The next morning, I went round to the Hyuuga compound. I didn't quite make it all the way there before I almost literally ran into Naruto.
It was, frankly, one of the last places I expected to see him.
I blinked. "What are you doing here?"
He rubbed at the back of his head and chuckled awkwardly. "Eh, I had to come and get Neji," he explained. "I have a mission with his team."
"Already?" I asked, a little surprised. Then again, Naruto hadn't been hurt and he couldn't exactly do much training in the village when Kakashi-sensei had been sent out again almost as soon as he'd returned.
"When I sent out all those clones to look for stuff in Land of River, they found some guys who wanted to come to Konoha." Naruto shrugged. "I helped them a bit, and they must have got here okay because when I asked Baa-chan about it, she said it could be my problem."
Well, it was good that Naruto was taking responsibility for things, and following up on what happened. I guessed that Tsunade was trying to encourage that. And it would probably be good for Naruto to 'lead' a mission where he actually was the person in charge, rather than the way he would defer to me or Shikamaru. Not that I suspected Neji would let him get away with terrible decisions but it would be different.
It did put a bit of a hole in some of my plans though.
"That's great," I said, distractedly. "Uh. Do you think… could you do me a favour?"
"Of course!" Naruto said, brightly, as if he'd love nothing more.
I felt a little bad about asking. It wasn't that I thought he would say no. It was that I was pretty sure he would say yes. "I'm a little low on chakra," I said. "Do you think I could…"
Naruto lifted his hands up, glowing blue. "Of course! That's easy. I have heaps of chakra!" He giggled. "I thought you were going to ask something difficult."
I didn't have enough chakra to properly do a Transfusion. It wasn't really the kind of jutsu you were supposed to use on yourself, either. In the end, I only really managed to smooth out some of the peaks before shunting it into my coils. It felt awful. It burnt.
"Thanks," I said, managing an actual smile despite all that. "Good luck with your mission. Stay out of trouble."
Naruto grinned and bounced off.
I rubbed tiredly at my eyes, and went and talked to Hinata anyway. Maybe it was for the best that Neji wasn't there. He was clever enough to put it together that something was up if I asked about it directly, and good enough at reading people that he'd notice if I tried to ask about it indirectly.
Maybe Kiba would be the better choice after all.
I headed back onto the clan grounds and swung by the main pharmaceutical office to pick up the Inuzuka Clinic delivery and requisite paperwork. It wasn't unusual for me to do that, so no one really raised any eyebrows, though I did have to repeat 'I'm fine, I'm fine' a few times.
Hana was in the office when I got there, so it was a simple matter of running through the checklist, checking the bottles and signing off that everything had arrived safely. I liked Hana, she was brisk and no nonsense, but never really rough or curt. Also, you had to respect anyone who maintained both an active field presence and effectively adapted Konoha medical training for animals.
"Great," I said, folding up the signed papers and tucking them into my pocket when we were done. "Is Kiba around?"
Hana filed her copy away into a black folder. "In the kennels," she affirmed, pushing the back door to the office open and bellowing his name down the corridor.
I smothered a grin.
"What?" Kiba hollered back, vaguely annoyed, before his head poked into the office. He blinked at me. "Oh. Hey. What's up?"
I shrugged. "Just dropping off the clinic's medicine. How're you holding up?" He'd been injured worse than I had on the Sound Four mission, but we hadn't really had a chance to catch up since.
"Eh, I'm back on light duty." Kiba shrugged and held the door open, a clear invitation to follow. "I heard you got yourself messed up again."
"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," I said, because when did you ever get the chance to quote that and mean it?
Kiba laughed. "Well yeah, they must have been." We twisted through a few corridors, though a room with small dog cages and outside where the large runs were. Most of the Inuzuka dogs roamed free, but about half of the cages were full with dogs that were injured, or had puppies, or otherwise needed to be separated from the rest.
There was a press of small fury bodies to the outer fence as they all rushed over to investigate the 'new' person. I crouched down and wiggled my fingers at them. "So cute."
"They all need names," Kiba said idly. "You got any good ones?"
"Sorry," I said. "Nara are good at a lot of things, but names aren't one of them. We're twins named 'deer girl' and 'deer boy' and the only reason we have the 'deer' is because of tradition."
"Better than getting called 'nose'," he shrugged philosophically.
"Is it really that Kanji?" I asked. "I thought it would be 'flower'?"
"That's what Hana wants people to think," Kiba said. "But it's not. Mom was on the good drugs and dad was too scared to argue. At least they picked mine in advance."
I snickered. We bantered a bit more. I learnt that Shino was apparently back in the village, and annoyed that he'd been the sole member of the Konoha 12 to not go on the Sound Four mission.
"Seriously," Kiba said. "Don't bring it up unless you want a half an hour rant about it."
"Would telling him that he was one of the first people we asked for help?" I asked. "If he'd been in the village, he would have been there." Because I could sympathize with feeling left out. It wasn't like we'd done it on purpose, but it was a big event that everyone but him had been involved in.
"Oh, I know," Kiba responded. "I told him it was his own fault for being so smug about going with his dad. If he'd just been doing nothing like the rest of us…" He grinned at me.
"The price of ambition," I quipped lightly.
Kiba opened the gate, and a whole litter of puppies came tumbling out over me. "So this is what you've been doing? Looking after puppies?"
"Mostly," Kiba agreed. "And training."
"Sasuke said you helped him with the genjutsu thing the other day," I said, hoping that was opening enough to get him to talk. I didn't want to ask too many pointed questions. I wasn't sure if Kiba would know anything that Sasuke didn't, and I didn't want a repeat of how that conversation had gone. Kiba would be much safer if he didn't suspect anything was amiss.
"He told you that? Well yeah. When the lightning bolt hit, I sniffed the caster out; used the scent of the jutsu to track back to where she was hiding. Should have figured it was a genjutsu at that point, but I didn't."
That was pretty impressive actually, in terms of tracking. I wasn't an expert, but jutsu didn't exactly leave much in the way of a ninja's scent. Maybe a small amount of chakra residue…
"Then she got us all in another genjutsu, like the entire village was empty and destroyed." He frowned. "It was weird. Even Kurenai-sensei's genjutsu aren't like that."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Even though we knew it was a genjutsu we couldn't break it. None of the normal methods worked." He showed me a bite mark on his hand, and since Akamaru wouldn't do that, I guessed it had to be part of their attempts to break the illusion. "Even Neji's Byakugan couldn't see through it. Sasuke even put a genjutsu on us, inside the genjutsu. I dunno, I think he hypnotized her into undoing it, in the end." He shrugged. "But the medics took her away after that. They said she was sick. And the Hokage said we'd call the whole thing a drill."
He cast a sheepish look at me.
I put on a reassuring smile. "It's okay, I already knew," I said. "She was about our age though, right? Yakumo Kurama?" I'd looked up the old newspapers in the clan archive, dredged up the articles about the house fire that mum had mentioned. There hadn't been a lot. There never really was, in the newspaper, and I wasn't exactly sure it was trustworthy anyway. But it had given me a name. "Did she go to school with us?"
"Nah," Kiba said with complete confidence. "I've never met her before." He tapped his nose. "She never went to the Academy at all."
Setting aside the implication that he would recognize and remember all those scents – which I wasn't sure I could even do with faces – that meshed with what I had thought. She might have just been old enough that we'd never crossed paths, or she might have not gone to the Academy the same way I narrowly missed out. It wasn't common, in clans, but it could happen.
"Did she seem sick?" I asked, mind ticking over. Sasuke had mentioned that too, that she had been called 'sick'. Was it a euphemism?
Kiba actually tilted his head in thought. "You know, I didn't notice," he said. "She didn't smell sick-sick. Not, like, hospital-sick." He shrugged. "But there's a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have picked up on. I'm not Hana. You gotta have training to notice that kind of stuff."
"Of course," I agreed automatically. Some of these were details I probably should have gotten from Sasuke in the first place. But some of them were things he wouldn't have known either. This had been a worthwhile venture.
There wasn't much else he could tell me. I let the conversation fade away from that topic, falling to other things, and maybe staying to play with the puppies for longer than was strictly necessary to maintain cover.
I swung by Sasuke's apartment, but he wasn't there. He wasn't at the team training grounds either, or the Uchiha training grounds, and that exhausted my list of places to look for him.
Damn.
I blew out a breath and leant against a tree, staring at the sky and hoping it would provide inspiration. The explanation that Yakumo was 'sick' had potential, but it was a dead end in terms of information. I couldn't access medical records – they were highly secure. It might not have been 'doctor-patient confidentiality' but Tsunade believed in keeping records of what were effectively weaknesses secret. That kind of stuff could literally be a killer if it got out.
Anbu was even more of a laugh, if they were involved. I'd get nothing there.
Short of out and out going to the Kurama clan compound… and we didn't really have any contact with them. I had no reason to. It would raise too many alarms if anyone was watching.
And Sasuke said she had been locked up before this attack, so it was doubtful I'd be able to get to her now.
I chewed the thought over as I wandered home, hoping something would jump out at me. There were ideas, but nothing I was willing to run with at this stage.
When I got home, Shikamaru was seated in the lounge, playing shogi against himself. There was a thick file sitting next to him, and he held it out to me without looking up from the game.
"Kofuku-oba dropped this off for you," he said, naming the aunt that was in charge of approving the clan research projects. I knew her reasonably well, but I couldn't think of any reason off hand why she would be looking for me now. "She said to come discuss it with her later."
"Okay," I agreed, uncertainly, taking it and flipping it open. The first page was familiar though. I'd forgotten about this. I'd lodged an application to have access to a variety of stone and rock types, and possibly crystals to see if there was variation in the amount of chakra that they would be able to store. It had been one of the first steps to my attempts to create a chakra storage seal.
I'd forgotten about it, because it had been lodged before I'd graduated, and I suspected it was full of faulty fuuinjutsu assumptions.
"It was approved?" I asked surprised, and received no answer.
It wasn't that I was asking for materials that were rare or difficult to get a hold of. It was just… even I didn't stand by my original application. There was no way Kofuku-oba thought it was a good research plan. Unless she meant for me to learn that, but … well. There were easier ways to convey that.
I'd have to go see her to find out.
I sighed, deeply. Infusion of chakra or not, I felt tired. All these mysteries didn't help.
"I'm going to go lie down," I said. "Read a book or something."
Except that reminded me that I really did have a book to read. I tromped up the stairs, mind whirling into a different problem and the solutions I'd picked out.
Now that I had chakra to use, I knew what I could do with the Book of Gelel. It was a little risky, but infinitely safer than leaving it lying around in my room, even sealed into a scroll.
I'd seal it into me.
Storage seals could be put onto anything – there wasn't anything wrong with that. They just weren't usually practical to put on people, unless you were desperately in need of a spare kunai. And most ninja wouldn't have known enough about sealing to do it themselves, and wouldn't have trusted a Seal Master to put a seal on them either.
None of those were really a problem for me. I could do it myself – had put seals on myself already – and I only wanted to store one thing.
I got out my ink and brush and stared at myself in the mirror, trying to decide where it was going to go. Somewhere that it wouldn't be immediately noticeable, so arms were out, and my training seal already took up a chunk of space around my wrists. Back would be too difficult to reach, and I probably wanted to be able to get the damn thing out to read. Eventually I settled on the curve of my hip bone, where it would be hidden regardless of whether I wore pants or swimsuits.
It required a bit of awkward twisting to paint the seals along my leg and stomach. I had to lie flat on the ground, and one part trailed off me and onto a scroll laying on the floor. I tried not to move much as I put the brush down and unsealed the book from its previous home.
I took a deep breath, balancing it carefully on the point of my hip. "Seal."
Chakra flexed. Smoke puffed out. The ink coiled and retracted, chasing its way over my skin to the center point. I could feel it twisting, could feel the new pocket dimension forming, could feel the seal setting on my skin. I breathed deep, rode it out, and pressed, forcing the seal smaller and smaller, compressing it to a point.
It was… interesting. I didn't usually compress seals. None that I used were big enough to bother with going the extra step.
I sat up. Moved my hand so I could see it. Heavy gothic lettering, English letters, slightly smaller than the palm of my hand. Not bad.
Granted, I could have chosen a better compressed form than the word 'book' but it was descriptive. It worked. It conveyed the essence of what I wanted it for.
I pressed chakra into the seal, releasing the book. It appeared with no problem, and the outline of the seal was still visible on my hip. Good. It was no good if the seal would only work once. It was too messy to have to redo it each time. But there was no reason it shouldn't have. Normal storage seals worked more than once.
The whole process hadn't taken all the much chakra, but it was have been more than I would have been able to spare if I hadn't run into Naruto. As it was, I was probably going to have to use some up before I went to my next hospital check-in, otherwise there would be questions asked.
I fixed my clothes, put away my ink and brush, and sat down to read.