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edenfalling"The Guardian in Spite of Herself" is the sequel to "The Way of the Apartment Manager," which can be found in final form here on ff.net, or in beta draft with comments here on my livejournal. It also has fanart, which can be found here.
Here is chapter 12, in which Naga-tachi begin tracking Itachi northeast, Naruto gets the last word in a fight, Sasuke experiments with unhealthy coping methods, Eiji and Ginji do not appear, and Yukiko really needs a vacation.
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The Guardian in Spite of Herself: Chapter 12
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The campsite was a dead loss. Naga forced herself to help examine it, but she didn't really see half of what passed before her eyes; the colors and forms wouldn't resolve into anything meaningful.
Psychosomatic, she told herself after the twentieth time she blinked and rubbed her eyes to clear them. It was just stress and her mind flinching away from something too raw and painful to work through without time, rest, and a lot of meditation.
Kakashi, Suisen, Kohaku, and the dogs poked around for maybe half an hour, confirming the outline of the fight and Itachi's outbound trail. It was faint -- Anbu knew all the tricks for concealment -- but it was there and even if Itachi could fool either human minds or canine noses, he probably couldn't fool both at the same time, at least not for long, and especially not at a remove of several days and who knew how many miles.
"Would he head for a village or stay hidden?" Kafunnokaze asked as they struck camp and prepared to head out. "At patrol speed, Kaiminori is about one day northeast along the border. He might have stopped there for supplies or information. We could save time heading there directly instead of following any switchbacks he tried."
Naga and Kakashi exchanged a glance. Kakashi held up his hands in a shrug; Naga twitched her shoulder. "He's arrogant. I'd stay low, but he may not think he needs to," Naga said.
"If he took off his forehead-protector and didn't use Sharingan, he could easily blend into most populations," Kakashi added. "The village wouldn't have been a significant risk. Was he carrying supplies, Naga?"
She frowned, trying to remember. "Not that I saw. But you can hide anything in tassel grass; he could've dropped a pack before he broke cover."
"Pakkun--" Kakashi began.
"Way ahead of you," the small dog grumbled, scratching his ear with a hind paw. "We found a small patch of crumpled grass that smells of the target and that fresh breeze shit Anbu soaks all their cloth in. If your Uchiha didn't drop a pack for an hour or two, I'm a monkey's uncle."
"Estimated size of the pack?" Suisen asked briskly as she shouldered her own bag.
"Standard, but it wasn't heavy," said Pakkun, rising from his crouch. "By the time he got here, he'd been moving for what, five days? He needed to resupply."
"Kaiminori it is," Kakashi decided. "Okay. Move out; I want us there by mid-afternoon."
"You said Kakashi was a goofy idiot," Kafunnokaze murmured to Naga as they started northeast, coving the ground in an easy loping run. "Does he have a split personality?"
Naga shook her head. "The loopy slacker's a mask, even if he wears it nearly all the time. Underneath he's all tied up in knots he won't let anyone find the loose ends for. Think he likes being a mess, don't ask me why. All jounin are crazy." She twitched, thinking of Maito Gai, or Mitarashi Anko, or Hyuuga Ren, her own jounin-sensei for one year -- that was a relationship she'd been glad to drop, along with the rest of that mismatched team. Even her parents were downright weird; they just hid it better than most high-level ninja. It probably came of working covert ops.
"That's okay. I'm sure insanity will be attractive on you," Kafunnokaze said, and dropped a kiss on her temple before dashing ahead to take point.
Naga fought a silly grin for the next half hour.
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Genjutsu taught a person how to juggle hundreds of details in the mind's eye. However, there was a difference between details you controlled and details the rest of the world threw at you, especially when the world seemed to take malicious glee in adding new complications. Past a certain number of variables, Yukiko gave up and started dumping her problems onto other people's shoulders.
"Yu-kun, Sakama-kun, if you don't shape up and behave for Yoshitaka-san, I swear I'll talk some of my old ninja friends into skinning you alive."
The boys blinked. "You sound really mad, Yukiko-neechan," Naruto said after a moment. "What did we do? We've been good!"
"This is a definition of 'good' that includes two near falls off a bridge because they got into a fight and didn't watch where they were running, one expensive bolt of silk knocked into a mud puddle at the door of a shop -- which I had to buy and will have to haul all the way to Tengai and back or pay to store here for a month -- and earsplitting arguments every hour all afternoon," Yukiko told Yoshitaka-san as she pushed the boys into the Seven Larks inn. "I have to show Seichi a few things, and then I want a couple hours away from my annoying little brother and his equally annoying friend. I apologize preemptively for any trouble they start, and thank you for agreeing to watch them during dinner."
She bowed and dragged Seichi out the door before Naruto had any chance to protest.
"We don't have to report in now," Seichi said as he detached Yukiko's hand from his sleeve and started walking up the hill. "I could do this after dark when the boys are asleep." His gray duster flapped loosely around his legs.
Yukiko shrugged. "I know, but I need a couple hours away from Naru-- from Yu-kun, or I might end up strangling him. Besides, this helps our cover; we have a legitimate excuse to visit the guard station, and if you really were an apprentice trader, it would be my responsibility to show you around town."
"True," Seichi said, and fell silent.
He seemed to have let the Tsukene persona drop for the moment, since nobody from the caravan was around. Yukiko was grateful; she had nothing against a little flirting, in moderation, but there was a difference between flirtation and being sleazed at, and Tsukene not only crossed that line, he mopped it off the metaphorical floor. Then he made suggestive poses with the mop.
Yukiko sighed. Okay, she was being unfair. Seichi seemed like a decent person under the assassin's ice and Tsukene's sleaze, and even the sleaze wasn't as bad as she was making it out to be. She was just tired, stressed, and not coping with things half as well as she normally could. Keeping track of Naruto was tricky in the most favorable circumstances, and a deep cover assassination mission was about as far from favorable as she could get without wandering into a war zone.
And she was trying to stop thinking about Naruto, damn it. Where was a good distraction when she needed one? ...Couldn't Seichi carry on a normal conversation? Well, she'd just start one herself.
"What, exactly, makes Amane Eiji so dangerous?" Yukiko asked, and then wanted to bite out her tongue. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She knew better than to ask for that kind of detail, and she definitely knew better than to talk about a mission in public. She really needed to focus.
Seichi wrapped an arm around her shoulders, leaned in with a smile... and miraculously didn't strangle or threaten her. Instead, he whispered into her ear, "He has a dream. He says that the hidden villages and the daimyo keep civilians weak and divided, that we block trade and destroy infrastructure, that we deliberately keep people from guiding their own lives, and that our very existence endangers everyone by creating a constant risk of war and an endless stream of missing-nin who prey on traders and isolated villages. Also, he says we turn children into monsters by teaching them to kill before they're old enough to realize what that choice means."
Huh. An idealist. People like that were always dangerous, even if they were right on some points. Maybe especially if they were right on some points; that made it easier for them to gain followers.
"I think civilians would be more likely to start wars than we are, and they'd probably kill a lot more people before they reached a truce," Yukiko murmured. "I understand why he has to go -- anyone saying those sorts of things is going to cause nothing but chaos and carnage -- but I feel sorry for him. He just wants people to be peaceful and to respect each other. It's a nice dream. And he's right about the kids."
"Death is a fact of life," Seichi said, combing his free hand through Yukiko's hair. "Where's the harm in teaching children how to face that without flinching?"
"There's a difference between facing death and creating death," Yukiko said as she pushed Seichi's arm off her shoulder. "But we can argue later; for now, let's just make our reports and talk to Kurenai."
The guard post was a small, unobtrusive building halfway up the hillside, which looked like nothing more than a flimsy, two-story civilian house. Unless Yukiko missed her guess, though, it had basement tunnels dug into the rock for secret access to several other parts of town, and the wooden walls were either reinforced with chakra and seals, or were a simple shell over solid stone construction. Those were standard tricks in civilian towns. Half the point of building a fortress was to keep it from being obvious, after all -- there was no sense daring people to attack or fostering resentment with showy displays of power, whereas there was a lot of sense in keeping your true strength hidden for when you needed to spring a trap.
A middle-aged genin checked their travel papers and ushered them into the public reception area, which was a plain room with benches along the side walls, a large desk for the clerk on duty, and a bell to summon help from the inner rooms. "Did you have any questions or complaints about the caravan security between Konoha and here?" he asked as he shut the overly solid door.
"No," Seichi said, and then slid into the assassin's skin.
He didn't change overtly -- it was nothing but a subtle shift of body language and intent -- but one second later the genin 's knees shook with the effort of retaining his composure.
"Yukiko-san and I are on a deep cover mission with Kurenai-san," Seichi said, flatly. "Kurenai-san has the confirming orders. Bring her here."
The genin sprinted through the inner doorway without stopping to ring the bell, though he retained just enough presence of mind to close and bar the door behind himself.
"That was unnecessary," Yukiko said as Seichi slid behind the desk and began flipping through the guard's papers.
"Mission business," he said, without shifting his attention from the documents.
Oh. Right. And mission business tended to bring out the assassin, because the assassin was the persona who took missions, just like the caravan merchants brought out Tsukene, because Tsukene was the persona who belonged in the caravan.
"I still say that can't be healthy," Yukiko said, but she tried not to sound judgmental. The middle of a mission wasn't the place to start doing amateur therapy on a temporary partner's head, no matter how much that partner might need to rearrange the contents of his mind before they collapsed. And she had no training and no idea where to start fixing Seichi, just like she had no idea where to start fixing Sasuke.
Breaking Seichi, on the other hand...
But breaking was always easier than building or repairing.
Faint sounds of people moving vibrated through the ceiling and the closed door -- just enough noise to show agitation, but not the chaos or lethal silence that marked flat-out panic. Yukiko closed her eyes and spun out a filament of chakra, trying to count and place everyone in the building. She found two genin upstairs, one out back, a chuunin directly overhead, and Kurenai walking down the hallway toward the inner door.
"Company's coming," she said. Seichi placed the papers back exactly as he found them and stood, a nearly invisible tension marking his stance.
"Seichi-san, Yukiko-san, how has your day gone?" Kurenai's voice preceded her through the doorway, and Seichi's shoulders relaxed; he slipped his hands into the pockets of his duster and pulled out a deck of cards.
"The boys did their level best to drive me insane, but we survived," Yukiko said wryly. "I want to leave them here at the guard station until someone can come from Konoha to escort them home. I don't trust them alone, and Sasuke shouldn't be unguarded anyway, not until his brother is eliminated."
A flicker of some emotion passed over Kurenai's face too quickly to decipher, and Yukiko stiffened. "About the Uchiha situation..." Kurenai said, and hesitated. "Well, to be blunt, it's grown worse. This station just got word that yesterday a small group of Mist-nin penetrated the village defenses--"
"What defenses?" Seichi said as cards cascaded from hand to hand. "The military police run all the patrols except the gate guards, and without the Uchiha..." He drew a card across his throat. "Wounded deer, and the wolves are circling."
Kurenai frowned. "Yes, well, in any case, the Mist-nin reached the hospital before they were intercepted. They were aiming for Uchiha Tsukime."
"Oh, shit. Is she all right?" For Naga's sake, and for Sasuke's, please let the girl be alive...
"Still in a coma, and with a few bruises from being tossed over somebody's shoulder, but otherwise unharmed," Kurenai said. "We assume their goal was capture, not assassination. But that's not the worst part. A two-man team of Cloud-nin took advantage of the confusion and penetrated the defenses on the other side of town. They went for your apartment building."
Sasuke. They had been looking for Sasuke. Enemy ninja had gotten into Konoha -- into her home -- and they'd been looking for Sasuke.
Shit.
Now what was she supposed to do?
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It would be easy to escape from Yoshitaka, but there was no point to that. Naruto's sister and the caravan guard would find him before he could get anywhere useful, and he didn't know where to go in any case. Nobody knew where his brother was.
Sasuke picked half-heartedly at his yakitori and tried to tune out both Yoshitaka's lecture on responsibility and Naruto's constant, annoying interruptions. What was the point of anything? He'd overhead half a conversation and jumped to conclusions, instead of gathering more information like a real ninja would. Itachi would never make a mistake like that.
"I'm going to bed," he said into a break in Yoshitaka's lecture. "Where's the room key?"
Yoshitaka handed the key across the small table with an air of relief. "Here. Thank you for behaving, Sakama-kun, and please take your impossible friend with you!"
"I'm not impossible," Naruto protested. "You just don't want to admit I found holes in your stupid lecture."
"Shut up," Sasuke hissed at him, and then bowed to Yoshitaka, the way his mother would have told him to. "Thanks, sorry for the trouble, and good night." Then he dragged Naruto through the common room of the inn, heading for the stairs.
"Jerk," Naruto muttered, trying to pry Sasuke's fingers off his sleeve. "I like Yoshitaka-san -- he actually talks to me, not like you. What's the point of being undercover if we don't get to do anything interesting?"
The point was that if Sasuke felt awful, it wasn't fair for Naruto to be happy. But he couldn't say that. "The point is to stay alive, idiot, and the more time you spend with anyone, the less you watch your mouth. You'd give everything away to Yoshitaka-san by the end of the night."
"I would not!"
"Would so."
"Would not!"
"Would--" Sasuke felt like beating his head against the wall. He unlocked the door of their room and shoved Naruto inside. "I'm not having this argument. You're stupid, and you talk too much, and it's your fault we're stuck in the middle of nowhere messing up your sister's mission. I hate you."
Naruto's blue eyes narrowed, and his whisker marks seemed to darken. "Oh yeah? I hate you too, bastard, and it's not like I made you come with me," he snapped, and yanked the key out of the lock. "If I can't do what I want, you can't either -- why don't you go talk to Yoshitaka-san!" Naruto shoved Sasuke back into the hallway. Then he slammed the door.
The deadbolt slid home with a quiet finality.
Sasuke clenched his fists and glared at the door. He could break it down or pick the lock -- any first year student could manage simple civilian locks -- but that wasn't the point. The point was that Naruto had won. He'd flipped the situation so he was in control, and Sasuke was reacting to his actions instead of the other way around. If Sasuke tried to get into the room now, he'd just be confirming Naruto's victory.
"Loser," he muttered.
Then he skulked back downstairs and out into the evening. The Seven Larks sat inside a low stone wall, with the stables and wagon house to the left and the inn to the right, separated by a bare, dusty yard. Four floodlights chased away the shadows by the gate and the inner feet of the walls, but left the center of the yard swathed in charcoal gray. As Sasuke opened the inn's door, light spilled around him into that patch of shadow, revealing Naruto's sister and Tsukene Seichi.
Neither of them reacted to the sudden light in their eyes. Sasuke tallied another mark on a mental scroll -- he was almost certain Seichi was a ninja, but not quite sure enough to say anything. He didn't want to look stupid if he was wrong.
"Sasu-- Sakama-kun! It's funny to see you outside; we were just talking about you." Naruto's sister raked a hand through her hair and looked worried. "Um. We have some news from home, about your family. Let's go somewhere more private and talk."
The world was sharp-edged and clear and divided between the white of the floodlights and the black of the shadows. Sasuke dug his fingernails into the bandages on his palms; the fabric shifted and pulled over raw scabs.
"You'll reopen your cuts if you keep doing that," Seichi said, mildly. "Crippling yourself is pointless."
Sasuke kept his hands clenched, but he changed the angle of his fingers, just enough to lessen the pressure. "Whatever. Tell me about my family. Tell me what else he did." His voice shook. Fear, probably. He didn't want to know, didn't want to see more dead relatives in brilliant, exacting detail every time he ran out of ways to distract himself.
But he had to know. He needed to know what Itachi had done, what he had to avenge. No matter how many nightmares he got, he had to know. He couldn't afford to be weak.
Naruto's sister and Seichi exchanged an unreadable glance. After a second, she waved her hand and he nodded. "Let's go inside, to our room. It's quieter."
Sasuke followed, tallying another mark.
Their room was a clone of his and Naruto's; the only difference was the extra bags leaning against the wall and the deck of cards on the nightstand, which Seichi immediately scooped up and began shuffling. Meanwhile, Naruto's sister locked the door, closed her eyes, and ran through a handful of seals. Something prickled faintly over the back of Sasuke's neck, and a curtain of silence seemed to fall around the three of them.
"Tell me," he said.
Naruto's sister raked both hands through her blue-green hair, sighed, and sat down on one of the beds. "Yeah, okay. First of all, right now you're not the only surviving Uchiha -- one of your cousins, Tsukime, is in the Konoha hospital. We didn't tell you before because she's in a coma and nobody's sure if she'll wake up."
The world had gone edged and colorless again, holding its breath.
"There might be other survivors, too," the woman continued, "but nobody's sure. See, your brother killed everyone who was in Konoha, but there were eleven Uchiha out on missions that night. We've only confirmed four deaths, plus Tsukime. That leaves six unaccounted for. Apparently Itachi used clan codes to send them into hiding, and now it's a race to see if we can reach them before he does."
Survivors. There might be survivors. He wasn't the only one left, and nobody had told him. Sasuke's fingers twitched, tightening against his palms.
"Are you okay?" Naruto's sister asked.
"Who was gone? I saw-- I didn't look for everyone, not once I saw-- I just ran home, and then-- and then..." His voice was shaking again. He shifted his eyes to the window -- before breaking glass, you had to wrap your hands in cloth or use a shielding jutsu he didn't know yet, to keep the shards from wounding you. "Who did he miss?"
"We don't know whether he missed them," she said. "That's why nobody told you, because we didn't want to disappoint you if... well, if it turned out we were wrong. Anyway, I don't have the list. It's classified."
"Uchiha Kensuke, Mayumi, Noriyama, Hanzo, Shiburi, and Akaro," Seichi said. "They're your family; you have the right to know." He dealt a cross-shaped array of cards onto his bed and went back to ignoring the conversation.
Sasuke matched names to faces. Nobody he knew well, nobody who spent much time in Konoha -- for some reason, anyone in the clan who didn't join the military police tended to avoid the village. Tsukime and Akaro were closest to his age, but they were both from outer families, so he hadn't seen them often, only when they practiced in the central park, or when the whole clan gathered for special ceremonies.
"Sasuke? There's more, and you need to know." Naruto's sister sounded gentle, like she was trying to coax a scared dog to her hand or a kitten from a tree. It was insulting. He wasn't like that anymore, not since Ita-- He didn't need to be protected.
Sasuke started one of Iruka-sensei's exercises, trying to figure out how each thing in the room could be used as a weapon. The window was easy; glass was sharp. The lamp could be a bludgeon, the bulb a slashing weapon, the cord a whip or a strangling wire. He couldn't lift the beds, but the sheets would make good distractions; they could also be used as nets or rope.
Naruto's sister frowned. "Pay attention, Sasuke; this is important. Yesterday a group of Mist-nin slipped into Konoha and tried to kidnap your cousin Tsukime. At the same time, two Cloud-nin went to my building, probably trying to kidnap you. You don't have a clan to protect you anymore, and a lot of people are interested in your bloodline limit. So this is what we're going to do."
She held out her hand, five fingers raised. "First, I'm going to stay in Nagarehiya with you and Naruto, until someone can come from Konoha to take you home. Then you're going to keep pretending to be Sakama, even in Konoha. You're going to stay with a jounin until the military police get the village patrol schedules sorted out. You can't attend the academy for a few weeks, and you can't go outside the village walls. And you can't tell anyone that some of your relatives may be alive." All her fingers were folded down, one for each sentence; she turned over her fist and opened her hand again. "Are we clear?"
The small table would be easy to break, and then he could use its legs as makeshift bokken. The pitcher of water could be thrown; so could the shallow bowl sitting beside it. The curtains were like sheets, only smaller -- whips or distractions. Pillows could be used for one of the oldest vanishing tricks -- you let the enemy slash one open, and ran while the explosion of feathers or cotton fluff blinded him for a moment.
"Sasuke, are you listening to me?"
Finally, Sasuke felt calm enough to meet her eyes. "I'm not going back."
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End of Chapter Twelve
Back to chapter 11
Continue to chapter 13
Read the final version here on ff.net. (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The lj version is a beta draft, with all the boneheaded mistakes that implies.)
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This is a very rough draft, as these things go, but I wanted to get something up since it's been 4 months since chapter 11. I want to tweak it a little to make it clear that Kurenai immediately sent a report to Konoha confirming that Sasuke was in Nagarehiya and safe for the moment. I also want to check the names of the potential Uchiha survivors -- I basically pulled these out of a hat and I have no idea if they all even really work as names. (And yes, Uchiha Akaro is the minor OC from "The Way of the Apartment Manager," because it's much easier to reuse people than to keep creating new ones.)
Here is chapter 12, in which Naga-tachi begin tracking Itachi northeast, Naruto gets the last word in a fight, Sasuke experiments with unhealthy coping methods, Eiji and Ginji do not appear, and Yukiko really needs a vacation.
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The Guardian in Spite of Herself: Chapter 12
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The campsite was a dead loss. Naga forced herself to help examine it, but she didn't really see half of what passed before her eyes; the colors and forms wouldn't resolve into anything meaningful.
Psychosomatic, she told herself after the twentieth time she blinked and rubbed her eyes to clear them. It was just stress and her mind flinching away from something too raw and painful to work through without time, rest, and a lot of meditation.
Kakashi, Suisen, Kohaku, and the dogs poked around for maybe half an hour, confirming the outline of the fight and Itachi's outbound trail. It was faint -- Anbu knew all the tricks for concealment -- but it was there and even if Itachi could fool either human minds or canine noses, he probably couldn't fool both at the same time, at least not for long, and especially not at a remove of several days and who knew how many miles.
"Would he head for a village or stay hidden?" Kafunnokaze asked as they struck camp and prepared to head out. "At patrol speed, Kaiminori is about one day northeast along the border. He might have stopped there for supplies or information. We could save time heading there directly instead of following any switchbacks he tried."
Naga and Kakashi exchanged a glance. Kakashi held up his hands in a shrug; Naga twitched her shoulder. "He's arrogant. I'd stay low, but he may not think he needs to," Naga said.
"If he took off his forehead-protector and didn't use Sharingan, he could easily blend into most populations," Kakashi added. "The village wouldn't have been a significant risk. Was he carrying supplies, Naga?"
She frowned, trying to remember. "Not that I saw. But you can hide anything in tassel grass; he could've dropped a pack before he broke cover."
"Pakkun--" Kakashi began.
"Way ahead of you," the small dog grumbled, scratching his ear with a hind paw. "We found a small patch of crumpled grass that smells of the target and that fresh breeze shit Anbu soaks all their cloth in. If your Uchiha didn't drop a pack for an hour or two, I'm a monkey's uncle."
"Estimated size of the pack?" Suisen asked briskly as she shouldered her own bag.
"Standard, but it wasn't heavy," said Pakkun, rising from his crouch. "By the time he got here, he'd been moving for what, five days? He needed to resupply."
"Kaiminori it is," Kakashi decided. "Okay. Move out; I want us there by mid-afternoon."
"You said Kakashi was a goofy idiot," Kafunnokaze murmured to Naga as they started northeast, coving the ground in an easy loping run. "Does he have a split personality?"
Naga shook her head. "The loopy slacker's a mask, even if he wears it nearly all the time. Underneath he's all tied up in knots he won't let anyone find the loose ends for. Think he likes being a mess, don't ask me why. All jounin are crazy." She twitched, thinking of Maito Gai, or Mitarashi Anko, or Hyuuga Ren, her own jounin-sensei for one year -- that was a relationship she'd been glad to drop, along with the rest of that mismatched team. Even her parents were downright weird; they just hid it better than most high-level ninja. It probably came of working covert ops.
"That's okay. I'm sure insanity will be attractive on you," Kafunnokaze said, and dropped a kiss on her temple before dashing ahead to take point.
Naga fought a silly grin for the next half hour.
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Genjutsu taught a person how to juggle hundreds of details in the mind's eye. However, there was a difference between details you controlled and details the rest of the world threw at you, especially when the world seemed to take malicious glee in adding new complications. Past a certain number of variables, Yukiko gave up and started dumping her problems onto other people's shoulders.
"Yu-kun, Sakama-kun, if you don't shape up and behave for Yoshitaka-san, I swear I'll talk some of my old ninja friends into skinning you alive."
The boys blinked. "You sound really mad, Yukiko-neechan," Naruto said after a moment. "What did we do? We've been good!"
"This is a definition of 'good' that includes two near falls off a bridge because they got into a fight and didn't watch where they were running, one expensive bolt of silk knocked into a mud puddle at the door of a shop -- which I had to buy and will have to haul all the way to Tengai and back or pay to store here for a month -- and earsplitting arguments every hour all afternoon," Yukiko told Yoshitaka-san as she pushed the boys into the Seven Larks inn. "I have to show Seichi a few things, and then I want a couple hours away from my annoying little brother and his equally annoying friend. I apologize preemptively for any trouble they start, and thank you for agreeing to watch them during dinner."
She bowed and dragged Seichi out the door before Naruto had any chance to protest.
"We don't have to report in now," Seichi said as he detached Yukiko's hand from his sleeve and started walking up the hill. "I could do this after dark when the boys are asleep." His gray duster flapped loosely around his legs.
Yukiko shrugged. "I know, but I need a couple hours away from Naru-- from Yu-kun, or I might end up strangling him. Besides, this helps our cover; we have a legitimate excuse to visit the guard station, and if you really were an apprentice trader, it would be my responsibility to show you around town."
"True," Seichi said, and fell silent.
He seemed to have let the Tsukene persona drop for the moment, since nobody from the caravan was around. Yukiko was grateful; she had nothing against a little flirting, in moderation, but there was a difference between flirtation and being sleazed at, and Tsukene not only crossed that line, he mopped it off the metaphorical floor. Then he made suggestive poses with the mop.
Yukiko sighed. Okay, she was being unfair. Seichi seemed like a decent person under the assassin's ice and Tsukene's sleaze, and even the sleaze wasn't as bad as she was making it out to be. She was just tired, stressed, and not coping with things half as well as she normally could. Keeping track of Naruto was tricky in the most favorable circumstances, and a deep cover assassination mission was about as far from favorable as she could get without wandering into a war zone.
And she was trying to stop thinking about Naruto, damn it. Where was a good distraction when she needed one? ...Couldn't Seichi carry on a normal conversation? Well, she'd just start one herself.
"What, exactly, makes Amane Eiji so dangerous?" Yukiko asked, and then wanted to bite out her tongue. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She knew better than to ask for that kind of detail, and she definitely knew better than to talk about a mission in public. She really needed to focus.
Seichi wrapped an arm around her shoulders, leaned in with a smile... and miraculously didn't strangle or threaten her. Instead, he whispered into her ear, "He has a dream. He says that the hidden villages and the daimyo keep civilians weak and divided, that we block trade and destroy infrastructure, that we deliberately keep people from guiding their own lives, and that our very existence endangers everyone by creating a constant risk of war and an endless stream of missing-nin who prey on traders and isolated villages. Also, he says we turn children into monsters by teaching them to kill before they're old enough to realize what that choice means."
Huh. An idealist. People like that were always dangerous, even if they were right on some points. Maybe especially if they were right on some points; that made it easier for them to gain followers.
"I think civilians would be more likely to start wars than we are, and they'd probably kill a lot more people before they reached a truce," Yukiko murmured. "I understand why he has to go -- anyone saying those sorts of things is going to cause nothing but chaos and carnage -- but I feel sorry for him. He just wants people to be peaceful and to respect each other. It's a nice dream. And he's right about the kids."
"Death is a fact of life," Seichi said, combing his free hand through Yukiko's hair. "Where's the harm in teaching children how to face that without flinching?"
"There's a difference between facing death and creating death," Yukiko said as she pushed Seichi's arm off her shoulder. "But we can argue later; for now, let's just make our reports and talk to Kurenai."
The guard post was a small, unobtrusive building halfway up the hillside, which looked like nothing more than a flimsy, two-story civilian house. Unless Yukiko missed her guess, though, it had basement tunnels dug into the rock for secret access to several other parts of town, and the wooden walls were either reinforced with chakra and seals, or were a simple shell over solid stone construction. Those were standard tricks in civilian towns. Half the point of building a fortress was to keep it from being obvious, after all -- there was no sense daring people to attack or fostering resentment with showy displays of power, whereas there was a lot of sense in keeping your true strength hidden for when you needed to spring a trap.
A middle-aged genin checked their travel papers and ushered them into the public reception area, which was a plain room with benches along the side walls, a large desk for the clerk on duty, and a bell to summon help from the inner rooms. "Did you have any questions or complaints about the caravan security between Konoha and here?" he asked as he shut the overly solid door.
"No," Seichi said, and then slid into the assassin's skin.
He didn't change overtly -- it was nothing but a subtle shift of body language and intent -- but one second later the genin 's knees shook with the effort of retaining his composure.
"Yukiko-san and I are on a deep cover mission with Kurenai-san," Seichi said, flatly. "Kurenai-san has the confirming orders. Bring her here."
The genin sprinted through the inner doorway without stopping to ring the bell, though he retained just enough presence of mind to close and bar the door behind himself.
"That was unnecessary," Yukiko said as Seichi slid behind the desk and began flipping through the guard's papers.
"Mission business," he said, without shifting his attention from the documents.
Oh. Right. And mission business tended to bring out the assassin, because the assassin was the persona who took missions, just like the caravan merchants brought out Tsukene, because Tsukene was the persona who belonged in the caravan.
"I still say that can't be healthy," Yukiko said, but she tried not to sound judgmental. The middle of a mission wasn't the place to start doing amateur therapy on a temporary partner's head, no matter how much that partner might need to rearrange the contents of his mind before they collapsed. And she had no training and no idea where to start fixing Seichi, just like she had no idea where to start fixing Sasuke.
Breaking Seichi, on the other hand...
But breaking was always easier than building or repairing.
Faint sounds of people moving vibrated through the ceiling and the closed door -- just enough noise to show agitation, but not the chaos or lethal silence that marked flat-out panic. Yukiko closed her eyes and spun out a filament of chakra, trying to count and place everyone in the building. She found two genin upstairs, one out back, a chuunin directly overhead, and Kurenai walking down the hallway toward the inner door.
"Company's coming," she said. Seichi placed the papers back exactly as he found them and stood, a nearly invisible tension marking his stance.
"Seichi-san, Yukiko-san, how has your day gone?" Kurenai's voice preceded her through the doorway, and Seichi's shoulders relaxed; he slipped his hands into the pockets of his duster and pulled out a deck of cards.
"The boys did their level best to drive me insane, but we survived," Yukiko said wryly. "I want to leave them here at the guard station until someone can come from Konoha to escort them home. I don't trust them alone, and Sasuke shouldn't be unguarded anyway, not until his brother is eliminated."
A flicker of some emotion passed over Kurenai's face too quickly to decipher, and Yukiko stiffened. "About the Uchiha situation..." Kurenai said, and hesitated. "Well, to be blunt, it's grown worse. This station just got word that yesterday a small group of Mist-nin penetrated the village defenses--"
"What defenses?" Seichi said as cards cascaded from hand to hand. "The military police run all the patrols except the gate guards, and without the Uchiha..." He drew a card across his throat. "Wounded deer, and the wolves are circling."
Kurenai frowned. "Yes, well, in any case, the Mist-nin reached the hospital before they were intercepted. They were aiming for Uchiha Tsukime."
"Oh, shit. Is she all right?" For Naga's sake, and for Sasuke's, please let the girl be alive...
"Still in a coma, and with a few bruises from being tossed over somebody's shoulder, but otherwise unharmed," Kurenai said. "We assume their goal was capture, not assassination. But that's not the worst part. A two-man team of Cloud-nin took advantage of the confusion and penetrated the defenses on the other side of town. They went for your apartment building."
Sasuke. They had been looking for Sasuke. Enemy ninja had gotten into Konoha -- into her home -- and they'd been looking for Sasuke.
Shit.
Now what was she supposed to do?
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It would be easy to escape from Yoshitaka, but there was no point to that. Naruto's sister and the caravan guard would find him before he could get anywhere useful, and he didn't know where to go in any case. Nobody knew where his brother was.
Sasuke picked half-heartedly at his yakitori and tried to tune out both Yoshitaka's lecture on responsibility and Naruto's constant, annoying interruptions. What was the point of anything? He'd overhead half a conversation and jumped to conclusions, instead of gathering more information like a real ninja would. Itachi would never make a mistake like that.
"I'm going to bed," he said into a break in Yoshitaka's lecture. "Where's the room key?"
Yoshitaka handed the key across the small table with an air of relief. "Here. Thank you for behaving, Sakama-kun, and please take your impossible friend with you!"
"I'm not impossible," Naruto protested. "You just don't want to admit I found holes in your stupid lecture."
"Shut up," Sasuke hissed at him, and then bowed to Yoshitaka, the way his mother would have told him to. "Thanks, sorry for the trouble, and good night." Then he dragged Naruto through the common room of the inn, heading for the stairs.
"Jerk," Naruto muttered, trying to pry Sasuke's fingers off his sleeve. "I like Yoshitaka-san -- he actually talks to me, not like you. What's the point of being undercover if we don't get to do anything interesting?"
The point was that if Sasuke felt awful, it wasn't fair for Naruto to be happy. But he couldn't say that. "The point is to stay alive, idiot, and the more time you spend with anyone, the less you watch your mouth. You'd give everything away to Yoshitaka-san by the end of the night."
"I would not!"
"Would so."
"Would not!"
"Would--" Sasuke felt like beating his head against the wall. He unlocked the door of their room and shoved Naruto inside. "I'm not having this argument. You're stupid, and you talk too much, and it's your fault we're stuck in the middle of nowhere messing up your sister's mission. I hate you."
Naruto's blue eyes narrowed, and his whisker marks seemed to darken. "Oh yeah? I hate you too, bastard, and it's not like I made you come with me," he snapped, and yanked the key out of the lock. "If I can't do what I want, you can't either -- why don't you go talk to Yoshitaka-san!" Naruto shoved Sasuke back into the hallway. Then he slammed the door.
The deadbolt slid home with a quiet finality.
Sasuke clenched his fists and glared at the door. He could break it down or pick the lock -- any first year student could manage simple civilian locks -- but that wasn't the point. The point was that Naruto had won. He'd flipped the situation so he was in control, and Sasuke was reacting to his actions instead of the other way around. If Sasuke tried to get into the room now, he'd just be confirming Naruto's victory.
"Loser," he muttered.
Then he skulked back downstairs and out into the evening. The Seven Larks sat inside a low stone wall, with the stables and wagon house to the left and the inn to the right, separated by a bare, dusty yard. Four floodlights chased away the shadows by the gate and the inner feet of the walls, but left the center of the yard swathed in charcoal gray. As Sasuke opened the inn's door, light spilled around him into that patch of shadow, revealing Naruto's sister and Tsukene Seichi.
Neither of them reacted to the sudden light in their eyes. Sasuke tallied another mark on a mental scroll -- he was almost certain Seichi was a ninja, but not quite sure enough to say anything. He didn't want to look stupid if he was wrong.
"Sasu-- Sakama-kun! It's funny to see you outside; we were just talking about you." Naruto's sister raked a hand through her hair and looked worried. "Um. We have some news from home, about your family. Let's go somewhere more private and talk."
The world was sharp-edged and clear and divided between the white of the floodlights and the black of the shadows. Sasuke dug his fingernails into the bandages on his palms; the fabric shifted and pulled over raw scabs.
"You'll reopen your cuts if you keep doing that," Seichi said, mildly. "Crippling yourself is pointless."
Sasuke kept his hands clenched, but he changed the angle of his fingers, just enough to lessen the pressure. "Whatever. Tell me about my family. Tell me what else he did." His voice shook. Fear, probably. He didn't want to know, didn't want to see more dead relatives in brilliant, exacting detail every time he ran out of ways to distract himself.
But he had to know. He needed to know what Itachi had done, what he had to avenge. No matter how many nightmares he got, he had to know. He couldn't afford to be weak.
Naruto's sister and Seichi exchanged an unreadable glance. After a second, she waved her hand and he nodded. "Let's go inside, to our room. It's quieter."
Sasuke followed, tallying another mark.
Their room was a clone of his and Naruto's; the only difference was the extra bags leaning against the wall and the deck of cards on the nightstand, which Seichi immediately scooped up and began shuffling. Meanwhile, Naruto's sister locked the door, closed her eyes, and ran through a handful of seals. Something prickled faintly over the back of Sasuke's neck, and a curtain of silence seemed to fall around the three of them.
"Tell me," he said.
Naruto's sister raked both hands through her blue-green hair, sighed, and sat down on one of the beds. "Yeah, okay. First of all, right now you're not the only surviving Uchiha -- one of your cousins, Tsukime, is in the Konoha hospital. We didn't tell you before because she's in a coma and nobody's sure if she'll wake up."
The world had gone edged and colorless again, holding its breath.
"There might be other survivors, too," the woman continued, "but nobody's sure. See, your brother killed everyone who was in Konoha, but there were eleven Uchiha out on missions that night. We've only confirmed four deaths, plus Tsukime. That leaves six unaccounted for. Apparently Itachi used clan codes to send them into hiding, and now it's a race to see if we can reach them before he does."
Survivors. There might be survivors. He wasn't the only one left, and nobody had told him. Sasuke's fingers twitched, tightening against his palms.
"Are you okay?" Naruto's sister asked.
"Who was gone? I saw-- I didn't look for everyone, not once I saw-- I just ran home, and then-- and then..." His voice was shaking again. He shifted his eyes to the window -- before breaking glass, you had to wrap your hands in cloth or use a shielding jutsu he didn't know yet, to keep the shards from wounding you. "Who did he miss?"
"We don't know whether he missed them," she said. "That's why nobody told you, because we didn't want to disappoint you if... well, if it turned out we were wrong. Anyway, I don't have the list. It's classified."
"Uchiha Kensuke, Mayumi, Noriyama, Hanzo, Shiburi, and Akaro," Seichi said. "They're your family; you have the right to know." He dealt a cross-shaped array of cards onto his bed and went back to ignoring the conversation.
Sasuke matched names to faces. Nobody he knew well, nobody who spent much time in Konoha -- for some reason, anyone in the clan who didn't join the military police tended to avoid the village. Tsukime and Akaro were closest to his age, but they were both from outer families, so he hadn't seen them often, only when they practiced in the central park, or when the whole clan gathered for special ceremonies.
"Sasuke? There's more, and you need to know." Naruto's sister sounded gentle, like she was trying to coax a scared dog to her hand or a kitten from a tree. It was insulting. He wasn't like that anymore, not since Ita-- He didn't need to be protected.
Sasuke started one of Iruka-sensei's exercises, trying to figure out how each thing in the room could be used as a weapon. The window was easy; glass was sharp. The lamp could be a bludgeon, the bulb a slashing weapon, the cord a whip or a strangling wire. He couldn't lift the beds, but the sheets would make good distractions; they could also be used as nets or rope.
Naruto's sister frowned. "Pay attention, Sasuke; this is important. Yesterday a group of Mist-nin slipped into Konoha and tried to kidnap your cousin Tsukime. At the same time, two Cloud-nin went to my building, probably trying to kidnap you. You don't have a clan to protect you anymore, and a lot of people are interested in your bloodline limit. So this is what we're going to do."
She held out her hand, five fingers raised. "First, I'm going to stay in Nagarehiya with you and Naruto, until someone can come from Konoha to take you home. Then you're going to keep pretending to be Sakama, even in Konoha. You're going to stay with a jounin until the military police get the village patrol schedules sorted out. You can't attend the academy for a few weeks, and you can't go outside the village walls. And you can't tell anyone that some of your relatives may be alive." All her fingers were folded down, one for each sentence; she turned over her fist and opened her hand again. "Are we clear?"
The small table would be easy to break, and then he could use its legs as makeshift bokken. The pitcher of water could be thrown; so could the shallow bowl sitting beside it. The curtains were like sheets, only smaller -- whips or distractions. Pillows could be used for one of the oldest vanishing tricks -- you let the enemy slash one open, and ran while the explosion of feathers or cotton fluff blinded him for a moment.
"Sasuke, are you listening to me?"
Finally, Sasuke felt calm enough to meet her eyes. "I'm not going back."
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End of Chapter Twelve
Back to chapter 11
Continue to chapter 13
Read the final version here on ff.net. (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The lj version is a beta draft, with all the boneheaded mistakes that implies.)
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This is a very rough draft, as these things go, but I wanted to get something up since it's been 4 months since chapter 11. I want to tweak it a little to make it clear that Kurenai immediately sent a report to Konoha confirming that Sasuke was in Nagarehiya and safe for the moment. I also want to check the names of the potential Uchiha survivors -- I basically pulled these out of a hat and I have no idea if they all even really work as names. (And yes, Uchiha Akaro is the minor OC from "The Way of the Apartment Manager," because it's much easier to reuse people than to keep creating new ones.)
