If you want to help me financially, you can do it on
https://ko-fi.com/neverluckysmile
The toad fidgeted a little, directing big pleading eyes up at the dark-haired child in the room. Children often carried candy, right? And they were susceptible to emotional manipulation and cute things. And Gamatsu was adorable.
Sasuke glowered, wishing that old hag would just hurry up and finish reading. He swore that thing was staring at him. Whatever was going on must be important. When he had reluctantly brought the foul thing to the tower, she had been in a meeting of some sort with an ANBU operative and the Nara clan head (a group that was assembled surprisingly often). He'd caught the end of a sentence when he'd come to the door. Oddly enough, it seemed to be about how clan heads were unsuitable for something or another.
Possibly the Nara clan head was as lazy as his son and avoiding another responsibility, Sasuke thought. Or perhaps he'd misheard.
In any case, when she'd seen the toad, the Hokage had groaned and ushered both men out of her office with instructions to keep on doing what they had been doing.
He wasn't entirely out of the information loop—he knew that toads were the summon clan tied to Naruto's teacher. They appeared in the Hokage's office (or in the case with this one, accidentally got lost somewhere in Konoha and had to be escorted there) from time to time with messages of some sort. But usually, Tsunade didn't spend so long in her 'thinking' pose afterward. He liked to sass his shishou occasionally, but he knew better than to make a sound when she had her eyes closed, and forehead pinned between her thumb and forefinger.
Shizune nudged his shoulder companionably, winking and spelling out 'katana tonight' with her free hand. He tried not to smirk—weapons training with Shizune was probably the best part of his week, and he would rather do it more than twice every seven days or so when she wasn't too busy. It seemed strange when he consciously realized that sweet, gentle Shizune had qualified for ANBU work and had of course mastered their trademark blade, but that didn't make it any less true. Or useful. Itachi had mastered the blade as well, after all.
'Yes,' he signed back, keeping his hand obscured from Tsunade's perspective. Just in case she looked up. The Hokage was a grumpy old hag sometimes.
"Shizune, I need a drink."
Other times, she was a grumpy old drunk.
His senpai scowled gently, putting hands to hips and tilting them confrontationally. "Shishou! You're still working for at least another hour. Can't you wait?"
Tsunade gave him a pleading expression. "You there. My cute apprentice." (Shizune gasped, faux-hurt). "Be a good student and get your poor, suffering mentor something hard to drink." She nearly welled up with tears. "I have to break bad news to your former sensei, that unkempt lunatic."
Instantly Sasuke understood her position. Kakashi could be a bit difficult. Assuming the ten minute to four hour wait didn't already have you murderous, his unique brand of charm could inspire that feeling almost instantly if he felt like you needed to be punished passive aggressively. "I'll find something," he promised, turning away and leaving the office at a jog. If he hurried, he could come and go before Kakashi came around. He hated getting caught between his two mentors. Tsunade was his mentor now, but Kakashi had been a decent teacher to him and there was still the possibility Sasuke might need him in future.
Shizune took the paper Tsunade had discarded and began reading. She did her best not to giggle, she really did. "That's lovely, but I'm not sure why it's relevant to Hatake-san," she gasped.
"Not that part!" Tsunade snapped, flushing red. "The last part. I'm guessing this letter was written over a few days and the last part is very recent."
A few minutes later, Shizune's expression shifted, levity gone. "Oh dear." She sucked in a long breath and unintentionally held it, expelling deeply when she'd finished. "Well… Good luck, shishou." She began to back away. "I'm late for a shift at the hospital."
No way was she going to be caught up in one of their bizarre power plays. For a guy who didn't want to be Hokage, Hatake-san sure challenged Tsunade-sama's authority an awful lot. Granted, to Shizune's knowledge he only openly defied Tsunade the once over her hare-brained idea to make a thirteen year old a Jounin before she'd led a single mission as a Chuunin. (Shizune hadn't been fond of the idea either, no matter how 'safe' the posting Tsunade wanted her to fill would supposedly be or how badly the numbers needed to be filled.)
There was no way that he didn't know just how much it pissed her off to have to wait hours to give mission briefings. Hatake-san provoked her mentor on purpose.
But she couldn't really do much to him. How does one discipline a man who has practically no ambitions? Anything that would interfere with his combat efficiency was out—he was currently uncontested as the most powerful shinobi in her active forces, so demoting him or locking him up would be harming her own efforts to make Konoha seem powerful after the recent power imbalances. That was the same reason she didn't send him out on extended missions—it was a delicate balance between taking advantage of his skills and making sure that the other countries knew that the Copy Nin could be in Fire Country at any given point in time. It grated, but she knew that his reputation was one of the things keeping the wolves at bay.
In a practical sense, any four of her Jounin were probably more useful in a large fight than the Copy Nin. He wasn't an army by himself, and could be overcome. But a large part of what maintained the tenuous balance between the great powers was the fear of big names and their potential. Reputation was everything, and people tended to think of powerful shinobi opponents in terms of "Do we have anyone who could beat them", instead of the more logical, "What would we have to do in order to kill this troublesome person, whether that means sacrificing a few high-level shinobi or outsmarting them". The ninja world was sometimes a silly place like that.
If the real aim of jutsu development, for example, was the ability to aid warfare in traditional ninja fashion, the field would probably have been discarded. An assassination could be done silently, quickly, and from almost any distance without the tell-tale flare of chakra to alert any guards with simple weaponry.
No… the jutsu arms race was a dick-measuring contest. Shizune pulled up her schedule for the day, relieved to see that she had a surgery coming up soon. Having something to concentrate on would help her relax.
Shizune had never tried to join in on the rush for reputation like her shishou and her teammates had. She used the same summons as her mentor, but her name wasn't internationally feared. Konoha needed heroes like Tsunade, Kakashi, and the Red Chained Death… but not all of Konoha's heroes could be big names. Being a big name made a shinobi into a big target.
Unfortunately, it looked like that was happening too early to Aiko-chan. It wasn't exactly shocking. Tsunade had known what she was doing when she asked Hatake-san to see if the girl could use the legendary chakra chains. But it was a little depressing to know that she didn't have the opportunity to become a truly exceptional ninja before she had a reputation. It would be one thing if she'd gained that reputation by doing something truly monstrous like the Sannin's legendary battle against Hanzo the Salamander—a reputation that was already tested didn't draw nearly as many fortune hunters as a reputation for a rare and powerful bloodline ability. Her youth would work against her (no matter what Gai thought on that matter). Children did seem like easier targets.
In the administration building, Tsunade was bracing herself for another temper tantrum, knowing full well that the stupidly blank expression could be hiding any number of ridiculous thoughts that somehow cycled around to place blame on her shoulders. She hadn't quite forgotten the last argument yet. Her nerves were taut, and she was ready with any number of cutting rejoinders about where exactly the blame for this situation should rest.
"Ah. Is that all?"
She stared, dumbfounded. "You're not bothered in the least."
Hatake shrugged, looking perfectly at ease. "I didn't teach her an A class ability with the blindly optimistic idea that she would never use it," he said mildly. "I believe that use in combat is in fact the purpose of learning jutsu. It's where I tend to use my deadly jutsu. It was unfortunate that she used it in front of Rock nin, but no one has ever told her why that was a bad idea." He gave her a rather pointed look. "Seeing as how those much older and wiser than me have concluded it's too dangerous for the twins to know the truth, I thought that you had already taken those incredibly obvious concerns into consideration."
"Right," she said weakly. Tsunade a made a fist and thumped lightly at her chest, coughing slightly to clear her voice. "Well. Yes, that's all. Take the letter with you, Naruto wrote notes for you and Aiko. I took Sasuke's out already." She frowned. "At least, I assumed he's the 'bastard' in question that it's addressed to."
"Good call." He eye-smiled and stuffed the papers into his book before giving her a sloppy salute and shunshin-ing away. She didn't see the way that his jaw clenched or that carefully deliberate way he slouched against a tree to read the missive for himself.
When she was alone, Tsunade took the opportunity to gently bang her head against the deck. Just once- she didn't indulge in this often, but it felt appropriate right now. In retrospect, it seemed obvious that children didn't know to act on knowledge they had been forbidden from having.
'Maybe it's time to rescind that order. Aiko should know why she's being hunted, and Naruto is with the one person who knew Minato best of all.' Tsunade sighed, feeling old and tired. 'I'm sure the pervert would love to talk about the good old days.' She was awfully advanced in youth (thank you, Gai) to be adjusting to the role of a Hokage. Really, she wasn't that much younger than the Sandaime had been the first time he retired. Thinking about setting up the future generations for success was an overwhelming task. The brats that Jiraiya's brat had spawned were all grown up for Kami's sake. She'd found herself a couple of successors (and that Uchiha brat had been a better find than she'd anticipated, with equal measures of grit and talent) and Jiraiya had found another one.
She was a little uneasy about that—it would kill the man to lose another student. And besides, if anything happened to this one and Jiraiya never got to train another student, whoever picked up the contract would be starting over from scratch. But she couldn't do much about that- Jiraiya didn't really take her orders and she didn't want to cause him the pain of letting yet another vulnerable student into his heart. Naruto just had to be the student Jiraiya could rest his hopes on.
Her line of thoughts turned to her other teammate (and no matter how many years had passed, on some level she still thought of him as her teammate). He had just the one surviving student in the village… How old was Anko, anyway? Hell, she had to be in her early twenties. That was old enough to take on a student, wasn't it?
Tsunade sighed, pushing herself up from her desk. It had been a long day, and she had another meeting with that pointy-headed brat from Sand tomorrow- the third day in a row. She'd hoped to have that over quickly, but now there was more information to share. Jiraiya thought it was important that everyone know that the jinchuuriki were being hunted and that he was growing more concerned about Akatsuki. If they were going to be allies, sand should know.
"Be a damn shame if we lost that black-eyed snot nose," she grumbled to herself somewhat sarcastically.
It was almost an insult that the jinchuuriki Sand had attempted to weaponize against them had been sent with the diplomat. Judging by reports of his involvement in the failed invasion, the boy had been brutal. He was dangerous. She wouldn't have tolerated him in the village if not for one person's babbling on the subject- the relentlessly optimistic brat who had returned her to the village. If Naruto had accurately assessed her own personality at a glance and convinced her to return, he might have actually seen something others had missed in the One-Tails' jinchuuriki.
Naruto had done his level best to convince her that the brat was really a good person and should be trusted. Tsunade wasn't entirely convinced, but he hadn't done anything remotely suspicious in the time he'd been in the village.
'In fact', she thought rather sourly, 'He may be the evidence I use for an argument about a bizarre, previously unnoted Uzumaki tendency to assume the best of homicidal maniacs. Worst of all, the lunatics may be right.'
She hadn't been best pleased to hear from ANBU Cat that Uzumaki Aiko had approached the dangerous foreigner of her own volition and then proceeded to physically drag him to a damn ice cream shop while he looked confused. Tsunade didn't know the chit well— all she knew was that the girl seemed competent enough on paper, apparently tugged at long-dormant parental instincts in that damn Hatake brat, and was the object of a hilariously obvious fixation by her own apprentice. (When he referred to just about everyone with mild disrespect except 'Aiko-senpai', she had noticed and laughed over it with Shizune).
Maybe her personal observations of the girl as quiet, reasonably intelligent, and serious had been off. Personally, Tsunade found the idea of pursuing a friendship with a foreigner who had tried to kill you in past to be particularly unintelligent. But she wouldn't deny that Naruto and Aiko's general blockheadedness and lack of social awareness would be a boon if Konoha did tie itself to Suna.
'Really,' she lamented as she got ready to leave for the day, 'It's a damn shame that those two idiots got assigned to Hatake as a sensei. Someone more socially competent might have helped them.' She couldn't help but snort at her next thought and half-wished someone else was around to share it with. 'In the kingdom of the socially blind, the one-eyed man is king.'
Before she left, Tsunade jotted down a note to herself—she'd have Anko brought in for a meeting in the early morning and tell her that she had to find a child to take as a student. Then she stalked out the door, giving a warning glance to the secretary who opened her mouth as if to say something.
She was the Hokage here, damnit. She didn't have to answer to anyone.
A few moments later, she backtracked and asked Keiko to have Anko summoned to her office at her earliest open appointment. Upon further reflection, it made sense to make use of her secretary to set appointments.
~~~
"That's the girl?" Temari hissed while their escort stared blankly, trying not to elbow her otouto in her excitement. Gaara looked as placid as ever, only nodding in response. The girl in question was wandering down the street with a produce bag, gazing up at a man with spiky white hair. She appeared to be talking up a storm, and her body language was directed solely to her companion. In contrast, he was slouched and appeared to be barely awake.
She sighed. 'It's that same weirdo I keep running into,' she groused. On one hand, it made some sense. This chick was everywhere she looked. It was like Konoha only had the one Chuunin. The girl had displayed interest in Gaara at the tower, and displayed a distinct lack of survival instincts every time Temari had seen her.
The first time three or so years ago in Suna, she had been infuriated by the smarmy Konoha kunoichi wandering around their streets after curfew as if nothing was wrong. That had been back when Gaara was at his worst and the village was constantly on lock-down. She and Kankuro had both been tense, constantly in fear for their lives.
Less than half a year ago at that Chuunin exam, it had become clear that the other girl was above her level and actually working with the half-naked lunatic running the second exam. She had accordingly found a safer target to poke at- a testy blonde with annoyingly perfect hair.
Temari hadn't seen the redhead again until she showed up leading a group of genin to stop Gaara. She was a bit unclear on exactly what had happened, but the results made it clear that a few genin and one Chuunin had somehow stopped him. Gaara wasn't talking about it and Konoha surely wasn't sharing their intelligence on the matter. It was enough to almost make her regret hanging back from the fight.
So she was wary.
On one hand, this might not be as big of a deal as she had thought. Gaara hadn't seemed to realize that she'd assumed he had taken the other girl on a date.
It was almost a little disappointing. She'd had a thrill of sisterly pride at the idea of her little brother going on his first date (never mind that she hadn't been on one). It might have been a massive boon for her plan to get him the Kazekage robes as well. The biggest stumbling block she would have to navigate was the fact that everyone was terrified of Gaara and thought he was completely alien- inhuman and unrelatable. If he had practice socializing in Konoha, it might expedite things back home.
On the other hand, it could be dangerous for him to grow close to a foreign kunoichi just when he was learning how to be human. If this girl were the mercenary sort, she could be intending to subvert Gaara to Konoha, or just gain information.
Either way, she was probably screwed. He had eventually clarified that the girl he had met was Uzumaki Naruto's sister. 'And doesn't that explain so much,' she thought sarcastically. They were a weird bunch. She half-hoped there weren't more. Suna might not survive the alliance.
If Gaara wanted to talk to her because the girl was a connection to Naruto, there was almost no chance she'd be able to convince him not to talk to her anymore. Not that Gaara had ever really listened to her in the first place. At best, he would do what he wanted regardless of her warnings. At worst, he would become irritated with her for attempting to get between him and Naruto. He only had the one friend at the moment, and Gaara was pretty attached already. Seeing how much he had changed in the short months since the Uzumaki boy had talked sense into him, Temari didn't even want to detach her brother from the foreign nin.
However unwise it was, it seemed that Gaara had acquired a second friend for himself.
Since she was such an excellent sister, she had to at least try to scope out the girl. It was her duty as an older sibling.
~~~
"Are you aware that the two Suna ambassadors are following you?" Kakashi asked his apprentice mildly before he left. The girl flushed a little.
"Um, yes," she admitted. "I think that might be my fault. I saw Gaara-san wandering around yesterday."
She frowned slightly, letting the prepared not-quite-a-lie slip out. "I wanted to see what it was that Naruto had spotted in him."
Kakashi gave a long-suffering sigh and intentionally mussed up her hair. "You shouldn't be so hard to keep alive. Now that you've finally managed the chakra chains, I want you to master them as soon as possible. Preferably in a way that involves no Konoha casualties."
She flushed at the reference to her failure so far to use any less than terrifyingly lethal force with her chains. Until she knew her strength and how to use them to restrain instead of kill, she couldn't be said to have succeeded at her technique. It would be stupid to try to improve the chains before she had mastered them.
"I have someone in mind as a training partner for you. In the meantime, I want you to work on your kenjutsu. Hopefully, you'll have easy opportunities soon."
She nodded obediently, not questioning the rather strange statement or showing surprise when he poofed out of sight. He knew what he was talking about. He always did. But shishou almost never answered questions. Aiko gently touched the handle of the short ANBU style blade she had been practicing with lately as if to make sure it was still there. She had bought it herself with the shop owner's guidance under the vague guiding instructions Kakashi had given her. The weight of it still felt strange to her, even now that she was finally getting used to the heavy Chuunin vest.
The letter he had passed on to her was tucked into her pocket. Oddly enough, her shishou had found her while she was out at the market for fresh fruit and vegetables to hand it over and caution her about what having a bounty on her head meant.
Frankly, she was surprised. It hadn't seemed like that big of a deal to her—lots of people she knew had bloodlines or other special abilities. She'd only killed one man with it, in that altercation and since. Aiko had seen Anko use senbon to far more deadly effect in past, for the kami's sake.
It was something she could learn to live with. The advice she had been given boiled down to 'don't leave survivors to talk about her abilities.' (Unless she'd done something spectacularly impressive that she wanted to become public knowledge, of course, was the caveat).
As a kunoichi, her life was meant to be dangerous. She would always be running into people who wanted her dead. Anyone she had reason to be worried about losing a fight to either wouldn't be interested in her comparatively small bounty or would be intelligent enough to want to know more about her combat abilities before engaging her. The bounty had a sparse information section with a bare physical description, her name, one special skill and a guess at her overall level gauged from one short encounter. Anyone stupid enough to try to collect on that contract without more information would probably be someone she could defeat out of hand.
She was totally going to find a copy of her bounty and keep it. It was pretty fucking cool, when she really thought about it. God, Karin was going to freak out.
~~~
'Of course shishou was right about my chance to practice swordplay,' Aiko thought the next day with a smile. When she had reported personally to the Hokage's office for her orders (and seen a pouty Anko stomping out) she had found out that her primary mission this time was actually the elimination of a small group of troublemakers that had been reported by a group of merchants when they'd arrived in town.
Apparently three or four people had turned to banditry lately. Granted, there was always someone unintelligent enough to risk crime even when the consequences were likely to be immediate and severe. When civilians were willing to risk banditry so close to a ninja village, it generally meant one of two things. Either the village was regarded as being too weak for them to waste the manpower on a minor problem, or that their targets were minor enough that no one would care about a few fleeced merchants. After all, if they had been intelligent enough to hire shinobi protectors, the bandits wouldn't have bothered. In a way, bandits like those helped keep ninja economies together.
Unfortunately for this particular group of troublemakers, Konoha was not as weak as they were supposed and the people they had robbed had possessed friends with enough money for a C-class mission.
It was barely deserving of that title, being within a few hours travel of the village and with so few low level targets, but every mission with potential for combat had to be rated above D-class. The run to the closest outpost had actually been postponed, but since she had already been on a conveniently low-level team her partners would be her three genin. She had been instructed to guide them through their first combat experience and brush with death but to avoid having them deal it out directly if at all possible—it was too traumatizing. When that happened, it sometimes set young ninja back on their ability to adjust to shinobi life.
Aiko was far too practical to let that happen. Aside from her personal fondness for her first team, she didn't believe in squandering resources.
The genin weren't told of the change in mission directives until they were out of town that afternoon, heading in a slightly different direction. This was apparently standard procedure- Konoha didn't want to send shinobi out on obvious, easily intercepted patterns or give anyone an opportunity to set a trap for an inexperienced team. It would be for the best if no one knew what exactly was going on at any given point in time.
The more she learned about how Tsunade ran the village, the more Aiko was impressed. If being Hokage hadn't been Naruto's dream she might have wanted to see how well she could do at the job herself. It seemed like such a shame she'd never have an opportunity to be the de facto queen of a small country (hey, being 'Queen' sounded much better than 'Kage').
'Maybe in the next life,' she snickered.
Perhaps she was sending the bandits that she easily tracked down by footprints from the scene of the reported robbery to a better life as well. A girl could never know. The universe was full of wonder. She glanced backwards to assess her team before she made a move when they finally found their targets bedded down for the night. 'A bit green-faced, but fine.'
If she had been the slightest bit worried about these men's abilities, she would have killed them all in their sleep. Her reasons for allowing the man on watch to make a dying gargle that brought the other three out of their sleeping rolls were two-fold.
Firstly, it might be less traumatizing for the kids to be able to think of the people she was about to kill as opponents and villains instead of sleeping victims. In her experience, it was less disturbing to kill in the heat of a fight than by gently letting blood in someone's sleep. It was perhaps silly- it might be kinder to let them feel no fear. But she cared more about the genin than the bandits, to be honest.
The second reason was more practical than kind-hearted. She had been told to practice her sword work, after all. Killing them in their sleep would only have been useful for practicing her Ring-Wraith impersonation, and it wouldn't even be funny since no one else would get the joke. Shame, that.
When the deed was done and Aiko had the knowledge that could only come from experience of just how much force was required to separate a head from the body with a single blade, more than one shaking child vomited. Gently, Aiko pulled down the mask that protected her mouth from bloodspray to rest around her neck and rubbed each of their backs in turn. She murmured soothing nonsense before patting Ken fondly and instructing the three to wait a moment while she finished up. Aiko burnt the corpses effortlessly—she felt more at home on jobs like this than any other. They went back to the hunter and tracker roots of her training under Kakashi.
Chakra sense lit up like radar, she swung her legs in the air from her perch on a rock over the stream where her ducklings were cleaning up and refilling water pouches. She was no Karin, of course, but her range was wide enough that she could feel the flickering of both the outpost and ninja back home.
No one protested when she didn't allow them to bed down for the night, instead heading back to Konoha immediately. There was no point in lingering in the forest when they could make it back to the village before first light.
Aiko was practical, after all.