What Iruka Saw

Mission update is live.

Get comfortable. The village is watching.

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The medic had put Iruka's shuriken in a shallow tray. Naruto could see one blade above the folded cloth, clean now except where blood had dried in the join. It looked too small for the hole it had made.

"Stop looking at it," Iruka said.

"I'm not."

"You have been looking at it since they brought us in."

Naruto shifted his eyes to the wall. A painted arrow marked the way to the Hokage's office. He had followed arrows through the tower earlier that night, carrying a scroll he had no right to touch. This one led toward a conversation he couldn't outrun.

Iruka sat on a treatment bench with his vest open and his back turned to the medic. She had removed the weapon in the clearing, packed the wound, and warned him that moving his left shoulder would pull at the dressing. He moved it when Naruto tried to stand.

"Sit down," Iruka said.

"I was going to get water."

"There's a cup beside you."

Naruto looked. There was. It had been there long enough to collect a skin of dust.

"Then I was going to get better water."

The medic caught his elbow before he could make a joke of the tremor in his hand. She was young enough that he wanted to call her a girl, and tired enough to make that feel insulting. She pressed two fingers to his wrist, counted, and let go.

"Drink this one first. Small mouthfuls. If your sight doubles, tell me before you fall over."

"I've only fallen over once."

"Twice," Iruka said.

"The second time I sat down."

"With your face."

The medic moved to the other end of the bench to fetch fresh gauze. Naruto drank. The water tasted of the tin cup, and he was grateful for it. For a moment his stomach stopped arguing with his head.

An ANBU came through the side door carrying a narrow board and a rolled sheet. The mask was plain white with a dark mark over one eye. Naruto had seen that one in the clearing, or thought he had. After the clones broke, masks and branches had changed places too easily in his memory.

"Instructor Umino," the operative said. "We need the recovery acknowledgment."

Iruka kept his eyes on the medic. "You have the scroll."

"This records how it was received."

"Then let me see what it says."

The operative held out the board. Iruka did not take it until the medic finished tying the bandage. The delay was deliberate; Naruto could hear it in the way Iruka thanked her without looking up. She gave him a look that said she knew.

Iruka read slowly, his thumb holding the paper flat against the board. His thumb stopped near the bottom.

"What does 'bound on recovery' mean?" he asked.

"The scroll arrived with a cord around it."

"A new cord."

"Transport cord. Standard."

"The strap it had in the clearing was cut. I cut it."

The operative tilted the board toward himself. "The item was secured when it reached intake."

"That is a different sentence."

Naruto's throat tightened. Iruka had cut the strap to keep Mizuki from taking the scroll. He had seen it happen. He had also opened the scroll hours before Iruka arrived and rolled it closed when he heard him coming. A receipt that treated the new cord like the old strap would make the wrong version of that night look tidy.

He could let it.

Iruka glanced at him, then at the blank line beneath the custody note. He left the space for Naruto to fill.

"I opened it," Naruto said.

The operative turned his mask. "That is in the field account."

"Is it?"

"You used a technique from it."

"That's not the same as writing down when." Naruto set the cup aside. It scraped the bench louder than he intended. "I opened it before Mizuki showed up. I practiced. Then I rolled it back up."

Iruka's thumb left the page.

He had known Naruto learned the technique before the fighting ended. He had not known how long Naruto had been alone with the scroll. The difference appeared in his face and stayed there.

"How many times?" Iruka asked.

Naruto tried to put the first clones in order. The reader kneeling beside the scroll. The watcher turning at a noise. The one who sat still and talked about heat behind his stomach. Those memories arrived on top of his own, with no clean edge between them. The later bursts came back as broken wrists, smoke, and Mizuki's knife.

"I don't know."

The operative's head lifted a fraction. "We can record an estimate."

"No," Naruto said too quickly. He made himself slow down. "I tried it before he came. More than once. I can't give you a number I trust."

The medic returned with a fresh bandage for his shoulder. She had stayed far enough away to grant them something like privacy and close enough to hear every word. Naruto wanted her to have missed it. He also wanted the operative to write it exactly.

Iruka held the board out. "Don't sign this as it stands."

"I can't change the recovery officer's observation," the operative said.

"I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you not to make a transport cord into the original strap."

"The inner leaves were not inspected at intake."

"Put that down."

"This form is for custody."

Iruka gave a short breath that turned into a wince. His hand went to his back before he could stop it. The medic stepped forward; he shook his head, then regretted the movement.

"Custody is why I care," he said. "If someone reads 'bound on recovery' tomorrow, they'll think the original strap stayed closed. I saw it cut. Naruto says he opened the scroll earlier. Those are two different observations, and both belong with the thing you took."

The operative looked toward the door. He could refuse. There was an office above them full of people who could make a field receipt feel like a verdict, and Naruto knew none of their names. He knew what one unnamed reader might do with a line that looked certain.

"I can attach a discrepancy sheet," the operative said at last. "The original acknowledgment stays with the receiving unit. Your statement goes beside it, not over it."

"Good."

Iruka reached for the board again. The medic caught his wrist.

"You can dictate," she said. "You cannot write with that shoulder."

"I write with the other hand."

"You brace the board with this one."

Iruka looked at the board, then at Naruto, as if the boy were responsible for the invention of two-handed writing. Naruto raised his uninjured hand.

"I'll hold it."

"You will sit still," the medic and Iruka said together.

The operative took the board back. It would have been funny at another hour. Naruto let his mouth twitch and no more.

They moved to a desk just beyond the treatment screen. It was low enough that Iruka could remain seated; someone had dragged a stool over for the operative. The medic stayed within sight and set the weapon tray on a shelf where Naruto could no longer watch it.

The first line was easy. Iruka had cut the original strap during Mizuki's capture. The operative wrote the time as a range taken from the patrol log, not as an exact minute Iruka could not have known. The new cord had been applied for transport. Its presence said nothing about the leaves inside.

Then the operative asked Naruto whether he had removed anything.

"No."

"You are certain?"

"I didn't tear a page out. I didn't take a rubbing. I read one part and shut it when I heard someone coming."

"Which part?"

Naruto could feel Iruka waiting. This was where a careful answer might save him trouble. A careless one might make Iruka believe he was only sorry because he had been caught. He had wanted the technique, badly. The fear in the clearing hadn't made that want disappear.

"The shadow clone technique," he said. "I couldn't make the Academy clone work. Mizuki told me the scroll held something I could learn. I chose that one."

Iruka looked down at the desk. Naruto wished he could take back the last sentence and hated himself for wishing it. The choice had put a weapon in his hands. It had also put a blade in Iruka's back.

"Mizuki told you to take it?" the operative asked.

"He told me where to find it. I took it."

"And the marks behind the Academy?"

Naruto held the cup in both hands. The orange paint under Iruka's fingers in the clearing had seemed clever until Iruka bled onto the grass.

"I left marks," he said. "I wanted someone to find the route."

"Why?"

The old answer was ready: because he knew how the story ought to go. It was useless here, and worse than useless to Iruka. It did not explain why he had trusted a pattern more than a person.

"I don't know how to say that yet."

The operative's pencil rested above the paper.

"Then don't put a reason in my mouth," Naruto said. He hadn't meant to sound angry. He was angry anyway, mostly at the empty space where an honest explanation should have been.

Iruka leaned forward. "He has answered what you need for the item sheet. The Hokage can ask about the route himself."

The mask turned toward him. "The Hokage will."

"I expect so."

Iruka shifted on the bench, one hand pressed against his bandage. He had stopped the operative from asking about the route. He had not stopped Naruto from putting his name on the sheet.

The operative finished the attachment and read it aloud. Naruto corrected one word. The paper said he had mastered the technique before the confrontation. He hadn't. The clones had fallen apart, or he had; he could not remember which failure came first.

"Learned," he said. "Not mastered."

"You produced working copies in the field."

"They worked until they didn't."

Iruka watched him. "Write 'performed,'" he said. "That's what the field team saw. What he can do tomorrow is another question."

The operative changed the word. No one thanked Naruto for the distinction. That helped him believe it might last.

Iruka signed only his own observation. The operative asked Naruto to mark his account too. He stared at the blank line until the paper blurred. Signing did not make the theft worse; the theft had happened. It made him answerable to a version of it that other people could carry away.

He wrote his name. The letters leaned downhill by the end.

"You can add a correction later," the operative said.

"Will anyone read it?"

"If it's attached to this sheet."

Not a promise that anyone would believe him. The operative left a space beneath the signature instead of filling it with a neat conclusion. Iruka noticed that too.

The medic brought Naruto a cloth damp with cool water. She untied Iruka's forehead protector from his brow and cleaned the dried blood along the edge of his hair. Naruto reached for the metal when she finished. It was warm from his skin and scratched where he had tied it too tightly. He folded it into his pocket, not because it was evidence or an award, but because Iruka had given it to him in a clearing where neither of them had been sure they would leave.

"I'm keeping this," he told Iruka.

"I wasn't asking for it back."

"You keep staring."

"I'm checking you haven't lost it already."

Naruto almost answered with a boast. His arm hurt. Iruka's back hurt worse. He left the boast alone.

A messenger came for the receipt. The operative closed the board, made a second copy for the medical desk, and carried the original attachment upstairs with the recovery papers. The Forbidden Scroll had gone ahead of them under seal. Naruto watched the messenger take the stairs without asking where it was kept.

The medic made Iruka stand and sit once before she would let him leave the bench. He passed the test and tried to hide how much it cost. She told him to return if the dressing soaked through, if his fingers went numb, or if his breathing changed. He repeated the instructions badly; she made him do it again.

Naruto waited at the painted arrow. He wanted to ask whether Iruka believed the part he had left unwritten. He wanted Iruka to tell him the whole night had been Mizuki's fault. Neither question would help the man climb the stairs.

"You could have said you found it open," Iruka said when they were alone for half a breath.

"You would have known."

"I wasn't there when you opened it."

"I know."

Iruka adjusted the vest over his bandage. "I would have had to decide whether to believe you. That's different."

Naruto gripped the railing with his good hand. He had taken the scroll before anyone was wounded. Iruka knew it now without having to guess from a mask's report. It changed the look between them. It had not made Iruka leave.

The office door waited at the top of the stairs. Naruto could hear paper moving behind it and one low voice he could not make out. He let Iruka go first, slow enough for the medic's warning to matter. Naruto followed with the bloodied headband in his pocket and his own crooked name on a sheet already out of reach. He still had to answer why he had left the trail. He hoped he would not make Iruka regret hearing the truth he could give.

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