"Aiko-senpai? How much longer are we going to be here?" Emiko looked up from scratching graffiti onto the wall with a shuriken's edge. She had been diligently crafting responses to what looked to be slurs written the last time Sand and Leaf were on the outs.
Aiko silently resolved not to have that girl inside her home, and shrugged. It had been a little over two weeks since they had first arrived. Apparently, the glamour of doing Chuunin level work and representing their country had worn off.
"Until things are resolved or until Konoha sends us relief, I suppose." She didn't really expect Tsunade would do that, however. Not unless one of them died. But the fib was a little more reassuring, if not by much. Besides, it could happen. If the situation became noticeably worse and Tsunade wanted to extract the fragile genin, they might be switched out for a higher level team.
It wasn't likely, however. Konoha needed every high level nin that they could use right now, which was probably why two elites like Yamato and Kakashi had been sent to counterbalance the rest of the team. It was probably easier to lose the labor of two high level nin for an extended period of time (when not in outright warfare, anyway) than it would have been to lose nine chuunin or low level jounin.
Ken groaned, dragging his pillow up to cover his face. "You're just depressing me now."
"Sorry, not sorry." Aiko gave an enormous stretch that lifted most of her torso off the mattress, letting her fingertips brush the wall, and then collapsed back down with a huff.
Being off duty was almost more boring than being on duty when they were so far away from anything to do. She could write or play around with fuinjutsu, Aiko supposed, but she didn't really feel like it. That was all she ever did in her free time anymore.
'It's a bad time for me to be investigating new hobbies,' she mocked herself lightly. Yamato had been amusing himself by constructing elaborate additions to the outpost. Sand seemed a bit bemused by his architectural enthusiasm, but gamely allowed him all the parapets he wanted to make them for free. It was becoming quite lovely, actually.
Kakashi must have found something to occupy his time as well, as she never saw him when they weren't on duty. Somehow, he was never eating when she was, and always out after she went to bed. Occasionally she saw him sleeping when she got up, but that was rare and not really all that interesting of a sight. (Even if he did snuggle his pillow in a ridiculously adorable way).
She had no idea what Akira was up to, frankly, but she suspected it had something to do with a cute fifteen year old from Mist. Aiko wished her the best of luck. He didn't seem interested in the slightest.
But the rest of them seemed to spend most of their downtime moping in the barracks and occasionally grouching about the lack of hot water.
'I could take a nap,' she mused, feeling as lazy as a cat. 'Or find someone who would want a spar. How hard could that be?' At least one other person had to be bored enough to go for the idea.
The second idea held more appeal, so she hauled her sorry carcass off the bed and lightly jumped to the floor. Aiko paused for a moment to roll her neck, and then began gathering up the cross-band that went around her torso to hold her sword and the low-hanging belt for her little black hip pack. Emiko sat up and watched her curiously on the other side of the room.
"Where are you going? I thought you were off duty until tomorrow."
Aiko nodded absently, tightening her straps. "I am. I was thinking about finding someone who'd want a spar."
The younger girl snorted. "Good luck with that. I am staying right here, thank you very much."
She tried not to roll her eyes. It wasn't like she was really all that desperate to spar a twelve year old genin, even if that genin happened to be a taijutsu fighter like Emiko.
The door swung shut behind her with a terrible creaking sound (the one that made Aiko wonder if they had been placed in that barracks so Sand knew when they were coming and leaving) and midday heat slapped her in the face.
"Ow." She cringed, putting a hand up to ward off the sun while her eyes adjusted, black spots dancing in her vision. After a few moments, she was able to see again and leisurely set off at a walk towards the enclosed grounds on the Wind side of the border that she'd seen used for sparring.
Luck was on her side. Someone was actually running through katas when she arrived. She knew who it was when Kankuro pushed back his cat-eared hood, letting it tousle his mildly sweaty hair on the way.
Aiko took a moment to wonder at the eccentricities of ninja. Why did people act as if a little mask like hers and Kakashi's was hilariously weird when there were lunatics wandering around with cat-ears on their mission gear?
"Hey, Kankuro-san. Are you up for a spar?"
Of course, asking questions like that was not a diplomatic way to begin a conversation when asking for a favor, so she tabled the commentary on his perhaps overly daring mission gear for another time.
He looked mildly surprised. Whether it was at being addressed or that she knew his name, she wasn't sure.
"You sure?" He gave a smug glance at Crow, sitting propped up against the stone wall. "I doubt you've ever fought anyone like me before."
'Jeeze, how cocky.' Aiko intentionally kept her face still. "I think I'll manage," she drawled.
She thought she could win, but it would be stupid to brag and then be unable to come through. Kankuro was a Chuunin as well, after all. He had been Chuunin level long before the genin exams, much like how Temari was really a low-level Jounin fighter. Doubtlessly, they'd been held back because Gaara needed a team and he was just barely sentimental enough to not kill them.
Instead of making pre-fight boasts she might not be able to follow through on, Aiko scuffed her left boot against the ground. "Any fight restrictions?"
Kankuro smirked. "No permanent injuries, I don't want the hassle of finding a medical nin to mop you up."
Aiko snorted, amused. "I suppose I don't want to have to be mopped up," she agreed easily. He huffed and fell into an easy taijutsu stance, one hand held up. Wordlessly, she moved to engage, opening with a sweeping kick to gauge his speed. He momentarily faulted and barely managed to jump up and over, twisting his torso to land a glancing backhand against her collarbone. She managed to sway backwards to avoid most of the blow, but the senbon hidden between his knuckles left three long scratches from the base of her neck to just below her collarbone in the small area unprotected by her open flak jacket.
The move didn't surprise her. He was a puppet master, and puppet masters played with hidden weaponry and poisons. But they had agreed not to cause harm requiring a medic nin, so the move had probably been reflexive rather than an attempt to poison her.
She used the momentum from her lean backwards to fold entirely in half, placing her hands on the ground behind her. It took an instant to shift her center of mass to her hands and bend her legs, snapping them out in to a double kick that caught Kankuro in the gut and sent him stumbling backwards with a wheeze.
'I have to keep him on the run,' she decided. 'Now that he knows he can't overwhelm me easily with taijutsu, he'll move for his safety blanket. That puppet of his.' Her gaze flickered to the left to check that he had yet to use chakra strings to move it.
It was exactly where it had been before, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. It did give her an idea, however.
Kankuro wasn't the only one who could use chakra strings. Undoubtedly, he was a hundred times better with it than she was, but she would only need to restrict his movements a little to throw him off his game. She lifted her right palm and shot a single string to loosely connect to Crow's forehead. The extra string pooled on the floor. Normally it would be intelligent to secure it tightly, but she didn't want to risk moving it before Kankuro tried to.
In the instant where she was solely balanced on her left palm, she gave a light push to allow the upward momentum from her kick to carry her upwards and bending forwards to re-orient in the air. By the time she turned her attention back to her opponent, he had regained his balance and flung out one hand.
She quirked a smile. She'd been just in time. Crow came sweeping in from the side, bristling with silver weaponry. He was on track to get in between her and Kankuro just instants before she could hit the ground again and take advantage of his wide-open, unguarded stance.
It was crude. It would probably make a puppet expert like Kankuro flinch if he'd not been too distracted to see it. But Aiko yanked on her lone thread with her right hand to yank on Crow, halting his flight with a stuttering movement.
The look on Kankuro's face was great when she used her left to suckerpunch him in the gut so hard that he fell backwards onto his ass and flipped over, at one point managing to have his feet flat on the ground at the same time as he was on his upper back. He lost control of Crow, who flopped and skidded across the ground with a horrible clatter of metal odds and ends and a small snapping sound that was probably some hidden mechanism.
When he sat up and blinked up at her, she lost it in a fit of giggles. "Sorry," she managed, pushing her hand of her face and quirking an eyebrow. "You just looked so surprised."
He scowled for a moment, but good-naturedly rolled his eyes and pushed himself to his feet. "That was adorably bad, seriously. Come on, what kind of move was that?"
"One that surprised you," she shot back, completely unashamed of the crudity of her attack. "Come on, didn't you think I knew you'd try to use Crow?"
Kankuro made a face at her and ambled over to check his puppet. "Yare, yare, laugh it up. I would have kicked your ass with him."
"Very possible," she agreed politely. "Hence why I didn't let you use him. I'm sorry if he's damaged, though."
She wandered a little closer, crossing her arms and slipping her hands under the Chuunin vest loosely hanging open over her long gray top. Curiously, she quirked her head sideways and watched Kankuro fidget with his downed puppet. He made a face, but didn't look too upset. "It's fine. Minor damage and some things knocked out of place. I can fix it tonight."
"That's good." She shuffled her feet in place a little. The fight had been a nice break from the monotony, but it had been short enough that she was already coming down from the adrenaline surge.
"So… Thanks for the spar. I've been getting restless."
He snorted. "We've noticed. What's up with you and your team? You look like you're about to break into a three-way fight at any moment."
'Even the Sand team noticed?'
They barely saw each other when not actively working. Well, that was mildly embarrassing. They should at least be able to put up a united front for such a short time.
Aiko just shrugged. "Don't worry, we won't." The look he gave her implied that he thought she was full of shit for 'subtly' avoiding his real question. But he didn't pry again, wrapping up Crow and slinging the puppet over his back.
He looked at her instantly when she stiffened, focus distant.
"What's wrong?"
Aiko tugged her hair into a low-hanging, messy ponytail. "I think we have incoming on the other side." She jerked her head in the direction of the border. "Way larger than usual. It feels like we might have a real fight on our hands, for once."
He grinned. "Excellent."
"I'll go get my team. Yours is nearby, right?"
It turned out not to be necessary. Temari came plummeting from one of Yamato's beautiful towers on her three-moon fan, teeth bared and looking excited. Baki shunshined behind them, hands shoved casually in his pockets.
Aiko looked around, half-expecting her team to come swooping out of nowhere. She was almost disappointed when they didn't show up.
"Well, that's embarrassing," she muttered. Kankuro let out a little chuckle.
Yamato flipped down off the barracks roof, landing in a crouch. An instant later, Kakashi ambled out the door of the mess hall, reading a book.
Temari looked at the cover and twitched. It was the iconic orange one, with a man chasing a busty brunette.
Aiko was torn between two reactions. She wanted to be irritated with her team leader for not being as cool as the Sand team when even Yamato put in the effort, but she also really liked Kakashi's sheer nonchalant dickery.
She settled for silence, barely turning when the chakra signatures of the Mist team stationed a few miles down the line became agitated and vibrant, as if they were preparing for their own fight.
"Aiko. Is it just this outpost?"
Biting her lip, she shook her head. "No, at least the next one also seems to be aware of incoming."
Yamato gave her a put-out expression. "What, is that all you can tell?"
"I'm not Karin," she snarked. "It's not like you can do any better, fairy princess."
The sand nin stood silent, appalled. Kakashi just sighed, rubbing at his face with a palm. "Moving on."
Barracks opened, and the outpost buildings began to bristle with the border Chuunin. Baki sighed. "Too many cooks will ruin the soup," he rumbled.
Temari rolled her eyes, exchanging a put-open glance with Kankuro.
'I don't like the clichés either,' Aiko sighed. But Baki had a point. The Chuunin were a last resort measure, the last line of defense for Wind country borders. They shouldn't be involved in this sort of fight. It was their responsibility to engage the enemy as far out as they could, leaving only those who slipped through them to the Chuunin.
Silently, they leapt as a group, covering ground rapidly. They met with the converging Sound forces only half a mile out.
It was actually mildly surprising. This seemed more like an actual trained force, not the ragtag experiments that had been thrown at them.
What's worse, she was relatively certain that she recognized some of them. She had never seen them before in her life, but the man with extra arms and the lithe boy with bone-white hair were rather distinctive. Aiko didn't remember their names, but she was relatively certain they had been some of Orochimaru's elite forces.
Kakashi must have similarly recognized their importance, because he engaged the spidery man and wordlessly gestured Yamato to take the white-haired boy. She bristled, a shiver going up her spine when Yamato's wood was met with bone sluicing through flesh, twisting into the shape of a sickle weapon.
'That's so creepy.'
He'd split his own flesh, jaggedly tearing through skin, meat, and veins, without seeming to even flinch.
Then she was distracted by her own fight, slipping out her blade to meet a woman wielding two long kunai with a metallic clang. She'd been on the other side of that weapon match-up enough to know that it was very possible for a skilled user to out-maneuver the user of the larger blade, so she didn't get cocky.
As expected, her opponent's first move captured the blade and twisted it away from her body. That was when Aiko would have jabbed in to gut, so she had been waiting to kick out at the other woman, impacting the forearm that slipped in with a crack.
The Sound kunoichi grimaced with a flinch, reflexively pulling her left arm back into her torso. That protected her gut from the kick that followed it back, but now that the inner kunai had been removed, Aiko was free to slash in with her blade, opening her opponent up from the meaty part of her shoulder downwards across her torso into her breast. She cried out horribly, leaping backwards, but Aiko pressed forwards and twisted her sword arm so that the angle allowed her to jab forwards and impale the other kunoichi completely, ending with the hilt resting against the lower part of the ribcage.
Even without looking, Aiko knew that she'd severed the nerves on the right side of the other girl's spine. Nothing short of immediate medical attention from Tsunade of the Sannin could save that girl's ninja career.
The point became moot in the next moment when she gently pried the right kunai from a slackening grip and used it to open the Sound kunoichi's throat. She ignored the pleading look in large, teary brown eyes and soundlessly gaping mouth, unceremoniously propping her foot against the older girl to help her extract her sword. Uncaring, Aiko lifted her head in search of the next opponent as soon as the Sound kunoichi had fallen backwards to drown in her own blood.
Then she noted the oddity that no one else seemed to have seen yet. 'Aren't those all three Sound nin?'
There weren't just the six fights (with three Konoha nin and three Suna nin) that there should have been. There was one extra fight happening in between a whirling Sound-nin with hair almost as light at the bone-freak's and anyone who got within arm's reach, primarily two other male nin.
'The enemy of my enemy is my friend,' she shrugged, leaping forward to take one of the nin harassing the light-haired boy. He had to be about her age, from the brief glimpses she got of him.
And he was a water type, she realized when a glancing blow from a bulky man with a chokuto drew a splash of clear liquid instead of blood. That was the classic sign of a water clone. In any moment now, it would collapse and he would come charging in from another direction.
But that never happened, in the long seconds while she traveled towards the second nin. Both of them were still focused on the water clone… which must have meant they knew something she didn't, like why it never collapsed and instead bent forwards to meet the incoming blow with a fierce grin. It sliced through his form entirely, but didn't cause any harm or dispel.
Aiko shivered, thoroughly creeped out by the persistent weirdness of Sound nin, even if he didn't seem to be a Sound nin. She shoved her own sword through the back of the second nin who had been circling behind the light-haired boy. Blood spatter coated her front, hot and wet and plastering her top indecently to her chest and stomach where it got in between her open hanging jacket.
The boy he'd been about to hit gave a rough laugh, turning to grin wildly at her with sharp teeth. "Thanks, dollface."
She let her jaw drop and stared for an instant. "What?"
There was a sudden surge of killing intent on the other side of the clearing, but she didn't turn to see what was going on. It was probably better not to know.
"Heads-up!"
Aiko didn't need the warning. She was already moving to dodge the blow aimed at the base of her neck, twisting her body around. Effortlessly, she let the sword lead her movements and force her new foe back. Her free hand dug into her kunai holster and bristled with metal that she flung in a tight fan pattern.
She'd expected him to dodge, to be frank. He probably would have if her new friend hadn't cut the tendons at the back of his knees with his own blade, laughing all the while.
With a shrug, she scanned the clearing for more enemies, but things seemed to be winding down. Yamato was swinging around to assist Kakashi, the bone-user slumped dead on the ground. Baki and Temari were taking on another nin, keeping him away from Kankuro who appeared to be bleeding heavily from a gut wound.
And her new friend was creeping up beside her and giving her a sharp-toothed smile. She leaned away, brows furrowed at his strangeness.
"Thanks," she tried politely. 'What the fuck is up with him?'
"Aiko, what the hell are you doing?" Kakashi flickered in front of her, blocking her view of the strange boy.
"I don't think he was with them," she pointed out. "He turned on them before Sound was even losing, so he's not just a cowardly turncoat. We know they're somehow subverting people, so is it really implausible that we'd run into someone who didn't want to be here?"
Besides, something about this boy really tugged at her memory. He was lanky, lightly muscled and very tall for his build, and his hair almost looked lavender where the sunlight caught it.
Kakashi did not seem best pleased, but at least he didn't kill the kid on the spot. He was probably thinking more along the lines of getting information out of them than rewarding a temporary comrade in arms, but Aiko was fine with that as well.