I was whining to FFN user fascinationgame that I wanted to write a stereotypical Sakura fic but with Karin, and they suggested an Akatsuki-as-cats fic. What follows is entirely their fault.
WARNING: Karin hurts the cats. She hurts one before she knows it's really a person. It's not graphic, but if the idea bothers you, then proceed with caution.
xXx
Karin stared at the cat in front of the drop point.
The drop point had once been a roadside tea shop and was still marked as such, but Karin would be surprised if there was a single tea leaf left in the place. The paint on the shopfront was chipped but still legible, the neglected dirt road in front of it still passable by foot but not by cart. The shop boasted a "restaurant," which was just a window counter under an awning, with a handful of collapsed and rotting wooden tables in the shade of the huge beech trees that lined the road. The cat was perched on one of the tables.
It was an especially ugly cat– hairless and wrinkled and huge with awkward rolls of fat. Its green eyes narrowed into slits as it eyed Karin right back.
With an irritated huff, Karin turned on her heel, ignoring the stupid cat and banging on the little bell on the counter.
"Excuse me," she yelled into the window, curiously left open despite the rain that had only just stopped. "I've been waiting here twenty minutes–"
At her feet and propped against the bottom of the counter, the missing-nin she'd dragged all the way over from a hovel in the Land of Waves let out a low groan. Karin banged on the wood with her fist.
"EXCUSE ME," she hollered.
The missing-nin's eyes fluttered as his body fought for consciousness. Karin swore under her breath and squatted down to dig through her pack for more paralytics. She was never taking someone in alive again.
The stupid cat was still watching her, its tail twitching behind it. Even though it was disgustingly huge for a hairless cat, its skin looked like it was a full dress size too large for it. Distracting. Also, there was something terribly wrong with its chakra, which was even more distracting.
Two hours later, Karin was still having a glaring contest with the cat, and an extremely frazzled looking woman staggered out of the forest into the tea shop's clearing.
"Bunny-san?" Karin asked, wrestling her eyes away from the weird cat. The more she stared at it, the more flesh-colored scars she noticed lining its flabby skin. Gross.
"Ah, yes," replied the woman, who looked more like a Confused Bird-san. "Are you– uh– dropping off?"
The woman disappeared into the shop, but when she reappeared at the counter some minutes later, she seemed much more collected.
"So sorry about that," she said, dropping a heavy ledger on the counter between them. "We had a, hmm, an incident with one of our drop-offs."
"Uh-huh," Karin answered.
"Who did you say this was?" Bunny-san asked, leaning over the counter to get a good look.
Karin's captive was a man who'd fled Iwa during the Second Shinobi War. He'd been an infiltration specialist who'd flown under the radar, living a nondescript and untrackable life for decades. That was, of course, until Karin had decided to find him.
Bunny-san had to go deep into her records to find him.
"And you did this by yourself?" she asked, eyebrows raised at Karin.
"Does it matter?" Karin snapped. "I'd like to get out of here, and you're already running late."
Bunny-san, who had undoubtedly dealt with ruder customers than Karin, shrugged it off easily. It did not, in fact, matter who'd found and incapacitated the man and dragged him here, as long as Karin was there to collect on the bounty. Bunny-san had Karin haul the man's unconscious body onto the counter, examined him, and then passed over Karin's money.
"Mrrroooow," the ugly cat complained while Karin counted her payment. The cat leapt off the table and landed heavily in the grass, wet from recent rain. It prowled over to Karin and glared up at her. "Mrrr," it insisted.
"Shoo," Karin commanded, then went back to her money.
The missing-nin had originally been an A-rank for the value of the state secrets he knew, but he'd dropped down to a low-B as time made his knowledge less dangerous. Had anyone had any idea where he'd gone, he'd probably be ranked even lower.
That was Karin's comfort zone: bounties ranked for the difficulty of finding, not the difficulty of capturing. Once she'd found him, it had been frankly embarrassing how little coaxing it had taken him to ingest the homemade snacks she'd offered to him at his favorite fishing spot.
In any case, Karin was not currently living a particularly glamorous lifestyle, and the pay was enough to get her through the rest of the month.
"Your summons gives me the creeps," Karin said as she tucked her money away.
"Hmm?" Bunny-san said, looking up from hog-tying the missing-nin. "Oh, the cat? He's not ours."
Karin glowered at the cat some more, and it glowered back at her. The ugly thing was… well, beyond being the most hideous animal she'd ever seen, it also did not feel like a cat to her sixth sense. A summon's chakra still felt like an animal, just with a sense of sentience to it, and usually in much higher quantities. This thing's chakra felt almost…
Well. Almost human.
It was very upsetting and also very not Karin's business.
"If that's all," she said stiffly to Bunny-san, and then sauntered down to the road to be on her way.
The cat followed her.
"Shoo," she snapped at it, and sent a half-hearted kick its way. It dodged and hissed angrily at her.
Two men crashed out of the forest, a third man held between them. Karin, who had become quite an expert in current bounties this past year, recognized the first two men as working at the drop point, and the unconscious man between them as an A-rank missing nin from Suna. He was beaten and battered in a way that she did not think the drop point ninja were capable of. Was this Bunny-san's "incident"?
"I don't know where Customer-san went," she heard Bunny-san saying to her colleagues.
"I guess we'll get the commission fee and the bounty then," one of the ninja said, and then the cat went berserk.
It hurled itself back across the clearing to the tea shop, tackling the man with enough force to make him stumble. It sank both its teeth and its claws into the man, who screamed like a child finding a spider in his bathtub.
Karin rolled her eyes and continued on her way. She was over a day's trek from home, and it was already late. She'd have to camp somewhere for the night. Annoying.
xXx
It had been raining on and off all day, so rather than sleep in the mud, Karin crawled into a tree and stuck herself to a sturdy branch for the night. When she'd first left Grass Country, which was mostly open plains, learning to sleep with her chakra gluing her to a tree had been difficult, but. Well. She'd had lots of time it practice.
She got roughly three hours of sleep before her sixth sense woke her up. The cat was back. She could feel it, all weird and almost-human and way too big for a cat, right on the periphery of her usual sensing range. There was another, equally weird chakra with it. Had it found a friend?
Karin stood silently on the tree and took a minute to stretch. The cat was coming her way, and she had sworn off getting involved in any more fucked-up jutsu.
She didn't know what the cat was, exactly, but it definitely went into the category of "fucked-up jutsu," and she was leaving.
The cat was weird and a little scary in its weirdness, but it was still a cat limited by cat anatomy, and Karin outran it easily. Whatever the second weird chakra was, it stuck with the cat.
Karin arrived home at dawn and immediately flopped down on her bed to nap. This turned out to be a technical error, because when she woke, the cat and its friend were somewhere outside. More precisely, they'd just arrived at the outskirts the picturesque coastal town Karin was currently residing in.
Groaning, Karin kicked off her blankets and pulled on her glasses. It would be better to go deal with them outside than let them find her home. The neighbors already thought she'd murdered her grandfather for the house– no need to make them more suspicious.
(The old man hadn't actually been her grandfather, but she hadn't killed him. She'd just… picked out a chakra signature she knew was fading and then faked some tears at his bedside and told some lies to inherit his cute cottage.)
She found them sniffing around among the scraggly bushes outside of town. The second weird chakra turned out to belong to another, much prettier cat. This one had sleek, pure white fur, pink eyes, and was currently bleeding from its shoulder. Both cats froze when they noticed her.
"Well?" she asked, sniffing and crossing her arms.
Predictably, being cats, neither of them answered. The hideous hairless one flattened both its ears to the back of its head and hissed.
"Did you come all this way just to yell at me?" Karin asked.
Maybe she had insulted it somehow. Maybe it hated hunter-nin. Maybe part of its fucked-up jutsu made it imprint on her. Maybe–
The white one attacked her.
"Motherfucker–" Karin screamed. She kicked it hard enough to send it crashing through the nearest bush, but not before it had managed to sink its claws into her exposed tight.
The ugly one seemed to agree with her, because it turned and pounced on its friend, yowling and hissing. Karin swore at them, and then started to stomp back to the town.
Halfway down mainstreet, she felt the cats disentangle themselves and hurry into the village. She rolled her eyes and ducked into an empty restaurant. Her server, a teenaged boy, set her cake and a kettle of boiling water down in front of her.
"W–we're out of your tea," he stammered, "but I can go get more!"
He ran out before Karin could tell him to take the water away, then, which was the type of service you got when there were wild rumors of you being a murderer.
He left in such a hurry, he didn't notice the two cats dart in as he left, leaving the door swinging behind him. The white one was now practically pink, bleeding in multiple places. Karin watched them approach with eyebrows raised.
The hairless one hoped onto her table and batted her cake off the table. Karin made no move to intervene as the plate broke on the floor, the frosting splattering everywhere. The white cat sniffed at it.
"...uh-huh," Karin said, unimpressed. The ugly cat sat in front of her, ears flat and eyes slit, watching her expectantly. Its face wrinkled impressively.
When the cat failed to make any other sort of move, Karin laced some honey into her voice and asked mockingly, "Can I help you? Do you want someone to pet your ugly face?"
The cat let out a singular hiss. The white one was licking cake crumbs off the floor.
"Then I guess we're out an impasse," Karin said, flipping her hair over her shoulder leaning back into her chair.
"Mrrow," the cat said, its tail twitching. If it couldn't explain to Karin what it wanted, then she wasn't sure why it had been so insistent on following her. She wished she had tea and not just a pot of hot water, so she could pour and drink it all casual-like, to show off to the cat that she really, really couldn't be bothered with it.
The white cat hopped onto the table, cake in its whiskers. It rubbed against the hairless cat, who smacked it away with just as must force and vitriol as it had Karin's cake. The white cat stumbled into the teapot and knocked it over. Karin back her chair away to avoid the scalding water, which was a good thing, because suddenly there was a naked man on her table.
"What!" Karin squawked, jumping out of her chair.
"SHIT–" the man yelled, and Karin had to admit, she'd definitely had this exact fantasy before. The man was handsome and fit, with mussed silver hair and eyes as red as hers. He was completely without clothes, posed for her on the table.
The ugly cat sort of hissed at it, ears so flat they could barely be seen, and then it jumped off the table and rolled in the steaming puddle leaking from the tea pot.
Right before her very eyes, the cat transformed into a man. His chakra twisted and bloomed, now fully human and even bigger. This was, incidentally, another fantasy of Karin's, except in her fantasies the magic transforming naked man was much sexier.
Also in her fantasies, the sexy naked man almost never attacked her.
"Get her," the new naked man grunted, and lunged at her. He was giant and muscled and covered in poorly-stitched scars, with inky black hair, and he moved much faster than Karin would have anticipated.
Still, for the unexpected speed, he must not have fully adjusted to being human yet, because his grab was sloppy and Karin managed to slip through his arms and run up the wall to kneel on the ceiling. Below her, the silver-haired man stood and cracked his neck, blinking and slightly dazed. He squinted up at Karin.
"Why're we after this bitch, Kakuzu?" he asked, and Karin realized they weren't completely naked– they both wore matching rings.
"That's whatI'd like to know," Karin snapped down at them. She could probably make it to a door or a window and escape, but if she didn't know their motives, she couldn't anticipate if they would follow her and how far they'd go to pursue her.
The big one, Kakuzu, narrowed his acid green eyes at her, completely unabashed in his nakedness.
"She's a tracker," he said.
"Eh?" the silver haired one answered, pulling an elbow back to stretch his shoulders, also completely unashamed of his nakedness. This was something Karin could support in attractive people, except that she didn't like being attacked. "But we broke the jutsu just now, didn't we?"
Kakuzu just sort of… growled. Then his forearm detached from his body and shot at Karin.
She had been doing so well at her vow against fucked-up jutsu, too.
Karin rolled to avoid it, and it broke through the ceiling. The hand was supported by several creepy black tendrils, and one whipped around and stabbed at her. She dodged and accidentally hit one of the fire sprinklers mounted on the ceiling. It broke off, clattering to the floor below, and water sprayed.
The sprinklers, she thought, must not be up to code, because the water they released was brown. Still, it hit Kakuzu full force.
He turned back into an ugly cat.
"What the f–" the silver-haired one managed to get out before he too turned into a cat.
Cautiously, Karin dropped down onto the table. On the floor, the cats were spitting and hissing, circling each other aggressively. Their chakra had condensed down and taken on an animalistic feel to it, but the chakra was still recognizable as belonging to the two men.
Both cats were drenched and miserable looking.
Karin had heard of Kakuzu. He was infamous in bounty hunter circles. You didn't get in his way, and if he wanted the mark you were after, you let him have it. He had been around as long as anyone could remember, a nightmare and a legend and a myth.
And… a cat, apparently.
Karin could get away from him in cat-form. But if he turned back– and he'd just proven he could– she was probably screwed. She couldn't run from the world's most dangerous bounty hunter forever.
"Hey," she called down to them. Both of them tensed and looked up at her. "You need me to track someone down?"
Kakuzu-cat mewled. His partner sat and started licking dry blood from his fur.
"I think we can make a deal," Karin said slowly. "Why don't we go back to my place and talk it over?"
Kakuzu-cat did some sort of weird bob with his head that she interpreted as agreement, and both cats followed Karin out of the restaurant. She nearly bumped into the waiter boy, holding paper bag and panting from his rush.
"There was an accident," Karin said blandly. "You should maintain the building better."
"What–" the boy started to say, and she brushed past him.
The road to Karin's house took her up a cliff, which overlooked the sea. The main bulk of the town, nestled at the foot of the steep slope and adjacent to a white-sand beach, was geared at tourism, but historically the town had been a fishing village. As she headed up the cliff, the houses got less and less modern. At the top of the cliff, half the little homes lining it were abandoned.
Karin liked her current residence, despite it not even having electricity, because it was simultaneously remote and right next to a modern town with shopping and amenities. Not to mention, as the path wound along the cliff, the view was beautiful.
Both cats plodded along behind her. When Karin paused to take in the sea stretched out before her, a greyish blue under the overcast sky, the cats stopped with her. The breeze from the sea was cool and salty, and it blew her red hair back over her shoulders.
"Mrrow," the white cat complained after a minute of her staring. Karin hadn't recognized him from any bingo books, and she concluded he wasn't as dangerous as Kakuzu.
Sighing deeply, Karin stared down at the cats. Cutting a deal with Kakuzu was better than being hunted down and murdered, but it still wasn't an ideal solution.
Without a single sign of warning to the hideous cat, Karin punted it over the edge of the cliff.
The ideal solution, really, was to just eliminate the threat all together.
Kakuzu screamed as he went sailing, flailing his limbs in comic outrage. But he was just a cat, and he wasn't going to survive the fall or the rough water below. The white cat also screamed, clawing at her and spitting and biting, all its hair on edge.
It was mean, but it was still a cat. It only took a minute for Karin to wrestle it from where it was destroying her shirt and hurl it over the cliff as well.
"Good riddance," she murmured, leaning over the cliff to make sure they were gone.
The white cat had clawed her in several places, but Karin healed quick. She was more annoyed that he'd ruined one of her favorite shirts.
She'd probably done the world a favor, getting rid of those two.
xXx
Four days later, Karin was chopping wood outside her ill-begotten cottage, and she felt Kakuzu and his friend approaching at rapid speed. They were human again, their chakra huge and furious and deadly.
"For god's sake," she muttered to herself. How the hell were they still alive?
She dropped her axe, thought better of it, and scooped it back up. Her pursuers were far off, but they were fast, and there wasn't really any time to flee or prepare something. She had spent the last few nights reviewing their encounter, though, and she had some guesses about what sort of predicament Kakuzu and his friend were in. Karin ran down the side of the cliff and very carefully walked out over the water.
Salt water was easier than fresh to balance on, but the rolling waves and the currents that formed here made the task precarious. Karin could stand still easy enough, but she wouldn't be able to defend herself without risking falling in. She hoped her guess about the cats was correct.
She squinted upwards as she watched Kakuzu and the silver-haired man descend the cliff. They stopped several meters from the water, clinging to the cliff face with their very human chakra. They were clothed now, although the silver-haired one had neglected to find himself a shirt.
"Fancy meeting you here," Karin called, adjusting her grip on her ax.
"What the FUCK, lady," the silver-haired man yelled.
"Get over here," Kakuzu growled. He'd found some sort of hood and pulled it over most of his face, but his eyes were still vibrant and dangerous. "Or I will rip your limbs off."
"Hmm," said Karin, popping a hip and hoisting the ax over her shoulder. "Why don't you come out here and make me?"
Neither of them made a move.
"What's wrong?" Karin asked, voice dripping with fake innocence. "Cat got your tongue?"
The silver-haired man howled in fury and leapt down to the water. Karin watched him adjust the chakra of his feet perfectly to match the shifting of the sea. Then he turned into a cat.
"MRROW!" he screamed, breaking through the water with a tiny splash.
"Hidan," Kakzu bit out through gritted teeth.
The cat– Hidan?– screamed and flailed in the water as it rolled him over and yanked him out to sea. Karin walked over to him and held the ax out helpfully. Hidan-cat grabbed on to it with one sad paw, and the force of the current pinned him to the flat side of the blade.
"I'm still open to making a deal," Karin called to Kakuzu, smiling sweetly.
Kakuzu narrowed his eyes at her, exactly the way Kakuzu-cat had done. Karin shifted slightly so Hidan-cat continued to half-drown at the end of her ax instead of being sucked out to sea.
"Fine," Kakuzu said finally.
Karin flicked the ax and grabbed Hidan-cat by a back leg. She held him up at arms length, and he hissed and made several futile attempts to claw her.
The ideal solution was to eliminate the threat, but given the threat had just come back in murderous vengeance, Karin would take an unideal solution.
So much for avoiding fucked-up jutsu.
xXx
NOTES: I will hopefully continue this, but it's a very "when I feel like it" story, so don't expect frequent updates.