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edenfallingThis would be where the plot really starts to kick off, though I still haven't managed to properly introduce my fourth POV character. Ah well, next chapter. At least I got the word count back to normal in this one!
This is the sequel to "The Way of the Apartment Manager," which can be found in clean draft here on ff.net, or in rough draft with comments here on my livejournal. It also has fanart, which can be found here.
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The Guardian in Spite of Herself: Chapter 3
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Sasuke looked warily at the half-familiar boy in the orange pants and jacket, but the boy ignored him. Instead, he was watching the doorway the woman had run through, and his face was crinkled with worry. "I guess it was Naga," he mumbled. Then he shrugged and turned back to Sasuke. He grinned -- it was a stupid smile, big enough that anyone could see it from a hundred yards away. It went with his clothes and his spiky, yellow hair.
"Hey, hey, I'm Uzumaki Naruto, and Yukiko-neechan's my big sister and this is her building, so it's sort of my building too. So I'm gonna tell you the rules." He held up his hand and started ticking off fingers. "You're not allowed to bug the tenants or mess up the public areas, but you can do what you want in your room as long as you fix it before you stop renting the apartment. You can bug Yukiko-neechan, 'cause she's a ninja and it's like practice, but you can't mess up anything really important, like contracts and taxes, 'cause then she'll be really mad. And," he added with a scowl that stretched the three whisker marks on each of his cheeks, "you can't bug her when I'm already with her, 'cause she's my sister.
"The yard out back is for ninja practice and stuff, but you have to be careful if civilians are out there with pets, 'cause killing dogs by accident is stupid and irrespons'ble, and Yukiko-neechan has to pay huge fines," -- he waved his arms expressively -- "and then she yells a lot and that's no fun." He paused and scratched his head. "I think that's it. Oh! And when Yukiko-neechan's out on missions, her cousin Yusuke runs the place, and he stinks. He's not even a ninja, and he'll report you to the police if you break the rules."
Naruto grinned again. "There! Hey, hey, why are you living here anyway? Don't you have a house or something?"
Sasuke, still overwhelmed by the flood of words and the boy's sheer presence, didn't catch his flinch in time.
Naruto's blue eyes narrowed. "Hey, if you're in the room across from mine, that's a really small apartment. You couldn't fit a whole family in there, not unless you squeezed really tight, and I heard a lot of people got killed a few days ago, and... hey, hey, was that your family?"
Sasuke glared, but Naruto ran right over him without noticing. "That really stinks, if it was your family, but I didn't have any family either, and now Yukiko-neechan's my family, so maybe we can be your family too! Even if you are a stuck-up bastard and you don't talk." He held out his hand toward Sasuke. "I'll take one of your bags upstairs. Okay?"
Finally, an opening. "No," Sasuke said, as flatly as he could.
Hurt flashed across Naruto's face, but the orange boy quickly buried it under cheerful confusion. "No, don't take your bag, or no, don't be friends?"
"Both," Sasuke said, and then added, almost in spite of himself, "Moron."
Naruto nodded absently. "Yeah, yeah, I thought that's what you meant. I'm not gonna do anything now 'cause Yukiko-neechan's worried about Naga, but tomorrow I'm gonna kick your ass, bastard. And you can carry your bags yourself." He stuck his tongue out at Sasuke and dashed out of the office as fast as he'd slammed into it not five minutes before.
Sasuke peered around the doorframe to see which way Naruto went, and relaxed when the orange boy ran outside instead of heading for the stairs. He waited a long minute, counting his breaths, until he was certain Naruto wasn't coming back and wouldn't see him struggling with his packs. Then he grabbed the heavier one, the one the woman had carried on the way from home, and started dragging it toward the rear stairwell.
He didn't need anybody's pity, or any more fake families. Especially not one that had people like Naruto in it.
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Yukiko held up a section of wall for several minutes while Tonoike Taizen and Bashoto fussed over their daughter, and then made her apologies and slipped out. She needed to talk to Heika-san.
Apparently Heika-san had the same thought, since a nurse flagged her down as she walked toward the main door of the hospital, and told her that Heika-san wanted to see her at headquarters ASAP. Yukiko nodded and took to the roofs, squinting against the late afternoon sun. It was the fastest way around Konoha, and she needed to do something physical anyway.
Intelligence and Interrogations had their headquarters in a nondescript complex of low buildings near the edge of town, well away from the Hokage monument and the Hokage's tower and administration complex on top of the cliff. It was best not to keep prisoners too close to the important things, and the small gap in communications was wonderful for plausible deniability, should the need arise. Yukiko landed on the ground near the complex wall -- you simply didn't roof-hop over headquarters, the same way you didn't roof-hop over Anbu central -- and walked through the open gate.
Heika-san had a small office on the first basement level, with a well-concealed ventilation tunnel that also -- through the careful arrangement of mirrors -- let in a bit of natural sunlight. Beyond that indulgence, there was no visible sign that this office was one of the two nerve centers of headquarters. Heika-san liked it that way. He looked up from his desk as Yukiko knocked on his open door.
"We're doubly disrupted now," he began abruptly. "Everyone's on short staff since the Uchiha died, and with the new revelations, we have to mobilize teams to find potential survivors. Everything else is a mess, and we're upping priority on some missions. You were assigned to investigate a shipping magnate up in Sky Country, to see if we strictly need to kill him or if we can leave that to Hidden Cloud when they finally see what's under their noses."
Yukiko nodded. "I wasn't scheduled to leave for another two weeks," she said neutrally.
Heika-san frowned. "True, but we can't afford any potential instability now, with our numbers down and our people scattered. It's been upgraded to immediate assassination. You'll have one week to find his connections, and then your partner takes him out. You're working with Anbu on this mission -- Fuuma Seichi, one of their assassination specialists.
"Your cover is the same as usual -- we'll add you to a trade caravan that leaves for Sky Country the day after tomorrow, under escort by Yuuhi Kurenai. Meet Seichi and Kurenai here, ten in the morning tomorrow, and make plans." Heika-san pinned Yukiko with his hard, black stare. "Don't screw up. We need that man gone, and we need his connections and his plans. And don't bring Cloud-nin down on your back."
He returned to his papers, clearing dismissing Yukiko. She bowed, and walked silently down the corridor toward the stairs. She didn't answer any of the other Intelligence ops who greeted her, just waved absently and continued on her way out of the complex. She didn't feel settled enough to carry on a conversation.
Assassination. She'd never run an assassination before. Oh, she'd killed people -- she was a shinobi -- but they had almost all been trying to kill her at the same time. Selecting a person who hadn't attacked her and calmly deciding that he or she would die... no, that she hadn't done. There was a reason she'd never wanted to join Anbu. There was also a reason people said Anbu was a head-trip and nobody should stay there longer than five years at a stretch.
Now she'd have to work hand-in-glove with an Anbu, an assassination specialist. Yukiko touched her forehead-protector for reassurance. She could do this.
Fuuma Seichi. She thought she recognized the name, actually -- he was some relation of Ame, her old genin teammate. A second cousin, perhaps, and a few years older. She could work with a Fuuma -- that clan was known for generally having their heads on reasonably straight, unlike, say, the Hyuuga or the Uchiha.
Yukiko paused. Uchiha. Sasuke. What on earth was she going to do with the boy while she was off in Sky Country? Then an even more unpleasant thought hit her: she'd left Sasuke alone with Naruto three hours ago. Shit. Was her building still standing?
Yukiko abandoned her mission worries and ran towards her home. Fortunately, it was still standing when she got there, though Tsubume Emi from 3-F had left a note in her box complaining about loud thumping noises in the rear stairwell.
Apparently, Sasuke had managed to get both his bags up to the seventh floor and into his room, since neither he nor his luggage were in her office or slumped in the stairwell when Yukiko went to investigate. Her office looked untouched, so either he and Naruto had become instant friends -- she snorted at the thought -- or they'd drawn a truce of some sort. She hoped it was permanent enough that they wouldn't start an all-out war when she left in two days. That would not be good for her property values.
Yukiko sat behind her desk and cradled her head in her hands. Shit. She had tonight, part of tomorrow, and maybe an hour or two the next morning to arrange all her affairs for the next two to three weeks. This was not a good time for surprise missions -- she'd just bought the building next door last month, and she was in the middle of negotiating blueprints and prices with the construction company she'd hired to renovate it. She could leave her cousin Yusuke in charge of this building -- that was no problem -- but she didn't quite trust him to close the contract with Soujiro-san, or to oversee the construction project. Furthermore, Yura had agreed to open a restaurant on the ground floor of the new building, and Yukiko really didn't trust Yusuke to keep his big sister's design whims under control.
On top of all that, what the hell was she supposed to do about Sasuke? Sarutobi Hokage-sama had entrusted the boy into her care, and now she was going to hare off and leave him alone less than a week after Sarutobi-sama had told her that he shouldn't be left alone! This was a nightmare.
"Hey, hey, Yukiko-neechan?"
Yukiko looked up at Naruto's voice; the kid was hanging onto the doorframe and swinging back and forth, in and out of her office. He grinned hopefully at her. "I was good! I didn't even yell at the bastard, even though he called me a moron and looked at me all nasty like people do when they want to hit you. So I get ramen now, right?"
"Yeah," Yukiko said, pushing back from her desk, "you get ramen. Let me take off my vest and grab my wallet, and we'll head to Ichiraku."
Naruto bounced with anticipation. Yukiko grinned at him; he could be an incredibly annoying brat sometimes, but he was her incredibly annoying brat. And whatever shit he'd lived through before he came here, he didn't clam up and close off like Sasuke did. She was beginning to wonder if anything could get through that boy's shell at this point, or if he was going to be solid ice until he exploded some day. If even Naruto couldn't get more than Sasuke's standard glare, there was probably no hope for the boy.
Well, if he was frozen inside, at least he'd be stable while she was away. He wouldn't get any better, but as long as he didn't get worse, she'd call that good enough. Dealing with mental trauma wasn't her problem anyway -- yeah, she played around with people's heads, but she wasn't a medic or a Yamanaka. Her skills were geared toward breaking people, not putting them back together.
"Hurry up, Yukiko-neechan!" Naruto shouted. "Come on! I want my ramen now!"
"You need to work on your patience if you want to be a great shinobi, kid," Yukiko said, but she let Naruto grab her hand and pull her into the mellow evening light.
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The sun teetered on the rim of the hills, casting giant shadows and blinding horizontal rays of light over Konoha and onto the western face of the hospital. It was impossible for Naga to watch her window directly, but she heard the slight rustle as somebody slid down the outer wall and swung in.
She hurled a kunai in the intruder's general direction and another at the cord holding up the blinds. They rattled down and she blinked furiously, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness. "Visiting hours aren't quite over," she said, drawing a third kunai, "but you're supposed to use the door."
"Ah. But where's the fun in that?" the intruder asked lightly.
Naga set down her kunai and groaned. "Go away, Kakashi."
The jounin, who was definitely in the running for Most Irritating Person on Earth, only smiled -- his visible eye crinkled into a happy crescent and his cloth facemask flexed slightly. "Yo. I would've come sooner, but I was delayed by a swarm of rabid bumblebees. Congratulations on pulling your teammate out of that mess."
What was she supposed to say to that? Yeah, she'd pulled Tsukime out, but she'd been stupid enough to let Itachi catch her eyes in the first place, and Tsukime might never manage fieldwork again. "Whatever," Naga said, twitching her shoulder. She looked down at her lap and fiddled with the kunai. "Thanks for teaching me that jutsu, last year."
Kakashi waved that off and slumped onto the stool, pulling out his latest porn book as he sat. Naga waited in silence as he flipped through several pages. Finally, he settled on what seemed to be a satisfactory image.
"They're sending me after Itachi," he said, sounding remarkably detached and pleasant.
Naga nodded. "Figures. You were Anbu. And you have the Sharingan."
"And nin-dogs -- it's one of my lesser-known skills, but I'm a reasonably skilled summoner."
Naga nodded again, not bothering to say anything. He didn't look like he was watching, but Kakashi was a jounin; there was very little she wouldn't put past him.
"Can you walk?"
Naga twitched her shoulder irritably. "Beats me -- I'm under orders to stay in bed and not try anything. They even made me use a bedpan."
Kakashi lowered his book and looked at her, straight on. "Try. I need a partner. You have a good tracking summons, you have firsthand experience of Itachi's new skill, you have a taijutsu style he can't copy, and you have the motivation to push yourself beyond your limits. It's not standard procedure to bring non-Anbu in on hunting missions, but if you're up to this, I want you."
For about three seconds, Naga's mind went blank. Then her mouth curled up into something that might pass as a smile, if you didn't look too closely, but that felt more like baring her fangs at scurrying prey. "Even if I can't move right... get me soldier pills and I'll come. I don't care what I screw up. That bastard nearly killed Tsukime. I want him dead."
Kakashi shook his head. "No. If you're not recovered, you'll just be a liability."
"Fuck you."
Kakashi didn't bother to answer. He just waited, expressionless, his porn book held loosely in one hand as he watched her.
Slowly, painfully, Naga pushed the light blanket off her body and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her right calf was bandaged, and she could feel the itching, burning throb of a healing wound. Beyond that, her whole body ached, like she'd been running flat-out while wearing a weighted bodysuit, or like... well, like all her muscles and tendons had been sliced and stitched back together. It's psychosomatic, she told herself. It wasn't real. But she knew that was a lie -- something about Itachi's crazy eyes made the pain real, even if the swords had been an illusion.
Whatever. She was shinobi, and she had a partner to avenge. She was going to put weight on her feet, and then she was going to stand up and walk across the room, one step at a time.
Kakashi's stare felt heavy on her side.
Naga stood, wavered, and took the first step.
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Yukiko slept badly and woke early, plagued by thoughts of everything that could go wrong with her project, with an assassination, and with Naruto and Sasuke. Sometimes they got muddled and she dreamed of assassins decimating the construction company, Naruto killing her target, or Sasuke masquerading as a code inspector declaring her new building unsafe. She took a long shower to clear her mind, and went to visit her uncle.
Her cousin Yui smiled from behind the counter as Yukiko walked through Ayakawa Yutaro's grocery shop. Yukiko smiled back; she did a fair amount of specialty shopping for her uncle as part of her cover on intelligence missions, but Yui was the one who usually received the cargo, which both Yukiko and Yutaro were just as happy about. Neither of them liked the other much.
Still, there was no denying that Yutaro had a shrewd mind and a keen eye for a deal, and while Yura might change her mind simply to spite him, Yukiko figured that her uncle could and would stop listening to any design changes past a certain point. If that left Yura with a restaurant she didn't like, that was her own problem. All Yukiko needed was to have the plans finalized by the middle of next week, without being overcharged by the architect, the interior designer, or Soujiro-san's construction company, and Yutaro could certainly manage that.
She walked up the stairs to his office, making certain not to silence her steps. The last thing she needed to do was startle her uncle and remind him, again, that she'd broken the family tradition and become a ninja.
"Uncle Yutaro," she said, keeping her voice neutral.
"Yukiko," he responded, laying his pen down on his account book and turning his chair to face her. His deep-set eyes were quizzical, and faintly disapproving. "I thought we'd already agreed that you should look into salted rainbow fish when you visit Sky Country -- there simply aren't many other foods there worth transporting in small quantities."
Yukiko suppressed a grimace; next time something like this came up, she swore, she was going to have Yusuke trained well enough that she wouldn't have to bother humiliating herself this way. "I know," she said. "Something's come up, though -- you've heard about what happened to the Uchiha?"
Yutaro nodded, and seemed set to begin a lecture on the natural and negative consequences of the shinobi lifestyle.
Yukiko forestalled him. "It turns out Itachi didn't kill all of his clan -- the ones who were one missions are in hiding -- and there's a scramble to find them before he does. A lot of missions are cancelled or moved forward, and mine's one of them. I'm leaving tomorrow, not in two weeks, which means somebody else has to close the deal with Soujiro-san. Yusuke's not up to that yet, and he can't keep Yura from switching her plans past the deadline."
Faced with a business problem, Yutaro let his habitual protests against Yukiko's chosen life slide for the moment. "I see. Will Soujiro-san be available today? I can free time this afternoon to discuss the necessary details."
Yukiko sighed with relief. "Good. I had a meeting scheduled for three, so if you would stop by my office then, we can get everything straightened out. I have the apartment plans mostly in order, and Soujiro-san's architect is making sure everything is workable. Yura's restaurant is the only big issue left, and you can deal with her as well as I can."
"I should hope so," Yutaro said dryly, letting a rare glimpse of humor show through his serious façade. "I did raise her for sixteen years, after all." Yukiko smiled at her uncle.
"If your mission is rescheduled, I'm sure you have other meetings to get to," Yutaro continued, turning back to his accounts. "I'll see you at three, Yukiko."
Yukiko's smile turned wry at her uncle's dismissal; she'd run her own business for eight years and he still treated her like a child sometimes. "Thanks, Uncle Yutaro," she said, and left, clattering briskly down his creaky stairs.
She hurried home and killed an hour tweaking the boiler -- she'd have to break down and buy a new one sometime before winter, but for now she could baby it along week by week -- before changing her jacket for her chuunin vest and heading toward headquarters to meet Yuuhi Kurenai and Fuuma Seichi, to plan an assassination.
She knew Kurenai, vaguely -- most non-Uchiha genjutsu specialists knew each other, since their field was somewhat esoteric -- and she thought the younger woman was competent, though oddly shy for a shinobi. Seichi, though... she had a vague memory of Ame pointing to an older boy with brown hair when she'd invited Yukiko and Kasumi to a Fuuma clan gathering one time, but that wasn't much to go on. And anyway, he'd become an assassin since then. Assassins were always a bit... odd, at best, and downright unbalanced at worst. Hatake Kakashi was a former assassin, and look what Anbu had done to him.
The shinobi at the front desk directed her to a room on the second floor of headquarters, and Yukiko trudged off to meet her temporary partners. She was early by fifteen minutes, but when she reached the room, she could hear quiet voices discussing the most likely route to Sky Country. Yukiko sighed; it was good that neither Kurenai nor Seichi had Kakashi's particular bad habits, but she'd hoped to be the first to arrive.
She kept her steps audible and knocked politely on the doorframe before entering the room. The two occupants looked up, studied her briefly, and then Kurenai motioned to close the door. Yukiko did, and sat in the free chair at the small table, making her own study of her new teammates as she went.
Yuuhi Kurenai was pale and slight, with wavy dark hair and the solid red eyes of the Yuuhi clan. She wore her chuunin vest over one of the strangest outfits Yukiko had ever seen -- a dress that seemed to be made of wrapped bandages. It looked as though a sneeze would dislodge it, but Kurenai seemed perfectly comfortable, so Yukiko supposed it must be more stable than it appeared -- that, or she had no body-shyness and used it as a distraction technique.
Fuuma Seichi was much more nondescript, which suited a covert assassin. He wore black pants, an old white shirt, and a long gray duster over his vest. His hair was reddish-brown and needed a trim; it fell messily across his forehead and shaded his eyes, making his face hard to read. Unlike Kurenai, who was patiently still in the classic kunoichi tradition, he fiddled constantly with a deck of cards, shuffling, dealing strange arrays of numbers and faces, and then gathering the cards to shuffle again. His fingers were covered in tiny, white scars; after a moment, Yukiko identified them as old paper cuts.
"We're all early," he said without looking up at Yukiko or Kurenai. "That could be a problem, if we all push our schedules."
Yukiko shrugged. "It's best to get things done quickly, considering how little time we have to plan. I wasn't expecting to leave for another two weeks."
"Mmm," Kurenai said. "What precisely is your mission? I'm supposed to follow you discreetly once you reach your destination, but I don't know why you need support."
Now Seichi looked up and shook his hair from his face; his eyes were pale blue, and cold, like ice. Assassin eyes, Yukiko thought, and realized why he hid them. "We're heading for Tengai, a port on the north bay in Sky Country. There's a merchant who's gathering missing-nin, and the last report said he's made contact with an organized group of them. We have a week to track his connections, and then I kill him."
Kurenai seemed slightly taken aback by the disinterest in his voice. "Oh. Then I'm backup in case the missing-nin spot you." Seichi nodded and returned to shuffling his cards, letting his hair fall back into his eyes.
"Seichi and I will be undercover," Yukiko said. "My usual pose is as a buyer for my uncle's store, so I'll be looking for various delicacies to bring back. No matter how hard the target tries to keep his business secret, his competitors and trading partners will know some of his plans. If you can identify some of his missing-nin and tail them, that would also be helpful."
"I'll be infiltrating his organization," Seichi said, still sounding as if this mission meant less to him than his next meal, "probably as a clerk or a dock-worker. While we're traveling, I'll share caravan space with Yukiko -- do you object if we spin a family cover, or act as lovers?" He dealt a game of solitaire and began playing, flipping over cards and ordering them in chains of alternating red and black.
Yukiko shook her head. "That's fine, although family friends might be easier -- that way, I'll have a legitimate excuse to be helping you. Love doesn't get much respect in business, but everyone understands family obligations."
"Whatever works." Seichi lost his game, swept up his cards, and shuffled them again. He cut them into three stacks, rejoined them, and dealt a swift cross-shaped pattern. "Aha. Good omens. We should work well together."
Fortune-telling, huh? Yukiko exchanged an ironic glance with Kurenai. Assassins always got peculiar after a while; if this was the extent of Seichi's quirks, she could live with that. "So we're settled," Kurenai said. "The caravan leaves at an hour past dawn tomorrow, starting from the east gate." Yukiko nodded and pushed back her chair, ready to conclude the meeting.
As Kurenai stood, she shook her hair behind her shoulders and asked, "What's the target's name?"
Seichi's cards rattled against the table as he answered. "Amane Eiji. And the group he's made contact with goes by the name Akatsuki."
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End of Chapter Three
Back to chapter 2
Continue to chapter 4
Read the clean version here on ff.net
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You know, when I was writing "Apartment Manager" I sometimes wasn't sure what ought to happen next, but I never had to wonder whose POV it should follow. Here I'm trying to balance four POVs as well as a bunch of seemingly disparate plot threads, which means I get to have fun (hah!) playing mix'n'match with various scenes. Yukiko's long passage in the middle, for example, was originally two separate scenes, on either side of Naga's scene, but I think it works better this way, particularly in light of timing issues.
As for Sasuke and Naruto's interaction... if you have any complaints, you'll have to take them up with Naruto. The scene isn't quite what I meant to write, but he just opened his mouth and this is what came out. *shrug* Yeah, I know it's ultimately all me, but sometimes the words just come and it would take way to much effort to argue the issue with my subconscious.
This is the sequel to "The Way of the Apartment Manager," which can be found in clean draft here on ff.net, or in rough draft with comments here on my livejournal. It also has fanart, which can be found here.
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The Guardian in Spite of Herself: Chapter 3
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Sasuke looked warily at the half-familiar boy in the orange pants and jacket, but the boy ignored him. Instead, he was watching the doorway the woman had run through, and his face was crinkled with worry. "I guess it was Naga," he mumbled. Then he shrugged and turned back to Sasuke. He grinned -- it was a stupid smile, big enough that anyone could see it from a hundred yards away. It went with his clothes and his spiky, yellow hair.
"Hey, hey, I'm Uzumaki Naruto, and Yukiko-neechan's my big sister and this is her building, so it's sort of my building too. So I'm gonna tell you the rules." He held up his hand and started ticking off fingers. "You're not allowed to bug the tenants or mess up the public areas, but you can do what you want in your room as long as you fix it before you stop renting the apartment. You can bug Yukiko-neechan, 'cause she's a ninja and it's like practice, but you can't mess up anything really important, like contracts and taxes, 'cause then she'll be really mad. And," he added with a scowl that stretched the three whisker marks on each of his cheeks, "you can't bug her when I'm already with her, 'cause she's my sister.
"The yard out back is for ninja practice and stuff, but you have to be careful if civilians are out there with pets, 'cause killing dogs by accident is stupid and irrespons'ble, and Yukiko-neechan has to pay huge fines," -- he waved his arms expressively -- "and then she yells a lot and that's no fun." He paused and scratched his head. "I think that's it. Oh! And when Yukiko-neechan's out on missions, her cousin Yusuke runs the place, and he stinks. He's not even a ninja, and he'll report you to the police if you break the rules."
Naruto grinned again. "There! Hey, hey, why are you living here anyway? Don't you have a house or something?"
Sasuke, still overwhelmed by the flood of words and the boy's sheer presence, didn't catch his flinch in time.
Naruto's blue eyes narrowed. "Hey, if you're in the room across from mine, that's a really small apartment. You couldn't fit a whole family in there, not unless you squeezed really tight, and I heard a lot of people got killed a few days ago, and... hey, hey, was that your family?"
Sasuke glared, but Naruto ran right over him without noticing. "That really stinks, if it was your family, but I didn't have any family either, and now Yukiko-neechan's my family, so maybe we can be your family too! Even if you are a stuck-up bastard and you don't talk." He held out his hand toward Sasuke. "I'll take one of your bags upstairs. Okay?"
Finally, an opening. "No," Sasuke said, as flatly as he could.
Hurt flashed across Naruto's face, but the orange boy quickly buried it under cheerful confusion. "No, don't take your bag, or no, don't be friends?"
"Both," Sasuke said, and then added, almost in spite of himself, "Moron."
Naruto nodded absently. "Yeah, yeah, I thought that's what you meant. I'm not gonna do anything now 'cause Yukiko-neechan's worried about Naga, but tomorrow I'm gonna kick your ass, bastard. And you can carry your bags yourself." He stuck his tongue out at Sasuke and dashed out of the office as fast as he'd slammed into it not five minutes before.
Sasuke peered around the doorframe to see which way Naruto went, and relaxed when the orange boy ran outside instead of heading for the stairs. He waited a long minute, counting his breaths, until he was certain Naruto wasn't coming back and wouldn't see him struggling with his packs. Then he grabbed the heavier one, the one the woman had carried on the way from home, and started dragging it toward the rear stairwell.
He didn't need anybody's pity, or any more fake families. Especially not one that had people like Naruto in it.
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Yukiko held up a section of wall for several minutes while Tonoike Taizen and Bashoto fussed over their daughter, and then made her apologies and slipped out. She needed to talk to Heika-san.
Apparently Heika-san had the same thought, since a nurse flagged her down as she walked toward the main door of the hospital, and told her that Heika-san wanted to see her at headquarters ASAP. Yukiko nodded and took to the roofs, squinting against the late afternoon sun. It was the fastest way around Konoha, and she needed to do something physical anyway.
Intelligence and Interrogations had their headquarters in a nondescript complex of low buildings near the edge of town, well away from the Hokage monument and the Hokage's tower and administration complex on top of the cliff. It was best not to keep prisoners too close to the important things, and the small gap in communications was wonderful for plausible deniability, should the need arise. Yukiko landed on the ground near the complex wall -- you simply didn't roof-hop over headquarters, the same way you didn't roof-hop over Anbu central -- and walked through the open gate.
Heika-san had a small office on the first basement level, with a well-concealed ventilation tunnel that also -- through the careful arrangement of mirrors -- let in a bit of natural sunlight. Beyond that indulgence, there was no visible sign that this office was one of the two nerve centers of headquarters. Heika-san liked it that way. He looked up from his desk as Yukiko knocked on his open door.
"We're doubly disrupted now," he began abruptly. "Everyone's on short staff since the Uchiha died, and with the new revelations, we have to mobilize teams to find potential survivors. Everything else is a mess, and we're upping priority on some missions. You were assigned to investigate a shipping magnate up in Sky Country, to see if we strictly need to kill him or if we can leave that to Hidden Cloud when they finally see what's under their noses."
Yukiko nodded. "I wasn't scheduled to leave for another two weeks," she said neutrally.
Heika-san frowned. "True, but we can't afford any potential instability now, with our numbers down and our people scattered. It's been upgraded to immediate assassination. You'll have one week to find his connections, and then your partner takes him out. You're working with Anbu on this mission -- Fuuma Seichi, one of their assassination specialists.
"Your cover is the same as usual -- we'll add you to a trade caravan that leaves for Sky Country the day after tomorrow, under escort by Yuuhi Kurenai. Meet Seichi and Kurenai here, ten in the morning tomorrow, and make plans." Heika-san pinned Yukiko with his hard, black stare. "Don't screw up. We need that man gone, and we need his connections and his plans. And don't bring Cloud-nin down on your back."
He returned to his papers, clearing dismissing Yukiko. She bowed, and walked silently down the corridor toward the stairs. She didn't answer any of the other Intelligence ops who greeted her, just waved absently and continued on her way out of the complex. She didn't feel settled enough to carry on a conversation.
Assassination. She'd never run an assassination before. Oh, she'd killed people -- she was a shinobi -- but they had almost all been trying to kill her at the same time. Selecting a person who hadn't attacked her and calmly deciding that he or she would die... no, that she hadn't done. There was a reason she'd never wanted to join Anbu. There was also a reason people said Anbu was a head-trip and nobody should stay there longer than five years at a stretch.
Now she'd have to work hand-in-glove with an Anbu, an assassination specialist. Yukiko touched her forehead-protector for reassurance. She could do this.
Fuuma Seichi. She thought she recognized the name, actually -- he was some relation of Ame, her old genin teammate. A second cousin, perhaps, and a few years older. She could work with a Fuuma -- that clan was known for generally having their heads on reasonably straight, unlike, say, the Hyuuga or the Uchiha.
Yukiko paused. Uchiha. Sasuke. What on earth was she going to do with the boy while she was off in Sky Country? Then an even more unpleasant thought hit her: she'd left Sasuke alone with Naruto three hours ago. Shit. Was her building still standing?
Yukiko abandoned her mission worries and ran towards her home. Fortunately, it was still standing when she got there, though Tsubume Emi from 3-F had left a note in her box complaining about loud thumping noises in the rear stairwell.
Apparently, Sasuke had managed to get both his bags up to the seventh floor and into his room, since neither he nor his luggage were in her office or slumped in the stairwell when Yukiko went to investigate. Her office looked untouched, so either he and Naruto had become instant friends -- she snorted at the thought -- or they'd drawn a truce of some sort. She hoped it was permanent enough that they wouldn't start an all-out war when she left in two days. That would not be good for her property values.
Yukiko sat behind her desk and cradled her head in her hands. Shit. She had tonight, part of tomorrow, and maybe an hour or two the next morning to arrange all her affairs for the next two to three weeks. This was not a good time for surprise missions -- she'd just bought the building next door last month, and she was in the middle of negotiating blueprints and prices with the construction company she'd hired to renovate it. She could leave her cousin Yusuke in charge of this building -- that was no problem -- but she didn't quite trust him to close the contract with Soujiro-san, or to oversee the construction project. Furthermore, Yura had agreed to open a restaurant on the ground floor of the new building, and Yukiko really didn't trust Yusuke to keep his big sister's design whims under control.
On top of all that, what the hell was she supposed to do about Sasuke? Sarutobi Hokage-sama had entrusted the boy into her care, and now she was going to hare off and leave him alone less than a week after Sarutobi-sama had told her that he shouldn't be left alone! This was a nightmare.
"Hey, hey, Yukiko-neechan?"
Yukiko looked up at Naruto's voice; the kid was hanging onto the doorframe and swinging back and forth, in and out of her office. He grinned hopefully at her. "I was good! I didn't even yell at the bastard, even though he called me a moron and looked at me all nasty like people do when they want to hit you. So I get ramen now, right?"
"Yeah," Yukiko said, pushing back from her desk, "you get ramen. Let me take off my vest and grab my wallet, and we'll head to Ichiraku."
Naruto bounced with anticipation. Yukiko grinned at him; he could be an incredibly annoying brat sometimes, but he was her incredibly annoying brat. And whatever shit he'd lived through before he came here, he didn't clam up and close off like Sasuke did. She was beginning to wonder if anything could get through that boy's shell at this point, or if he was going to be solid ice until he exploded some day. If even Naruto couldn't get more than Sasuke's standard glare, there was probably no hope for the boy.
Well, if he was frozen inside, at least he'd be stable while she was away. He wouldn't get any better, but as long as he didn't get worse, she'd call that good enough. Dealing with mental trauma wasn't her problem anyway -- yeah, she played around with people's heads, but she wasn't a medic or a Yamanaka. Her skills were geared toward breaking people, not putting them back together.
"Hurry up, Yukiko-neechan!" Naruto shouted. "Come on! I want my ramen now!"
"You need to work on your patience if you want to be a great shinobi, kid," Yukiko said, but she let Naruto grab her hand and pull her into the mellow evening light.
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The sun teetered on the rim of the hills, casting giant shadows and blinding horizontal rays of light over Konoha and onto the western face of the hospital. It was impossible for Naga to watch her window directly, but she heard the slight rustle as somebody slid down the outer wall and swung in.
She hurled a kunai in the intruder's general direction and another at the cord holding up the blinds. They rattled down and she blinked furiously, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness. "Visiting hours aren't quite over," she said, drawing a third kunai, "but you're supposed to use the door."
"Ah. But where's the fun in that?" the intruder asked lightly.
Naga set down her kunai and groaned. "Go away, Kakashi."
The jounin, who was definitely in the running for Most Irritating Person on Earth, only smiled -- his visible eye crinkled into a happy crescent and his cloth facemask flexed slightly. "Yo. I would've come sooner, but I was delayed by a swarm of rabid bumblebees. Congratulations on pulling your teammate out of that mess."
What was she supposed to say to that? Yeah, she'd pulled Tsukime out, but she'd been stupid enough to let Itachi catch her eyes in the first place, and Tsukime might never manage fieldwork again. "Whatever," Naga said, twitching her shoulder. She looked down at her lap and fiddled with the kunai. "Thanks for teaching me that jutsu, last year."
Kakashi waved that off and slumped onto the stool, pulling out his latest porn book as he sat. Naga waited in silence as he flipped through several pages. Finally, he settled on what seemed to be a satisfactory image.
"They're sending me after Itachi," he said, sounding remarkably detached and pleasant.
Naga nodded. "Figures. You were Anbu. And you have the Sharingan."
"And nin-dogs -- it's one of my lesser-known skills, but I'm a reasonably skilled summoner."
Naga nodded again, not bothering to say anything. He didn't look like he was watching, but Kakashi was a jounin; there was very little she wouldn't put past him.
"Can you walk?"
Naga twitched her shoulder irritably. "Beats me -- I'm under orders to stay in bed and not try anything. They even made me use a bedpan."
Kakashi lowered his book and looked at her, straight on. "Try. I need a partner. You have a good tracking summons, you have firsthand experience of Itachi's new skill, you have a taijutsu style he can't copy, and you have the motivation to push yourself beyond your limits. It's not standard procedure to bring non-Anbu in on hunting missions, but if you're up to this, I want you."
For about three seconds, Naga's mind went blank. Then her mouth curled up into something that might pass as a smile, if you didn't look too closely, but that felt more like baring her fangs at scurrying prey. "Even if I can't move right... get me soldier pills and I'll come. I don't care what I screw up. That bastard nearly killed Tsukime. I want him dead."
Kakashi shook his head. "No. If you're not recovered, you'll just be a liability."
"Fuck you."
Kakashi didn't bother to answer. He just waited, expressionless, his porn book held loosely in one hand as he watched her.
Slowly, painfully, Naga pushed the light blanket off her body and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her right calf was bandaged, and she could feel the itching, burning throb of a healing wound. Beyond that, her whole body ached, like she'd been running flat-out while wearing a weighted bodysuit, or like... well, like all her muscles and tendons had been sliced and stitched back together. It's psychosomatic, she told herself. It wasn't real. But she knew that was a lie -- something about Itachi's crazy eyes made the pain real, even if the swords had been an illusion.
Whatever. She was shinobi, and she had a partner to avenge. She was going to put weight on her feet, and then she was going to stand up and walk across the room, one step at a time.
Kakashi's stare felt heavy on her side.
Naga stood, wavered, and took the first step.
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Yukiko slept badly and woke early, plagued by thoughts of everything that could go wrong with her project, with an assassination, and with Naruto and Sasuke. Sometimes they got muddled and she dreamed of assassins decimating the construction company, Naruto killing her target, or Sasuke masquerading as a code inspector declaring her new building unsafe. She took a long shower to clear her mind, and went to visit her uncle.
Her cousin Yui smiled from behind the counter as Yukiko walked through Ayakawa Yutaro's grocery shop. Yukiko smiled back; she did a fair amount of specialty shopping for her uncle as part of her cover on intelligence missions, but Yui was the one who usually received the cargo, which both Yukiko and Yutaro were just as happy about. Neither of them liked the other much.
Still, there was no denying that Yutaro had a shrewd mind and a keen eye for a deal, and while Yura might change her mind simply to spite him, Yukiko figured that her uncle could and would stop listening to any design changes past a certain point. If that left Yura with a restaurant she didn't like, that was her own problem. All Yukiko needed was to have the plans finalized by the middle of next week, without being overcharged by the architect, the interior designer, or Soujiro-san's construction company, and Yutaro could certainly manage that.
She walked up the stairs to his office, making certain not to silence her steps. The last thing she needed to do was startle her uncle and remind him, again, that she'd broken the family tradition and become a ninja.
"Uncle Yutaro," she said, keeping her voice neutral.
"Yukiko," he responded, laying his pen down on his account book and turning his chair to face her. His deep-set eyes were quizzical, and faintly disapproving. "I thought we'd already agreed that you should look into salted rainbow fish when you visit Sky Country -- there simply aren't many other foods there worth transporting in small quantities."
Yukiko suppressed a grimace; next time something like this came up, she swore, she was going to have Yusuke trained well enough that she wouldn't have to bother humiliating herself this way. "I know," she said. "Something's come up, though -- you've heard about what happened to the Uchiha?"
Yutaro nodded, and seemed set to begin a lecture on the natural and negative consequences of the shinobi lifestyle.
Yukiko forestalled him. "It turns out Itachi didn't kill all of his clan -- the ones who were one missions are in hiding -- and there's a scramble to find them before he does. A lot of missions are cancelled or moved forward, and mine's one of them. I'm leaving tomorrow, not in two weeks, which means somebody else has to close the deal with Soujiro-san. Yusuke's not up to that yet, and he can't keep Yura from switching her plans past the deadline."
Faced with a business problem, Yutaro let his habitual protests against Yukiko's chosen life slide for the moment. "I see. Will Soujiro-san be available today? I can free time this afternoon to discuss the necessary details."
Yukiko sighed with relief. "Good. I had a meeting scheduled for three, so if you would stop by my office then, we can get everything straightened out. I have the apartment plans mostly in order, and Soujiro-san's architect is making sure everything is workable. Yura's restaurant is the only big issue left, and you can deal with her as well as I can."
"I should hope so," Yutaro said dryly, letting a rare glimpse of humor show through his serious façade. "I did raise her for sixteen years, after all." Yukiko smiled at her uncle.
"If your mission is rescheduled, I'm sure you have other meetings to get to," Yutaro continued, turning back to his accounts. "I'll see you at three, Yukiko."
Yukiko's smile turned wry at her uncle's dismissal; she'd run her own business for eight years and he still treated her like a child sometimes. "Thanks, Uncle Yutaro," she said, and left, clattering briskly down his creaky stairs.
She hurried home and killed an hour tweaking the boiler -- she'd have to break down and buy a new one sometime before winter, but for now she could baby it along week by week -- before changing her jacket for her chuunin vest and heading toward headquarters to meet Yuuhi Kurenai and Fuuma Seichi, to plan an assassination.
She knew Kurenai, vaguely -- most non-Uchiha genjutsu specialists knew each other, since their field was somewhat esoteric -- and she thought the younger woman was competent, though oddly shy for a shinobi. Seichi, though... she had a vague memory of Ame pointing to an older boy with brown hair when she'd invited Yukiko and Kasumi to a Fuuma clan gathering one time, but that wasn't much to go on. And anyway, he'd become an assassin since then. Assassins were always a bit... odd, at best, and downright unbalanced at worst. Hatake Kakashi was a former assassin, and look what Anbu had done to him.
The shinobi at the front desk directed her to a room on the second floor of headquarters, and Yukiko trudged off to meet her temporary partners. She was early by fifteen minutes, but when she reached the room, she could hear quiet voices discussing the most likely route to Sky Country. Yukiko sighed; it was good that neither Kurenai nor Seichi had Kakashi's particular bad habits, but she'd hoped to be the first to arrive.
She kept her steps audible and knocked politely on the doorframe before entering the room. The two occupants looked up, studied her briefly, and then Kurenai motioned to close the door. Yukiko did, and sat in the free chair at the small table, making her own study of her new teammates as she went.
Yuuhi Kurenai was pale and slight, with wavy dark hair and the solid red eyes of the Yuuhi clan. She wore her chuunin vest over one of the strangest outfits Yukiko had ever seen -- a dress that seemed to be made of wrapped bandages. It looked as though a sneeze would dislodge it, but Kurenai seemed perfectly comfortable, so Yukiko supposed it must be more stable than it appeared -- that, or she had no body-shyness and used it as a distraction technique.
Fuuma Seichi was much more nondescript, which suited a covert assassin. He wore black pants, an old white shirt, and a long gray duster over his vest. His hair was reddish-brown and needed a trim; it fell messily across his forehead and shaded his eyes, making his face hard to read. Unlike Kurenai, who was patiently still in the classic kunoichi tradition, he fiddled constantly with a deck of cards, shuffling, dealing strange arrays of numbers and faces, and then gathering the cards to shuffle again. His fingers were covered in tiny, white scars; after a moment, Yukiko identified them as old paper cuts.
"We're all early," he said without looking up at Yukiko or Kurenai. "That could be a problem, if we all push our schedules."
Yukiko shrugged. "It's best to get things done quickly, considering how little time we have to plan. I wasn't expecting to leave for another two weeks."
"Mmm," Kurenai said. "What precisely is your mission? I'm supposed to follow you discreetly once you reach your destination, but I don't know why you need support."
Now Seichi looked up and shook his hair from his face; his eyes were pale blue, and cold, like ice. Assassin eyes, Yukiko thought, and realized why he hid them. "We're heading for Tengai, a port on the north bay in Sky Country. There's a merchant who's gathering missing-nin, and the last report said he's made contact with an organized group of them. We have a week to track his connections, and then I kill him."
Kurenai seemed slightly taken aback by the disinterest in his voice. "Oh. Then I'm backup in case the missing-nin spot you." Seichi nodded and returned to shuffling his cards, letting his hair fall back into his eyes.
"Seichi and I will be undercover," Yukiko said. "My usual pose is as a buyer for my uncle's store, so I'll be looking for various delicacies to bring back. No matter how hard the target tries to keep his business secret, his competitors and trading partners will know some of his plans. If you can identify some of his missing-nin and tail them, that would also be helpful."
"I'll be infiltrating his organization," Seichi said, still sounding as if this mission meant less to him than his next meal, "probably as a clerk or a dock-worker. While we're traveling, I'll share caravan space with Yukiko -- do you object if we spin a family cover, or act as lovers?" He dealt a game of solitaire and began playing, flipping over cards and ordering them in chains of alternating red and black.
Yukiko shook her head. "That's fine, although family friends might be easier -- that way, I'll have a legitimate excuse to be helping you. Love doesn't get much respect in business, but everyone understands family obligations."
"Whatever works." Seichi lost his game, swept up his cards, and shuffled them again. He cut them into three stacks, rejoined them, and dealt a swift cross-shaped pattern. "Aha. Good omens. We should work well together."
Fortune-telling, huh? Yukiko exchanged an ironic glance with Kurenai. Assassins always got peculiar after a while; if this was the extent of Seichi's quirks, she could live with that. "So we're settled," Kurenai said. "The caravan leaves at an hour past dawn tomorrow, starting from the east gate." Yukiko nodded and pushed back her chair, ready to conclude the meeting.
As Kurenai stood, she shook her hair behind her shoulders and asked, "What's the target's name?"
Seichi's cards rattled against the table as he answered. "Amane Eiji. And the group he's made contact with goes by the name Akatsuki."
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End of Chapter Three
Back to chapter 2
Continue to chapter 4
Read the clean version here on ff.net
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You know, when I was writing "Apartment Manager" I sometimes wasn't sure what ought to happen next, but I never had to wonder whose POV it should follow. Here I'm trying to balance four POVs as well as a bunch of seemingly disparate plot threads, which means I get to have fun (hah!) playing mix'n'match with various scenes. Yukiko's long passage in the middle, for example, was originally two separate scenes, on either side of Naga's scene, but I think it works better this way, particularly in light of timing issues.
As for Sasuke and Naruto's interaction... if you have any complaints, you'll have to take them up with Naruto. The scene isn't quite what I meant to write, but he just opened his mouth and this is what came out. *shrug* Yeah, I know it's ultimately all me, but sometimes the words just come and it would take way to much effort to argue the issue with my subconscious.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-09 07:03 pm (UTC)