Chapter 24: New Team Six Arc: One

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

We meet up the next morning in front of the Aburame Compound as our last official day as Team Six. Muta chose to forgo wearing his new flak jacket, instead opting for the simple tan high collared jacket of our earlier days. We all look the same as we usually did, I'm still wearing my tan shirt and shorts, and Toku has his casual hoodie.

"We'll always be Team Tan." Toku bumps shoulders with Muta and trails his hands through Ni's fur. His other arm is slung around my shoulder and we move with a casual unity down the street. "That's never going to change."

Muta smiles at him and then at me. "I know."

We walk onward together, but there's a change in the air, a sort of charged energy that hadn't manifested before. Tomorrow everything will change.

"You better show up at the Hyuga compound on Saturday." I say to Muta, trying desperately to blink back tears. "Koma-senpai promised to oversee taijutsu training."

He looks at me, and very carefully brushes a stray tear from my cheek. "I will."

We stop at Sensei's house for breakfast. Muta leaves his glasses on the counter when we enter the kitchen, unzips his jacket and leaves it over the back of a kitchen chair. "Look at you three." Kiho-baachan squishes our each of our cheeks together in turn. "All grown up aren't you?" She sets a breakfast tray down for the Triplets and shoos us toward the kitchen table. "Sit down, I'll go rouse the eternally sleeping Waste of Space."

Toku muffles a snort. "Of course, Sensei's sleeping in on the one day we aren't slated to do anything."

I giggle. "Maybe we showed up too early."

"Perhaps Sensei will be annoyed that we disturbed his precious sleep time." Muta's lips tilt upwards in a shallow smile, and his golden eyes are alight with mischief. "You two should do this to Sensei with whomever I'm replaced with." You'll never be replaced, Muta.

"You won't be replaced." I set my hand over his and look him in the eye. "You're a part of Team Six. No one will ever change that."

"Yes, Muta-kun, take Hana-chan's advice or I'll feel like I taught you nothing this past year and a half." Sensei slouches his way into the kitchen with Kiho-baachan prods his back.

"Hurry up Space Waster. We haven't got all day, you know." She says it good naturedly, and we can tell she isn't angry, just impatient, as Kiho-baachan often is with Sensei.

He turns back to look at her with narrowed eyes and a yawn. "If I hurry I'll miss the subtlety in your cooking, Vicious Hag."

Kiho-baachan goes pink and I'm reminded of just how much they actually care for each other despite the terrible nicknames that must have been a product of their childhood together on a team.

Sensei turns to us. "So what do you three want to do today?"

Toku groans and slams his head against the wooden table. "Anything, anything at all, but En-sensei please never make us dig through a manure pile ever again."

There's an unholy gleam in Sensei's eye as he considers it. "Nah, I can't promise you that. It'll get rid of a prime source of entertainment for me."

Toku peels himself off the table just enough to glare balefully at Sensei. "I still smell like manure no matter how much I wash."

I giggle and Muta chokes on his water, so I pound his back. "It's been months since the last manure expedition, Toku!" I stick my tongue out at him. "It just goes to show that you can corrupt the Hyuga but you can't take away his sense of cleanliness."

Toku growls and lunges towards me. "Haven't I been corrupted enough, Dog Girl?"

I shriek and evade him by hiding behind Sensei. "Never!"

We wander around Konoha afterwards with no real destination in mind. In the end, we take a D-rank mission, painting fences is alright enough as an activity given that we were already tan, and it is a good way to pretend that we were having a normal team day.

The Hokage notices Muta's lack of flak jacket, I'm sure. They don't call him the God of Shinobi because he's an old man with a village to run and a pipe to smoke. But he says nothing of it, or our indulgence in extra bonding time that could no longer be called team bonding.

"Pass me a paintbrush please, Sensei?" I look up from mixing the different shades of paint with a stirring rod. "At this rate, we'll not be able to finish before lunch, and I know how much you love the dim sun at Mufu-an."

Supposedly, Sensei is helping the boys paint the fence. He's just...painting very slowly, as if each brush stroke's precision meant life or death. I am not amused. He turns to me with reproach in his eyes. "I liked it better when you respected my authority, Hana-chan."

"But Sensei, I only respect authority when you actually have it." I swipe his paintbrush from his loose fingers and happily set about painting the fence rather hapazardly. Sensei winces. "You have to admit, most of the time you just happen to be the oldest joker."

"Hmm...perhaps." He lies down on the ground very casually next to the can of paint I was mixing, and stirs it lazily without looking at it. "I don't know if I like what Hokage-sama's trying to sell."

"Is it about team placements?" Toku leans in to our conversation. "Because if there is a possibility, I would personally vote to leave Kasuga behind on a mission if he ends up here with us, since I'm not as nice as Hana-chan or Mu-kun."

Sensei sits up just enough so he can look Toku in the eye while chastising him. "You are not to prove yourself cut from the same cloth as him, Tokuma-kun. Else I might actually have to resign from teaching altogether."

"No, you can't do that, Sensei." We chorus in unison, aghast at the very idea.

"Who would we be the ducklings to?" I ponder.

"Who would be our second mother?" Muta wonders.

"Who would nag us until we did something or other?" Toku finishes.

"Oh wait." We tap our chins in unison. "That would be Kiho-baachan." We shake our heads. "It's okay, Sensei, you can retire and Kiho-baachan can pound everything into our heads."

Sensei sighs, long suffering and miserable. "Yet, I love you three hellions more than my own flesh and blood children."

"You don't have any of those, Sensei." Muta quirks a smile that becomes all out laughter. "You only have us."

The next morning Sensei collects Toku and I before breakfast. "Come, we're going to pick up our new teammate."

Toku and I look at each other. Does our new teammate not know where we meet? Shrug, and move on. Our shoulders brush and we walk side by side like we've always been doing so, but it's not the same. There is an empty space where Muta used to be, he'd gone on to tracking an hour earlier still.

So lost are we that we don't even quite notice where we've been headed until we are past the Naka river, and in fact, past the compound gates themselves.

The Uchiwa painted on every house is a bit of a giveaway though.

We've come to collect an Uchiha? What was the council smoking? Do they want Team Six to explode? The only Uchiha Toku even vaguely tolerates is already on a team...

We've gathered quite a crowd by this point, small children not old enough for the Academy, old men smoking on porch steps, old women out with laundry or just gossip, young mothers watching their children, the list goes on.

All of them Uchiha, dark haired, dark eyed, and they go quiet as we pass by. The spectacle is unnerving. The gazes make me feel like there are ants crawling between my shoulder blades.

Sensei raps on a doorway. "Uchiha-san? We're here."

It's Mikoto-san that opens the door. Wait, but Itachi already has a genin team?

We're seated in the sitting room as Mikoto-san bustles around first handing out tea, and then calming a crying Sasuke, and then nearly running out the door after Fugaku-san because he'd forgotten his bento, but finally, she sits down.

"I'm so sorry to have troubled you to come all this way for Itachi-kun, Nara-san." She grips her teacup rather tightly, and doesn't quite look us in the eye. "And oh, you've brought both of your students with you." She makes sure to not look Toku in the eye at all.

He shifts uneasily and taps his fingers against my thigh-Hana, I don't like it here-in Konoha Standard.

Grin and bear it, Toku. I tap back. Remember Itachi-kun isn't that bad.

I still don't know why we're here to pick Itachi up since he had a team, unless...unless he didn't have a team anymore. There were no mentions of Itachi's genin teammates later on in the series. If they'd still been alive after he massacred the clan and left them, wouldn't they have at least been upset enough to say so?

But no, it had just been Kakashi carrying a burden because they'd worked together in ANBU. I had an increasingly bad feeling about today, suddenly made worse by the fact that there is no Muta.

"There's no need to be so formal, Uchiha-san." Sensei drawls from his place beside us. "The tension in your shoulders'll give you back and neck pain."

"He's just not been the same, since the mission." Mikoto-san whispers as if though speaking louder would hurt the air somehow. "He's seen death before, but I haven't seen him like this."

Sensei gets to his feet, and gestures for us to wait were we are. "Where's Itachi-kun's room? I'd like to go speak to him."

We do make it to Mufu-an at a quarter past nine in the morning. Itachi had been dead silent the entire time, weighing down the team atmosphere even more, but he had gotten out of bed at least.

Mikoto-san had counted it as a win. Sensei...not so much.

"We are late, and the table in the back is in use." He slouches forward and groans while digging around in his pockets. "Where did I leave, ah yes." He waves a hundred ryo bill at a passing waitress. "I want the room I reserved."

"You reserved it for eight o'clock, Ensui-san." The petite middle aged woman crosses her arms over her chest and doesn't back down. "You're an hour and fifteen minutes late."

"Something unexpected came up, Fumiko-san, don't be petty. I don't even need anything special, just that table." Sensei has particularly good set of kicked puppy eyes that he uses on rare occasions when Kiho-baachan isn't looking, and as such this must be one of those times.

She takes the bill, glares at Sensei, and marches off. "Doesn't want anything special, he says. As late as Hatake, wants only that table, but it's nothing special."

We get our table.

Sensei orders four cups of rose tea and three plates of dim sun. "Tell us a bit about yourself, Itachi-kun. I think I deserve it after spending an extra hundred ryo than what I thought I'd be when I got up this morning."

"I'm not strong enough to protect anyone, yet." Itachi stares mechanically at his tea, and the steam coming off of his tea. "I'm sorry. I failed. There was a teleporting ninja who killed Temma and I couldn't help it." Teleporting? Uchiha Obito? I suddenly have no desire to visit the memorial stone to talk to anyone anymore. Did something I say about Itachi prompt Tobi to check on the Clan Heir?

What did I do, and did it change anything?

"Bullshit." Toku slams a fist down on the table. "You graduated the top of our class." As always when he's unusually angry, his Byakugan is half way active. "You didn't mess up, someone else did. There's no way that there'd be teleporting shinobi on a C-rank mission without someone with more power than you screwing up."

"You believe me?" Itachi raises his eyes from his teacup and for the first time that morning shows a hint of emotion even if it is only disbelief.

"I don't think you've become a liar a year and a half after graduation, Uchiha." Toku shrugs. "You've never been prone to telling wild stories, so if you say he's teleporting, then as far as I can tell, he's teleporting." Toku's still blunt and impolite enough to border on rude, but he isn't unfriendly despite the bad blood between clans. "And if he's teleporting and killing genin he's an enemy of Konoha."

Itachi had been too miserable to take issue with Toku's rudeness, but I doubt he would even if he were feeling normal. Itachi is forgiving in that sense. Far too forgiving, if what had later happened with Sasuke is a correct measuring stick.

I set a hand over Itachi's tea, and feel the heat of the steam on my skin. I needed some sting to keep me grounded at the moment, because really there's too much I might have changed by talking to Uchiha Obito because I wanted to remind him that he 'died' a hero. I might have made everything worse. "It isn't your fault that you were attacked by a rogue shinobi, Itachi-kun." It might very well have been mine. "We're hardier than you think." I do my best to smile at him, but all I remember is just how many people I've ripped a piece off of by now a year and a half into being a real ninja, that one kunoichi from Iwa who I had torn apart, and the last exam where I'd felt so victorious ripping out a teenaged girl's throat. "You can trust that we'll keep ourselves alive."

Sensei, who'd been watching the scene with discerning dark eyes, enters the conversation. "I need you to have a tangible goal to guide you toward it, Itachi-kun. As your sensei, that is my job. Your previous sensei may not have asked you this before, but I will." He tilts Itach's chin up, and looks him in the eye. "Why are you a shinobi, Itachi-kun?"

Itachi takes a very deep breath, and seems to find the answer he'd been searching for, deep inside himself. "Because I love this village, Ensui-sensei, and I want to protect it."

"A good choice." Sensei nods. "I'll do my best to help you succeed."

Our first team lunch is at Sensei's house. There are three children sitting around the kitchen table in the Nara-Yamanaka residence again, and it's only been a day, but the mood is truly awful.

It's nothing like the bantering tone we'd shared just yesterday. In fact, one of the children isn't even one that was here yesterday.

"Do...make yourself at home, Uchiha-kun." Kiho-baachan, normally so good with people is only capable of interacting with Itachi in very short bursts.

"Thank you, Nara-san." Itachi sits down in the chair that she pulls out for him.

She does not ask him to call her Baachan. She doesn't tease Sensei and call him a 'waste of space' or coo over her cute ducklings. She simply sets out all the different dishes she had made for lunch, which is no less delicious, and resumes her tense silence.

"I think the flower woman needs to keep a hold of her emotions, Hana." Ni mumbles by my feet. He's the only one of his brothers that elected to come with me today. Ichi and San are off on an adventure with Kuromaru since Kaa-san is staying at home.

"I think you need to learn more names, Ni." I stick my head under the table so I can talk to him more clearly. "You only know me and your brothers. You keep calling Kaa-san Kaa and Kiba pup and my teammates Bug Boy and White Eyed Boy. Clearly you do know names since you've called Itachi-kun Uchiha boy before, but now that he's on our team you'll devolve into calling him Red Eyed Boy next."

Ni huffs and does not reply. I resume my rightful position with my head above the table.

"I think that's the most I've heard you say at one time to one of the Triplets, Hana." I smirk at Toku.

"I say plenty to them, it's just not easy for you to pick up on." I suppose the more tactile ways of expressing information isn't someone who can see everything's greatest strength.

But there's plenty of ways I talk to the Triplets without speaking. My hands through their fur, a meeting of eyes, a pat on the head, a tapping foot, crossed legs, a smile, a frown, there are more ways to speak than just with words.

"I think the bond you share with them is special." Itachi smiles again for the first time today. It's a little rusty from disuse, but it's mostly fine. He'll live.

"They're my brothers." I shrug. "My oldest friends, they have to be special."

Toku turns to Itachi and prods him in the stomach. "Come on, say thank you to Kiho-baachan for a wonderful lunch."

Itachi gapes at him, mouth wide open like a fish.

Kiho-baachan giggles with not quite her usual flair. "I'm sorry, Itachi-kun. Give me a little time. I'll get used to you." She reaches out to smooth down his hair, and Itachi very carefully allows it. I feel some of the tension bleed out of the air.

A.N. And so now we have the New Team Six Arc. Only this arc and another to go before things start to get really interesting. I'd wanted to introduce another character, but he didn't make it into the chapter. He'll definitely be in the next chapter though.

Thanks to WhiteFang001 for reviewing last chapter. (I agree Kasuga's actions were kind of horrible, but I do have some idea of what sort of purpose he's serving in the story.)

And thank you to everyone who favorited and followed. You guys are great.

~Tavina