Work Text:
Ibiki silently gapes at the sticky hanami dango-covered file—a classified SS-rank missing-nin report—and slowly lifts his head to look over to the Hokage’s fumbling errand-boy. He stares at him for a long moment, the chuunin visibly shrinking before his eyes (as he should: Ibiki was proud of his notorious reputation and a honed, wickedly venomous glare), which couldn’t be said about his top-notch, best of the best, T&I’s most vicious interrogators.
He hates the day he appointed them to work together.
Ibiki pinches the bridge of his nose. He loudly exhales. “Uchiha,” he orders, pointing at his subordinate with the sticky file. “Explain.”
Uchiha feigns a sour and regretful face.
Ibiki pointedly ignores Mitarashi’s barely contained grin.
“Well,” Uchiha says, scratching his scarred cheek. “I admit, we went a little overboard. We—”
Ibiki points at the file cabinet, then at the matted sofa in the corner of his office, then at his own desk—all fully coated in syrup.
“A lot overboard,” Uchiha instantly corrects himself. He makes no attempts to pretend to be sheepish. “We got the confession in the end. Izumo-san helped a lot, hasn’t he?”
The chuunin shudders as Uchiha’s heavy palm lands on his syrup-covered shoulder. The Uchiha grins.
Mitarashi, to Ibiki’s dismay, picks that moment to open her mouth. “Who knew that guy had a phobia of syrupy things, right? I mean, come on, the dude is an A-ranked missing-nin, and all it took for him to sob himself sick was a little bit of—”
“A lot of syrup,” Uchiha corrects, shooting Ibiki a wide toothy grin.
“A lot of syrup,” Mitarashi agrees. “It will also save the department the costs for our lunch breaks. The dango stand’s prices are driving me crazy lately, and I haven’t received a pay raise in—”
Ibiki raises his—sticky, Kamisama, why is everything so sticky—hand to silence her. Both of his top-notch, best of the best, T&I’s most idiotic interrogators shut their stupid little mouths up. “I wish I could say both of you are fucking fired,” Ibiki notes how none of them even try to wince at his words—he had spoiled them both too much, hasn’t he? “But if I attempt that I will be put through a mind-walking hell by Yamanaka Inoichi himself.”
Uchiha’s shoulder twitches like he wants to shrug.
“You both,” he points at them with his sticky finger, “are going to clean this fucking mess.”
Mitarashi hunches her shoulders and opens her mouth to whine but Ibiki raises his hand again. Both of his obedient, well-trained, murderous, stupid subordinates shut their mouth traps again.
“You are going to clean this,” Ibiki stresses, “and rewrite every single file that you have personally stained with this,” he purses his lips, “mess. Am I understood?”
An uneven chorus of whiny (Mitarashi) and deceptively bored (Uchiha) “yessir”'s rings in the office.
Ibiki finally turns his head back to the chuunin, squinting at him, detachedly observing as the man tried to drop through the concrete floor as if he had suddenly wished to be turned into a ghost.
“And you,” Ibiki licks his finger and cringes at the immense sweetness of it, “will tell me exactly what this technique is and how you came up with it. We might even talk about your... promotion later.”
The chuunin gulps.
Ibiki isn’t sure if he loves or hates his job.
=/=
“Aw, Inocchan, you are so grown up now!”
Ino squeaks (she will deny it later) and flails as strong arms pick her up, hauling her upwards by her armpits, swinging her around like a ragdoll. Her half-undone ponytail that she was trying to fix after Asuma-sensei’s stupid survival exercise gets into her face, into her mouth, and into her eyes. She garbles out a sound of protest, trying to twist herself in the arms of the man to at least face him to both throw a hug and whine at his face for messing up her hair yet again.
She gets thrown into the air instead like she was a child —the memories of climbing the man’s arms and back, getting manhandled and propelled into the air just to be caught again flood Ino’s brain, making something inside her mellow out, thoughts of the pre-academy times warming her chest.
Ino purposefully pouts when she is caught again, a little out of breath, finally facing a wide grin on a heavily scarred face. She tries to grab at him but the man just extends his arms forward, making Ino’s hands grasp just millimetres away from his nose.
“Not fair!” she squirms. “Put me down! You are embarrassing me!”
Obito-nii smirks. “Is shinobi life fair, Inocchan?” he asks all serious, immediately frowning and flashing a single red eye at her which could’ve been intimidating if Ino didn’t know the Uchiha since she was but a toddler. “I thought Inoichi-san taught you better.”
Ino puffs out her cheeks and crosses her arms over her chest.
She had heard how Kaa-san used to complain about Tou-san bringing “strays” to their house back when Ino was yet to start the academy. She remembers seeing a lot of older clansmen dragged into their house and into Tou-san’s office (“We are just gonna have a friendly little chat,” Tou-san would say, his future victims anxiously looking at a little sofa standing next to a big, spacious window). She remembers being confused about why would anyone be scared of Tou-san’s office: Ino loved playing in it; she loved drawing or weaving flower crowns on that sofa while Tou-san would work on… whatever he did back then.
At some point, Tou-san started bringing in other people.
None of them visited the Yamanaka household more than once—Ino barely remembers any faces from that time, half of the shinobi that were dragged into Tou-san’s office clad in masks and oddly plain uniforms.
Obito-nii was the first one to stick.
She remembers hiding behind Kaa-san when Tou-san had dragged a hissing Obito-nii into his office, resolutely shutting the door behind himself and not going out until way after they had already finished their dinner. Tou-san would emerge later, after walking Obito-nii to the door, Tou-san’s face tired but thoughtful.
Obito-nii kept coming back.
She was scared of him at first—she didn’t know what was up with his scarred face, his shaggy long hair, his permanently scowling lips. Tou-san would always spend a very long time holed up with Obito-nii in his office, emerging way past Ino’s bedtime, always first guiding a much quieter but no less angry-looking Obito back to the gates of the compound.
Then, Obito-nii started staying for dinners.
Ino had nearly crawled underneath the table the first time Tou-san had emerged from his office not only earlier, but also dragging the Uchiha by an elbow, forcibly pushing him to sit at the table, silently communicating with Kaa-san to put another serving of ichiju-sansai in front of him.
The dinners with Obito were awkward. No one spoke—Kaa-san and Tou-san had tried for a small talk at first but Obito-nii never answered past a few grunts. Even imagining Obito’s attention focused on herself was something that haunted her in a few nightmares back during that time—Uchiha’s disfigured face, lone eye, untamed mane of hair and a foul frown would appear to her in the shadows of her home, following her like a ghost, never saying anything, never leaving the corner where Tou-san’s office was.
The first time Obito-nii had offered Ino a candy was—
Weird.
Obito had started coming over on his own, no longer guided to and from Tou-san’s office by a firm hand on his elbow. Ino largely avoided going inside when she knew Tou-san would have another one of his “meetings” with Obito—she’d stay on engawa or go bother Shikamaru to play ninja with her.
She was too late to escape, that one time.
Obito-nii had paused when she had stumbled out of the kitchen right in front of him, frozen like a small animal before a larger predator. She stared up at the teenager, afraid to breathe, afraid to move—she had realized he was gone only when she owlishly blinked at her palm, a small lollipop clutched in her fist, the hair on the back of her head standing up in wild cowlicks where Obito’s palm had landed to ruffle it.
It was… easier to tolerate him, after.
And it was easier to accept Obito’s existence if every time he came over he’d bring her something in return.
(“You were like a feral animal,” Obito-nii snickered years later, clutching Ino’s wrists so she wouldn’t try to rip out whatever was left oh his hair, so tragically cut close to his scalp after she had spent the entire evening braiding flowers into it. “Had to find out what candies you like from Inoichi-san. Was tired of you looking at me like I was gonna bite you.”
“Was not,” Ino pouts in response.
She ceases her attempts to mourn the loss of Obito-nii’s hair only when he purchases her a whole bucket of cherry tomatoes, muttering under his nose something about “kids and their tomatoes these days”.)
Ino wasn’t a scared little kid anymore, afraid of ghosts and shadows and gloomy teenagers. She is a Yamanaka clan heir, a daughter of the head of T&I, and despite her Tou-san being helplessly wrapped around Obito-nii’s finger ever since he had started appearing at the dinners, Obito-nii himself was helplessly wrapped around her’s.
— which is why, probably, when Obito-nii, not releasing his hold under her armpits as if she would bite him, manhandled her toward her favorite cafe and ordered her not one but two custard purins, she knew she’d have to barter harder for whatever it is niichan wanted from her.
Obito-nii props his cheek on his palm, lazily holding a dango stick in his fingers, his body lax and perfectly copying the image of Shikamaru when he was about to fall asleep during the class.
(“Unfair!” Ino screeches when Obito-nii cackles and wraps her ankles in wild vines that seemed to pop out of the ground on his personal whim. “I was masking my chakra signature! You were asleep!”
Obito shakes his head and flicks her on her forehead. “Sucks to be you, princess. We’ll go through the drill again.”
Ino groans and wishes Obito-nii to go back and rot in the Uchiha compound.
His laughter rang across the training ground for the first time since she had met him.)
“So,” Obito-nii says. “I have a business proposition for you.”
Ino perks up at that. “What do I get in return?”
She gets a Kami-damned head pat like she was some kind of a dog—Ino bristles and ducks way too late to escape the gloved hand.
“Aw, what a nasty little thing,” Obito coos, batting his eyelashes in Ino’s direction. “Growing up to be just like your papa. You’ll make him so proud.”
Ino tries to stab her spoon into Obito’s hand—she misses by a mile.
He beams at her with one of those smiles that make Tou-san groan in anguish. “You’ll get,” Obito makes a show out of humming and grimacing, and rolling his eye, and pretending to think very hard, “ah, you drive a tough bargain, Inocchan.”
Ino blinks, her cheeks still stuffed with purin.
Obito winks at her—or blinks, she can never guess with his one-eyed stare. “I’ll make sure to bribe the mission desk’s chuunins to only give you the best D-ranks. For the next two months.”
Ino squints back at him. “No weeding plants,” she says. “No swamps, no dirt baths, no painting fences,” she thinks for a second and then adds: “And I want a C-rank.”
Obito-nii smirks like he didn’t expect anything else from her. “Deal, Inocchan,” he says. “How kind of you to agree before even listening to what I wanted from you.”
Ino gapes at him, Obito’s smile growing wider and wider with each second.
No C-rank is worth whatever Obito is smiling so widely about.
=/=
Ibiki stares dumbly at the child in front of him. “What is this,” he asks, dragging his palm down his face, migraine already tangible in his throbbing temples.
Mitarashi beams at him, a tiny Yamanaka child propped on Ibiki’s desk, Uchiha squatting in front of her to keep covering the squirming kid’s face in something that looked like mud. “This is our bait,” Mitarashi announces happily, arms-deep in something that looked—and smelled—suspiciously like blood. “For prisoner 10726. You're gonna love this, Ibiki-buchou. It’s gonna be better than any Princess Gale movie.”
The Yamanaka child whines something about not wanting to get dirt into her hair just as Uchiha’s greasy palms land on her loose ponytail to make it look like the girl had bathed in a swamp just moments before.
“Stop squirming, Inocchan,” Uchiha says, jovial, his fingers digging holes and ripping apart her loose yellow kimono. “Didn’t you tell me you wanted to be a movie star?”
The child whines. “I was seven!” she cries out, trying to twist away from the Uchiha’s hands. “You promised no dirt! No swamps!”
Uchiha clicks his tongue. “Sure, for the D-ranks,” he confirms, critically assessing first the child’s face, then Mitarashi’s horrible bloody concoction. “Yo, Anko. She’s ready.”
Mitarashi’s smile grows feral.
Ibiki barely manages to snatch the stack of documents off his table before the coppery-smelling blood-red liquid is upturned over a screeching Yamanaka kid.
=/=
(“But Tobi doesn’t want to harm you,” Obito pouts as Anko snickers to herself, comfortably propped in the security control room, watching Uchiha easily slide into the role of a dumbass in front of a stoic prisoner. “Tobi is a good boy. Tobi’s senpai is not!”
The prisoner lifts his head, blond hair hanging in heavy greasy lumps around his face. He says nothing, remaining as silent as he was three days ago when he was first brought to T&I.
Obito flails around a little, twisting his fingers, obscenely pouting and projecting melancholy. “Juro-san shouldn’t be doing this! Juro-san is a good prisoner! Will you confess, Juro-san?”
The prisoner turns his head away, heavy shackles on his legs moving as he twisted his body away from Obito’s pathetic display of concern.
Obito clings to the metal bars of the cell for a little bit longer, playing up his concern for the mysterious senpai, before, dejected, dragging himself to the door and out of the interrogation room, promising the prisoner he’d do anything to save him from the death penalty.
The door closes.
Anko smirks, leaning closer to the display.
And so the show begins.)
=/=
If Ibiki had any hair he’d be ripping it out in fistfuls.
“You have sent Inoichi-san’s daughter,” he repeats again like he can’t believe the words that leave his lips, “to play prisoner 10726’s deceased sister. Yamanaka Inoichi’s daughter. A genin. Straight to the cell of an S-rank missing-nin.”
Uchiha shrugs.
Mitarashi is too busy showing a recently washed Yamanaka Inoichi’s daughter her snakes, the kid hesitant but curious nonetheless.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Uchiha lifts his sole eyebrow. “He confessed, we got it on tape. Inocchan had a blast weeping about the injustices of the universe—I have inspired her enough with all the dirt in her hair. The guy broke down and cried at her feet,” Uchiha stuffs his hands into his pockets and smiles brilliantly. “Where’s my raise, Ibiki-buchou?”
Ibiki closes his eyes and counts to ten. Then to twenty. Then to a hundred.
Ibiki is not looking forward to passing the report to Inoichi after this shit is dealt with.
=/=
“Okay but listen,” Obito insists, half-hanging over the table, ochoko clasped in his fingers. “Genjutsu. Jus’ fuckin’—put them in a perfect version of their, uh, whatev’r. World. And then— boom! Layer that shit. Layer ‘t, like, a h’ndred times. Fuck ‘t up sooo badly th’t each genjutsu is only a bit different from the other but it gets worse with each cycle. They’ll go mad before they can escape th’ first ten cycles. They won’t know if they broke the genjutsu or nah. ‘s sooo easy to break then-m. Then. Them.”
Anko goes to grasp at tokkuri at the other side of the table and almost faceplants into a plate of gyoza.
“You Uchiha and your damn genjutsu,” she huffs when a sympathetic Genma pushes tokkuri closer to her grasping fingers. “G’njutsu this, g’njutsu that. I propose: venom. Suna has sooo much cool shit and we have no access to any of that. I ‘nce saw a man’s entire arm rot away and off in f’ve minutes. An’ they promised the antidote if he confessed but there is no antidote. Like, jus’ imagine—”
Kurenai lets out a nervous little laugh. “You guys scare me sometimes,” she huffs out, pressing herself tighter into the back of her side of the cubicle.
Anko snorts, rolling her eyes, still tightly hugging tokkuri to her chest where Raidou was half-heartedly trying to unclasp her hands from around the bottleneck. “You’re just boring. Jounin-senseis. Blegh. Glorified bab’sitters is what y’re.”
Asuma coughs to cover Kurenai’s pointed look in Anko’s direction. “Hey, hey,” he interrupts, shoving another piece of tofu onto Kurenai’s plate to distract her from trying to put Anko into Obito’s described hundred-layered genjutsu. “I’ve heard you guys would be in charge of the, uh, chuunin exams. Any tips for us poor,” Kurenai shoots him a pointed look, “jounin-sensei on what to focus on in preparation for that?”
Obito snickers. Anko shows her terrifyingly sharp snake fangs.
“Just wish them luck,” Obito says, cryptic, suddenly sounding much less drunk than he was mere minutes ago. “Lots and lots of luck. They’ll need it.”
Asuma steals Kurenais ochoko and downs it in one go.
=/=
Obito beams. Izumo tries to hide behind the stack of paperwork on his desk.
“Kouhai, my dearest,” Uchiha sing-songs, skipping towards Izumo’s desk. “Would you be free next week to help out your dearest senpai with an itty-bitty task?”
Izumo thinks back to Kotetsu and how, since Ibiki-san had roped Izumo into T&I, he had zero free time to spend with his partner.
He opens his mouth.
Obito claps him on his back and winks, giving him finger guns.
“Awesome,” Uchiha exclaims, already on his way out of the damp dungeon that Izumo now called his workplace. “I am counting on you, kouhai! Catch you later!”
Izumo thinks about quitting.
=/=
Some days Sasuke wishes he truly, really was the last loyal Uchiha left in Konoha.
Obito-nii waves at Team Seven from the depths of the Forest of Death, his uniform frustratingly clean compared to Sasuke’s head-to-toe sticky-syrupy state.
Dobe is the first one to react and leap forward despite Haruno’s hissed protests, the dumbass already on the way to the familiar face. “Obito-nii!” he screeches, and Sasuke feels a pang of something he dismisses as not jealousy rising in his chest—because there was no way he’d feel that way towards his weird, unhinged, forever late, stupidly tactile cousin.
(This is Sasuke’s cousin.
Naruto can find himself another last remaining relative.)
Obito-nii tilts his head to the side, smiling at them. Sasuke stalls, putting an arm to stop Sakura from engaging.
Obito’s single sharingan bores into Naruto’s closing in form.
“Ah, Team Seven,” he says all syrupy-sweet (Sasuke cringes), kusari already wrapped around his wrists, chain hanging low from the tree branch where Obito-nii was crouching. “Nice of you to make it in time to meet your poor and longing proctor.”
Naruto stalls and Sasuke can see his shoulders tense.
Obito’s smile widens. “Now,” he says, lazily rolling his shoulders. “You want these scrolls? Come get them.”
=/=
Little Yamanaka girl pretends to dramatically pass out so close to Orochimaru’s feet that even he pauses for a split second, giving Anko an opening to launch her snakes at the bastard sensei’s side.
Obito’s ugly mug and a swirl of Kamui take out half of the Snake Sannin’s right arm.
Despite Orochimaru being her kill, Anko doesn’t mind the frustrating and agonizing screech the Sannin lets out in the two Uchiha’s direction.
=/=
Ibiki glares at the report his top-notch, best of the best, T&I’s most vicious interrogators have delivered him on the captured Sound and Suna nin.
He pulls open the drawer, the glide of it still slow with poorly washed out syrup.
Ibiki stares at a bottle of sake for too long before deciding that he is a better person.
He shuts the drawer and gets up to go get wasted in the bar.
=/=
Sakura stares at Sasuke’s fuming form, his eyes red, tomoes spinning lazily around his pupils as he seemed to be close to putting a kunai through Kakashi-sensei’s chest.
She moves her head to look at Kakashi-sensei staring at Sasuke’s cousin, the man dressed in a mesh shirt and standard shinobi pants, easily wrestling one of those ex-gate guards into the green expanse of the training ground.
Boys are stupid, Sakura thinks, rolling her eyes.
=/=
Anko drops a heavy book on top of Obito’s desk.
He blinks once, then twice, before slowly lifting his head upwards to glare at her in suspicion.
“Are we interrogating that pedo from a week ago again?” he asks slowly as if trying to develop the ability to use the Yamanaka secret jutsu on the spot.
Anko rolls her eyes. “No,” she snorts, grabbing Obito by his hair and shoving his hissing face into the book cover. “Get familiarized. Birds and bees. Penis to vagina—or, I guess, more like a penis to ass. Penis to penis. Can’t have you be clueless to Hatake’s ogling forever if you aren’t planning on dicking him down yourself first.”
Obito stares up at her.
She barely dodges a kunai aimed at her neck.
=/=
Hatake stares up at Ibiki.
Ibiki’s hands itch for his hidden sake bottle.
“In my defence,” Hatake says, weakly moving his arms, his bound hands bruised at his wrists, “I do not know what is going on either.”
Anko gives Ibiki a thumbs-up from the other side of the room.
Ibiki doesn’t question it.
Perhaps Tsunade-sama had the right idea about unofficially deserting the village and becoming a world-known drunkard.
=/=
Obito enters the interrogation cell.
He stares at the prisoner, spins around, and stalks to strangle Anko.
Kakashi scratches his cheek through his mask and wonders if this is some kind of an elaborate punishment for avoiding his ex-teammate for the past fourteen years.
=/=
Inoichi almost doesn’t flinch when Ibiki’s resignation letter gets slammed into his desktop, making the frame with a picture of baby Ino dangerously wobble where it was perched against his long-forgotten, potentially mould-infested coffee mug.
“I am resigning,” Ibiki states the obvious.
Inoichi squints up at him. “What did Obito and Anko do this time?” he asks because if there was anything going on in T&I, it was always the two then-teens he took under his wing when Konoha was planning to just appoint them civilian therapists. “They didn’t blow anything up again, did they?”
Ibiki grits his teeth. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “They didn’t.”
Inoichi hums. “So the Division is still standing, Kamizuki did not flood the lower levels with his Suiton Syrup jutsu, and my daughter,” Ibiki visibly stiffens, “was not smuggled into a top-secret interrogation room yet again. So. What happened?”
Ibiki shifts, suddenly uncomfortable, such a long-forgotten expression coloring the other shinobi's features that Inoichi can't even remember last seeing it since Ibiki was a kid and he himself was a teenager.
Embarrassment, Inoichi thinks in disturbing delight.
Inoichi would have a field day were he to somehow get into this man’s head even for a minute.
“Hatake,” Ibiki spits out, his cheeks going red, gruesome slashes of his scars standing out even more than before. “And the Uchiha.”
Inoichi’s eyes widen. “Oh, they finally got laid?” he asks as Ibiki groans, dragging a hand across his face. “Great news! I’ll have to invite them both to the next family dinner. Little Sasuke too. Sakura and Uzumaki-kun as well—it would be mean to separate them from—”
“Do you accept my resignation, Inoichi-san?” Ibiki insists again, interrupting Inoichi’s wistful thoughts on whatever was waiting for him today at home. “I am at my wits' end. I can’t—”
Inoichi raises a questioning eyebrow. “And what? Leave the interrogation division in Obito’s hands? In Anko’s hands?”
Ibiki imagines the hallways welled with syrup, Kamizuki Izumo’s horrified face and a hunched form hiding from the Uchiha in the corner of the furthest interrogation cell.
He imagines snakes crawling all around the recently fixed hallways, reptiles getting into Ibiki’s carefully curated archives of paperwork, serpents strangling prisoners before anyone could get any information out of them.
He imagines a genjutsu cast in every corner of the department, the jutsus layered, unbreakable, mindbending in a way that no one but the caster could disperse.
He imagines genin running along the hallways of a classified, hidden, near black ops-level department.
Ibiki tiredly picks up the papers from Inoichi’s desk and rips them apart.
He goes back to his office.
Morino Ibiki finally opens his stashed sake bottle and for the first time in years stops thinking about his top-notch, best of the best, T&I’s most vicious interrogators.