Tazuna wasn't at all happy having Zabuza and Haku in the house, but he quickly shut up when Haruka reiterated why her team was under no legal obligation to protect him. She didn't know why he made such a fuss anyway. The two nukenin were incredibly well behaved all things considered, Haku even helped making food and cleaning the house. Zabuza, for his part, mostly just stayed out of the way, keeping watch on the porch or roof.
"How come you're just okay with this?" he asked Haruka after breakfast the next day. She gave him a confused look.
"What do you mean?"
"This whole where suddenly on the same side business. Your teammates look as if they expect me to turn around and bite their heads off any minute, but you don't even watch to make sure I'm not up to something." He explained, real curiosity in his voice and only a hint of mockery. At that Haruka laughed, she wasn't half as unconcerned as he seemed to think.
"I don't have to watch," she told him with a smirk. "I can sense chakra a lot better than the average shinobi. Not to mention that you have precisely no reason to turn on any of us. You already have your money, Gato isn't going to pay you anything even if you do bring him Tazuna's head and Haku would be very cross with you if you so much as thought about going after my team."
"Haku is my tool, he'll do as I say," Zabuza declared, completely ignoring everything else Haruka had said.
"Sure, but you care too much to give an order like that. If you didn't you wouldn't have allowed him to stay back during our first fight."
He didn't say anything to that, but the silence told her all she needed to know. As long as Naruto and Haku were friends Zabuza wouldn't turn against them. Naruto might be annoyingly soft hearted, but that didn't mean Haruka couldn't use that to her advantage.
"Why was someone like you working for Gato anyway?"
"What do you mean 'someone like me'? I'm a fucking assassin you know?" Zabuza's tone was so indignant that Haruka had to laugh again.
"You don't even want to guess how many kind assassins I know," she smiled. "You might be an arrogant asshole Demon, but you're not a bad man. You saved an orphan from the street, made him strong and still protect him, even though doing so heavily limits his use as a tool. Call him whatever you want, but in the end actions will always speak louder than words."
"Don't be naive," he scoffed. "Saving one boy doesn't make me good and it doesn't erase everything else I've done and will do."
"It's good enough for me. Also, you're honest so I know you won't stab me in the back without warning me first. That's really more than anyone can expect in a world that trains children to kill each other without anyone even batting an eye."
"I thought Konoha was the nicer village."
"We probably just have better liars."
***
A few hours later Haruka and a still unconscious Kakashi were the only shinobi in the house. Naruto had decided he would keep watch over the bridge builder, which meant Haku was going as well and of course neither Sasuke nor Zabuza were willing to leave their respective teammates alone with someone they didn't trust. Haruka thought it was kind of funny, but they might actually need the numbers. By now Gato would have noticed that both his money and the nukenin were gone. He'd probably assume Zabuza had robbed him and fled, which meant he would want to take care of his little Tazuna problem before anyone noticed that he couldn't pay them.
If Kakashi had been awake she would have been at the bridge as well. Zabuza was good, but he wasn't really back in fighting shape just yet and Haku's aversion to hurting anyone, much less killing them, could prove to be a problem. Gato could send at least fifty men after the bridge builder if he wanted to and when being outnumbered more than ten to one it was imperative to eliminate enemies as fast and permanently as possible. Not to mention that neither Sasuke or Naruto had ever killed anyone before and only been in one real fight. By rights Naruto should have left a bunch of clones at the house and Haruka should have gone to the bridge with her team that morning, but if she had to choose she would choose Kakashi and that was precisely the reason she sat next to him instead.
Tazuna's daughter, Tsunami, looked in on her several times, but never said anything. She was still making sure Inari stayed as far away from Haruka as possible too. Despite that the morning was kind of peaceful, right up until it wasn't.
"Tsunami!" Haruka shouted the second she felt the chakra signatures of Gato's two bodyguards. "Take your brat and go upstairs, stay out of sight no matter what you hear." The woman reacted immediately, not asking a single question. Haruka thought she saw her take a frying pan with her, but couldn't be sure, too distracted by the sound of splintering wood.
The idiot ronin had smashed through one of the thin walls to enter the house. They were shouting something about taking Tsunami to Gato, presumably as leverage to get the bridge builder's cooperation. They both carried a katana, and while one seemed to prefer a tanto as a secondary weapon the other had a wakizashi. Not that either of them drew the weapons when they saw her. Apparently little girl and unconscious men weren't worth the trouble. Their mistake.
Haruka wanted to tell them that using the front door would have been a perfectly acceptable way to enter. Instead she played the frightened child. She needed to take both of them out at the same time if possible because they were positioned between her and the stairs. Haruka might not particularly care about Tazuna or his family, but she wouldn't risk their lives for no reason either.
"A kid?" The ronin whose upper body and right arm were tattooed with swirling lines asked. "Should we take her too?"
"We only need one hostage," the other one told him. Haruka used their distraction to rush them. Her back still hurt, so she wasn't quite as fast or agile as she'd have liked to be though. The small one managed to draw his sword by the time she'd ripped the big one's throat out. It didn't save him from the same fate, but he did manage to swipe at her before he went down. A nasty cut parted Haruka's shirt and had pain blooming across the ribs on her left side only moments later.
"Fuck," she cursed. She'd survive, but that wound would definitely leave a scar and right now she really didn't need anything else impacting her ability to fight. Also, two scars for one mission was excessive, at that rate she wouldn't have any good skin left by the time she was eighteen. Her healing was fast enough that small wounds didn't leave marks, but something as deep as that cut or the kunai she'd taken to the back during her fight with Zabuza's minions were a different matter.
"Tsunami?" She called, after making sure there was nobody else around. The woman shrieked the second she saw the two bodies and hastily shoved Inari behind her, telling him to go back to his room.
"He is a child!" She screamed at a completely unimpressed Haruka.
"So am I, so are my teammates. All of us have bleed in order to keep you and your family alive. Get over it woman and help me get the bodies out of the house."
Tsunami's disgust reached new heights, when Haruka started taking the weapons off of her kills and then went through their pockets to see if they had anything else that might be of use. They didn't, but the woman still was under the impression that it was some kind of violation.
Haruka had no idea what her problem was. Both men were too dead to care anymore, not to mention that they had been ready to kidnap Tsunami and kill Haruka only minutes earlier. Why did they suddenly deserve respect now that they were dead? Especially considering that Tsunami would have likely done anything to keep them away from her son, had it come to that.
They'd have to burn or bury the bodies later, at that moment Haruka didn't have the energy left and she needed to take care of her side. In fact that should and would have been the first thing she did, if Tsunami hadn't started screeching like a harpy. Haruka gingerly held her side and very slowly walked back into the house. There were no more enemies to fight off at the moment and Tazuna's daughter seemed unhappy, but pacified.
At least that was what Haruka thought until she managed to actually get inside and rooted around in her first aid kit for thread and needle. Apparently Tsunami hadn't noticed she got hurt during the altercation with the ronin, but now that she did know the women suddenly started to fuss. It was awkward and made Haruka really uncomfortable. Not even Ibiki, who could be quite overprotective, was this much of a mother hen. The woman was alternately scolding Haruka for getting hurt, taking care of the wound, thanking her for saving them and complaining about how she'd saved them.
It was so distracting that Haruka didn't even notice they had woken Kakashi until he let out a very melodramatic groan and insinuated that he was in dire need of a nursemaid. Haruka's breath caught in her throat for a moment and then she was up and in Kakashi's arms, her own wound completely forgotten. With her sensei awake again she wouldn't have to call the shots anymore. He could solve this stupid mess of a mission and then they could all go back home and never even think about lying old drunks ever again.
"Hey, don't cry pup," Kakashi said softly, patting her back. It was an awkward attempt to comfort her, but Haruka didn't care as long as he was okay. Enduring pain and horror while she had been one of Orochimaru's experiments hadn't been this hard. Back then there wasn't really anything for her to lose. Life had been a patchwork of terrible days, one bleeding into the next in a never ending agony. At some point she had simply distanced herself from everything that had happened to and around her, been numb to it. Now though, she had things and people to lose and suddenly life wasn't just something to escape from and death her path to freedom. Instead living was at least as beautiful as it was terrible and death now had the power to rip loved ones away from her. Now understanding why Orochimaru might be willing to do just about anything to gain the secret to immortality didn't seem quite as hard to understand.
Haruka's tears were silent, but calming down again took a long time, now that the dam had broken. When she finally did, she roughly cleaned her face, using her shirt as a makeshift towel and grinned up at Kakashi.
"You're really bad at this," she told him and he huffed in mock annoyance.
"See if I pat your back again you little runt."
He sprang up only moments later, kunai drawn and stepping in front of her. Haruka almost broke down laughing when she saw Zabuza peering through the hole in the wall. His chakra was tense, but he gave a very good impression of someone that didn't give a single fuck and was merely curious about the odd design choice.
"I take it you ran into trouble as well?" She asked, peering around Kakashi's legs from her position on the floor.
"You could say that," he told her, still wary of the other jonin, but not making a move to attack. "Gato sent a bunch of his thugs, half of them fled when they saw me and we took care of the rest. Oh, and apparently he thought it necessary to show up himself and announce that he never intended to pay me in the first place so I explained the error of that business practice to him as well."
Kakashi stared between the two of them, while Zabuza updated Haruka on what exactly had happened. They boys were all a little bloody, but no one sustained serious injuries. Apparently both Naruto and Haku had managed not to kill anyone. The former by mobbing his opponent with clones and pummeling them until they were unconscious or ran away and the latter by paralyzing them with his senbon. Sasuke on the other hand had been a little more deadly, but Zabuza had taken care of most of the killing. The way the nukenin told the story it sounded a little like pandemonium had broken loose on the bridge, and it involved a lot more orange than he was comfortable with.
"Okay, I clearly missed something," Kakashi said afterwards. He sounded as if he wasn't sure he hadn't just stumbled into a really weird dream and was giving it the benefit of the doubt for now. "Anyone care to fill me in?"