Curse These Old Bones - Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Waves

The rain came down in torrents, a relentless wall of water that turned the streets into rivers and soaked Ao’s cloak until it felt like dead weight across his shoulders. He moved through the muddy streets of the village near Gatō’s mansion, his steps measured, unhurried. Civilian pace. Anonymity was as much a weapon as any blade, and he wielded it with precision. His eyes flicked to every doorway, every window. People moved within their homes, shadows against the flickering light of oil lamps. Nothing seemed out of place, but that meant little.

The children’s laughter caught his attention first. High-pitched, joyous. A cluster of them ran through the rain, their bare feet kicking up muddy sprays, their faces flushed with excitement. Ao’s lips pressed into a thin line. Strange. There was no joy in places like this. Not under Gatō’s rule. He watched them for a moment, his gaze calculating, cold. Children were valuable indicators—more honest than adults. Fear should have dulled them, stolen their play. But here they were, laughing.

One of them, a small girl with tangled hair plastered to her face by the rain, slammed into his side. She stumbled back, blinking up at him with wide, startled eyes. “Sorry, mister,” she mumbled, brushing mud from her knees. Then, without waiting for a response, she turned and ran off to rejoin the others, her laughter fading into the downpour.

Ao resumed walking, his thoughts coiling tight. Joyful children, careless enough to run into strangers. They were no longer afraid. That wasn’t just strange—it was dangerous. This village was supposed to be crushed under Gatō’s heel. These people had no reason to smile, and yet they were. He drew in a breath, and the smell hit him. Meat. Cooked meat, rich and savory, carried through the rain.

That made him stop.

Meat in a village like this? Impossible. Gatō had bled these people dry, reducing them to scraps and hunger. If they were eating now—if they were eating well—it meant something had changed. Something that was no longer in his control. His hand flexed under his cloak, the fabric heavy with water. This was more than a shift. It was a threat. Gatō’s resources were tied directly to the Kiri Resistance’s operations. If the man had lost his grip, the supply lines Mei had carefully built were in jeopardy.

Unacceptable.

Ao moved into the shadow of an alley, pressing his fingers together in a familiar seal. Chakra flared in his veins, sharp and precise, as his Byakugan activated. The world peeled back, layer by layer, homes dissolving into outlines. His vision swept through the village, through walls and roofs. People sat around tables piled with food, their faces bright with laughter. He spotted steaming bowls, roasted cuts of meat, pitchers of drink. Their smiles were wrong—too wide, too genuine. It didn’t add up.

“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.

His body flickered, vanishing from the alley in a sharp burst of speed. The village blurred around him as he chained body-flickers, his movements as fluid as the rain. Each step brought him closer to Gatō’s mansion, the sprawling estate emerging from the mist like a fortress. He landed on an outcropping a few hundred meters away, crouched low. The mud squelched under his boots, but his body stayed perfectly still, his breathing even.

He pressed his fingers together again, activating his Byakugan. The mansion unfolded before him in exquisite detail. He scanned it quickly, efficiently. Gatō was in his office, hunched over his desk, scribbling frantically into a ledger. His pen darted across the paper in quick, erratic bursts, the movement of a man trying to salvage a disaster. Ao lingered on the numbers for a moment, but they were incomprehensible at a glance. That wasn’t his focus.

His gaze shifted.

Zabuza Momochi.

Inside the mansion, Zabuza sat on the edge of an ornate couch, his massive blade resting against his shoulder. His posture was rigid, his grip on the hilt unrelenting, every muscle taut as if he were a predator moments from striking. The tension in the room was palpable. His apprentice stood nearby, unnervingly still, his dark eyes scanning every corner like a hawk watching for movement. Zabuza wasn’t lounging, and he wasn’t guarding. He was waiting, his presence charged with purpose.

Zabuza presence here did not surprise him. He had personally steered Gatō toward hiring Zabuza, following Mei’s explicit orders. The move had been calculated, a part of her intricate strategy to keep Zabuza close to Kirigakure. Mei hoped to one day pull the rogue swordsman back into the fold, leveraging his formidable strength against Yagura Karatachi, the Fourth Mizukage. But…Zabuza was not suppose to be in Gato's mansion. On a couch. Without Gato in the same room. Normally, contacts between missing nins of his calibers and mens like Gato were very short — only the few minutes needed to give orders or to take a payment. But this?

And…No guards, no ronin—three men Ao had known to be vicious and reliable, almost as strong as chunins, were nowhere to be found. The house was too quiet, save for the rain drumming against its walls. Something had shifted here. Something dangerous. Ao’s gaze lingered on the swordsman’s white-knuckled grip, the apprentice’s coiled readiness. Strange. What was able to put a jonin as strong as Zabuza - who was himself almost as strong as Ao, on edge in this city where the second strongest person was barely a chitin ? Whatever had happened to Gatō’s men, whatever Zabuza was waiting for, it reeked of instability. 

Instability that could unravel everything.

Something was very wrong.

“Are you lost, pretty boy?”

The voice sliced through the rain, sharp as a kunai and far, far too close.

Ao didn’t think. His hand snapped out, hurling a kunai through the downpour. The blade spun clean and fast, a perfect arc aimed at where the voice had come from. But it hit nothing. The sound of the impact was swallowed by the rain. No resistance. No flesh. Just mud.

The Byakugan should have seen her. How the fuck hadn’t it?

She stepped into the edge of his vision, as if she had been standing there all along, her silhouette cutting through the haze of rain. 

Anko Mitarashi. 

The grin on her face was more teeth than smile, the rain streaking down her face like rivers of oil. Her eyes glimmered with a malicious delight that made her presence even worse than the unexpected ambush. Ao didn’t need her reputation to tell him she was dangerous—he could see it in her stance, the coiled readiness, the kind of hunger that didn’t come from battle but from the thrill of what came after.

He measured her in a heartbeat. Strong, yes, but not stronger than him. If it came down to a fight, he’d win. It wasn’t her skills as a jonin that made his blood run cold. No — Ao knew he was stronger than her. Probably. It was the very fact she was here. Anko was Konoha’s sharpest edge in intelligence work. If she was in this backwater…

“What’s Konoha’s leash dog doing so far from her yard?” he asked, his voice flat and cold, the words an attempt to claw back control.

Her grin widened, but before she could answer, it came.

The blow hit him like the wrath of a god. He didn’t see it, didn’t feel it until it was too late. One moment he was standing, poised for a counterstrike; the next, his body was flying through the air, ribs cracking like dry branches as something massive and jagged slammed into his side. He smashed into the mud fifty meters away, the ground shuddering under his weight. Blood sprayed from his mouth, his vision blurring as his body screamed in pain.

For a moment, there was only the rain, cold and unrelenting as it mixed with the blood pooling beneath him. His Byakugan flickered weakly, straining to regain focus. He coughed, wet and ragged, blood dribbling from his lips. His chest heaved as his lungs clawed for air. His ribs—fuck—his ribs were fractured, maybe worse. But what made his stomach lurch wasn’t the pain.

It was what had hit him.

Samehada.

He’d seen it in the split second before it struck: the jagged, scaled edge of the living blade. Its serrated surface rippled with chakra, shifting as if tasting him. Samehada was here. Which meant Kisame Hoshigaki was here.

But when he forced his eyes upward, the man walking toward him through the rain was not Kisame.

The figure was tall, broad, and casual in a way that made Ao’s blood run cold. Rain slid off his shoulders like it feared touching him, and in his hand, he carried Samehada with a loose grip, its massive frame humming faintly. But it was the head attached to the man’s belt that froze Ao’s breath in his throat.

Kisame’s severed head hung there, lashed to the man’s hip like a grotesque trophy. Its lifeless eyes stared blankly into the storm, its face twisted in an eternal snarl. The rain ran down the contours of his face, mixing with the blood dried into the jagged wound where his neck should have been.

Ao felt his chest tighten. The Byakugan pulsed frantically, scanning the man, searching for a clue, an answer. His eyes caught the sharp lines of his features, the stance, the barely restrained power in the way he walked.

“A Sarutobi,” Ao rasped, forcing the words past the blood pooling in his mouth. “Are you… Hiroto?”, he asked. What was Konoha Anbu's commander doing here? And had he….The Monster of the Mist….He….was…

The man stopped a few paces away, tilting his head slightly, his expression amused. “Hiroto? Nah,” he said, the rain running off his face as he glanced down at Kisame’s severed head. He gave it a small tug, as if adjusting a trinket. “That’s my brother. But nice try.”

Ao tried to rise, ignoring the stabbing pain in his side, but the man moved again. Faster than anything Ao had seen. The sound came first—high, piercing, a drill of noise that tore into his skull. It wasn’t something physical he could block. It was inside him, tearing at his thoughts, splitting his mind like fractured glass. His Byakugan flickered again, his vision blurring as his balance wavered. His feet stumbled, and for the first time in years, Ao felt helpless. What the fuck was this jutsu?

"People really should take better care of their internal ear…"

And then the blade came again.

Samehada slammed into his ribs, tearing through flesh and cracking bone. Ao’s body flew once more, his vision blotting with white as pain roared through him. He hit the ground with a wet thud, skidding through the mud. Blood poured from his mouth, mixing with the rain-soaked earth. The world around him spun, his Byakugan flickering weakly, barely holding into its socket.

When he forced his head up, his arms trembling, the man was already walking toward him again. Samehada was slung casually over his shoulder, humming faintly as it drank in the chakra it had ripped from Ao’s body. The man stopped just short, towering over him, his silhouette sharp against the dark storm.

“You’re too slow, old man,” the Sarutobi said, his tone light but charged with mockery when he said 'old'. “Didn’t they teach you, back in your days in the Mist, to watch for the storm behind the blade?”

Ao spat blood, forcing himself to his knees, his mind scrambling for a plan. 

He had to survive. 

— — — 

ANBU HQ

Kakashi Hatake was positively giddy. A rare and deeply concerning phenomenon, considering the man’s reputation. It wasn’t just the kind of happy that tugged at the edges of his masked face; no, this was full-body, spring-in-his-step, almost-whistling-as-he-walked levels of cheer. And here, in the shadowy depths of ANBU Headquarters, it was downright unnerving.

A Chūnin, from one of Anbu's track-and-kill team, crossing paths with him in the corridor froze mid-step. They blinked once, twice, and then scuttled backward into an adjoining room, mumbling something about urgent paperwork. Better to vanish than be caught in whatever eldritch horror had possessed The Hound.

Kakashi, oblivious—or more likely, entirely aware but too chipper to care—kept moving. Yesterday had been a good day, no, a great day. Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha had graduated as Genin. It was a milestone for the boys, yes, but for Kakashi, it was so much more.

He was finally going to keep his promise. The one he made to Minato and Kushina all those years ago, standing amid rubble and grief.

“I’ll take care of him,” he had sworn, heart heavy with guilt and determination. And now, at last, he could.

No one else can handle Naruto. Or Sasuke. Certainly not whoever they slap into that third spot, Kakashi mused. The Hokage’s deal was almost laughably easy. Two weeks of ANBU babysitting? Fine. Afterward, he’d just step into his rightful place as their sensei, as long as he could affirm he was better than whatever poor jonin his Kage wanted to saddle the boys with. Nobody would challenge him. Nobody could.

He turned a corner and found himself face-to-face with “Wolf,” one of his ANBU subordinates and an old teammate of his, who immediately snapped to attention.

“Commander,” she said sharply.

“Provisional Commander,” Kakashi corrected, holding up a finger like a teacher chiding a student. 

“Two more days.”

The mock relief that crossed her masked face — he knew her too well - made Kakashi laugh. He waved her off with a carefree flick of his hand and continued on his way, leaving Wolf to mutter, “Two days too long…” as she scurried in the opposite direction.

It wasn’t long before Kakashi emerged into the open air, the pale morning light soft against his skin. He leapt onto the nearest rooftop, enjoying the wind as it ruffled his hair. For a moment, he almost felt like a teenager again, back when the world was just training and pranks and simple missions.

The Hokage Tower loomed ahead, and Kakashi landed gracefully in front of its entrance. With a deep breath, he adjusted his mask (even though it didn’t need adjusting) and sauntered inside, still riding his high. A few minutes later, he stood before the Third Hokage, straight-backed and composed in a way that was rare for him.

“Lord Hokage,” Kakashi said, his tone unusually formal. “I’m here to report. I’ve prepared my recommendations for the next ANBU Commander, as per your request.”

The Hokage — well, the blood clone of the Hokage, he knew — looked up from his paperwork with an expression that could only be described as amused. Hiruzen Sarutobi might’ve been old, but there was a twinkle in his eye that suggested he enjoyed watching younger shinobi trip over themselves.

“Ah, Kakashi. Good. But before we get into that, let’s revisit the agreement.”

Kakashi tilted his head, his visible eye narrowing ever so slightly. “Of course,” he said, feigning patience.

The deal had been simple: act as provisional ANBU Commander for two weeks while the Genin exams concluded. Afterward, the Hokage would appoint a Jōnin to Naruto’s team. If Kakashi found the candidate unworthy, he could step in instead. And who was going to argue with that?

“Nobody else could possibly handle them,” Kakashi said, his voice practically dripping with confidence. “I mean, you’ve met Naruto.”

Hiruzen chuckled, puffing lightly on his pipe. “So you believe, do you?”

“Absolutely,” Kakashi replied, his trademark eye-smile in full force.

He was so sure of himself, he didn’t even flinch when the Hokage’s own smile widened—a little too much for comfort.

The office door creaked open behind him.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal—a door opening was just a door opening. But something about the sound made Kakashi freeze, his posture stiffening as though a cold wind had blown through the Hokage’s office. His fingers twitched involuntarily, and he fought the sudden, ridiculous urge to bolt.

Hiruzen Sarutobi, seated behind his desk, glanced up with an amused twinkle in his eye. The Hokage didn’t seem alarmed. If anything, he looked far too entertained for Kakashi’s liking.

“Well,” came a voice from the doorway, rich with humor and carrying a lilt of mockery that struck like a thrown kunai, “so this is the man that thinks he can teach Naruto better than me.”

Kakashi’s throat constricted so fast he nearly choked on his own spit. His heart did something unnatural—maybe it skipped a beat, or maybe it just gave up altogether. His mask hid his expression, but his visible eye widened just slightly before narrowing into a cautious line. He didn’t turn. He…couldn’t turn.

He knew this voice.

The voice spoke again, slow and teasing, with the precision of someone who knew they had all the power in the room. “Go on, Kakashi. Look me in the eyes and tell me you would be better for Naruto than me.”

Kakashi’s body betrayed him, forcing him to turn despite every instinct screaming at him to stay still. His eye met the speaker’s, and the world felt like it had tilted sideways. For a long moment, Kakashi was utterly frozen—his thoughts a scrambled, incoherent mess.

The grin that greeted him was sharp and amused, full of warmth and menace in equal measure, and it only deepened as the silence dragged on.

“Long time no see, Kakashi,” the voice said, softer now but no less damning.

In that moment, Kakashi knew two things.

One: he was not walking out of this room as Naruto’s sensei.

And two: if he cried in front of his Kage, this would haunt him for the rest of his life. 

“…Oh, come on,” he muttered under his breath. Well, he tried to mutter. All that came out was a faint croak.