Naruto was: the way his face lit up, and the ease with which he approached two other small children by the slide and immediately started chatting to them. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was an ordinary kid, and that was where the danger lay. How could Sandaime allow him to wander around Konoha like this, putting everyone at risk?
He’d become so distracted by Naruto that he walked past Kakashi and his friend without noticing how close he’d got. He only realised when he heard Kakashi say, voice low but distinct, “-designs for another curse seal.”
Iruka’s step faltered, but he was too well-trained to stop and stare. He’d passed his chuunin exam two months ago, after all, and he managed to carry on walking without looking back, even though he dearly wanted to. He hadn’t studied curse seals, but he knew they were a complicated combination of seals and jutsus, a whole new form of sealing technique pioneered by Orochimaru. Iruka had briefly known Orochimaru as Anko’s jounin-sensei before he’d fled the village following the discovery of a laboratory outside Konoha with some kind of forbidden experiments inside. Iruka had never found out exactly what ANBU had unearthed in the lab, though there were plenty of rumours about that too.
Why was Kakashi talking about a curse seal? He wasn’t a seals master. Iruka glanced again at Naruto and wondered: was it Naruto’s seal he was talking about? Could that be a curse seal? Iruka didn’t have the slightest clue, and he knew it was none of his business, but there was no way he could go home and forget about it. Not after he’d spent the morning stringing up wards in Naruto’s bedroom that would lock three other small children in a room with a rampaging kyuubi. If there was anything Kakashi knew – the slightest clue that could help Iruka figure out an alternative – then he needed to hear it.
It would have been too obvious to circle back and hang about within eavesdropping distance, so Iruka turned his steps towards a bench, sat down and tugged a blank sheet of chakra paper out of his pocket. He produced a fountain pen, hesitated a moment with the cap between his teeth, and then carefully drew a seal on the paper. After waiting impatiently for the ink to dry, he pushed some chakra into the paper to activate it. Immediately, the seal produced a crackling, staticky sound that made Iruka wince and lean back. But almost as quickly, the sound quieted to a low hiss. Satisfied, Iruka slipped the seal into his pocket and cast about for a more private place to sit.
He climbed a nearby tree. It wasn’t close to Kakashi, but it had a perfect line of sight, which was exactly what Iruka needed. He wished he had a book or some similar prop he could use to make himself less suspicious, but even if Kakashi clocked him, he had no reason to think that a lone teenager sitting in a tree had anything to do with him. Iruka took out the seal and turned it so the inked side faced towards Kakashi. The hissing distorted, the noise becoming muffled voices, and then it sharpened.
“-probably just rumours,” Kakashi’s voice said, a little crackly as it came through the seal but perfectly audible. “We have to send someone, of course, but it’s not the first time we’ve had sightings. You shouldn’t stress about it – not when we don’t know for sure.”
Iruka had found this particular seal in a book of espionage sealing techniques. He’d borrowed it from Asuka’s workshop, though she didn’t exactly know that she was lending it. He hadn’t been certain it was the kind of thing he was allowed to study, so he’d decided it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, and so far she hadn’t noticed it was missing – or if she had then she hadn’t asked for it back. He’d memorised all the best seals anyway, so even if she took back the book, she couldn’t scrape the knowledge from his brain.
“Who are they sending?” Kakashi’s friend asked. His voice was furtive, as though afraid to be overheard, and Iruka made sure to stare away from them.
“Not us,” Kakashi said firmly.
“But maybe it would be best if I…”
“Tenzou,” Kakashi said. “It would not be best to send you. I don’t think Orochimaru has really set up a base so close to the border, but if there’s the slightest chance that he’s out there then you are not setting foot within fifty miles of him. I won’t allow it, and I’m sure the hokage wouldn’t think it was a good idea either.”
Iruka’s breath caught. Orochimaru had been sighted? He wondered if Anko knew.
“I think I’d rather go myself than sit and wait for news,” Tenzou said softly. Iruka wondered who he was, and what connection he could possibly have to Orochimaru. He was too young to have been a former student before Anko. In fact, it was weird that Iruka didn’t know him from school. “And if he really is designing new curse seals, if he’s experimenting again, it’s only a matter of time before…”
He stopped talking abruptly as Naruto yelled Kakashi’s name. Naruto had an incredibly loud voice for such a small kid, and Iruka was grateful the seal only enhanced the volume of people it was directly pointing at, otherwise he might have been deafened.
“Hang on,” Kakashi muttered as Naruto hollered his name again. “Let me go check on him.”
Tenzou glanced at his watch. “I should get going anyway. I start my shift in thirty minutes.”
“Come say goodbye to Naruto then.”
Iruka kept the seal trained on them as they entered the playground, but they didn’t say anything else of interest. He deactivated the seal when they got close to Naruto and curled the paper absentmindedly around his fingers.
It hadn’t been a helpful conversation to overhear, but it was certainly an interesting one. Iruka watched as Tenzou walked away, wondering idly who he was, but he soon turned his attention back to Kakashi, who was pushing Naruto on a swing. Each time his hands touched Naruto’s small back, Iruka felt his stomach clench. How did Kakashi have the courage to stay so close to him? And why would he want to?
He'd been staring intently at Naruto, and when he lifted his gaze again, it was a shock to find Kakashi staring straight back at him. Iruka’s hand tightened reflexively on the seal, crumpling the paper. He didn’t breathe for the three long seconds that Kakashi held his gaze before Naruto swung back and he dropped his focus back to the boy on the swing. He didn’t look up at Iruka again, but the message was clear: I know you’re there.
It was probably the first time Kakashi had ever looked directly at him. Iruka sat breathlessly in the tree for another minute, and when it became clear that Kakashi wasn’t going to acknowledge him again, he dropped down through the branches and walked quickly away. His heart was still pounding, and he didn’t quite know why.
“Orochimaru-sensei?” Anko asked. “I haven’t heard anything about him for ages. Why, what have you heard?”
She’d returned from a mission earlier that morning, and had freshly woken from a nap when Iruka had knocked on her door. She was currently lying on the sofa, leaving Iruka to sit on the floor, but she raised her head with interest when he asked about her old jounin-sensei.
“Some rumour about a new lab,” Iruka said. “Near the border. Though they didn’t say which border.”
“Last I heard, they thought he’d gone north,” Anko said. “This was a couple of years ago, but they definitely asked me if I’d ever heard him mention the Valley of the End. I hadn’t,” she added. “Though I had to say it fifty times before they believed me.”
She was still sour about the interrogation ANBU had put her through after Orochimaru had left the village. Her whole genin team had been put through the wringer; even Iruka had wondered what secrets they were keeping, although he’d never admit this to Anko.
“Huh,” Iruka said absently. He rested his chin on his palm, staring at the half-completed mission report on Anko’s coffee table. “Hey, Anko, can I ask you about him?”
“About Orochimaru-sensei?” She had never stopped calling him sensei. Iruka had always found that strange. “You’re already asking me about him.” When Iruka raised an eyebrow at her, she sighed and rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “What about him?”
“He was good with seals, right?”
“He was good with everything,” Anko said. “He was probably the smartest person in this whole village. When he first took us on as a team, he told us he didn’t specialise in any one shinobi art – he specialised in innovation.”
“You mean those experiments?”
Iruka’s gaze flicked down to Anko’s neck. Her hair covered the mark Orochimaru had left on her, but she’d shown it to him before. Anko herself had once been an experiment for Orochimaru’s curse seals.
She caught him looking and held his gaze defiantly until he looked away.
“Yeah,” she said. “His experiments. But most of them weren’t on people. I know what they say about him, but it’s bullshit. Most of what he did was making new jutsus or messing around with seals. The hokage just didn’t like it because he wasn’t scared of using forbidden techniques.”
They had never really talked about Orochimaru before. When he’d first left the village, ANBU had frightened Anko into keeping her mouth shut, and then later she’d been angry – at Orochimaru for keeping secrets, at the village for chasing him out. This was the first time Iruka had heard her speak about him in such measured tones.
“Forbidden techniques are forbidden for a reason though,” Iruka pointed out. “Didn’t you say that when he put the curse seal on you it really hurt?”
Anko’s fingers disappeared under her hair to press against the seal.
“He warned me it would hurt,” she said. “And if I’d known how much, I might not have gone through with it, but…it was worth it.” She fixed him with that challenging stare again, as though daring him to argue. “He didn’t do it because he wanted to hurt me; he did it to help me. To make me stronger. And it worked. If he’d stuck around longer, maybe he could have done something about the pain, but I guess I’ll have to live with it now. Thanks, Konoha.”
Iruka was taken aback by her tone.
“You’d let him experiment on you again?” he asked, horrified. “But they found bodies in his lab!”
Anko screwed up her mouth like she’d sucked on a lemon.
“That’s what they say,” she said. “But no one’s ever said who those bodies were. The more I’ve thought about it – and I’ve thought about it a lot over the past three years – the more I think the hokage lied to us.”
“What?”
Anko sat up, taking her hand away from her neck so her hair fell over the seal again.
“I don’t think Orochimaru-sensei did what they claim he did,” she said fiercely. “I would have known if he was a bad guy. He just wasn’t, OK? He was always good to us, and it wasn’t exactly a secret that he liked pushing the boundaries. His experiments were meant to help the village, not hurt it! But he refused to be held back by the rules and that pissed off the hokage or the council or someone high up in the food chain. So they decided to arrest him and make up a lot of bullshit about him being some kind of mad scientist. He escaped, of course – he must have known what they were up to – but they decided to tell everyone their lies anyway, to make sure everyone was prejudiced against him. So he couldn’t ever come back.”
It took Iruka a long moment to absorb all of that. Anko waited impatiently through his stunned silence, her shoulders already hunched defensively, anticipating his disbelief.
“I don’t think the hokage would lie to everyone,” Iruka said slowly. “Especially about his own student.”
“Oh, they did not have a good relationship,” Anko said. “Sandaime was always getting on his back, trying to stop him doing his research. Orochimaru-sensei always taught us that knowledge should be free for everyone. The hokage shouldn’t get to call certain things ‘forbidden’ and then hide them away where he and ANBU could still use them but no one else could.”
“Sandaime doesn’t use forbidden techniques!”
“If he didn’t want to use them then why does he keep all the books and scrolls with that ‘forbidden’ stuff in it?” Anko challenged. Iruka opened his mouth to snap back, and then, finding he didn’t have a good answer, shut it again.
It occurred to him that the wards Asuka had used at the orphanage might have contained forbidden techniques. The seals containing the kyuubi in Naruto were undoubtedly forbidden knowledge. He could see the sense in keeping knowledge about the kyuubi under wraps, but even if it was the right thing to do, it still proved Anko’s point.
“Did Orochimaru have anything to do with sealing the kyuubi away?” he blurted out.
It was Anko’s turn to be taken aback by the turn of the conversation.
“That was the Yondaime, wasn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think sensei had anything to do with that. He never mentioned the kyuubi, I don’t think.”
“But do you think he could have? Or that he could…make the seals better?”
Anko still looked as though she was struggling to figure out how they’d ended up here.
“Probably,” she said. “I really think he could have done anything if he set his mind to it. That’s what made him dangerous to the village. He was too clever and they couldn’t control him. Keeping the power in their own hands was more important than letting him help the village. I really do believe that.”
Iruka leaned back, resting on his hands. His head was a grinding whir of thoughts. He had a lot to think about.
That night, Iruka lay on his futon and didn’t sleep. He kept thinking about the orphanage, and the three other children in Naruto’s room. The older children down the hall. The ghost of his past self in his old room.
It had been a long time since he’d felt truly frightened of the kyuubi. The years had placed a distance between himself and the monster, and by the time he had found out who Naruto was, he had already left the orphanage. He had kept an eye on Naruto since then, not because he thought he could do anything to dilute the threat but because it made him feel more in control if he knew where Naruto was and who he was with.
But now, thanks to Asuka, he knew that the threat might not stay dormant much longer. When Naruto’s chakra awakened, when they started to train him at the Academy – what then? Would the kyuubi wriggle free of its bonds? Would the orphanage become a feeding ground, the children vanishing into its terrible maw? He thought of the kyuubi’s hot breath and the stink of blood, and it was so real in his mind – half nightmare, half memory – that he bolted upright and clapped a hand over his mouth, sure he was about to be sick.
The nausea passed slowly. Iruka sat on his futon breathing hard, his heart kicking like a frightened child. The kyuubi could not be allowed to break free again. He knew with a stomach-curdling certainty that he would not survive a second attack. It would come for him as it had come for his parents, and the whole village would fall. There would be nothing left except ashes and bones.
But it didn’t have to be like that. They could change Konoha’s fate if only someone was brave enough to act. If only everyone stopped saying ‘it can’t be done’ and a single voice spoke up and said ‘I can’. Iruka wanted to be that voice but he didn’t have the skills and he couldn’t learn fast enough. He couldn’t take the kyuubi out of Naruto and seal it away somewhere safer.
But he thought he knew who could.
It was almost dawn when Iruka crept into the orphanage through the bathroom window at the back. He had been worried that the kids might have stopped ensuring that the lock was always broken, but he should have known that the new lot were just as eager to sneak out in the night as he and his friends had been. The window was smaller than he remembered, but he managed to lift himself over the windowsill, twisting to avoid the sink, and then touched down softly onto the lino without making a sound.
He stood and listened for a long minute. None of the staff should be up yet, but it paid to stay vigilant. When his patience was stretched to its limit, Iruka opened the bathroom door and slipped out into the hall.
The orphanage did have wards, but due to the comings and goings of so many children and visitors, they were the kind often used on public buildings. They lay dormant, allowing anyone to pass through, unless the staff were alerted to a security breach, and then they would initiate lockdown. It had been one less barrier to break through on the way in, but if anyone caught him in the building, he might not manage to make it out.
Although the outside world was lit with a dusky predawn light, the hallway, lined with shut doors, was dark. Iruka moved very slowly as he retraced his steps from the day before. When he reached the door to Naruto’s room, he stopped with his hand an inch from the handle and had to force himself to take several long, slow breaths. They didn’t help.
He knew that what he was about to do would get him arrested – maybe worse. He’d barely slept, and his body felt tired and heavy even though his brain was lit up like the glint of sunlight on razor wire. Was this a stupid, impulsive decision? Most likely. But that didn’t make it wrong.
The door clicked gently as Iruka turned the handle and pushed it open, but there was no sound from the four small beds inside. Iruka crossed the threshold, realised he didn’t know which of the four lumps under their covers was Naruto, and had to bend down over each sleeping form, holding his breath, to inspect them.
He found Naruto in the third bed. Naruto’s arm was stretched out over a toy rabbit, and his lips were slightly parted. He didn’t stir as Iruka carefully drew a seal from his pocket, wincing as the paper rustled.
Iruka pushed a little chakra into the seal and then pressed it gently to Naruto’s arm. Naruto’s fingers twitched and his breathing deepened as the sedative took hold.
It did not feel good to use a seal on a five-year-old. It wouldn’t do Naruto any harm – Iruka wouldn’t hurt the boy, even if he was maybe, technically, kidnapping him – but Iruka had to keep him quiet somehow. It was better for everyone if Naruto stayed asleep until they were out of the village.
Scooping Naruto out of the bed gave Iruka much more trouble than he’d anticipated. Were five-year-olds always this heavy? He swore soundlessly as he heaved Naruto up against his chest in an awkward hold, then had to lower him back to the bed again and adjust his grip. One of the other children rolled over and Iruka squeezed his eyes shut and prayed that the kid wouldn’t wake up. When no sleepy voices raised out of the dark, Iruka tried again with silent desperation, and this time managed to get Naruto into a hold that was secure if not comfortable. Then he turned and carried him out of the bedroom and back down the hall.
Getting Naruto out of the window and down to the ground took more time than Iruka had allowed for, and by the time he laid Naruto down on the dewy lawn to grab his rucksack, he was aware that there were lights turning on in the staff quarters of the orphanage. He heaved Naruto back up into his arms, made sure the sedative seal was tucked close to his chest out of sight, and then hurried out onto the street, all the while expecting a cry to go up behind him. It never did.
Since he’d had his revelation several hours ago, Iruka had made a very basic plan. The steps were these: 1) get Naruto out of the village, 2) find Orochimaru and persuade him to help remove the kyuubi, and 3) somehow convince Sandaime that the ends justified the means. There were a few details still to sort out, but Iruka figured he could deal with steps two and three once he’d successfully taken the kyuubi outside the village gates. That was the most important part, and there wasn’t any time to waste.
There weren’t many people on the streets yet, and so no one challenged Iruka as he hurried towards the eastern gate. He was conscious that Naruto was still wearing his pyjamas, and since he hadn’t thought to take any of Naruto’s clothes from his room, he was going to have to stay in pyjamas. It was too late to go back now.
During the early hours of the morning, Iruka had planned a route to the gate that avoided the ANBU patrols as much as possible. There wasn’t a large ANBU presence in the village at this time of day, but if one of them caught him, it was all over. Most of them knew Iruka – he regretted now that he’d baited them so much as a young prankster – and he was sure that all of them would recognise Naruto. Good thing that in his troublemaker days he had made a point of tracking their patrol routes, the better to either avoid them or set traps for them.
The village gates opened at 6am sharp every morning, and Iruka arrived just as they were swinging open with a creak. There were two chuunin guards on duty, but no one else around. Iruka hung back for a few minutes anyway, watching the rooftops for ANBU, but if any were nearby then he couldn’t see them. He’d have to risk it.
It would have been ideal if he could have left in the busy middle of the day; he could have picked a moment when the guards had been distracted and then sauntered out unchallenged and unnoticed. As it was, he was going to have to talk his way through. It wasn’t like he couldn’t just walk in and out as he pleased, but a teenager carrying a sleeping child at the crack of dawn definitely counted as unusual and borderline suspicious behaviour.
Adjusting Naruto in his arms one last time, Iruka straightened his back and strode towards the gate at a casual pace, as though he had every right to be carrying Naruto out of the village. He’d made sure to dress in his chuunin uniform, his forehead protector strapped on to raise his status from a no-good teenager to a shinobi of rank.
As he’d expected, one of the guards stepped forwards to meet him: a woman who Iruka didn’t know. He smiled at her, hoping to keep her attention on him so she wouldn’t look too closely at Naruto. He had no idea what the chances were that she’d recognise the kid.
“I think you forgot to dress your little brother,” the woman said conversationally, but there was tension in her shoulders.
Iruka shushed her and glanced down at Naruto as though worried he might wake up.
“Not my brother,” he said. “My mission. I need to take him to some relatives – thought it would be easier if he started the journey sleeping.” The woman’s posture lost some of its edge but her gaze was still wary.
“Where are his parents?” she asked.
“Dead,” Iruka said truthfully. “His mother just passed away so I’m taking him to an aunt. I have the mission scroll in my bag – if you hold him for a second, I can find it for you.”
He stepped forwards, shifting Naruto in his arms, but as he’d hoped, the woman hastily waved her hands.
“No, that’s OK. Get going. Poor kid, I hope he’s going to a nice home.”
“Yeah, me too,” Iruka said.
He restrained himself from hurrying as he passed the guard and stepped out onto the road. He thought he felt her watching him, but he didn’t look back, and only when he’d gone a good distance did he channel chakra into his feet and start running, veering off the road and into the trees, heading north.
He wouldn’t have long before someone realised that Naruto was missing. Maybe they already had.