Temari hadn't been wrong about the sheer overwhelming numbers of Sound forces that harassed the border at all hours. With the addition of three mixed teams of Chuunin and Jounin from Mist (who seemed even less happy about the dry climate than the Konoha nin were) it was almost child's play to rebuff the assaults. Disposing of the corpses was almost a larger problem, since apparently the three governments involved were bickering over who should take possession of them and give medical analyses of whatever the hell Sound had done to them. The debate only intensified after the spectacularly creepy realization that Sound had somehow militarized some of the defeated Grass forces against the alliance.
They didn't respond to attempted reasoning or negotiating. The sounds of spectacularly un-ninja like roaring and shrieks took on a distinctly eerie tone when it became inescapably clear that they hadn't just run into one or two nut jobs. Sound had done something that forced their victims/allies (depending on your perspective) into unspeakable rage: They were big dumb brutes who just had to be pointed in the right direction.
That was almost worse than the bizarre abilities some of them displayed. Many were just hulking with grotesque muscles and red-eyed rage, but others used auditory genjutsu or jutsu like the three sound nin in the Chuunin exams had. Others spat acid, seemed immune to pain, or dislocated their joints to attempt to creep through small spaces for ambushes, mindlessly grinning and crawling forwards even when they'd nearly immobilized themselves.
Sand's border force had apparently been so depleted (both by the constant harassment and in the wake of the unsuccessful attack on Konoha) that they were able to give their allies a small barracks each. Konoha's teams were crammed in like sardines, at least for a few days until someone got the bright idea to disperse the genin teams along the line so that they didn't have such a large weak spot. The younger team stayed nearby, and the boys went west down the borderline to the next outpost. Since Aiko's team was part of the rapid response team, they ended up staying in the first outpost with the same Sand team they'd been working with, joined by a solely Chuunin Mist team. Their higher level teams ended up moving westward.
'It makes sense,' she mused, sharpening her sword the fourth morning, once everyone had been reassigned. 'Separating the supplementary forces both by rank and origin both ensures that there is no obvious weak point, and reduces the chance for collusion or information spread to Sound, unless of course the perpetrators are willing to risk their own people. Gaara isn't as bad at this game as Tsunade seems to think he is.' A hot wind blew her bangs into her eyes, casting curved shadows over her vision. She scowled and pursed her lips to blow them out of her face.
Her whetstone didn't pause, but she lifted her head to give Temari a glance across the clearing where they were sharing watch. 'Of course, the orders might not actually be coming from Gaara, per say,' she allowed. 'It might just be easier for the real tactical brains to claim authority from a Kage when giving distasteful
orders like splitting up teams from their countrymen.'
Temari sighed, as if catching onto Aiko's thoughts about the dreary necessity of dealing with disgruntled Mist nin. (It was like a job requirement, apparently. They were all cranky, all the time).
"Something wrong?" The older girl looked at her as if she didn't want to answer, and then shrugged indolently.
"Waiting for them to come to us is getting really old, when we know that they have to be replenishing their forces somehow at this point." Irritably, she flung a silver shuriken into the dirt with a soft 'whush' sound, and then glared at it as if it was the source of her ill temper.
Left unsaid was a point that had already been discussed ad nauseam—Sound couldn't possibly hope to win any sort of tactical victory if they were really just throwing everyone they had at Wind Country. There had to be something they were missing. Was it an attempt to draw support away from another border to attack there? Were the seemingly unsuccessful attacks actually serving some sort of objective? Was the whole thing a smokescreen for some larger plan?
It was absolutely infuriating to sit around in what was either a death trap they could sense but couldn't see closing around them, or an indication that Sound was run by monkeys.
'For all we know, they could be,' she thought glumly. With Orochimaru dead, none of their intelligence operatives seemed to have any idea whatsoever as to who was calling the shots in Sound. Knowing who was making the decisions would have provided at least a little insight into what the hell they could be hoping to accomplish.
"It would be a lot more satisfying to go to the source," she agreed casually. Aiko heaved a sigh, swiveling her blade to check the edge. It was immaculate. That meant she couldn't really justify continuing to sharpen it just because she was bored. Regretfully, she slid it home in the sheath and put her kit away, sealing it into a scroll the size of her thumb when rolled up. Temari watched with visible interest, leaning over slightly.
"How do you do that?" she asked, jerking her head towards the scroll Aiko was tucking into her hip pouch.
She blinked and looked up from the pouch to the older girl. "What do you mean? Using it, or making it?" She wasn't entirely sure where to go with that question. Sealing for storage was one of the most basic functions of fuinjutsu, a base level skill that translated as the foundation for many of the more advanced skills. It was like being asked to explain how she wrote her name—she'd been taught how to do it such a long time ago that she didn't know how to explain it. Every answer she came up with sounded condescending or made her feel embarrassed to explain something so basic.
Temari scrunched up her nose. "You made that?" She scoffed and turned her face away. "I thought those had to be bought. Ours are reserved for Jounin. And I meant using one so much smaller than the material you're putting in it. That doesn't even make sense."
Aiko shrugged, not wanting to criticize that system or get into a long explanation. "Well, they are expensive to buy," she offered diplomatically. "And the size of the scroll is actually not correlated to the possible storage space. The scroll only needs to be large enough for the person making it to put their version of a storage seal on it."
"Aiko." She flinched, twisting to face Kakashi. He looked disinterested and distant, striding across the clearing. Slightly behind him, Yamato was all kitted out as if for a long mission. "We're on patrol."
"Right." It took only a moment to tighten the band keeping her sword on and fall in line behind them. They took off at a run. It felt like an odd patrol—checking between scrubland and trees that seldom broke fifteen feet in height meant that they stayed on the ground instead of using trees as a patrol route as she was accustomed. Besides that oddity, she didn't know the area at all, which made the trip nerve-wracking. But she tried not to let that tension show. No doubt Kakashi knew the map better than she did, and she wouldn't have said a damn thing even if he'd appeared to be taking them to Iron.
She did miss being able to talk to him. They'd used to banter, at least off duty if not while actually running missions. It was thoroughly bizarre not to be on speaking terms with the only person in the world she looked up to.
'Phrasing it that way either sounds pathetic or cynical, I'm not sure which.' No one could see her at the back of the group, so she allowed herself an ironic smile. What did having Kakashi as her role model mean about her? Was she just naïve, a bad judge of character?
Aiko knew perfectly well that he wasn't a perfect person. He'd let her down before, so it was hard to convince herself that it was even that she knew she could count on him. After all, he'd had a mental breakdown and abandoned his three surviving students without a word after Sakura died. That wasn't even a way to see her death as his fault—he wasn't the incompetent asshole who let Orochimaru into the village, after all, and no one could really expect a couple of prospective Chuunin to do anything against an S-class criminal.
Nor was Kakashi even stable. He lived in the past, the problem that had prompted the argument in the first place. But the failing manifested in other ways. It was probably a large part of why he was so emotionally distant, chronically late, and hard to connect with.
'But that's not all there is to him,' she argued with herself, irrationally upset by her own factual assessment. Kakashi was an excellent shinobi and a damn good person when he wasn't crippled by the weaknesses inherent in humanity. He had always cared about her and Naruto, even though he was incapable of giving them what they needed. She didn't hold his failure to take them in against him at all. He'd just lost everyone he'd let past the emotional barriers that were already nearly inescapable at the age of fourteen. It had probably been a struggle to patch himself together enough to function, let alone care for another person.
That train of thought resonated—that was why she admired him. He'd encountered crushing disappointments again and again and somehow managed to keep going. The facts that he was incredibly powerful and intelligent were attractive, of course, but they didn't hold a candle to his sheer determination to keep going.
She stopped cold, eyes wide.
Yamato and Kakashi snapped to attention, stopping in their run as well. "Uzumaki, what's wrong?" Her shishou's harsh voice managed to pierce the haze she was in.
Aiko swallowed, hard. And averted her eyes. "Nothing, sorry."
"Can we go on, then," he asked dryly. She nodded silently and fell back into formation, trying to pay more attention to her surroundings. But the realization that had just occurred to her was doing a spectacular job of tugging at her attention, as was the pounding of her heartbeat all the way up in her throat.
'Oh my god, I'm hot for teacher. That's why I hate it so much when he treats me like a living memorial.' As she ran, she amended that. 'Well, not entirely why. It's still annoying and not fair regardless.' She squirmed a little. 'Plus I feel like such an imposter, knowing that I'm not connected to Minato in the way he thinks I am. I mean, I am genetically, but mentally there was never even a chance I'd consider him my father.'
Aiko couldn't bear to look at her commander for the rest of the patrol. If she hadn't already been certain he was avoiding her, she would have done so religiously when they returned to the outpost after their turn on patrol.
'Doesn't matter, anyways,' she thought resentfully that night, staring up at the bunk above hers and trying to ignore Yamato's content snuffles from the bunk below. 'I'm trapped in a fourteen year old body and he'd never look at me anyway. Maybe I'm better off not reconciling with him. If he ever found out, he'd think I was sick. It's not like I can tell him I'm really an adult. He'll think I'm crazy or a fraud.' She turned over, pressing her forehead into her pillow and slipping her arms around the cool material. When she pressed her eyes shut, she could pretend that the next thought wasn't painful. 'Maybe I am sick and disgusting. He's tried to be like an older brother to me. When I get back to Konoha, I'll ask Tsunade to have the apprenticeship dissolved. She's wanted that forever anyways.'
Yamato had expected a better experience out of this mission.
He'd known that this was work, of course, and that it didn't have to be enjoyable. But the job wasn't a particularly hard one. It shouldn't have been so strained. Working with Kakashi-senpai had never been this painfully awkward before, and he couldn't exactly pinpoint what was going on.
Granted, he was perceptive enough to assume that whatever was putting senpai off his game was the same source of tension between senpai and Aiko. This was the first time he had ever seen them on bad terms. He hadn't even known they could argue. They had seemed far too close and alike in character. Besides, senpai just didn't do that—he never argued with subordinates. That gave them too much power. Aiko didn't seem happy about it, but she clearly had far too much influence over senpai's mood, at least.
Senpai had been acting distinctly unfriendly and distant to pretty much everyone, leaving Yamato in the unusual position of playing peacekeeper. It had become painfully obvious that Kakashi-senpai was far too distracted when he failed to notice the beginning of that ambush the first night they had arrived. Both Aiko and Kakashi were better sensors than Yamato. He didn't appreciate the failure in professionalism that they had both demonstrated.
'Whatever is going on is endangering the mission and Konoha's good reputation,' he noted darkly on the third day, when neither party had demonstrated any sign of attempting reconciliation. Things were getting ridiculous.
Aiko at least looked like she wanted to reconcile, despite her obvious tenseness and discomfort around their mission commander. She wasn't nearly as subtle as she thought she was. Her posture stiffened whenever Kakashi entered a room, she turned her body towards his, and she couldn't help but glance at him whenever he turned away from her.
Yamato rather thought that hyperawareness was probably why Kakashi-senpai was spending so much time outside of the barracks. He had been running on progressively less sleep, because it had become obvious that Aiko was too fidgety to fall asleep with him in the room. That probably kept him up, in turn.
'They're both acting like children.' Yamato tapped his fingers on his thigh irritably, watching Aiko mull blankly over the horrid food options at lunch one day as if the specific variety of slop that she chose was somehow going to be crucially important. 'At least Aiko has the excuse of being not much older than a child.'
Still, there was no way in hell he was going to get in between the two of them. They both had tempers, sharp tongues, and held grudges. Sure, they were just circling each other and growling now, but the moment he grabbed at one, they would probably do more than bark. ANBU Cat, of all people, knew better than to get in a dogfight.
The first day at the border outpost:
Kakashi wished he could be Hound right now. It would be so much easier to slip into a mission mindset and avoid thinking the godawful things that were running through his head. But he just couldn't. Hound wasn't capable of dealing with anything remotely diplomatic or co-operational. Hound hunted.
So he was Kakashi instead. Being Kakashi was hard. It hurt, and he'd always dealt with hurt by internalizing it or running away from it. He couldn't internalize this. It kept coming back up to the surface and troubling him. The things his student had said hurt whenever he looked at her, but seeing her so obviously hurting made him want to fix her hurts as he had done for years. He'd avoid seeing Aiko if he could, but being assigned to a three-person team with her made that impossible.
The worst part was that he wasn't certain if he wanted to hate her for shattering his world view or for being right.
Suspecting that he had been in the wrong was a miserable sensation. He closed his eyes, not even caring that the water in the shower was ice-cold. Re-evaluating his actions was even more unpleasant.
'The Sandaime warned me years ago,' he thought with bleak amusement. 'When I told him the twins deserved to be taught because Minato would have wanted it and I owed him. He told me not to confuse them, and I did anyways. I'm so stupid.'
He spent the second day in a haze of self-recriminations, failure, and mindless duty, knowing by his reflexive self-hatred he had done something wrong but not what or why. Eventually, his mind turned to analysis of precisely why what Aiko had said had been so terrible.
When Aiko had completely rejected Minato (rejected Minato-sensei, who had loved his unborn twins so much it hurt) his first reaction was to push her away. He'd never thought her capable of that. If she denied an association with sensei, who was she? Did he even know her?
That thought was the one that had pulled at his mind and made him wonder if she hadn't been completely right. It hadn't been that long ago that he had been musing that she was his favorite subordinate, had it? If it had solely been because she was the last living piece of sensei, wouldn't Naruto have been his favorite?
In personality, Aiko was very little like either of her parents. In appearance, she was dead center which usually failed to evoke either of them. By contrast, Naruto wore Minato's face with Kushina's enormous (and often false to hide pain or awkwardness) smiles. But Naruto wasn't his favorite subordinate. He preferred working with Aiko.
That meant that he liked her on her own merits, he concluded logically as he laid in bed the second night and tried to sleep. His godawful mind picked back up on the same train of thought as soon as he opened his eye in the morning.
Why was that so difficult to concede? He didn't like admitting that he wasn't just fond of her because she was sensei's child. It seemed like a betrayal of sensei's memory.
Kakashi wished he weren't a genius, or at least that he wasn't so intimately familiar with his own failings. Now that he wasn't purposefully blind to what was going on, it was easy for him to parse apart.
'I've been using Aiko as a crutch and not treating her as her own person. I thought of her as sensei's kid, not a human being with an individual identity. Of course that was hurtful to her. Does she have another adult in her life?'
He'd never noticed or even heard of one. That thought was troubling. Now that he'd noticed the oddity, he couldn't stop wondering what Aiko had meant when she'd claimed that she had raised Naruto. She was the same age. Surely the Sandaime had found some sort of guardian for them. Kakashi had been emotionally and mentally unable to acknowledge their presence for years, burying himself in ANBU duties. But surely he would have been contacted if the Sandaime needed help with the twins, right?
He winced, remembering how irrational he had been at that point in his life. No. The Sandaime wouldn't have asked him. Kakashi had been dangerously unstable when the twins were young, and if the third Hokage hadn't been an uncommonly kind and forgiving man (a dangerously sentimental man, an honest part of his mind added) then he wouldn't have been given the chance to teach the twins. …Especially since he hadn't wanted to have anything to do with them at the time.
The worry and curiosity about the twins' childhood tugged at his attention and made him want to look into the matter immediately just to assuage the bad feeling he had. But that was impossible, so the sick feeling became just one of many that cycled through his gut while he rehashed the different things that troubled him. This would have been easier if he'd been better with emotions, he knew.
A month ago, Kakashi would have said that Aiko was much more emotionally stable than he was. Now he was less certain. That outburst had been the product of years of internalized distress and pressure. He knew what it looked like when a person erupted from stress. The Rasengan probably wasn't even the real problem, it was just a trigger and everything else had overflowed.
What she had said about her parents reeked conspicuously of abandonment issues. In a clinical sense, Kakashi could assess that her reaction was not abnormal. Orphans generally followed one of two extremes— they longed for parents and family, or they completely rejected the idea that they needed them as a defense mechanism. After all, it was hard to miss something you had never had. An emotional issue that you could talk yourself into ignoring could be suppressed and added to the list of things bothering you that you never intended to deal with. It was a strategy Kakashi often utilized and he could appreciate its use.
He just couldn't come to terms with anyone thinking that about Minato-sensei. Sensei had practically raised him, after all, even though he hadn't thought he needed it at the time. Sensei had been an excellent father figure… to him.
Kakashi winced. 'How would Aiko know that?' he asked himself, rhetorically. Of course she wouldn't. 'It doesn't matter that he did his best to help me. That didn't affect the twins at all, and no one ever talked to them about what kind of people their parents are. To her, they're just names and old photographs in public records.'
And that hurt. It really, really hurt. Silently he wondered if Naruto felt the same way. It might break him if Naruto did.
But now that he'd analyzed the situation, he couldn't figure out a way to justify continuing to be upset with Aiko. It wasn't logical. She was reacting to her lived experiences. Besides, she hadn't seemed completely hostile to her parents as family and people. She just didn't see them as parents. There was some logic behind that. If he or someone else actually shared something real about Minato and Kushina, she might come to appreciate them more.
And if she didn't, they could just never have that conversation again. They'd managed to go four years without it, so clearly it wasn't perpetually on her mind.
'It was probably on her mind whenever I looked at her and thought of Sensei,' Kakashi acknowledged ruefully in the safety of his own mind. That meant that she was much better at reading him that he'd thought… which could only mean that he'd already relaxed around her enough to let her in.
He didn't see any way around it: she was one of his precious people. He had had other students, but only one apprentice. At times she was… a friend, perhaps, and not just someone he taught on a distant and professional basis? Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura were precious people too, of course. He had never been entrusted with such delicate lives before, and he had taken the duty seriously. But it hadn't been good enough. He hadn't been vigilant enough to keep Sakura safe, and he had already failed both of the boys and driven them away to better teachers.
'I can't fail the only one I have left,' he realized on the third morning at the outpost. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to reconcile with Aiko.
But that was easier said than done. He was an intelligent man, but not an emotionally fluent man. Did he just come out and say he was sorry for what he'd said? In his experience, words were dangerous. He could accidentally start the whole thing up again. She might be able to distance herself and understand what he was trying to do and not any unintentional insults…
'Then again, she might not,' he concluded when he saw her talking comfortably with the girl from Sand outside. That wasn't the problem so much as the way that she looked when she saw him. It was almost… frightened. Like a rabbit.
Did she think he was going to start an argument? A little hurt, he maintained as much distance as he could from his apprentice to keep from initiating another altercation until he had a plan of action. But she was acting so strangely. At one point, she completely stopped running in the middle of the patrol.
It didn't make any sense. Aiko had never been easily distracted on a mission. That was Naruto, not Aiko.
'Perhaps he died and she's channeling his spirit,' he joked blackly. It wasn't funny even to him. Something was wrong, and he didn't know how to fix it. He couldn't fix it with words. What else was there?
The answer came to him on the return trip to the outpost. He sent his subordinates to the barracks and made his brief report –uneventful, no intruders or new signs of travel spotted- and then asked if there was a room he could use. There was, and they wouldn't mind a bit of water damage. It was an empty storage area anyways, he couldn't do it much damage.
He rather thought that he could, but wisely didn't share that information. There was no chance he would teach Aiko the real chidori. Lightning was extremely dangerous to experiment with, and she had struggled immensely to learn even the basic attacks. That had scuppered some of his earlier plans for her training.
'Chidori was too dangerous anyway,' he noted, scratching out calculations on a bit of scrap paper. Lightning was a sharp, inflexible element. Much like how fire was hard to conjure without fuel to feed it and earth didn't want to move at all, his chakra nature had inherent qualities. One of which was the tendency to move in a straight or predictably jagged line at very high speeds. He had used that second characteristic to make Chidori very dangerous—it pushed his normal running speeds even further. Despite that benefit, the first quality made Chidori very dangerous to control. Being unable to alter trajectory once you had acquired a target was an enormous detractor from an attack.
But he was certain that particular component of Chidori was tied to its chakra nature, not the shape transformation. It was just a short spear, after all. It should be controllable. So far as flexibility went, water was one of lightning's opposites. It tended to follow certain patterns, but it could be pushed in any direction with a bit of force. ('And Aiko certainly has no problems with strategically applying force', he noted cynically, a bit surprised as just how well she had shattered him with a few well-placed words. She really was a smart girl).
As far as he could tell, there was no reason a water-natured spear transformation should have to adhere to a fixed trajectory. Of course, having the theory didn't tell him how to perform the attack. It had been years since he had designed a move himself.
Kakashi hypothesized that once he had altered his chakra nature (a necessary first step for him, but one that Aiko could skip) and figured out what handsign combination would optimally prepare his coils, all he would have to do was manifest the same shape transformation that he knew well. That should be easy to teach to Aiko, with her experience with chakra chains and strings. A spear wasn't that far off. Integrating the sharp, multi-faceted edges would be the challenge.
At least he had something constructive to work towards now. All would be well. She had always forgiven him in past for transgressions both mundane – like making her wait on him for training— and arguably serious ones – like leaving her alone in Suna to run into hostile nin while he gathered information when she was ten, and even in the arguably worse time when he'd fled back into ANBU after Sakura died. This would be no different.