A Name on the Roster

Mission update is live.

Get comfortable. The village is watching.

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The corridor was quiet after Naruto left. That did not make Iruka's back hurt less.

He had kept his shoulders square until the boy turned the corner. Now he leaned one hand against the wall and counted three breaths before straightening. The medic had told him to go home. She had not told him how to make it through a room full of students tomorrow without lifting his left arm.

Behind the office door, Hiruzen said, "Iruka."

Iruka considered pretending he had not heard. The Hokage would know, and the walk to the stairs was longer than the walk back to the desk.

He went in.

The Forbidden Scroll still rested sealed beside Hiruzen's hand. Iruka kept his eyes off it. The original custody acknowledgment belonged with the receiving unit; the discrepancy he had dictated was attached to the recovery papers, not a key to the inner leaves.

Hiruzen folded a report shut. "Sit down."

"I'll manage."

"That was not a question."

The chair was too low. Iruka sat anyway and tried not to show how carefully he did it. Hiruzen noticed. The man had noticed Naruto's pause before a joke, a lie shortened to one word, the way the boy had held the clean headband as if it might vanish. Of course he noticed a teacher bracing himself on the edge of a desk.

"The medic expects you back," Hiruzen said.

"I know."

"When?"

"Before evening."

"Iruka."

"When I have made sure Naruto gets home."

Hiruzen looked toward the empty doorway. "He is already on his way."

"That doesn't tell me whether he arrives."

It was an unfair answer. It also came from years of seeing Naruto turn a trip across the village into three detours, one argument, and a meal he could not pay for. Tonight he had carried a forbidden technique back from a fight he should not have survived. Iruka did not trust a single instruction to sleep to outweigh all of that.

Hiruzen set the report beneath his palm. "You cannot follow him through every street."

"I can ask the desk to send a runner if he doesn't answer his door."

"The desk has already been asked to leave him alone unless there is cause."

Iruka heard the edge in that. Naruto had left the office with a restriction on high clone numbers and a promise to report effects he considered dangerous. The Hokage had chosen not to turn that promise into an examination order. A runner sent after him at once would make the restraint look like a trick.

"Then I can go myself," Iruka said.

"You can barely get out of that chair."

"I got into it."

Hiruzen did not smile. "We need a better arrangement than whichever of us is most stubborn at the moment."

Iruka looked at the closed report. "Is that what this is?"

"This is an assessment of what he did and what we are allowed to do next."

"Allowed by whom?"

"By the limits I put on my own office, for a start."

The answer was small enough to sound honest. It did not settle Iruka. He knew what Naruto was. He had known for years, and he knew what village fear could turn that knowledge into when a fresh reason to be afraid walked into an Academy room wearing a new headband. He also knew the old man could close a file without closing a mouth.

"What goes to the Academy?" Iruka asked.

"His graduation and the restriction on unsupervised high numbers of clones. The jonin instructor gets the operational limit before training begins. Nothing about the reason the scroll was taken beyond the finding that Mizuki betrayed us."

"And the custody discrepancy?"

"It remains with the recovery papers. Your observation stays yours. It does not establish which leaves were read, and it does not turn you into a custodian of the scroll."

Iruka had wanted that said aloud. He had also wanted the paper to matter. Both wants could live in the same chest without making either one a fact.

"Naruto signed his account," he said.

"He did."

"That won't keep someone from calling him a thief."

"He took the scroll."

"I know what he did." Iruka's voice came out harder than he intended. His shoulder punished him for leaning forward. "I mean that people will stop at the word and never reach Mizuki, or the clearing, or the boy who put his name on the page."

Hiruzen's expression did not change. "I cannot order them to read further."

"You can order what your officers say."

"I can. I will. That is not the same as ordering what the village believes."

Iruka looked down at his hands. There was ink near his thumb from the earlier signature. He rubbed it and made a gray smear. The medic would notice that he had been holding a pen instead of resting. She noticed everything that could be used against a patient who argued.

"Tomorrow," Hiruzen said, "you will be in the classroom for team assignments."

"Unless you mean to give me leave."

"I would like to. You would refuse."

"I have a roster to read."

"That is why I called you back."

Hiruzen drew a plain sheet from beneath the closed report. It listed the graduating students and their placement times. Naruto's name appeared in the same column as the others. No mark beside it explained why his graduation had come a day late or who had made it possible. Iruka was relieved for half a second, then ashamed that a clean line could relieve him at all.

"He is on the list," Hiruzen said.

"I can see that."

"Seeing it is not the assignment. I need a person who will notice if he cannot remain in the room long enough to meet his team, or if the technique leaves him unsteady before his instructor has assessed him."

"That's a medic's job."

"The medic will assess symptoms. You know what his ordinary excuses sound like."

Iruka did. That was the part that frightened him. Naruto had learned to turn a shaking hand into a boast and a missed meal into a complaint about ramen. This morning he had been too tired to make either one convincing. After sleep, he might remember how.

"Do you want me to watch him in front of the class?" Iruka asked.

"I want you to teach the class. If you see a concrete problem, send him to the medical desk. Do not question him about the scroll in a room full of children."

"They're genin now."

"They are still children in that room."

Iruka thought of Naruto's face when Hiruzen had asked whether he was ready. He had said no. It had been the most adult answer in the office and the least comforting.

"What do I report?" he asked.

"Attendance, visible impairment, and whether he was sent for care. No guesses about motives. No second interview. Bring it to the Academy duty desk by noon; the desk sends the sealed note to me. Your jonin counterpart gets only what he needs to keep the boy from exceeding the limit."

"A noon deadline before the teams have even met their instructors."

"Your part ends at the handoff. His instructor's begins there."

Iruka read the line with Naruto's name again. The clean sheet did not tell him how to sit through the looks when the boy entered. It did not say whether Sakura would ask about the late pass or whether Sasuke would measure him as a rival. It did not say who among the adults had already heard a version of the night that made Naruto sound like the danger and Mizuki like a footnote.

"If another teacher asks?" Iruka said.

"The promotion is official. Mizuki is under investigation. Anything else comes from the office, not from you."

"They'll think I'm hiding something."

"You are. So am I. Neither of us may use that fact to invent a kinder explanation."

The words left no place for a rehearsed defense. Iruka wanted one anyway. He wanted to tell every person who had ever looked past Naruto that the boy had stood between him and a killing blow. He also wanted to keep them from seeing Naruto's signature on a theft account. Those wants pulled against each other until his wound throbbed with the effort of remaining still.

"He could have lied about opening it," Iruka said.

"He could have."

"He didn't."

"That matters to you."

"It should matter to you."

"It does." Hiruzen's voice stayed level. "It is not an amnesty."

Iruka almost said he had not asked for one. Then he remembered asking, in every softer way available, since Naruto walked into the office. He shut his mouth.

Hiruzen slid the roster across the desk. "If you accept, you give me a report of what you actually see by noon. If you cannot stand through the assignments, the deputy reads the names and you go to the medic. That is not a failure of loyalty."

"The deputy doesn't know the class."

"The deputy can pronounce their names."

Iruka took the sheet with his right hand. The motion tugged at the bandage. He kept his face still and knew he had not fooled Hiruzen.

"I'll be there," he said. "And if I have to sit, I'll sit."

"Good."

"I didn't say I could make him behave."

"I would not believe you if you had."

They let that be the closest thing to a joke. Hiruzen put the report away, leaving only the roster on Iruka's side of the desk. It was a clean boundary: his work began with the names he would call, not the sealed account he could not read further.

At the Academy duty desk, a clerk was changing the morning schedule. Iruka asked for the sealed-note envelope and a noon pickup. The clerk glanced at the roster in his hand, then at the bandage visible above his collar.

"Are you sure you want to do this tomorrow?" she asked.

"No," Iruka said. "Put my name on the duty line anyway."

She wrote it down. "Uzumaki's placement too?"

"All the placements."

"People have been asking about him."

"Tell them the list is official."

"That's all?"

"That's all I can give them."

The clerk's pen hesitated. She did not argue, but the question would keep moving without her help. Iruka could feel the shape of it in the hallway already. A Hokage's order could put Naruto on a roster. It could not make the village read his name without remembering every other name it had used for him.

Iruka took the empty envelope and went to the medic before he could turn duty into an excuse to avoid her. She made him sit. He obeyed after one attempt to explain the noon pickup, and she wrote down the time of his return as if she had expected him to try exactly this.

There was no report yet. Tomorrow he would have to watch a student without turning him into a case file, then write only what he knew. Tonight he could do the smaller thing the medic had been asking for all along. He held still while she checked the dressing.

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