Chapter 033

Cat came to find her shortly after dawn. Her crisp order to follow as stealthily as she could was the first time Haruka ever heard the ANBU's voice. That was also the only reason she did as told without commenting on the fact that she hadn't seen Cat in ages.

The woman did a double take when Haruka all but vanished. By now she could mask scent, body heat and any sound she made while keeping her chakra imperceptible. If she learned how to become invisible she'd practically be a ghost, but until then she'd have to make do with hiding in the shadows and moving around lines of sight.

Cat led her through a labyrinth of dark alleys and then tunnels until they reached a small room. By the time they stopped Haruka had no idea where they were, which was likely the point. The ANBU told her that this whole excursion was off the books before she opened the rusty door and led Haruka inside.

That announcement, or warning, came rather late, but she bit back the comment when she saw Hayate Gekko's bloody corpse on a low metal table in the middle of the room. there was a deep wound from his left shoulder to just below the ribs on his right side. Whatever had caused it was sharp enough to cleanly cut through a jonin vest, a layer of mesh, muscle and bone in a single swing. It very much reminded her of what Kakashi's notes said about the effect wind natured chakra had when using Chakra Flow. The referee was pale, his eyes and lips missing, and the wounds surrounding them made Haruka think that birds had found him quite a while before anyone else.

"Can you tell who killed him?" Cat asked, voice tight with barely suppressed anger. She wasn't just trying to do right by a colleague, she wanted revenge for the murder of a loved one, and Haruka hated having to disappoint her.

"No, there's barely any chakra residue left and I don't recognize the signature," she said, and then flinched when a wave of sadness and guilt hit Cat, pulling her under like a riptide. Haruka took a deep breath, adding: "I might, and I mean might, be able to compare the remaining traces to samples of suspects if you have any. It wouldn't be enough to definitively tell you who did it, but I could give you an approximation of how similar the signatures are."

Cat perked up at that, suddenly having something to do again to avoid the helplessness grief carried with it. She didn't even tell Haruka to stay put, just vanished without so much as a cloud of chakra smoke. Haruka shook her head and sat down, back against the wall. She hadn't gotten a lot of sleep that night, and while a room that was empty, but for a table and a corpse certainly wouldn't make her list of preferred sleeping locations anytime soon, she was so tired that she dozed off almost the second her behind made contact with the floor.

𖦹𖦹𖦹

She didn't feel any more rested the next time Cat woke her to present several pieces of clothing, so the ANBU couldn't have been gone long, but it was hard to tell without being able to see the sun. Haruka did, however, recognize three of the chakra signatures immediately as those of the Suna genin.

"Definitely not these," she said, giving them back and then concentrating on the remaining two. "Not Kabuto either, but the last one is close."

"How close?" The ANBU demanded.

"Close enough that it could have been the murderer, but I told you, I can't say for certain." Haruka made sure to put emphasis on that last part. Cat was no doubt acting without orders and it wouldn't do if she killed the wrong person. Especially if that person was a shinobi of an allied nation.

Cat nodded her thanks and escorted Haruka back to her flat without another word. She also promised to inform the Hokage about Dosu's death and how it had come about.

When Haruka woke up again several hours later there was a scroll on her bedside table, that contained information on an A-rank jutsu called Camouflage that allowed the user to bend light around their body by manipulating chakra to change the way it was reflected. If used correctly it would make someone almost completely invisible, even erasing their shadow. It wouldn't fool something like the Byakugan or Sharingan, and moving while under the jutsu would cause minor distortions in the air, but it perfectly rounded out Haruka's stealth repertoire.

She had to wonder about Cat's selection of potential murderers though. Now that she wasn't dead on her feet it seemed rather curious. Gaara didn't make a lot of sense because he seemed to be on some kind of leash and the wound that had killed Hayate didn't fit the way the redhead fought at all. Kankuro and Temari hadn't given any kind of indication that they might attack Konoha personnel, but if Cat had come to the same conclusions about how the injury had been caused as Haruka, those two made a little more sense. That meant the signature she couldn't place was likely their sensei as the only other Suna shinobi. Still Suna was not only allied with Konoha, but also far from the only nation with shinobi that could use wind natured chakra. In fact, Naruto had an affinity for the element, so there had to be some other reason for that specific selection.

And then there was Kabuto. Had he only been included because Haruka had warned Ibiki about him, or had he actually been revealed as a spy? Sometimes she really hated all the secrecy.

𖦹𖦹𖦹

Hinata had her final check up in the hospital a little under two weeks after her fight against Neji. Haruka was so glad that she decided to escort the heiress to her appointment. The theory of the Gentle Fist was interesting, but learning it without any way to actually practice fighting against it to see if she understood it as well as she thought was frustrating. Haruka was very much looking forward to her first spar with Hinata.

"Shikamaru, Naruto and Choji are somewhere on this floor. I'm going to check on them to see what is going on while you're with the medic," Haruka said. The other girl perked up at the mention of Naruto's name, and told her not to worry about it and that she'd come find them after she was done.

Haruka thought it was kind of a miracle that her blond teammate still hadn't figured out that Hinata liked him. He was incredibly adept when it came to reading people sometimes, but at other times he missed the most obvious things. Then again, maybe it was a good thing because his ignorance gave the heiress more time to get over how shy she was around him.

When Haruka looked into the room the three chakra signatures where in only Shikamaru greeted her. Choji was fast asleep and Naruto just waking up.

"What happened to those two?"

"Choji just ate too much, no idea about Naruto though," Shikamaru shrugged.

The blond yawned, mumbling something about giant frogs and stupid perverts, and then his eyes suddenly snapped open.

"Where am I?"

"Hospital," the Nara supplied in a drawl. Haruka raised an eyebrow at the fruit basket he held out to Naruto. Apparently he'd brought it for Choji, but the medic had said his teammate wasn't allowed to eat anything just yet. She shrugged and grabbed an apple, telling the other two in very vague terms about her training with Hinata. Shikamaru, for his part, had elected to spent the month resting, and Naruto had somehow gotten himself into a situation in which Konoha's seal master, Jiraiya, had decided throwing the boy off of a cliff would help him summon toads. Or something. There were definitely parts of that story missing, and Haruka rather suspected that they had something to do with the blond's seal.

"What is it?" Shikamaru asked, when her head suddenly snapped up.

"Maybe nothing," she told him, already halfway out of the door. The boys were hot on her heels a moment later. Haruka quickly moved down the corridor and into another room, only to see a cloud of sand hovering over Lee's hospital bed.

"What are you doing here you bastard?" Naruto demanded, rushing forward and hitting Gaara in the face. Shikamaru had the other boy's shadow bound a second later and Haruka body flickered between him and Lee. She considered forming a chakra barrier, but then dismissed the idea as useless, there was already sand on the bed.

Tiny pieces of Gaara's sand armor fell to the ground as he stared at each of them in turn. His eyes were as cold as ever and he didn't seem concerned at all, but his sand was moving away from Lee and back into the gourd on his back.

"I was trying to kill him," the redhead informed them.

"What…?" Naruto looked completely baffled, whereas Shikamaru was more concerned and trying to understand Gaara's behavior.

"Why? You already won your fight," the Nara reasoned. "Do you have some personal grudge against him?"

Gaara's answer was so cold and matter of fact, it had Haruka tense in anticipation of a fight.

"I do not. I'm going to kill him because I want to," he told them and then, at Naruto's outrage, added: "If you get in my way I will kill you too."

Shikamaru tried to intimidate him by bluffing. He claimed Gaara would have no chance three against one and with a bound shadow. Haruka knew better though. The Suna nin didn't have to be able to move to control his sand. Surprisingly enough, Gaara actually gave them another warning instead of outright attacking, and that made her think he was unsure about the situation.

Of course Naruto had little enough common sense at the best of times, and completely ignored the danger all of them were in. Shikamaru tried to warn him about the redhead's monstrous strength, but all that got him was a fierce grin.

"I won't lose to the likes of him!" The blond declared. "I have a real monster inside of me."

Haruka sighed, putting a hand to her forehead.

"So does he you moron, I already told you that."

Granted, Naruto's monster was a lot stronger, but unlike Gaara he only had access to a trickle of it's power. The Suna nin's gaze snapped to her, and then he explained that he'd always been a monster. That his father, the Kazekage, had tried to make him the ultimate weapon by sealing the spirit of Shukaku, a Suna priest, into him before he was even born. Haruka was pretty sure that the thing imprisoned inside of Gaara was one of the Tailed Beasts and not some spirit, but that probably wouldn't matter in the end.

"What a fucked up way for a parent to show love," Shikamaru commented. He was incredibly tense, and his nervousness only became worse when the redhead scoffed at him.

"Love?" He asked, with a chuckle that made Haruka distinctly uncomfortable. Then he continued to explain that to him, family was nothing but sacks of meat bound together by hatred. Apparently his mother had died giving birth to him, and his father had tried to have him assassinated for the past few years, after it turned out that making a child into a lethal weapon before it could even understand the concept of death was a bad idea.

When Gaara had reached the age of six it had been decided he was too dangerous and needed to be eliminated, which was fucked up, but so was the lesson the boy had taken away from his childhood. He was somehow under the impression that everyone needed a reason to exist, otherwise they were already dead. Something that Naruto seemed to agree with. Of course Naruto had decided that he wanted to make friends and earn the respect of his village. Gaara on the other hand had come to the conclusion that he existed to kill every other human. It was kind of scary to think that either could have taken the other's path easily enough.

Sand began to swirl around the room again, and Haruka decided it was time to test that theory about Gaara's leash. First she needed to draw his attention away from Shikamaru and Naruto though. She carefully cut a gash into the palm of her left hand with a kunai, and then flicked the blood at his face. His gaze immediately snapped to her, shifting between her eyes and the wound. He looked at least as confused as homicidal, which was probably the best result she was likely to get.

"The exam's rules prohibit fighting outside of official matches," she told him, keeping her voice as flat and matter of fact as she could manage. "Sparring is allowed for training purposes, killing is not. That means you have no right at all to attack Lee, seeing as he is unconscious and has most definitely not agreed to spar with you."

Gaara stared at her in that unnerving way of his, sand restlessly shifting in the air around him. Holding his gaze was hard, but Haruka felt his chakra calm and saw the madness recede from his eyes with every passing second.

"You're afraid," the redhead said, like he had on the roof, only this time it sounded almost like a question. Haruka laughed, in that way people did, when their brains struggled to get their stress levels back under control.

"Yeah, you scare the living shit out of me," she admitted. "But just like I told you last time: I don't like being hunted and the only sure way to avoid that is not to run."

Gaara let his icy gaze wash over each of them one more time, but then moved to leave the room, just as Gai and Hinata approached. He promised to kill them all before he was out of the door though. Not that Haruka cared right then, she was too busy sitting on the floor and trying to get her heart rate back to a reasonable pace.

Hinata offered to put their sparring session off until the next day, but Haruka declined. Instead asking Gai if she could borrow some weights from him. She spent almost every waking minute for the following two weeks with training. Fear was a great motivator.