Aiko was the only one who didn't hit her ass on the ground with a thump in the next moment when they all found themselves in slightly different locations. "Ha!" She snickered, pointing at Sasuke's dumb expression.
"Nnnnnng?"
Well, that was a familiar whine. Aiko dropped to her knees and gathered Mitsuo up in a hug when he bounded over to her, burying her nose in his nape and inhaling that wonderful, comforting, doggy smell.
"Let's go home, guys," Naruto sighed, voice sounding a little scratchy but pleased. "Just think, the next we know, we'll be relaxing in Konoha."
They hightailed it the hell out of those ruins, not even noting that Rouran should have been more decrepit. Rouran was considerably worse than it had been twenty years prior, and there didn't seem to be a terrible difference between a city that had been destroyed and abandoned for fifteen years and a city that had been resettled as a base for a small amount of survivors and partially repaired over the course of just two years after that same destruction.
Mitsuo didn't bother to inform them that there were people around inside to avoid the heat of day—they'd already run into those civilians and talked to them in the days while they were waiting to ambush Mukade, after all. Remnants of stubborn survivors who had refused to abandon their ancestral home after the initial danger had passed, apparently. He hadn't been that interested.
~~~
'Of course that was too good to be true. Just having Naruto say something jinxes it.'
"You have got to be fucking kidding me."
For once, the crudity wasn't coming from an Uzumaki. Yamato looked just about ready to cry from frustration at having trouble on what had promised to be a simple trip home after an unexpectedly complicated mission, but after a moment a steely expression shuttered over his face. "Those are our allies. We are obligated to lend assistance. Aiko, I want you to get Naruto out at the first sign of trouble. Stay back, since you're not in top form. I want you boys to work together and watch each other's backs. Alright Sasuke, Naruto?"
He paused, waiting for the acknowledgement that wasn't going to come because the blond had already taken off at a sprint for the little mob where two Akatsuki seemed to be tangling with a team from Mist. Or rather, half a team. One man was fighting with a blonde-haired woman, and the other was stomping a slight figure into the ground, laughing all the while.
"Get away from him!" Naruto roared, gaining a visible reddish tint to his aura and moving on a straight path for the light-haired enemy torturing a boy half his size. He immediately forced the Akatsuki back, with -oh kami, had he really managed to weaponize shadow clones to explode? She cringed a little at the sheer destruction it would have resulted in anywhere else. Here, it just blew up an enormous spray of searing hot sand that showered them even from twenty feet away.
"Is that their-" Sasuke began to ask in an undertone, dark eyes focused on the other mist nin.
"Yepp," Aiko cut him off grimly, eyes flickering to the struggling teenager who was on the verge of panic, curled on the ground bleeding. Panic was an understandable reaction to being pursued by S class criminals, of course, but it was much more alarming than usual when the boy in question was a jinchuuriki. "Assist Naruto, would you? Do not let him get cut. That man with the scythe is bad news."
He moved to Naruto, but Aiko had already flickered to Shinji's side and laboriously flipped him over onto his back to check his vitals and his seal to be sure that everything seemed stable.
As if he were paying attention to their conversation, the man who could only be Hidan gave a whooping laugh, jumping straight over Naruto's opening blow when he tried to turn their match to taijutsu. A terrible sharp joy was contorting his features to something grotesque and beautiful.
He wasn't particularly fast, though that mattered little when he only had to have one hit to have a killing blow.
"Oh pretty girls, I'm flattered to hear you gossip about me!"
Apparently, Hidan had bat ears like Kakashi. And he thought Sasuke was pretty.
'To be fair… He's probably prettier than I am. He's prettier than everyone, the bastard.'
"Actually, your information is pretty fucking good," the man panted, pushing his way closer to where she was standing even as Sasuke joined in and began harassing him, controlling the distance by darting around and trying to trap the older man with a virtual spider-web of conductive wires attached to shuriken. Hidan was momentarily tangled, but slogged close enough to shout at her despite the bleed freely flowing down his legs while Sasuke leapt back and ran through a very familiar series of handsigns. Naruto's eyes widened, and he scurried backwards himself.
"How'd you know that, bitch? Did you come to hear the word of Jashin? I never fuck a heathen, but if you're looking to con- Agh-!"
"That's always so anticlimactic," she mumbled, shading her eyes to check the identity of the enormous invertebrate plopped on top of an S class douchebag. "Is dropping your summons on someone really an approved technique, or is Sasuke just intentionally fucking with us all?"
"I see that we are done here," Hidan's partner called out, leaping backwards away from his fight with Yamato and the mist captain. He sounded entirely too pleased. "I am off to mourn my recently deceased comrade, since I cannot win this fight and take his corpse back from you."
An enraged scream emerged faintly from underneath the bulk of Katsuya's body, making her jolt in shock and give her tummy a quizzical look.
'Oh god, this is embarrassing. Is he really taking the opportunity to leave this guy in hopes that we kill him?'
Yes. Yes, he was. Hidan must be annoying as all hell.
"Is… he going to die?" The woman heading the Mist team wandered just close enough to give the furious screaming coming from under Katsuya's bulk an unnerved look. "Shouldn't that have broken every bone in his body?"
"Yes, that'll slow him down for a while," Aiko agreed mildly, wandering closer to Sasuke's summons now that she knew the three-tailed beast wasn't about to be released on the countryside. "I think that someone should grab his scythe quickly when Katsuya-sama leaves. But don't actually touch it," she stressed. "I'm pretty sure it's dangerous."
Yamato gave her a look that implied she must have hit her head when he wasn't watching, meandering over while rotating his wrist. "You're talking like he's going to get up."
She shrugged. "You never know," was her philosophical bullshit answer.
Sasuke looked appalled when Katsuya disappeared and Hidan wasn't completely pulped. "That makes no sense," he protested flatly, giving Hidan's struggling, gurgling body a disapproving stare. "Medically, that's absolutely impossible. I refuse to allow it. Naruto, Rasengan his head off."
"Yes, yes, queen Sasuke," Naruto snickered, calling up a clone and cocking his hip casually to let it work at shaping the swell of chakra he called forth. The pressure built and built until he quirked a savage little smile (he really wasn't a fan of anyone in a black and red cloak) and sprinted the last few meters to crouch and shove his hand through the mass that had been attached to a body struggling to get up. He aimed for the bulk of the skull, pulping the brain but leaving the jaw and throat merely sliced to hell (the jaw actually cut into three pieces that let it fall apart like a peeled orange).
Aiko felt strangely proud. He'd never even seen a zombie movie (to her knowledge, though he might have been left unsupervised and able to access late-night programs when she wasn't paying attention at some point) but he clearly knew that he should aim for the control center. Nothing with more intelligence than a chicken could hope to live without their brain to issue orders to the body.
"I think that did it," Yamato deadpanned at the mess. It had stopped struggling at least.
Aiko frowned thoughtfully. 'Is that really it? I thought this guy was supposed to be too tough to kill. I wish I knew how that happened in the manga.' In the end, all she could do was shrug. "Looks pretty dead to me. Anyone mind if I light it up?"
Couldn't hurt to be certain, after all.
The woman from Mist scowled. "This was our fight," she began to argue, before Yamato gently cut her off.
"I apologize, but our treaty does compel us to lend assistance, and at least one of them is dead now," he pointed out practically. "I would offer you the head as a good will measure, but seeing as how he didn't want to die otherwise…" he trailed off politely.
She sighed, giving the Konoha team as a whole a tired look. "I suppose you're right. It's just a bit frustrating to fight them for half an hour and have nothing to show for it but the bloodstains that used to be my second." Her expression was pinched in a way that Aiko just now recognized as suppressed grief.
Immediately, the light hearted atmosphere changed. "I'm sorry we were too late for your teammates," Naruto apologized solemnly, turning up to meet her eyes. "We didn't mean to belittle that loss."
They shared a gaze for a moment. Then the woman grunted softly and turned to gather her remaining team member up. "I don't care anymore. Burn him, bury him, take him home and feed him to your dogs. Whatever."
"I think the dogs would get sick," Aiko muttered in an aside to Sasuke. He gave her a disapproving expression and turned away.
'Apparently now is not the time for observations like that.'
Fair enough.
'God, how are those two going to get home?' She cringed. Sasuke looked like he was thinking about offering to provide medical support, but that might not be enough to really be doing right by their allies. The mist team was still weakened and vulnerable, as well as far from home. Were they done with whatever mission they'd been on and had been caught on the way home, or were they still under contract to take care of something?
'Oh. Duh. If they are going home, there's an obvious solution.'
"Er- actually, just a moment!" Aiko called out as the woman moved to laboriously support Shinji's weight enough for them to leave.
'I probably should have thought of this already.'
"Where are you two going? Back to Mist, or…?" she trailed off, tilting her head questioningly.
Shinji stared at her for a moment, blinking gummily. His captain's eyes were hard and she looked like she wanted to scowl, but for some reason she reluctantly shared, "We need to return home."
'Well, that answer conspicuously didn't mention whether or not their mission was already done or what it is, but it makes sense. She doesn't seem enthused about trusting us.'
Still, the offer should be made. "Would you like a ride home?" Aiko suggested guilelessly. "I could get you two to the Mizukage much more quickly than you can travel on your own."
Yamato slapped a hand to his head without bothering to muffle the noise. She could practically hear him moping that she shouldn't be voluntarily offering to share sensitive information with foreigners.
Aiko made a disapproving face and turned to him. "If I didn't offer," she started reproachfully, "The Mizukage would know about the slight when they got back and mentioned our team. Besides, Shinji already knows."
Her captain's eye twitched. Probably wondering why she was on first name terms with a Mist nin he'd never met before. She just rolled her eyes and turned back to the bemused mist nin who had been watching the interchange.
"Er." The woman glanced down at Shinji, and seemed to come to a realization. She paled. "Um. Are you-. I mean, you must be…"
Sasuke managed to give Aiko a look that implied she had managed to locate an absolute lunatic. The woman seemed petrified of her for some reason. Normally, she might have given a shrug in return, but she ignored him. The Mist Jounin looked intimidated enough already without being visibly mocked. "Yes?" she prodded patiently.
Despite looking like he'd been pounded into the ground, Shinji managed to roll his eyes. "Yes, Morino-sensei, this is the big scary seal master."
'This is a first. Are seal masters really so intimidating?'
Aiko kept her confusion off her face. "Is there a problem?"
"No." Morino shook her head and plastered on a strained smile. "No problem at all. I would be honored to accept your offer."
'Okay, this is weird. Two minutes ago she was sniping at us. Does she think I'm going to hold her down and stick a demon in her if she looks away?'
Morino was doing an excellent job of keeping Aiko in her vision even as Sasuke tugged Shinji away from her to provide field care. Her lurking was anxious enough that it actually made Aiko feel uncomfortable. Sweet, clever Naruto sensed and deflected the tension.
Of course, he did that by recounting the one time he'd met a Mist nin before that, so it wasn't that relaxing for Morino. She didn't seem sure if she wanted to be charmed by his cheery attitude and energy, or convinced that relating the time they'd killed Momochi Zabuza was a veiled insult to mist nin in general or a threat that they could do the same to her.
"Okay, time to go," Yamato interrupted when the story transitioned to something he and Jiraiya had done in Rice Country with a traveling circus. Morino gave him an icy stare that implied she had been enjoying that story.
Unsympathetic, Aiko grabbed Morino to drag her closer to Shinji, then rearranged her posture so that she was sort of one-armed hugging both of them around the waist. "Hold on tight," she warned.
Mildly flattered, she noted, 'Shinji must trust me. He doesn't seem nervous at all,' in the second before Morino gripped her with a good forty pounds too much force around her ribs. 'She, on the other hand, definitely doesn't trust me,' Aiko noted, forcing down a pained gasp and a crooked smile at the way Morino was shaking as she yanked on Mei's seal. Yamato's long-suffering face blurred oddly into that of the Mizukage, who was serendipitously in the same position from Aiko's point of view that her captain had been. Morino wheezed sadly and hunched over almost instantly, looking like she was considering being sick. 'You know, traveling this way seems to affect some people much more strongly than others…'
"Mizukage-sama," Shinji squeaked. Aiko pulled her arms back and he stumbled forward awkwardly, nearly falling into a puddle on the white tile floor.
"Yo." She raised her newly freed hand and gave a smile. "Long time, Mei-neechan."
The two Mist-nin who took orders from 'Mei-neechan' in the room gave her looks of varying levels of horror.
"Hello, Aiko-chan." Mei tilted her head skeptically. "Is there a reason you're here." She paused deliberately. "In my bathroom."
"Not in particular," Aiko assured, glancing down at the luxurious purple towel wrapped around the Mizukage's body. "You look nice with your hair up, though. Should wear it like that more often."
Another girl might have cringed to walk in on a foreign Kage while covered in dirt, blood, and the tattered remains of what had once been a nice shirt. But hey, at least they were indecent together.
"It doesn't dry if I leave it up," Mei replied flatly. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm not fit to entertain. May I assume you're here returning those two?" At the confirmatory nod, she gave them an unamused look. "I'll summon you in the morning."
"Yes, ma'am," Shinji forced out, looking like he wanted to die. He gave a perfunctory bow and fled like she was about to change her mind and scoop his eyeballs out for having seen her fresh out of the shower. Morino was already gone.
"You get a kick out of this, don't you?" Mei accused idly, a little smile playing about her lips while she casually pulled open her medicine cabinet and extracted a bottle of some sort of face mask.
Aiko managed to pull her eyes away from the path two terrified Mist-nin had just beat out at top speed to look back at the older woman, but didn't bother to smother her amusement. "I can't imagine what you're talking about. I certainly don't find any amusement in the fact that your subordinates seem to think you would be silly enough to hold a grudge against them because you happened to be half-naked when I offered to take them home after they got pretty well kicked by Akatsuki."
Mei made a sound of comprehension, smearing a green gel on her cheekbones with careful precision. "Mmm, that's what happened, then."
"Yes, I'm sure they'll have a better report for you." Aiko cracked her neck, and enjoyed a deep breath of the moist, floral scented air before she steeled herself to go back to the scrubland where she'd left her team. "Well, I should go."
"Have a nice night," Mei managed, sounding as if she didn't particularly care one way or another. "Say hi to sweetcheeks for me."
Aiko cringed. 'That is just the most undignified, awful nickname for Kakashi. I know that she's just messing with me, but that's going too far.'
She was still cringing when she flashed back to Naruto's side. In her absence, they appeared to have searched the corpse for information and identification so they could officially report him deceased and collect his bounty, if there was one. Without the head, the cloak and his signature weapon would have to do. It might not be good enough for the bounty, but Tsunade would understand.
"I didn't bring another sealing scroll," Yamato muttered, looking uncertainly at the long weapon. It wasn't something they particularly wanted to be seen carrying, even if it didn't emit a foul and evil atmosphere. It seemed almost sentient. "Did anyone else?"
"I have one with some equipment in it," Naruto reluctantly offered, frowning slightly. "We could redistribute that among our packs."
That was far from optimal, if the thing would even react normally to a seal. Yamato, Sasuke, and Naruto already had rather full looking packs, and Aiko had left hers in Rouran after it had been shredded. ('Thank god I already read those reports on enrollment and graduation', she thought regretfully.)
"No, I can get it," Aiko assured her brother, dropping the cloak they'd stripped off Hidan on top of the weapon, inside out so that the clouds were hidden. "I'm the only one who isn't already carrying anything." Gingerly, she used the fabric to pick up Hidan's scythe without actually touching it, held pinched between her thumb and fingers.
Immediately, she jolted. "Fuck!"
It felt as though the flesh was being cooked off her bones under where she gripped the long handle.
Unnerved, she let the scythe drop.
"That thing is evil," she blurted thoughtlessly, turning her hand to examine it. Sasuke made a surprised little grunt and reached over to grab her wrist. The skin where she'd touched the scythe through the cloak was seeping blood through hundreds of microtears. It only took him a few moments to patch the little wounds up, but everyone present looked at the Jashinist's tool with more trepidation after that. That had been the result of an instant's contact through a thick piece of fabric. There was no way they could touch it long enough to seal it into a storage array, even if they wanted to bring something so nasty into Konoha.
Yamato cleared his throat and bent to gather up the cloak, stuffing it into his pack. "Sasuke, kick up a hole, would you? Apparently we aren't taking that with us."
"One or two?" He raised an eyebrow and jerked his head slightly in the direction of Hidan's corpse… which seemed to be twitching, even though it was just a pile of meat with rather a lot of goo around it.
'Muscle spasms or regeneration?' Aiko shuddered. "Are… are we sure he's dead?" she ventured quietly, but no one else responded. There wasn't much to say. Everything about that man was wrong, very wrong, from the stink of his cheap hair gel to the fact that she couldn't sense his chakra when they'd arrived. It was almost as if he was already dead, or a silly genin who didn't realize that hiding all their chakra made them stand out in a crowd. 'It doesn't matter,' she thought viciously. 'He'll be dead for real in a moment.'
"No point in making two holes," Yamato pointed out professionally.
They rolled the body into the hole first, and grimacingly tossed down as much brain matter as they could gather. Sasuke kicked the scythe into the hole on top of its owner's corpse, and gave it a distrustful look an instant before he took a breath. "Fireball jutsu!" His back curled like a cat's for a moment, and the spout of flame poured out and down with licks of heat that stung Aiko's eyes, charring the flesh clean off Hidan's bones and leaving a collapsed skull to grin up at them, inadequately coated in dry remnants of flesh. Chillingly, the broken bones they knew had been caused by Katsuya's weight seemed to have largely healed in the time the body had been sitting still.
Sasuke was extremely proficient with the few fire jutsu he knew. His flames were hotter, larger, and more destructive than Aiko's by a noticeable amount, and her fire was perfectly adequate to melt senbon and kunai. But Hidan's scythe appeared unaffected when the smoke cleared. The metal didn't melt, warp, or even seen to burn. Uneasily, the Konoha team exchanged glances, but no one spoke.
"Ugh, that's so gross." Naruto turned his face away. "Let's cover him before he gets blown away."
He wasn't wrong—already, dry flakes of ash were rising up from the whole skeleton in the burial pit and twisting on the breeze. Sasuke gave everyone else an unimpressed look when they seemed to think he was going to pull a solution out of nowhere as easily as he'd calculated an angle that would send the sandstone in a shear instead of crumple and compact it.
"You can move sand just as well as I can," he pointed out acidly. "Naruto, just make a stupid amount of shadow clones to do it."
He grumbled, but Sasuke was right in that it only took a few minutes of work from ten clones and the team to fill the pit in as if a fissure had never been cracked. Perhaps the hole could have been deeper, but that was much more difficult to accomplish with sand than with dirt. Sand would spill inwards. He was a leathery skeleton, it wasn't as if he could possibly heal from that and dig his way out.
'Thank god.' Aiko felt bone-deep tiredness tugging her body down, to the point where she was almost willing to try to take a nap in the sand. 'We can finally go home now.' The others must have been similarly eager, because they all leapt back into the rhythm of running towards Konoha with a mindless determination that had to be their third or fourth wind of the day.
If they had waited, they might have seen the ashes floating on the breeze clump and stick together like they were pulled by a magnetic force, slowly swelling up with moisture stolen from the grudging atmosphere. With half an hour, they plopped back onto the sand glistening wetly, even if they didn't look like anything in particular yet, and were immediately coated in pale grains. After a few moments, the sand seemed to shiver from struggles below, and the raw flesh began sinking underneath.
~~~
"Home," someone breathed. Aiko didn't care to figure out whom, preoccupied as she was digging out the proper identification number for the gate guard from the recesses of her memory. She had three now, and using the wrong one would probably either convince people that she was an infiltrator or dangerously stupid.
Often, they didn't even need those identification credentials to get into the village since the gate guards knew them on sight or could check their mission documents.
Something had happened during their absence, however. All chitchat ceased in the unusually long waiting line to the gates. Aiko wasn't quite tall enough to count that there were eight guards and the doors were being opened and closed between each entrant until it was nearly her team's turn.
The grim expressions on the faces of two Chuunin she didn't know – meaning that they'd probably been pulled off other duties to supplement the security—convinced her not to ask here.
"Team Yamato?" A scarred man who could have been a Yamanaka took all their credentials at once and shuffled through them. "You're ordered to report to Hokage tower immediately once cleared."
"Of course," their captain agreed professionally, though that standing order probably concerned him as well. Their mission shouldn't have been a terribly large priority. Normally, only politically sensitive missions or those that could affect village security as a whole had to be reported immediately. The general policy was a twenty-four hour grace period to complete a written report and submit it, only supplemented by a verbal debriefing at the Hokage or the mission desk's discretion.
Mukade was a pain in the ass, and their mission report would have eventually been bumped up to a verbal meeting on account of how bafflingly insane it was, but he was hardly a matter of national security.
"Cheer up," Naruto prodded, practically bouncing ahead of the group in his eagerness to be home. He hardly seemed deterred by the nearly empty streets, but the other three were caught between solemnity and caution. "We're home, guys! And we're going to see the old lady, and she's going to think we had the best mission ever, and then we can go out for a celebratory dinner and I bet she'll have another cool job for us-"
"You're making me tired, idiot" Sasuke grunted in faux-irritation, though she was pretty certain he appreciated the lightened mood. He just liked to seem more mature than Naruto.
The first secretary waved them right on up with a cheerful (but tired) smile aimed at Sasuke. The office drones they passed on the middle levels were bustling about with a good deal less levity than usual. Upstairs, Keiko didn't bother to put on a front at all, and the bags under her eyes were a pretty significant hint as to the real state of things. "Oh good, you're here." She faultlessly slashed through one item on an intimidatingly long list with an ease that implied she'd been referencing it far too often. "Go on in."
Sasuke gave her an unusually visible sympathetic look, but strode into Tsunade's office with the casual ease gained from familiarity without another word.
At the sound of the door, Tsunade looked up wearily. There was no humor or fondness on her face at all when she greeted them. "That took longer than expected, and had markedly poor timing," she commented curtly. Before anyone could react, she cracked her neck, looked up, and added, "Not that it's your fault, it's just bad luck. Is there anything especially time-sensitive about your report? Did you get Mukade?"
"We could not take him alive, but we accomplished our main objective," Yamato briskly replied, clearly sensing that she wasn't in the mood to banter. "As for our mission report, a lot that we will have to talk to you about happened, but there's nothing especially time-sensitive or relevant to mission security except that we ran into two Akatsuki on the way back."
"What?" Tsunade interrupted, looking considerably more shocked than she should have been. "But the Uchiha should have been in…" She trailed off, and scowled at Yamato.
"Not Hoshigaki and Uchiha," Yamato clarified. "Two others. I'm relatively certain that one was the Hidan who destroyed Yugakure, but the other offered no identification. The second man escaped, but between Sasuke and Naruto, Hidan is rather thoroughly deceased."
"Thoroughly deceased," Tsunade repeated, a faint tinge of mocking in her tone. "What, precisely, counts as 'thoroughly' deceased and why wasn't the regular state enough?"
"I dropped Katsuya on him and Naruto destroyed his brain, so that he would stop regenerating," Sasuke contributed with a bored air. His mentor snorted, but looked rather smug.
"Yes, well." Yamato shifted his weight, and added, "When we encountered them, they were harassing a team from Mist that included their jinchuuriki. Apparently, they had already lost two teammates and weren't doing well, so I judged that we were obliged to offer assistance."
"Thank god," Tsunade muttered, rubbing the pad of her thumb along the side of her index finger in a compulsion that Aiko was relatively sure related to gambling and counting money. "It would have looked very badly on us if they'd been left. Did you see them safely to their destination?"
"Aiko did," Yamato offered.
The Hokage let out a sigh. "Then they went directly to Terumi? Good work." Wearily, she propped her chin on a hand and surveyed the group, sharp eyes cataloguing the nuances of their appearances. "I was worried when you didn't report on time. Akatsuki got their first jinchuuriki. Apparently, they've decided that any reputation they lost by failing completely when they first made a move needed to be rectified with a decisive strike."
'Well, that's a spectacularly grim subject to come home to.'
She didn't really know what was supposed to happen at this point, to be frank.
"The Raikage's brother is dead, and he's decided it's our fault."
Aiko was pretty sure that wasn't it.
Apparently, the Raikage was acting just as rational as Aiko had always suspected him to be.
'To be fair,' she thought guiltily, 'if it were my little brother who had been killed, I might not be at my best either.'
The thought was monstrous, but so was the risk that it hadn't just been a momentary mistake when the Raikage had lashed out at Konoha for supposedly pointing Akatsuki at Lightning to weaken them in preparation for a war. Konoha's having been directly involved in putting down two Akatsuki members had apparently convinced the Raikage that the attack on Gaara had been a smokescreen to conceal that they were affiliated with Akatsuki, meant to keep him from getting revenge on the real target and not the puppets they'd used to accomplish such a thing.
It wasn't an entirely illogical train of thought, to be fair. Aiko could easily see a village making a play like that… Mostly Lightning. The village that kept trying to steal babies with kekkai genkai really had no room to talk about underhanded power plays.
Of course, if that really was what had happened, the Raikage would have been better off to seek peace with Konoha, because he was on the wrong side of an uneven alliance.
But grief did strange things to thought processes, and it had to sting in an especially clear contrast that Konoha had apparently been easily rebuffing the people who had so easily killed B's team and extracted his bijuu, carelessly leaving the body to be found abandoned in the wilds by Cloud's trackers after the fact. He might think that he had to strike while the iron was hot, both to avenge his loss and to ensure that Konoha didn't manage to wage a war of attrition against Lightning country.
In terms of sheer manpower, Cloud was in a much better position than Konoha. If he decided to go to war, things could become grim even if Rock didn't join in. it seemed unlikely that Cloud could possibly triumph alone, but they could well have a pyrrhic sort of victory.
By getting Konoha's jinchuuriki, for example, since they thought they were owed a bijuu, and blaming someone else would be substantially less painful than admitting that the Raikage had been a moron of momentous proportions to snub Gaara's request for a summit to deal with Akatsuki.
"I don't really care what you want," Tsunade said testily.
'I should probably be paying attention now and analyzing this later.'
"But Tsunade-baachan! Aren't they winning if they keep us all here, too scared to go about business as usual?"
The Hokage rolled her eyes, a hint of fondness behind the movement. "I don't particularly care if the Akatsuki and Lightning think they're winning. What matters is doing what we have to do to keep Konoha safe. Right now, that's best served by concentrating our strength here. Consider this personal development time. Genin and Chuunin aren't going to be leaving the village much, so this is an excellent opportunity for you to spar against your age mates and accelerate training that might otherwise be interrupted by missions."
'Message received.' Aiko slumped a little. Genin and Chuunin wouldn't be leaving the village—that meant that Jounin would. No personal development time for her, then.
Unsurprisingly, Tsunade had her hang back after Naruto and Sasuke left, Yamato giving a curious glance backwards as he shut the door. Aiko braced herself for orders, already anticipating the worst. There was always something else.
"I don't plan on sending you out either unless anything changes, so consider yourself on personal development. On that note, I think it's time for you to finish some of your specialized training. You won't be as busy as usual, so feel free to stop cringing away from me. I'm not a complete monster, you know." Tsunade managed a tired smile. "Hold on a moment…" She rustled around for a form—a prescription note of some type, from what she could tell, and scratched in some coded information that made no sense to Aiko at all. "You'll be taking this directly to Shizune at the hospital either before you go home tonight, or first thing in the morning. There are rather a lot of immunizations to get you started on…"
Paper in hand, she had to wonder if that was really all there was. Useful, yes, but she didn't see how shots qualified as part of training. Tsunade seemed to register her confusion, and looked mildly amused.
"You'll be meeting your new instructor in the ANBU training facility tomorrow night. Don't worry too much—this is a short couple of lectures and not really bestowing an entirely new skill set."
Relieved, Aiko gave a short bow and was grateful to excuse herself. There were two more places she wanted to stop by before she went home and had a nice, hot shower. If she let herself put this off, she might forget entirely.
Involuntarily, she huffed, irritated with herself.
'I shouldn't lie to myself. I'm not likely to forget about the first thing because I want to do it, and I might avoid the second because it sucks. Forgetting hardly factors into the equation.'
~~~
Suddenly, Sensei's bizarre recurring warnings to wait until his prospective partner was seventeen in the unlikely circumstance that he ever decided he wanted to fuck someone fourteen years his junior (advice that first emerged when he was about ten and extended off-and-on until he was fourteen) fit into an unsettling context.
'He was so convinced that I was besmirching his as-of-yet unborn daughter that the abstract concern was retained even after he wiped his memory.' Under his headband, pure stress caused his Sharingan to burn through a shocking amount of chakra before Kakashi calmed his breathing.
Okay, mostly calmed his breathing.
Fine, he was all but hyperventilating, one hand shaking as it supported part of his weight on the counter after his sudden bout of faintness when the end of that jutsu hit him like a brick to the head. It didn't matter—no one was there to see.
His brain was breaking a little bit.
'He didn't say 'don't screw my baby. He said 'don't screw my baby until she's seventeen.' Oh kami, sensei. You are the strangest human being I have ever met.'
Sullenly, Kakashi shook his head and went back to brushing his teeth. He'd been having a perfectly acceptable evening home alone when a splitting migraine had heralded the breaking of what he now knew had been sealed memories.
'Why did he think I was involved with Aiko?'
Calmly, Kakashi spat and rinsed his mouth free of toothpaste, put the brush down, and put his palms on the mirror. Then he leaned forward and thunked his forehead against the glass with a good bit of force.
Nope. Still awake.
Unless those memories had been unsealed far too early, there was no reason for Minato to think that. (Oh kami, what if they had? Did that mean he was going to seduce his former student? He'd never seduced someone in his life, outside of mission constraints, and that didn't count, it was a completely different thing. He could hardly leave forever or kill her when he had the information he needed. This would almost certainly be an extracurricular type of seduction and not an assignment, after all.)
Where had Minato gotten such an idea? Surely not from the way they'd interacted. Shamefully, his nine year old self had been as chronically unimpressed about a team he now knew to be remarkable as he had been about almost everyone else. It just didn't make sense.
'It's not like Minato could have possibly known I've inadvertently scarred the image of her all but naked into my brain, courtesy of Naruto,' he thought sullenly, feeling a resentment for the blonde boy very similar to what he'd felt as a nine year old when he thought Naruto was trying to worm his way into Minato's good graces.
His subconscious eagerly latched onto the scapegoat. Naruto. This was all Naruto's fault somehow. He just didn't know how the boy had done it.
'Well, I do know that I need to sit him and Sasuke down and read them a riot act for being colossal jackasses after a comrade ended up behind enemy lines,' he thought darkly. Did the Academy really not cover that sensitivity training anymore? Even as a nine-year old eavesdropping on a conversation that had nothing to do with him, he'd cringed to realize the seriousness of what exactly the boys had been teasing Aiko about.
In one way, it was a mark of their comparative innocence. No one who had grown up in wartime would do such a thing out of ignorance. Cruelty, perhaps, but not ignorance. Neither of the boys were cruel.
He stiffened at the faint sound of a knock on his door. Damnit, it was the middle of the evening. Had someone come to call him in for an emergency assignment?
'Unlikely. They'd be pulsing their chakra signature to signal an emergency.'
Warily, Kakashi wandered out of the bathroom and meandered to where he'd left a clean mask, not bothering to hurry as he pulled it over his head. Whoever it was could wait.
"Kakashi!"
The voice was muffled, but unmistakable.
Panic.
What to do?
He had definitely not prepared to see Aiko again yet. He was still re-evaluating and assimilating his new memories and experiences.
'Come to think of it, I should probably talk to her about what she confessed to Minato about Sasori.'
And didn't that make him feel like a gigantic shithead? He'd never even asked: content to eliminate the threat and take her bravado at its face. Of course it was bravado. Only an idiot could truly be completely unaffected by being taken prisoner. She was a lot of things (hard to read, occasionally dramatic, and completely unaware of her own limits at times) but she wasn't an idiot.
"There's a jutsu I desperately need you to teach me or I will wilt and die and it'll be your fault," came the faint call.
Involuntarily, he snorted. Was she really still going on about that Shadow Shuriken Jutsu?
"I neeeeeeed it," was the plaintive cry, almost as if she'd heard him, and the soft sound of a little hand connecting with his door. And another- she was pawing at it like a kitten locked outside at night.
Apparently so.
Well, he didn't actually mind teaching that one. Minato had liked it well enough that he'd been eager to learn it. …Though he hadn't used it in so long that he'd barely remembered it existed. With its wide range, it was more flash than substance, unless your opponent was large and slow or otherwise unable to dodge the bulk of it. Personally, it wasn't worth it for him to use in most circumstances. He was so used to thinking in terms of conserving his chakra to compensate for his Sharingan that it was hard to actively choose to use a chakra-expensive jutsu unless it was the perfect one for the task.
He could be an adult and go confront her now, and possibly have that troublesome conversation and teach her the technique as a way to both end the awful emotion-infested dialogue and reward her for not running away when he asked her how she was doing.
Orrrrrr, he could hide under his bed until she left and leave a scroll with the handsigns and an explanation in her mailbox. It was a nearly fool-proof strategy. He had learned it from Minato-sensei himself as an excellent method of placating Kushina-san when she might have otherwise tossed him through a window when he tried to see her in person. Aiko wasn't likely to be angry, but it was still an excellent way to avoid unnecessary socialization…
That second option sounded really good, now that he considered it.
With a sigh, Kakashi opened his door and let a rather determined teenager use those appallingly well-practiced puppy eyes on him. She looked insufferably pleased to see him open the door.
If Aiko was in enough of a mood to come to his apartment and beg him to teach her, he wouldn't be able to hide. She knew where he was at all times (a singularly disturbing thought, had he trusted her any less to respect his privacy). But Aiko probably wasn't in a mood to indulge his desire for avoidance if he was so blatant about it—she might well just use the Hiraishin seal he had in his hip pouch if he ignored her.
'Come to think of it, was that what she was doing in that crowd of puppets?'
It didn't quite fit. She seemed to be able to destroy any machine that she'd touched, but that hardly correlated to the instantaneous travel Hiraishin allowed. But there had definitely been no mundane explosive materials like pre-made tags, powder, or even flammable liquids or gases. It had really seemed that her touch just meant death. There had to be something more to it.
"I can teach you that tomorrow," Kakashi cut Aiko off before she could demonstrate just how little dignity she had when there was something bright-colored and destructive involved, well aware of what she wanted. "But you have to answer a question."
Too late, he realized that he hadn't even decided if he wanted to let her know that he remembered meeting her in the past. Assuming it had happened on that mission and he wasn't remembering things too early—it would be even more awkward if she didn't know what he was talking about…
Well. If he decided he wanted to let the subject drop, he could always come up with another question that wouldn't give that away.
"Yeah, sure, whatever." She grinned up at him, looking tired and like she'd been beat to hell and back. "That was all I wanted. See you at noon?"
'My keen intuition tells me that her mission was not particularly relaxing.'
Kakashi repressed a sigh. So much for his good intentions. Why did he even let Tsunade avoid really giving her time off? Even if her mood seemed better, her physical condition didn't seem improved at all. "Seven a.m. sharp," he corrected gravely. Then he closed his door without waiting for her reply.
She'd probably go to bed now that she had what she wanted.
~~~
'Well, that went much better than I'd feared.'
But god, it was wonderful to see her Kakashi again, and not the weird chibi version who was about as approachable as a poison-tipped cactus. Even if he did look uncomfortable to see her at his door. Disoriented, even.
Maybe he was just that tired.
"I don't see how I could possibly sleep right now." Aiko heaved a sigh, not bothering to hurry at all. Really, what she was doing was best described as an 'amble', but she was enjoying the weather and the sights of her own Konoha. Even if it was in lockdown because they were possibly on the verge of war, it was still a thousand times better than the idyllic, pre-Kyuubi version she'd last seen.
And hadn't that all been food for thought?
Her feet took her somewhere she hadn't been in years without her making a real, conscious decision. It had never been a favorite destination.
'No delicate flower, I,' Aiko mused with rather bleak humor, surveying the field where the idiotic kunoichi classes had been forced to meet to prepare flower arrangements. Her classmates had generally treated it like a field trip, but she'd always had condescension for the stereotyping. Kunoichi weren't all infiltration specialists—putting flowers in vases was never going to be that crucial to her life, and just wasn't that hard either. (Besides, how likely would it be that someone would stop her to demand an impromptu floral arrangement even if she was masquerading as a civilian woman?)
A lot of the rules they had learned seemed so arbitrary and useless. She could appreciate flower meanings as a code—one she had dutifully memorized at the time and all but forgotten now—but really, it seemed so pretentious to her to make a grand system of it. What was the point of complicating something that was at its essence about making beautiful things? All the rules made hanakatoba an excellent outlet for creativity for people who thought like Ino did, but for the layman who would never create anything so complex or even be able to properly appreciate what others made… They were just in the way.
'People make things too complicated. Unfortunately, I'm still a people.'
She'd had to admit to herself what she was really doing when she first bent to pick a particularly fragrant flower—one that stank, but she liked the color. Aiko didn't bother to lie to herself about where she was going after that being an impulse, but she was a little grateful that it was almost dark, even if no one was likely to bother her there.
"Hey, mom. Dad." Aiko cleared her throat awkwardly, feeling a few delicate stems break under her fingers. She consciously loosened her vise grip and laid down the rather sparse, utilitarian bouquet beside the plain, ugly hunk of rock. "I, ah, picked out the flowers myself based on appearance, so they probably say something like 'victory in battle' or 'a pox upon your house, foul harlot', but I meant well. I'm… I'm sorry I've never come to talk to you before," she settled, feeling unbearably stupid.
It was just a rock. It couldn't possibly hope to stand in for the real people she'd convinced herself for years that she hadn't any curiosity about, even if their names were engraved there. How very deconstructive—both stated presence and acknowledged absence were encompassed in a few simple carved symbols.
'Does this really help anyone?'
Unsure, she blinked away itchiness in her eyes and rubbed at the back of her neck. "I think I was wrong about you two, and I understand you a little better now. It's…" she coughed, and tried again. "Making choices for and involving other people is harder than I thought it was. And I suppose I can't judge you by what you did on one particular day."
'Not as clear cut, is it?' a small, vicious part of her mind mocked her own past self. 'It's scary, having other people depend on you, and that was just one mission. Maybe you wouldn't have had the hardness of heart to choose your family over the hundreds of people in the village. Maybe you would have taken the easier way out of dying as a hero and avoiding being hated for your choices.'
She swallowed, hard.
'I don't… I don't want to think that I'd choose the greater good over Naruto. I don't.'
The stupid rock didn't have any answers for her.
Frustration and loneliness pulled through her chest like a violent wind, leaving her feeling bereft. Of what, she didn't know. Companionship? Guidance? Some mythical parental figure who would take care of everything for her? She scoffed bitterly at her own foolishness.
Still, the stone stood there. Implacable, impersonal, as if standing in judgment for the crimes she might commit one day against people who tried to harm those she cared about, or those she was sworn to defend.
'I wish I'd gotten to stay in Konoha longer that first day instead of leaving for Rouran again right away. I liked Minato much more than I expected to, so I might have liked to meet Kushina.'
Too late now.
Aiko averted her eyes, noting the grass wavering in the breeze more as a passage of shadows than sharp detail. "So… I think that's about it," she muttered, not entirely certain that coming to talk to a stone with names on it had helped anything. "I… goodnight, guys." She gave a jerky bow and fled the conventional way, letting her feet take her away from that one-sided conversation with a rush of air on her face and a pounding beneath her soles.
There was no rest that night, but there was thankfully a long, hot shower that cleaned off twenty years of dust and stress. Unable to sleep, Aiko stared at her ceiling until light crept back in.