When the ninja whipped back around to look at him, Kiba waved. Or he tried to, but ended up tangling his hand in the net. It swayed gently. "I got kinda stuck. An' I dropped my kunai." He stuck one skinny arm between the gaps in the weave, pointing to the ground far, far below. "Think you could lend a fella a hand?" He'd heard his dad say something similar not too long ago. He thought it made him sound grown up.

The ninja was looking at him. He couldn't see any expression behind the man's mask, but he wasn't afraid of ANBU. His mom was the leader of ANBU, so their job was to take care of him, too. That's how it worked, when you were the alpha's kid.

He smiled brightly. "I was doin' pretty good, but then I got startled..." He gave a studiously nonchalant shrug--he hoped the ninja didn't think he was a baby because he got startled--sending the net swaying yet again. Kiba wasn't afraid. He'd been up here for long enough that it was normal, now.

Ibiki stopped dead and stared at the swaying bundle. "What the hell are you doing in here?" he asked. He didn't wait for an answer before he started scaling the tree to get the boy free.

It was a little kid. Younger than Ibiki's little brother by several years, he guessed. Too young to even tell if it was a girl or a boy, although it was probably a boy, since he'd asked Ibiki to give a fella a hand. A boy who looked like a monkey and thought he was all grown up. Probably a ninja's kid, too, since he seemed more worried about having lost his kunai than the fact he was swaying in a trap tens of feet in the air.

Ibiki reached the supporting branch the trap dangled from, and tried to decide if it would hold his weight. Probably not. OK, so there had to be some other way to get the kid down. Maybe a clone could do it. He tested the branch again, sending the trap swaying. "Do you have a name, or should I just call you monkey boy?"

He laughed. "I'm Inuzuka Kiba! But I don't got a partner yet, so you don't have to remember my canine's name. I'll have one soon! An' then, if I get stuck, he'll get me down!" Kiba turned to watch the stranger, setting the net swaying. The man reached out and grabbed the cord in one strong hand. Kiba grinned into the expressionless mask. "I been tryin' to chew my way out, see, but it's not working." He held the heavy cord in both hands, gnawing on it until it was soggy, but nothing happened.

"I'm pretty sure it'll work eventually..." His foot slipped through, his shoe falling. It plopped to the ground far below. "Uh oh. Those are new. When we get down, we should make sure to--" Something tickled at the back of his mind. Something strange. He wrinkled his nose, sniffing instinctively. "You smell funny. Kinda like... like..." His eyes unfocused, pupils blowing as his hindbrain registered danger even if his forebrain couldn't identify what. "Kinda like the feral pack, only... different..." For a moment, eyes so pale they were almost white stared at the reptilian mask. Then Kiba shrunk back into the bottom of the net, twisting away to chew on the ropes some more. "I'm gonna get free, ANBU, an' get my shoe." It was important. He was certain it was important. He wasn't sure why, but instinct drove him onward.

The same sense that had set Kiba scrambling for a way out of his trap pricked the hairs all along Ibiki's neck. He smelled feral? That made no sense, but the awareness of threat was palpable.

"Stay where you are and stop moving around," Ibiki ordered. He backed up against the tree's trunk, shaped his chakra, and materialized a clone. It wordlessly took a kunai from Ibiki's hand and started inching along the swaying limb.

Ibiki scanned the forest floor. Nothing moved. There was no sound...

There was no sound. The peep of spring frogs was absent, and the call of birds. There was his breathing, the rustling of the clone along the branch, Kiba's continued struggle to chew his way to freedom, and nothing else.

"Don't move!" Ibiki barked. The clone reached down with one hand to saw at one rope of the net.

"I didn't!" Kiba wailed, setting the trap asway.

The clone nearly had a gap big enough for the boy to climb through when a quarter ton of tawny fury burst from the trees, leaping across empty space as if gravity didn't apply. In a frozen heartbeat, Ibiki saw massive, sickled claws stretched towards the dangling child. Almost without thought, he dove straight into the lion's side, knocking it off its trajectory. The pair of them whiffed under the trap, crashing against more trees, while the clone snatched at Kiba's arm and tried to tug him free.

Kiba didn't look around as the shape went plummeting past him. He focused on the clone and on trying to kick loose of the net, working himself out with all the single-minded intensity that, someday, might make him a worthy ninja. Provided he survived the Forest of Death.

The clone grabbed him by his scruff, and his small hands reached up to hold tight around its neck as it lifted him free, other hand pulling the netting away. "Hang on," the clone said. Kiba wrapped his legs around its waist and twined his claws in its shirt.

The world twisted and dropped, but Kiba had lots of relatives who were ninja, and knew how to cling so the shinobi could use his hands for climbing--or in this case, descending. Nothing was gonna shake him loose.

Still, the ground was a welcome relief.

"Stay here."

He let go reluctantly, sliding backward. There was a hollow in the massive tree behind him; he tucked himself into it, curling into a little ball. He wouldn't call for his ma, though. He was too grown up for that. Only cubs called for their moms.

He could hear the battle. The roar of the animal. The smash of trees. The world smelled like blood and ozone. He heard an all-too human grunt and curled smaller into his hollow.

That the ninja might not win never occurred to him, though instinct ripped fear through his chest and told him to stay small and quiet.

Metal thunked against--something. There was the smell of more blood, and an overpowering wash of pain. He could see the legs of the clone standing in front of his hidey-hole. He could see it when they vanished.

And then everything was quiet again.

"You can come out now, Inuzuka-chan," Ibiki called. He bent down to pick up his mask--knocked off in the battle--and frowned at the scratch raked across the decoration. A little model paint ought to fix that up, he thought, but... Damn. His chest protector was scored in long parallel lines. There'd be no hiding this from the quartermaster.

Perhaps saving an Inuzuka child from certain peril counted as a reasonable justification for equipment damage while training.

"You want to see the lion?" He found Kiba's tree, bent over, and peered into the hollow. His hair fell into his face for a moment, before he shook his head and whipped it back. He extended one gloved hand and grinned. "Come on, I'll show you."

Kiba flung himself at the man, wanting to protest that he hadn't been scared, even knowing he probably smelled like it. But bravery, his ma said, didn't come from not feeling something, it came from doing things well anyway. "I didn't make any noise!" He wrapped his arms around the ninja's neck and hung on for dear life. "An' I wanna see the lion! I probably could have beaten it, too!" Pulling back, he stared hard at the ANBU so the ninja would know he was serious.

Kiba frowned, getting a good look at the man's face for the first time. Scars drew furrows in his skin, pulling down his eyelid and the corner of his mouth on one side. He was spattered with red blood, cloyingly sweet and a little bit musky.

But there was something else...

Kiba sniffed. He leaned close, and sniffed the nearest blood. He stared hard at the ninja. Slowly, searching, he leaned close again and sniffed the man's mouth. He leaned back, frown growing. "I think you're bleeding." He drew a finger through the red on the man's neck, watching it wipe cleanly away from whole skin. "But this isn't yours." He sniffed the blood on his finger, leaned in to sniff the man's mouth again, and shook his head. "Doesn't smell like you." There was, however, too much blood for Kiba to figure out where the ninja could be hurt.

Inuzuka sensitivity to scent combined with a five-year-old's lack of guile gave rise to an interesting set of behaviors, Ibiki thought, ducking away from Kiba's questing nose. "I might have scraped my arm a little," he said, glancing down at his own bared shoulder. There was plenty of blood. The lion had held a surprisingly large amount of it.

He shifted Kiba to his right hip, and traced the claw marks up the diagonal across his armour with his left hand. One eyebrow rose. "It scratched my shoulder." There was a slash he couldn't quite see over his left biceps and across the joint itself. It was the tooth marks dented into the stiff ANBU vest that were more worrisome, though. Although it would probably hurt a lot more than it did now, if the lion's teeth had sunk in. Probably. He craned his neck.

OK, that was a little sore.

Probably nothing to worry about.

"You were very brave," he told Kiba. "It was a very big lion." He started heading towards the clearing where he'd left it. "I'm afraid it looks a little... gross now."

Kiba beamed under the words, swelling with pride. "My ma's really brave, an' she's got a really good nose, too, so that's why I could smell you're bleedin'! An' I can smell the lion's blood's different! An' I'm not afraid of nothin'! Once I saw--I saw Aomaru--that's my dad's familiar--eat a whole deer, or at least the insides, an' there was so much blood my sister almost barfed, but I didn't almost barf!" He bounced on the ninja's hip, trying to peering into the shadows toward where they were walking. "Is that the lion? Is it really big? Is there lots of blood? My ma could've beat it up, too! But not my dad 'cause, 'cause he's better at calmin' people down an' my aunt Tori says that's good 'cause my ma gets 'em all riled up and is that the lion?" The babbling stopped only when the actual corpse was in sight. At that point, Kiba squirmed with sheer glee, trying to get down.

Ibiki could feel the muscles bunching as Kiba prepared to leap down. But the lion had been out of his sight for long enough any number of scavengers could have scented the kill. It would be the height of stupidity to save the kid from a trap and a lion, and let him run right into some foraging giant centipede of doom.

"I'll put you down, but you have to stay with me," Ibiki said, in a voice as full of stern command as any he'd ever heard from Shida. Kiba looked at him with huge eyes. Eyes brimming with hurt. Eyes that begged, OH PLEAAAAAASE! There's a LION!

Which was, Ibiki had to admit, a pretty damn compelling argument.

"We'll check it together," he told Kiba, setting him on his feet. "In case it's booby trapped."

"I'm not afraid of a booby trap!" Kiba bounced forward, bounced back to the ninja's side, tucked his hand in the shinobi's much larger, heavily callused hand, and bounced some more. "I wasn't even afraid when I was in the net!" The ninja's hand was too big. Kiba shifted his grip, hanging onto the man's index and middle fingers. That was a better size.

Then he froze, nostrils flaring as he scented. "I don't think I smell any other things, but it's hard to tell with all the blood." He looked mournfully up at his rescuer. "It's blocking my nose. So we should be really quiet."

Ibiki nodded, curling his fingers in the boy's hand. With his other he grabbed shuriken from his holster. Projectiles to scatter any opportunistic carrion eaters. "It smells like blood to me, too," he said in a hushed voice. "But you can smell better than I can. You tell me if you notice anything but lion's blood."

They circled the corpse, Kiba's eyes huge as saucers, fastened on the lion, while Ibiki's gaze sought shadows and hiding places, searching for lurkers. By the time they came around to the lion's ripped open belly, he was satisfied it was safe.

"See that big ditch that ends where the lion's ribs are split open?" he asked, pointing at a violently dug furrow in the loamy soil. "That's how I killed it. With an earth jutsu. It was going to bite me again, so I hit it with the jutsu. Pow!"

OK, maybe he was showing off a little. But come on he'd just saved this kid, who had no business being here in the first place, from a lion the size of a bull. He ought to get a little adulation from the pint-sized Inuzuka out of that.

Kiba wrested his hand out of the ninja's, clambering up onto the lion's flank. He plopped down, looking around himself with great awe. The look he turned onto his rescuer was nothing short of worshipful. "I'm gonna learn earth jutsu when I get bigger! I--I'll make one up! To make an earth cannon! And it'll shoot ninja right out of the air!" He leapt to his feet, slapping his hands together and then striking a pose. "Like that!"

His foot slipped on fur and blood, sending him pinwheeling back to the forest floor. He peered at his hand, now red from where he'd tried to catch himself, and then tentatively licked it.

It was gross. He stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyes, wiping his hand off on the lion's fur. "My ma's familiar, he eats his kills! ...He's kinda gross." Then Kiba tiptoed around toward the lion's chest, huge eyes taking in the gory remains. "An' it clawed you?" He turned and looked at the ninja. "You're pretty good. Did you hit it really hard?" His tone was hopeful.

"Your ma's familiar would have to be pretty big to try to eat this lion. I don't think we should eat it though." Licking lion's blood off his hands probably wouldn't hurt the little Inuzuka, right? He wasn't sure whether it was general five-year-oldness that led Kiba to even try it, or some blood lust built into his clan.

Although Idate had certainly put some stupid things in his mouth when he'd been little. Like a bottle of their mother's nail polish. Ibiki had gotten in trouble for not watching his baby brother over that, even though it hadn't hurt anything long term other than the fancy parlour rug with the roses on it.

You could hardly see the stains, really.

"I hit him really hard," Ibiki said, pulling himself back to the here and now. "Want to see?" He held out his hand for inspection, showing bloodied knuckles and blooming blue bruises. "You can hit him right there, on the leg, to feel how strong he was."

Kiba scurried back behind the ninja, made a fist, wound up his arm, and ran forward bellowing, fist stretched straight out in front of him. He rammed the lion's leg and was knocked to his knees.

"AAAGGGHHH!" he tried again, punching the leg as hard as he possibly could. Then he hopped to his feet and gave it a roundhouse kick, but it didn't even move. He collapsed to the soggy ground. "WOW! You must be really strong. Like, a hundred an' nine an' infinity strong!" He looked up at the man with amazement. "Are you an alpha? Are those from claws?" He pointed, then drew his hand down his own face, tracing the long lines that marred his rescuer. "Are you gonna be the Hokage?"

Ibiki's own inner five-year-old swelled with pride. He grinned at Kiba and knelt down next to him. "Hmm, do you think I'm an alpha?" That was an interesting question. When he'd had to interview that Inuzuka woman and the cousin who had betrayed her, clan alpha and natural alphas and all the inner workings of the Inuzuka clan had come under Intel's scrutiny. Given how much respect the Inuzuka ceded to their alphas, it was flattering this kid thought he was one.

"I'm pretty strong, but I'm not as strong as Sandaime-sama," he went on. "Besides, I like being an ANBU." He touched his face, feeling the tracks that raked diagonally down, puckering the skin. "These scars were from claws, but not lion claws. Ninja claws. A weapon."

A sound drew his attention, some rustling in the undergrowth at the edge of their clearing. Time to go. Get this kid home.

"Want to go get dango with me?" A dead lion was certainly an exciting attraction, but Ibiki was pretty sure no kid could resist dango. "A good ninja doesn't stay around after an unexpected battle to be found with the corpses of his enemies, right?" he asked, paraphrasing one of the many rules he'd memorized in the code of conduct when he'd been at the academy.

Although it was possible this kid wasn't even in school yet. He could have learned to throw those punches from older siblings.

"Yeah!" Kiba leaped up, flinging his arms around the shinobi's neck. "I never stay around after an' unexpected battle to--to, uh, see the corpses of my enemies!" They'd just started learning the rules in school, and he thought he remembered that one. Or something like it.

Kiba reached up, tracing the long lines down the ninja's face. "My ma has claw scars, too! But those are from Inuzuka. 'Cause she fought like the whole clan. She's real strong. She's the strongest, an' she probably could fight the Hokage!" He paused, glancing around to see if anyone had heard. No one else was around. "But her scars are littler. And not on her face." He traced them again, mesmerized. "Some Inuzuka do gots scars on their face, though, and my ma's friend--his brothers're in the Academy too, but I don't like them--he's gots lots of scars, but we're not allowed to touch them."

Carefully, he patted his rescuer's cheek. Then he grinned shyly, burying his face in a warm neck. "But you let me touch 'em, huh, ANBU-niisan?"

Ibiki grinned and got to his feet, carrying Kiba along. Already promoted to older brother, huh? He wondered how often an unknown ANBU got that particular suffix attached. "I'm Morino Ibiki," he told Kiba. "My dad's a teacher at the Academy. Do you know him? He teaches older kids, mostly. Walks with a cane."

He tended to scare his students to death, at least according to Idate. Ibiki wasn't quite sure why a ninja with a cane was scarier than one without.

"My little brother Idate goes to the Academy. He's eight. Are you in school yet?"

They were moving at a decent clip away from the lion. Ibiki could hear the sounds of squabbling beasts partaking of the unexpected meal, as they competed to lay claim to the corpse. He risked a glance back, but they were too far from the kill to see through the trees now.

They emerged into a clearing, and Ibiki squinted at the suddenly blinding sunlight.

"This is my first year," Kiba told him solemnly, "but I know your dad! My sister had him a couple'a years ago. She was probably scared of him, too, but I wouldn't be. An' I know Idate. He says he knows everything, 'cause he's gots a brother in ANBU, but I tell him that he can't know everything 'cause only the Hokage knows everything. An' then he said that Hatake Kakashi knows everything, an' I said, 'No he doesn't!' an' Idate said I didn't even know who Kakashi-san was an' I said, 'So?' an' he said I was a baby."

Important conversation relayed, he took a deep, relaxing breath and looked around. "My pop says I shouldn't argue with the other kids so much, but Tori-bachan says that when my ma was a cub, she fought with them all the time, an' so if I fight with them then I'll get to be a strong ninja too, like gran'ma before she went away, an Tanaka-obasan. But my sister, she says only the women get to be good ninja, and I'll have to babysit the cubs."

He looked solemnly at Ibiki. "I think she's lying, but I'm not that good at smelling it, yet." Then he finally paused, resting against Ibiki's shoulder. He'd had a very trying day. "I don't think I came this way."

"You probably didn't come this way. We're going back the fast way, because I'm hungry," Ibiki told him. They covered ground steadily, in the shade of towering red cedars again. Ibiki crossed a brook a couple of times, running an S-shaped pattern through the rippling water, to disrupt their trail, in case anything was following. Probably nothing was following.

"So you know my brother. Idate is a brat," he said, as if that explained everything. He smiled. Idate was telling the world about how awesome his brother the ANBU was? Heh.

"My dad isn't really all that scary. You just have to work hard and follow the rules. He respects hard work. If you get in his class, though, and you fight, you'll get in trouble. I used to fight with my other brother, Isao. Dad would tie our hands to each other and sit us across a table from each other, and make us stay like that, if he caught us fighting. We had to stay tied until we told him the truth about what happened, and we both apologized."

Almost to the gates. He glanced back again, gratified that the sounds of amorous amphibians once more filled the air. "What kind of dango do you like? Red bean, black sesame, or shoyu? I like shoyu."

"Red bean," Kiba answered absently, mind caught up in the idea of not telling the truth. "I might fight anyway, 'cause that's what alphas do. Didn't you cut your hands apart? An' couldn't he smell if you didn't tell the truth?" He squirmed, tightening his legs around Ibiki's waist and leaning back to look at him more carefully. "An' alphas almost never apologize, 'cept Tori-bachan says Ma should apologize more often, that she's too canine even for the clan an' needs to work on bein' more human-like. She says the other alphas aren't such a pain." He stared hard at Ibiki, as if he could somehow see the secrets of what was really important.

"But I don't lie. Everyone can smell it." He hooked his fingers in the armor breastplate, tugging on it experimentally. "Couldn't your dad smell it on you?"

"My dad's not an Inuzuka, so no. He couldn't smell it." Something pricked at the back of Ibiki's brain: Inuzuka alpha who even her clan thought needed to be a bit more human... How many female alphas did the clan have, ayway? The Inuzuka woman he'd interviewed, Tsume, was not just an alpha, but a former clan head. And she had children: an older daughter, a younger son. If this was her son...

But he'd have said so, wouldn't he? Some variation of My Ma's an ANBU. She's the best one. Ibiki was sure of it.

"Hey, is your ma--" His question was never finished. "Duck your head!" he shouted, putting one hand protectively over the back of Kiba's neck. He brought the other up next to it, forming seals behind the child's back.

The trap he'd spotted almost too late, sprang, flinging a hail of senbon towards them. The weapons pierced thin air still shimmering with vapor and falling leaves. On the other side of the translocation, Ibiki skidded to a halt. They were just outside the forest gates.

"See that sign?" he asked Kiba, patting him down to be sure no needles had touched him. "It says 'Keep Out.' It means don't go in there! Ever. Got it?"

Kiba shrank away from him, rolling his head to one side to expose his throat. "I was just practicin' bein' a ninja! The other ninja go in there--I smelled 'em!" Quickly, he cuddled up close to Ibiki, tucking his hands between their bodies and hiding his face against the man's chest. "If the sign says no but ninja do, then the sign is wrong!" He cuddled smaller as he spoke this bit of defiance, and did his best to think puppy! thoughts.

It worked with the other Inuzuka, even if he was getting old enough now that sometimes it got him scruffed and shaken, instead.

"An' you were in there!"

First year... What did they teach them in their first year of Academy? Ibiki thought frantically. They taught what chakra was, they taught them to read and write. They taught some simple skills, like concealment. They taught hierarchy and order. They talked about the importance of following rules. It wasn't until third or fourth year that they introduced the idea that ninja had license to break many of society's rules, just so long as they followed their own.

"Right, ninja go in there. Have you ever seen anyone who wasn't at least a genin go in there?" Ibiki pulled Kiba away from him a little, so the boy had to look him in the eye. Inuzuka eyes were eerie, ice-blue that verged on white, with slit pupils like a beast's. Kiba's eyes held a plea in their wildness.

"Do you have your own hitai-ate yet? Have you earned it?" He was acutely aware he was quoting his parents. Issao had left a mission report out, and Ibiki had taken it and read it. Hoeing turnips, hauling garbage, planting rice. How was that a ninja's job, he'd demanded of his older brother. Retribution had been swift indeed, from his mother for taking a document he wasn't cleared to read, and from his father for questioning the wisdom of the Hokage, who assigned all missions. Without that rice and those turnips, Konoha would starve. If that garbage wasn't taken away, the village would succumb to pestilence and filth.

"I went in there because I needed to. I'm a special jounin and an ANBU. It's different." And that was as stupid an argument as he'd ever heard in his whole life. He looked down at himself, besmeared in lion's blood, still bleeding from the claws and maybe teeth that had raked his shoulder. "It's different. You can't go in there until you know how to get out."

Kiba slouched a little in Ibiki's arm, his totally reasonable point about how he hadn't seen anyone go in there, he'd smelled them and you couldn't smell rank, now defeated by the fact that he wasn't a ninja.

Yet.

"I could'a gotten out," he muttered sulkily, refusing to meet Ibiki's gaze. Then, louder, he continued, "An' someday I'm gonna be the best ninja, an' I'll be clan Alpha for everyone, even the Hokage, an' I'll kill all the bad guys an' my home will be in there 'cause I'll be daimyo of the forest." He paused, eyed Ibiki, and added, "An' I won't let you in there."