Sasuke had been surprisingly relieved to see that she had returned home when she had run into him on her way out of the tower. Aiko felt rather flattered by that. He must have been training on something interesting, because he had interesting marks on his arms- long, thin rents. She didn't have a chance to ask before he had excused himself to go get an antiseptic.
Her home had been a bit depressing, though. It was clear that it had been empty for a while—slightly stale smelling and dark. The grocery stock was about as bad as she would have expected after Karin had been left in charge for over a month, so she ate seaweed crackers instead of any real food. After an extensive healing and a long trip back, she was too tired to really care about nutrition. As soon as she was done, Aiko flopped into bed fully dressed and travel worn.
The world looked a little brighter in the morning. Sasuke dropped by obscenely early with a very angry Smaug wrapped up like a burrito in a blue towel. His expression practically dared her to say a word. He didn't stay for tea.
A runner came by at eight in the morning with a transcribed copy of the seal just as she was getting ready to go to the morning market. Aiko shoved it onto the kitchen table to come back to and headed out the door.
When she came back and dumped her bags on the table, she didn't even bother to put things away. The stuffiness was making her sneeze and dust motes were catching in the light. Aiko solved that problem by propping open all the doors and windows to the backyard to let air and sunlight in. Unfortunately, that also let the cat out. She took a moment to hope that Smaug the great and terrible didn't find romance. She didn't need kittens.
She put off the inevitable by putting away her groceries, washing the sheets she had unwisely slept on in travel clothes that night, and making tea, but before ten am she had to concede defeat and sit down with a notebook and the scribed seal.
To be frank, it was a hot mess to decipher.
Despite the sleek appearance of the seal, it was surprisingly complex. It was largely composed of non-standard symbology that almost certainly hid more usual symbols drawn first—that had to be why the lines were so thick. It probably said a lot about the person that designed it, actually. It had the minimum strokes for efficiency, a stark sort of beauty, and a very organized aesthetic. It was the work of a person who did not believe in excess effort, but did believe in perfectionism and hard work, and secrecy above all else. It was highly personalized, but looked very impersonal.
Seven thick strokes were visible.
Measurements revealed that the longest ones were almost exactly an inch. The four short ones were 3/8 of that length, and the width of every line was identical.
She sighed, and wished that it wasn't this type of seal. This… This would require…
MATH.
She wished she could pretend the visible strokes were only there to hide the underlying structure, but that seemed very out of character for the mentality that had designed this. Nothing in that seal was without intrinsic purpose. Aiko slumped a little, feeling sad. Jiraiya would have been better at this. But he was also much more important and his time was more valuable. Besides, he was nowhere near Konoha.
Figuring this out probably had more to do with the proportions and the strokes that those seven hid than anything else. Knowing its purpose helped- rather, she corrected herself, having a strong hypothesis as to its purpose helped. She'd told Tsunade she knew the seal's use from looking at it, but she really wouldn't have spotted that without her foreknowledge.
Aiko really wanted to figure out a counter to this seal as quickly as possible and use the rest of her break as time to work on a personal project. 'Then again,' she thought without a hint of shame at all, 'I can't spend all of my sabbatical working on one thing. I can work on reading Minato's notes at the same time'.
She re-sketched the seal as an outline without coloring in the lines, and then set it aside as a reference. Then she pulled out her notes—personally made copies of Jiraiya's index of symbols that had pretty much everything he had encountered that wasn't too dangerous for her to work with alone. The first thing to do was compose a list of symbols that she knew that could possibly be used to compose a privacy or binding seal. The easiest way to do this would be to compose her own version and reconstruct what the other seal master must have done.
If she were a different type of personality, she might try to devise a brute force solution. It was still a possibility. But to her it seemed like… oh, like putting a hole in fabric. Using a brute force solution would be like loosely securing the fabric on a rack and punching through. It was possible if the fabric was weak or if an enormous amount of force was utilized. But ultimately, it was a foolish and wasteful endeavor.
Even a strong construction could much more easily be torn along the line of the fabric. By using the way the threads pieced together, the very thing that made fabric strong could undo it.
(Of course, if the construction was loosened, a single thread could be tugged, or a seam ripped. But that wasn't feasible at the moment).
Sadly, the line of the seal's construction was literally hidden and there were no loose ends. Very neat person, Danzo was, if he was the one who had designed this.
Aiko wrote up what she had in her notes—the psych analysis, her theory about the purpose of the bars, and the possible symbols. Then she rubbed her dry eyes and tossed everything onto the table for later. Now that a life didn't immediately depend on her attention span, she wasn't going to spend all day on one thing. She hadn't even done her workout yet.
When she came back to the house and got cleaned up, she procrastinated working on the privacy seal by making food.
Then she procrastinated by flopping down on the couch and watching a movie. Absolutely nothing good or even tolerable was on. She admitted defeat to the universe in general and pulled out the notes Jiraiya had given her from Minato's projects. Aiko kicked back on the couch, slinging her feet over the side and laying against the arm. The papers in her lap were somewhat less than stimulating, but she resolved to read through them in their entirety before she actually tried to utilize anything she found in it.
That was going to take a while. Aiko glumly pinched the side of the bound notes and held her fingers up to gauge the size. It was, like, two inches thick. This had better be chock full of notations on learning and personalizing the hiraishin.
What's worse, she discovered as she read, they appeared to be almost a diary of sorts with little notations on where things had come from and how others had turned out. That might have seemed a good thing. Except that there was something spectacularly creepy about an intimate glimpse into the psyche of a dead man.
The next week drifted by much the same, holed up in her house alone. She vaguely regretted not asking where Karin and Hinata were. Even Anko would usually have stopped by at least once by now for dinner. Aiko alternated blazing through Minato's diary (and it really was a diary, with little notations about where he was writing sometimes or a particularly baffling encounter he'd had that day) and constructing her own versions of Danzo's tongue seal.
'On the bright side,' she thought somewhat sarcastically, 'even if I don't figure this seal out, I'll be able to make my own version and put it on some poor bastard. So glad I'm studying this.'
She had had several versions that seemed to meet both the strict criteria of what she assumed to be the seal's purpose and what she assumed to be the traits that its maker would have leaned towards, but had yet to design a counterseal to test against them.
Before she really got to that point, she'd need to have hypothesis as to the exact function of the black bars over them. Their prison cell-esque feel made her think of a locking mechanism, which made some sense given the way Root members were unable to share information. But she was leery to design a series of counterseals based on what was really a knee-jerk association. If she was wrong, it'd be a lot of busy work for nothing. Aiko didn't like wasting her efforts. She didn't mind working hard, but only if there was merit to the work itself both intrinsic and as a way to a goal.
At least she was able to soothe her irritation by remembering that this period of research and practice was actually helping her own fuinjutsu skills quite a bit. The scientific method of gathering information and then testing was somewhat satisfying and it would hopefully make the hiraishin easier.
She really did intend to learn that fuinjutsu, truth be told. Even though she wasn't entirely sure she was sold on the mechanics of the technique.
It seemed to be separated into two different uses. Minato had utilized it to travel distances faster by throwing a kunai and then tugging on the seal connection to catch it before it lost momentum. It seemed repetitive and tedious. There had to be some way to utilize it more efficiently over large distances.
The application for close combat appealed to her more. Minato had seemed to use it similarly—by throwing a kunai with the seal attached and then displacing himself—but it could be used even when the seal was stationary. That struck a chord with her and tugged at some received knowledge.
Minato related difficulty learning to use the right seal and re-emerge in an appropriate position to it. If he hadn't been careful while learning to use it, he might have ended up re-appearing around the seal instead of just behind it ready to catch and throw again. (Or in front, she noted vaguely, thinking that it would totally suck to be speared by her own kunai).
There had to be a better way to position oneself as you left the fold dimension. There just had to be. The metaphor that she had thought of was the way she would locate an earthquake's epicenter. Of course, it wasn't a metaphor or hypothesis she could very well share because the technology to measure seismic activity didn't exist here.
Still. Her idea was that much like the way any three seismic stations could locate the origin of a quake by measuring their distance from the disturbance and drawing out a circle that traced that distance around each station. The place where all three circles intersected was the epicenter, but anywhere in between the three was measurable.
Why couldn't the hiraishin function similarly? Instead of paying attention to an individual rapidly moving signal, why not use a small field of seals as the origin point? It was counterintuitive and distinct enough from the original concept of the hiraishin that it would almost certainly confuse anyone watching, unless they actually saw the field being opened. With that concept, she could re-orient anywhere in between three seals, making both long distance and combat type usage much simpler and streamlined.
But it was just a theory. She'd have to learn it regularly before she tried to modify it.
The kitchen timer went off, startling the girl on the couch. She sighed, noting with irritation that she was hungry again. That was so annoying—it got really old having to deal with hunger every single day. Aiko glanced down at a stasis seal contemplatively. Maybe if…
No, she chided herself. Some things should not be messed with, human body functions among them. She'd just have to eat.
The kitchen timer had actually been meant to signify that it was time to change focuses and not that she had thought ahead to food. So she resentfully pulled a pear out of the increasingly empty fruit bowl to shut her body up and rinsed it clean. Then she went back to work on Danzo's seal, switching notebooks and mentalities completely.
The days blended together, but at one point Aiko looked up and realized she wasn't entirely certain if she had done any physical conditioning or even showered for the last few days. It wouldn't do to get out of shape. So she forced herself through a quick shower and into training gear, and then through a workout so vigorous that Lee actually stopped to congratulate her. After her clean-up shower six hours later, she didn't even manage to get fully dressed before she absolutely had to go try a symbol combination that had occurred to her while running and had been bothering her for hours.
That's what she was doing when the door swung open and Karin pranced in like a fairy princess. Aiko blinked at the sudden light like some subterranean creature, slumped over with a towel still on her head and in a bathrobe.
"Good god, what happened to you?" Karin eyed her up and down.
There was an awkward silence. Until, that was, when Hinata trailed in and recoiled at the sight of her. The girls in the entryway exchanged an inscrutable look before moving in unison.
"Hinata, grab one of Aiko's empty books. We're going outside. Come on girl, get some clothes on."
Karin hustled and nagged her into an orange skirt Aiko never wore (because nothing matched the damn thing! It had been a terrible decision.) with a black belly shirt from her own closet and then out the door in what seemed like a whirling moment of ignored protestations.
"I was busy." Aiko pushed feebly at Karin's monster grip on her own arm. Damn, she'd gotten a lot stronger. She resolved to ask Anko what she had the girls doing for strength training. Hinata serenely shut the door behind them, clutching a couple of notebooks and colored pens and letting her loose hair flutter in the wind. 'Whoa, she's letting her hair grow out,' Aiko noted. That was unusual for her. Pretty, though.
At least it was nice out, she noted morosely. Aiko rather liked a slightly windy day.
"I don't care if you were busy," Karin briskly informed. "You look terrible. I know you're pale, but you look like you last saw daylight a year ago. If you absolutely must spend all your time scribbling, you should do it where you can soak up sunlight, fresh air, and the stunning good looks Hinata and I are giving off wherever the light hits our glorious radiance."
Aiko stared at her flatly. "Right." Then she jerked when Hinata poked her in the ribs with one finger and aimed a sliiiightly raised eyebrow at her, as if to ask 'You have something to say?'
She shook her head meekly.
'When did I become the short one?'
Aiko was mildly alarmed to realize that she hadn't grown at all in the past year, but that both of the girls on the other side of her definitely had. It wasn't exactly a critical aspect of her perception of self or anything, but she had always been the tallest kid around. She wasn't a particularly short fourteen, (at least she didn't think so) but she was suddenly looking up at more people and re-realizing how they compared size-wise.
She had the mildly depressing realization that she had probably just had an early growth spurt and might end up the shortest of her peers after all.
'Uh oh…'
Good lord, was that really Kiba grinning at the three of them from the other side of the park, watching a group of wrestling kids who had to be his relatives? Kami, his shoulders had not been that broad the last time she noticed him.
'Hell. When did this happen?'
Karin elbowed her in the ribs. "Try to look a little less traumatized about having a cute guy check you out."
"Guh." Aiko said, intelligently. But… but… she had thought of the people in her age group as 'children' for so long. She hadn't really dealt with the fact that they were rapidly turning into adults until she left long enough to reassess them and notice the changes when she returned. 'Oh, gross. But Kiba's just a baby! He's what, fourteen?'
Aiko was even less pleased to be led up onto a large rock to sun herself with the other two. Well. That part was fine. It was when Hinata smoothed open a book and quietly informed her that she'd promised to write friend fiction with them that she felt herself turning a little green. Her mind rushed to find age-appropriate targets.
There was something really discombobulating about this realization. It took her a minute to put together exactly what was bothering her—for as long as she could actually remember, she had possessed maturity and mental functions beyond those of her physical body. But now that her body was hitting puberty, her physical state now resembled her mental state. (As far as she knew. Aiko had no idea how to gauge how old she felt.)
She'd finally hit an age where what was on the inside approximately matched what was on the inside. This… this should be a good thing, right? Perhaps she didn't have to feel like her skin was wrong.
Despite having at least analyzed the situation, she would feel much more comfortable writing about people a little older than her companions for a while. "Kurenai and Asuma?"
~~~
Three Kage met in a bar. It was a very nice bar, to be fair, and the closest thing to a neutral ground that could be achieved within any of the three countries they ruled. As Konoha was both the geographic and political center of this alliance, Terumi Mei and Gaara no Sabaku had consented to meet in Fire Country, though not in Konoha itself. That would have been a security nightmare for all involved.
So there were very good reasons for the meeting place, and it was in fact an incredibly expensive, class operation. But it was still technically a bar. The Mizukage found herself tickled pink by that rather low-brow choice of venues and was considering making jokes about the fact that the Kazekage wasn't even old enough to be served here. Somehow she refrained, but the amusement dancing in her eyes told at least her poor beleaguered bodyguards that her thoughts were wicked.
'At least Tsunade had the decency to bring the Jounin with the really tight ass,' Mei noted with a smile directed at her target. Hatake Kakashi appeared spectacularly unconcerned to the point of possibly nodding off, but she was sure he had noted her interest. It wasn't like she was hiding it.
She hadn't wanted to be here. Mist was too unstable to be involving itself in any large-scale conflicts. Her original plan had been to court both Konoha and Kumo, juggling what she could to squeeze the most out of both of them.
That had all been ruined about a month ago.
No one should have known that she had having a jinchuuriki made. She had told exactly two people about the mission specifications- Ao, who she trusted with her life, and at the last minute, the Jounin commander who had led the backup squad. The members of that had been specially picked for the mission and only told to pack well before they left. None of them could have possibly gotten a message to a foreign village.
That created the unsettling implication that although she could trust her people, she had missed at least one foreign plant.
Mei had immediately pulled records of village departures and outgoing communications logs and poured over them personally while Chojuro took care of her paperwork. When she'd found a likely target, her blood had boiled with rage. With a lava user, boiling rage was somewhat literal and dangerous, so she hadn't been able to communicate orders for a full minute and a half while she clenched her jaw shut and let steam seep between her lips.
An office worker who had claimed to be ill had actually fled the village. The search she ordered of his apartment had revealed a few things—he had been passing information he should not have had access to, he was not planning to come back, and he had packed for cold country.
That meant the informant was not going to Konoha. She had initially wondered if the attempt on her jinchuuriki had been a ploy by Fire Country. After all, they had more information than anyone else about the proceedings.
But those findings ruled that out. No. Another party had made a move for the sanbi. While her mind had immediately leapt to the dissidents she had mostly murdered in her take-over, she couldn't dismiss the possibility that Kumo had discovered she was dealing with Konoha and made a move to undermine her power. If that was true, they might use the rebels as a shield or to put a puppet candidate in her position.
That she could not abide. Konoha was notoriously soft, but they had still managed to maintain a position as one of the most powerful shinobi villages if not the most powerful village. Konoha had never deceived her, so if she had to trust another village it would have to be them. At least this guaranteed her safety from Sand as well.
~~~
Tsunade gave a sharp smile that, had there been any justice in the world, would have hurt like a knife in the ribs to her fellow Kage. Instead, they both gave her consciously formulated looks of varying positivity (Terumi was a much better smiler, she noted). It was the first time meeting as equals, and she relished the opportunity to reevaluate her new allies. She didn't really consider either of them her equal just yet, to be honest.
Oh yes, they were both undoubtedly very powerful shinobi in their own right. Perhaps it was even true that they were the best their villages had to offer. But neither of them was prepared to really play the political game the way that it needed to be done. On one level, she was almost embarrassed to be playing with children. They would learn, of course. If the Sakabu boy had been less unstable, he would have been properly groomed like that sharp sister of his. But there was no use crying over spilt milk. Tsunade could use politically naïve allies just as well as she could work with experts.
She had wondered in the past weeks if Mist had actually managed to find the three spies who had individually 'discovered' sensitive information and fled the country (with just enough time to have raise suspicions about the sealing incident). Her real spy had remained safe in Mist, as had Danzo's inept hack for the moment. She might need him later. Tsunade had been hoping that the Terumi woman would find out about at least one of the plants, but she was also hoping that Mist would find themselves unable to catch any of them.
If Terumi had caught even one and discovered they were Tsunade's, the game and the alliance would have been over. It had been a simmering worry in her gut as the hours turned to days without a formal offer of alliance from Mist. But when it had come, she had known instantly that the ploy had been successful.
The young Kazekage, on the other hand, was to be dealt with differently. He could be outsmarted if need be, but Tsunade knew that his advisors were savvy and nosy enough to possibly catch onto Tsunade's games. (That sister of his wasn't one to be cowed by propriety.) No, he didn't need to be tricked to Konoha's side. He needed to be bound there in the most permanent manner possible. She had actually gotten the idea from young Naruto and his talk of bonds when he had helped convince her she belonged in Konoha. The philosophy had clearly touched a chord in the Kazekage—he had turned his life around in slightly less than a year.
To Tsunade, that meant that manipulating his emotions instead of his information was the way to maneuver the Kazekage where she needed him to be.
She already had the ideal person to manipulate the boy, and the best part would have been how sincere he would have been. Alas, Naruto was too dangerous to risk placement in one location for long, especially since he was traveling with her spymaster. It would be absolutely wasteful to have Jiraiya stay in one place. So at least until Naruto could protect himself, he could not be her tool of choice in this endeavor.
She didn't have to put a snake directly on Gaara's chest, of course. He was young and desperate enough for affection (though he didn't seem to consciously know it) that even an occasional encounter with an appropriate subject would keep him feeling fond of them. Those feelings could be fanned by keeping that person visible, and always associated with incidents of Konoha helping Sand. Even if he didn't realize it on a literal level, she knew enough psychology to know that giving the troubled young man enough of an emotional connection to people from Konoha would make him associate Konoha itself with those positive experiences.
She didn't let on to those thoughts, nor did she really hold either Kage's ignorance against them. It was madness to assume someone raised only to know to kill would somehow be optimal for running a village just because they were strong. The skill sets were completely separate, and the second was rarely taught except in the families that traditionally ruled over the villages.
The signing went smoothly, but the real politicking would happen after.
He had yet to say a word, but doubtlessly the Kazekage would speak up after the treaty was signed to request assistance with their border skirmishes. Tsunade already had a few ideas about the force she would send.
It seemed a strange coincidence, she mused, that the tool she had used to bind Mist (other than Danzo and a few well-placed spies cooling their heels after a long run at hotels in Rock and Lightning) might be her best one to bind Sand to herself as well. If she had Naruto readily available, she would have used him. Gaara seemed most attached to him, and there was little risk of him developing inappropriate affection for that particular Uzumaki. At least, statistically there was less risk, she amended. It didn't do to underestimate Naruto's ability to do the improbable.
But in his absence… The young Kazekage seemed to have a personal attachment to Naruto's sister as well. Tsunade didn't have as good of a sense of the girl's disposition as she did Naruto, so it was hard to say that encouraging that friendship would be a good way to keep Sand thinking of Konoha as friendly allies and not just someone to stab in the back later.
She would have to look into that. Whatever progress the chit might have made on that seal assignment would be a good tool for analysis of what made Uzumaki Aiko tick and if it would be safe to let her associate with such a vulnerable, crucial target as the Kazekage. While a success would solidify this alliance, a failure would rend it. Learning the way that someone thought was the best way to learn who they really are, on the inside. Tsunade had no need to rely on anything so trite or easily falsified as actions.
That lesson had been her hardest to learn. Most of what she knew had been learned at her grandfather's knee or under the Sandaime's protection. They hadn't been easy, by any means, but they had not come at the cost of blood, tears, doubt in her own perceptions, and years of bitter grief for friendship lost.
Orochimaru had been the one to teach Tsunade that a person's history of good actions didn't mean a damn if you didn't know why they were helping you. For that, she would always be grateful.