Naruto : Wind of Catastrophe

I had passed it off as a fluke two months ago, but every ninja knows that the saying "Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence" is complete nonsense. My crimson dreams are changing.

What exactly they're changing to, however...

...

I finish off my recount, read through it once, twice, three times, making sure that I've left nothing out of it. I think about trying to do the same with my other dream as well, but the particulars of that one have already faded into uselessness. Or been repressed. One of the two. All I can remember is that it lacked the crimson film just like this one, until the very end at least.

Satisfied for now with my recording, I roll the scroll up and take one last look at the trees hanging over the village before heading back into my room. The light from my alarm clock is the only thing illuminating the otherwise pitch black room, the numbers 5:49 glaring up at me. Far too early to be up, but I can never go back to sleep after having a crimson dream.

"Stupid dreams," I mutter, tossing the scroll down on my bed and shuffling into the bathroom. I go through my usual routine of showering and dressing in the dark, taking this rare opportunity of being up early to enjoy the heat of the water and actually find a clean pair of pants to wear before I have to go to my appointment for the morning. When I finally pass by my room with my sandals on my feet and keys in hand the clock reads 6:30.

Usually having to cede the rooftops to shinobi on duty is an enormous pain. But at times like this, when it's just late enough for some stalls to be open but early enough that the streets are pretty much deserted, it's actually kind of nice. I bump around from merchant to merchant, checking out breakfast foods and weapons and all kinds of other wares, exchanging a few words here and buying a few things there.

The sun is just beginning to peek up over the horizon of trees when I arrive at a small gray building made up of concrete bricks and little else. No windows. One solitary metal door. I walk up to it and raise my hand to knock, and flinch back just a little when an ANBU is suddenly there.

It's not like this hasn't happened every time I come to this place, but it never ceases to scare the hell out of me.

"Name, shinobi ID number, and purpose," the typical monotone that all ANBU are known for drifts past the ceramic mask- some sort of bird. I roll my eyes.

"Uzumaki Naruto, 12431, an appointment with Yamanaka Inoichi."

The ANBU raises a hand and taps an erratic beat on their armored shoulder, and after a moment of silence bows their head and opens the door. "Proceed."

"Yeah, good morning to you too," I grumble, moving into the building.

Drab tiles and more cement walls await me inside, illuminated by about a dozen shining bars in the ceiling. There's a small desk shoved up against the wall to my left, behind which a strained-looking woman wearing a chunin vest sits surrounded by piles of papers. She looks up at me briefly, nods towards the far side of the room and murmurs a clipped "good morning," and goes back to her work.

I walk over to the other side of the room where a set of concrete stairs leading downward await me, and descend into darkness. I emerge at the bottom into a hallway, and immediately turn to the right down a connecting hallway, thus beginning my journey through the labyrinth that is Konoha's Torture and Interrogation Headquarters.

It took me a lot of appointments here to get the path to Yamanaka's office down pat, and I'm still trying to forget some of the things I heard the first few times I got lost. I shudder, the memory of a stoic ANBU blocking my path and a woman's rising wails surging to the forefront of my mind.

I come to a stop at another door, this one made of oak instead of metal. I shove it open. A large room lays inside, decorated with a couple couches, some tables, a large refrigerator, and a blackboard that covers an entire wall. The Employee Lounge.

I'm just about to turn into the door leading to Yamanaka's office when I notice a certain robed someone sitting on one of the couches out of the corner of my eye. I turn to look at him, puzzled.

"Old man? What are you doing here?"

The old man's head, which had been dipped down to his chest, jerks up. He looks at me with a startled look on his face that I don't buy even a little bit. "Ah, Naruto. You've made it." He forces himself to his feet, grasping at his hip and wincing theatrically. I shake my head, a little smile tugging at my lips. "I was hoping to accompany you in your meeting with Inoichi today."

"Why?"

"Today he will be giving me his final assessment of you," he says, smiling.

That perks me right up. "Wait, really?" He hums in confirmation and gestures towards the Intelligence Shinobi's office.

"Shall we?"

Yamanaka's office is a modest thing, done up with a medium-sized desk across from the doorway, a couple chairs, and a gray leather couch. The man himself is scribbling something down behind said desk, and waves vaguely at a chair.

"Have a seat, Uzumaki-san, we'll begin in a moment." I grab the seat on the left while the old man takes the one on the right, and the Intelligence jounin continues to scribble away. He finishes whatever it is he's writing with a flourish a few minutes later, and looks up. I try my best to contain myself at the look on his face when he sees the old man, I really do, but a choked snicker still slips out.

"Hokage-sama! I'm so sorry, I didn't realize you were here-"

"It's quite alright, Inoichi," The old man says, waving him off. There's a mischievous glint in his eyes, which only makes me laugh louder. "Any time away from my desk is time well spent, I always say. Just pretend I'm not here."

So after a little bit of hesitation and another apology for good measure, Yamanaka and I get into our routine.

It started a little over a week after I woke up from my coma, these routine visits to Konoha's cosiest shinobi division. An ANBU had appeared on my balcony at seven in the morning and scared the bejeezus out of me, and promptly escorted me to Yamanaka's office. What followed- after I got done ranting about privacy and the unholy hour, of course- was two straight hours of hundreds upon hundreds of seemingly random, utterly inane questions from the Intelligence Shinobi.

It had taken me all of five minutes to realize he was testing to see if I was a sleeper agent.

Sleeper agents had been one of Iruka-sensei's more passionate topics, so we'd gone pretty in depth in our fourth year in the Academy as to the various methods used to create and "disarm" one. One of the first things that's done to a suspected sleeper agent is a thorough sweeping of the mind by a genjutsu expert. If and when that doesn't pick anything up, the suspect is given another sweep through by a Yamanaka. Nine times out of ten, one of these two things will catch whatever that particular sleeper's trigger happens to be and measures will be taken to disarm it from there.

Unfortunately for me, Kazu's freaky doujutsu is subtle enough to slip past even Uchiha Itachi, the greatest genjutsu master Konoha has to offer, and for some reason I'm not allowed to get molested by the Yamanaka's clan technique. So I get the third and by far the most tedious method. Running me through every possible scenario that might set off my trigger until one of them does and they can disable it from there.

For the first few meetings we stuck mainly to shinobi-related words and images. Kunai, every major and minor hidden village along with their various headbands, the names of every major clan in the Elemental Nations, and on and on and on. As I'd later find out, it was done this way so that I could head back out into the field as soon as possible. All of the really stupid stuff came after I went on my second mission, an incredibly dull assault on a group of bandits lording over a supply line heading in from Kusa. Yamanaka hit me with kitchen appliances, articles of clothing, internal organs- sometimes literally after a particularly long meeting. Nothing was spared.

This meeting is no different. Though the questions and images are more complex than in earlier meetings, there's so many of them that it all starts to blend together. I'm considering trying sleep with my eyes open when he sits back and makes one final mark on a piece of paper on his desk and nods sharply.

"That's it," he says briskly, reaching over and grabbing a folder filled with papers from past meetings and sliding it in amongst them. He turns to the old man and smiles slightly.

"He's clear, Hokage-sama."

"Seriously?" I ask in disbelief. I turn to the old man hopefully. "So no more meetings?"

He clicks his tongue at that, hitting me with a chiding look. "A Hokage does not ask questions he already knows the answers to, Naruto."

My eagerness drains out of me and I nod, shot down. I don't know what I was expecting, really. The procedures in dealing with potential sleeper agents haven't changed much in the last few decades, if at all.

You either get deactivated, or you get run through possible triggers in routine rotations in case you're a time-activated version. Which means if you happen to not be a sleeper agent at all, you get to go through the interrogations for the rest of your life.

I don't think I'm a sleeper agent. I'll never tell anyone why I think this, least of all the old man, because I doubt "That unknown ninja who kidnapped me just doesn't strike me as a bad guy" would go over well with anyone.

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