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fascinationex) wrote2019-01-07 06:44 pm
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Content: Konoha is haemorrhaging sannin. Hiruzen takes it personally.
Notes: I'm still testing the Mood for the tsunade-centric fic I have tentatively titled 'pathogenesis'. I don't know what I'm doing with this and I don't know where I'm going with it, but I am still sort of pleased to be doing it and/or going there.
“She must have known she would not have been executed,” Danzo said, stepping up beside him. The smoke of Hiruzen’s pipe drifted lazily into the warm summer air. Together they watched ninja swarm the old house with efficient purpose, like ants rushing around their own anthill. “There must be something more.”
Something worse, he meant.
“Hmm,” said Hiruzen, without much commitment. Interim reports suggested Tsunade had destroyed most of her records before leaving, but the medics still seemed upset by what they had uncovered. There had already been a degree of yelling about biocontainment and, as far as Hiruzen could see, physical contact between those working inside the building and those securing the perimeter had immediately been sharply curtailed. This did not, he thought, bode well.
If Tsunade had stayed, her research would have been -- perhaps not stopped. He wasn’t naive enough to think that it would have been stopped. But it would have been assessed, constrained, guided. Yes, that was the word: it would have been guided, assertively, by Konoha and her council.
Tsunade’s resistance, once accused, had been dramatic. There were broken walls and torn up footpaths, towering trees uprooted and tossed casually at her pursuers, ashes of old research documents scattered on the wind.
Yet in contrast to Tsunade’s reaction, the two members of her regular (sanctioned) research staff had been calm and cooperative. Happy? No. But not in fear of their lives. Tsunade must have known she would not have been executed, indeed.
Hiruzen could not say if her flight and the violence of it was symptomatic of some greater, hidden betrayal. He was too heartsick to trust his instincts on this.
And Tsunade had never taken guidance well.
Orochimaru’s defection was unexpected, but also, in hindsight, unsurprising. It was preceded -- signposted, really -- by increasingly erratic behaviour and feverish, incomprehensible commentary. His comrades had become unsettled and his single, poor, wild-eyed student had grown ever jumpier and more withdrawn. His isolation increased, his absences from meetings and events went first unexplained and then wearily unremarked, his attention drifted. Really, aside from the key factor of over sixty missing children, which should have come up as a red flag in itself much earlier, it was practically textbook.
When that report had landed on Hiruzen's desk, he'd put his head in his hands. In hindsight, that report could have come from an academy test paper. How To Identify Clearly Compromised Ninja, Course 101, for ten year olds.
Hiruzen should have seen it coming. Sentiment blinded him, yes, but willful ignorance played a big part too.
Tsunade’s defection, on the other hand -- that, nobody could have predicted. Even proud, paranoid Danzo had struggled to come up with a convincing 'I told you so’ for this.
In fact, it had only been the convergence of very specific circumstances that brought her under investigation at all -- that Tsunade had been drunk, and Jiraiya unexpectedly sober, that suspicions and tempers had been high already given the loss of Orochimaru, and that, having been once betrayed, Jiraiya had not hesitated to report her.
Tsunade’s secret research laboratory, hidden in plain sight in the old Senju manor, contained no dead children, at least -- that they’d found, anyway -- although there were plenty of dead animals of various kinds. But not all research had to involve killing Konoha children to be... unforgivably dangerous.
“Perhaps,” Hiruzen said now, feeling his own voice creak. He exhaled smoke into the still air. It was early summer yet, but there were already insects buzzing and humming, a dull drone in time to some mysterious natural rhythm, rising and falling as though to a heart beat.
The Senju place was old and unique, made entirely of heavy and seamless wood. The outside had been preserved carefully for generations because of it. Another wonder of the famous wood release. Even from this distance he could see the damage to the side through which Tsunade had left.
The insects were drowned out abruptly by the wail of a siren.
“Sir!” Chakra flickered and leaves scattered. A tall, green-eyed ninja with a curiously flat affect shimmered into view before them. He was, Hiruzen noted, primarily reporting to Danzo even though he was aware of, and arguably facing, Hiruzen. Hmm.
“There has been a failure of primary containment --”
“How?” Danzo demanded. From the minute hesitation of the ninja, Hiruzen divined the answer. How could he not? His mind said: no, not Tsunade, no, she wouldn’t. But he felt it in his bones and in his veins, in his heart, in the steady relentless shift of his lungs as he breathed --
In that second he felt older than the hills.
The ninja answered over Hirzuen’s soft, resigned sigh: “It seems that several samples were sabotaged intentionally by an airflow reversal, sir.”
This, Hiruzen felt, probably explained the sheer speed of Tsunade’s leave-taking, if not her motives.
“B-ranked quarantine procedures are in effect,” the ninja said.
It was hard to tell over the howl of the siren, but raised voices could be heard from within the house now, and he thought the research staff were among them -- they definitely sounded as though they were in fear of their lives now, Hiruzen realised. Distantly, he heard somebody begin to yell, and then to scream, higher and higher, more and more panicked and hysterical. He could taste the chakra on the air, thick and heavy with a new, sour terror.
The threat of the ANBU hadn't fazed them, but this did. It might have been nice had the reports on the nature of Tsunade’s research been inaccurate. It may have been vanishingly unlikely, yes, but... nice.
The fear of the staff suggested otherwise.
Hiruzen tapped his teeth against the stem of his pipe. The taste of smoke seemed prophetic, and all of a sudden he wanted to empty it out immediately.
“Make it S-ranked,” he murmured, looking past the ninja and on to the old Senju place.
The ninja glanced up, too eerily blank to truly seem startled. He recovered within a heartbeat.
“Sir.” He vanished in a rush of chakra and old leaves.
“S-rank containment?” Danzo repeated. S-rank containment was rarely used outside of war, when a malicious bio-weapon was suspected, but he did not, for once, sound as though he disapproved. Even as he said it, seals were flaring to life around the buildings, their painters wedged between two crackling walls of chakra that would completely isolate the hot zone. Under A-rank procedure, medics exiting would strip off all their heavy, sealed clothes and be cleaned between areas -- under S-rank procedure, they would not be permitted to leave for the duration of the quarantine.
The sounds of panic rose and fell, but the intentions in the chakra only escalated. There was a brief, sharp flicker of killing intent and a sudden drop in noise. The siren fell abruptly silent, but nobody was fool enough to stop the quarantine process now that it had been ordered.
“Hmm... it's better to be cautious, isn’t it?” Hiruzen said mildly.
Danzo glanced sideways at him and hummed, but he said nothing. They watched the activity at the house like that, standing, still, silent and intent, upon the hill for hours.
Decontamination and cleaning may have taken place, and all efforts may have been taken to secure any samples, but just the same Hiruzen was not surprised when symptoms began showing up among the trapped population within the first hour.
It killed fast, which was, in its way, a mercy. But it also killed and killed and killed. It was ravenous, insatiable, unstoppable.
Nobody survived exposure. Not the staff, not the highly trained ANBU with their masks and their gloves, not the field medics with their chakra sterilisation -- and in the end, not even the pathogen team that arrived from the hospital in their pressure suits all smeared with seals lived out the whole day.
Oh, Tsunade, Hiruzen thought, older and older by the second, bowed and worn and crushed beneath this new weight, no wonder you hid it. What were you thinking?
The village, he reflected, was lucky that they had seal masters still living, and that those masters’ barriers held. Perhaps that could be of use, he thought. “A moving barrier around the research teams --”
“Idiocy,” Danzo snapped. “It is out of control.”
“Perhaps the barrier can be...” He paused in the face of Danzo’s increasingly hot glare. "No," he said.
"No," Danzo said.
There was a moment's silence.
“Well,” he agreed finally, softly. “Did I see Uchiha Fumiyo earlier?” He knew he had.
Danzo grunted. The woman’s clan name was enough to imply the plan ahead of them, and he turned away, satisfied that his way would be got. Hiruzen did not sigh again.
There were two remaining medics beyond the containment area, but they had been the last volunteers and had already begun to develop symptoms. Losses must be cut.
At 2 AM, he finally gave the order to burn everything inside the barrier to the ground, and to leave plague markers to warn the unwary away from the barriers once it was done.
“Two students in one month,” Hiruzan could not help but say aloud, as the smoke billowed and the flames rose high in the dark sky. That terrible light made all their shadows huge, inconsistent and monstrous, mingling in with the silhouettes of twisted trees and streaming upon the ground behind them.
“And so Konoha is haemorrhaging sannin,” said Danzo. “This will be impossible to keep from our village’s enemies.”
It would. That was a thought that he should have had, as Hokage. He hadn't. Danzo was not like him, however -- he was not a man easily distracted by sentiment. This had not been an event on a small scale. Even the discovery of Orochimaru’s research had not been... like this. Discretion was impossible.
Hiruzen tipped his head toward the shadowy figure of an ANBU captain behind him. She stiffened under his attention, but she said nothing and awaited his order.
“Please have Senju Tsunade’s accesses revoked, and formally declare her to be a missing nin. She is wanted for--” he hesitated minutely, too short a period to catch unless one was familiar with him, although he felt Danzo shift his weight right beside him in response to the pause, “--capture and questioning,” he finished.
He felt heavy with the order, and already he wondered if he should have made it a kill order. He knew he should have done so immediately with Orochimaru, but Tsunade --
Two students in one month. He exhaled slowly. The ANBU agent was long gone now. The order had been given. Capture, not kill. It was too late to second guess it.
“I don’t suppose Jiraiya has any secrets he’d like to share with me,” he mused, dry and dark and only half joking.
“Believe me,” said Danzo in his harsh, humourless way, “I will find out.”
And Hiruzen could hardly blame him now.
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