A/N: I originally wrote this as an anonymous entry for a KakaSaku comm challenge on lj (namely, the Underneath the Underneath challenge). It was loads of fun. :) For more information on the challenge, you can find its entry in my writing journal (hint: you totally want to. There's a link to everyone's entries, and they're amazing). Reviews are always treasured. 3

It started with a bang.

i.

Actually, more like a loud cracking, but still pretty bad.

Terumi screamed like an idiot, and Sakura, hardcore ninja as ever, ducked and quickly covered her head. She heard a collective gasping from the caravan.

The sky exploded into a shower of sparks.

Sakura blinked, then stood. Terumi was quicker to regain her composure. She sprayed out the small fire with an extinguisher before turning on the caravan.

"Who set off the fireworks? Who?" She broke into a string of obscenities that even the most seasoned Konoha nin would be proud of. Sakura thought that Terumi was, perhaps, trying too hard to command respect. Then again, being a fellow five-four female, Sakura could understand where Terumi was coming from. Almost.

Kakashi appeared from behind the wagon (which now had a smoking hole blown through the top), and for a moment Sakura felt like she was going to have to list off her own obscene vocabulary. It turned out she didn't have to. Kakashi had, by the arm, a boy only a bit younger than herself. Obviously, by his lack of muscle and the easy way Kakashi pulled him, he was no ninja. This was a good thing, because although she'd been traveling with the caravan for a three days (the drawbacks of a civilian pace), Sakura didn't recognize him.

"Daichi," Terumi said, in a voice so threatening that Sakura, an only child, knew at once that the boy could only be her brother.

Kakashi held up a blackened cigarette between the fingers of his free hand. "He was trying to light this up."

"Smoking?" Daichi flinched. "He stows away in my cart and he smokes near the fireworks?" She gave him a sharp kick to the shin, which he tried to return. It didn't work, because Kakashi was still holding his arm.

"This is your brother?"

"Unfortunately, yes." Her eyes were narrowed on the smoking hole of her cart. Sakura understood that, for someone like Terumi, her cart was probably her whole livelihood. Too bad Sakura didn't feel worse about it. Terumi mumbled another expletive, this time one Sakura was unfamiliar with, and went to examine the damage. Kakashi let go of the boy's arm, but the boy lingered, probably afraid to approach his bad-tempered sister.

Sakura swayed on the soles of her feet. These civilian shoes hurt, and she didn't like stopping. Stopping during a long trip like this only made starting again harder. She fiddled with her water bottle and then turned her neck to stare at Terumi, who was flittering around her charred cart like a bothered insect.

"I don't think we'll have a very peaceful week," Kakashi said matter-of-factly. Sakura smiled blankly the way someone would smile at someone else who'd just spoken to them in a foreign language. I'm sorry, I don't know what you're saying, maybe if you speak in a language I understand we can finally talk.

Kakashi sighed. When Sakura was sure his bored glance had travelled elsewhere, she stole a look at him.

He looked a little unlike himself, in these clothes. Sakura wondered again why he had come; tried, again, to quash any foolish hope that it was for love of her. The mission, despite its triviality, had to be conducted undercover because of Rice's deathly bias against Konoha nin. Most people wanted bandits to catch the flash of a hidden village forehead protector. It stopped trouble before it started. But Terumi? She didn't want to scare off the customers.

Sakura sighed and attempted to tuck the strands of hair out of her face and behind her red kerchief. She knew that she looked similarly nondescript in Rice's clothes, similar to Kakashi's in their drabness. Hell, she wasn't even wearing a skirt – she was wearing a blouse and a dress, a coarse, beige affair that, despite the bicycle shorts underneath, made her dread a skirmish with bandits … or looking in a mirror.

Sakura tried to think of things that interested her. Things that didn't involve Kakashi. Things like medicine and textbooks – the smell of them, not moldy and old, but new and shiny-smelling – trying the Land of Rice's famed sweet fish dishes, her own clothes at home, her rented room and the flowers… that she needed to get rid of… and the fish water… that she desperately needed to change… and her jounin examination … and Kakashi…

She made a little groan of distress. Was this really going to haunt her until she returned to Konoha?

When she caught Kakashi looking at her curiously, she realized that yes, yes it was.

"Are you gonna give those back to me?"

The boy's fierce whisper to Kakashi interrupted her downward-spiral of a reverie.

"Give what back to him?" Sakura asked, still watching Terumi. It gave her some kind of petty pleasure, watching one of the other cart owners approach her and explain that she could continue with her cart in the present state, or the they could go on without the fireworks, as much as that would upset the townspeople. Sakura knew she was a terrible person for enjoying Terumi's predicament. She didn't much mind.

"His cigarettes," Kakashi answered, before the boy could. Sakura looked up at that. Kakashi shrugged. "It's a dirty habit. He should quit."

"Right," Sakura said flatly. As a part-time hospital medic, she'd seen all kinds of blackened lungs, especially in the older generations of ninja who considered their line of a work a hazardous one and smoking a detriment unlikely to affect them (if they were enlightened enough to believe it would affect them at all). One set of those lungs was Kakashi's. And he knew full well what he was doing, even before Sakura had started directing smoking-related barbs his way. At this point, she had decided she had no reason to care anymore. Let him go down the drain, if he so badly wanted to.

The funny thing was that, until three months ago, she hadn't even known he smoked. He'd been good at hiding it.

Kakashi, as if magically reading her mind and knowing exactly what would most piss her off, lit up one of the boy's cigarettes and took a drag. It was an awkward drag – he had to bunch up his mask near his nose – but it was a drag nonetheless, and Sakura didn't even get a good view of his face in the process.

"Hey! You just told me that was a dirty habit and I ought to quit!"

"I'm a dirty man," Kakashi said flatly, just to spite him. But when he looked at her, Sakura thought it might have been an apology, too.

It made her want to hit him.

"Hey," Terumi called over. It was louder than it needed to be, considering they were only a few yards away. "Ninja! Get your asses over here!"

Sakura rolled her eyes. Kakashi took another drag before dropping the near-new cigarette on the ground (much to the boy's frustration), re-arranging his mask, and following her toward Terumi.

"It would be best if you didn't announce us at this point," Sakura said evenly. Too evenly. Terumi snorted.

"You think you ninja types know everything, all the rules, think that normal people like me just don't understand. Whatever. Do you see anyone shady around? I sure don't. I see some other tradesmen and… oh, maybe that ox is going to tell on us!"

Sakura looked to Kakashi for backup, but his hands were in his pockets. He seemed thoroughly unconcerned. Sakura almost expected him to pull out some porn, but he hadn't had the same vigor for it since Jiraiya's death. Or maybe he was just getting on in age. It would serve him right, she thought spitefully.

"You know," Sakura said, "This hasn't been a cakewalk for us. You could at least be grateful."

"Grateful? For what I had to pay to get you?" Sakura opened her mouth to retort, but Terumi went on.

This kind of long-term mission to an unstable country for such a trivial matter (and in such gross clothes) was a huge pain. In fact, this mission was the kind of undertaking Sakura (apprentice to the hokage, thank you very much) wouldn't be taking unless she had a huge deficit of undercover in her resume and a serious desire to be promoted to jounin by the time she was nineteen. Which was in less than a year. And with the amount of paperwork and recommendations required for a pass (very different from the chuunin exam – it was more a test of how many people you could call favors on than of survival), she only had a few months to finish this up.

"-And I don't need you screwing this up," Terumi finished.

"We sympathize completely," Kakashi agreed, if only to shut her up.

"Right." She looked at the ninja warily. "Well, we have to get out of here. So let's keep going. Damn, I can't believe you two were stupid enough not to notice a stowaway." There was a second of shamed silence. Keyword being 'second'. Sakura couldn't bring herself to feel shamed for shafting Terumi, especially when the stowaway turned out to be another Shibata.

"We sympathize completely," Sakura mocked in a whisper.

"What was I going to tell her? She wasn't really going to stop until one of us said something."

Sakura was pretty sure Kakashi didn't care whether or not Terumi was yelling at him. His eyes were more focused on her ample chest. Maybe that accounted for recent lack of porn: he was the real thing right there, albeit through a layer of charcoal-mussed clothes. Sakura thwarted the urge to look forlornly down at her own chest and instead parted from Kakashi.

An hour later, they were back on the road. Sakura could feel blisters blooming on her feet. She usually didn't cure minor injuries with chakra, but when they got to this place she might have to make an exception. She glanced enviously at Kakashi's shoes. The men in this country had nice, practical boot-things.

"Hey… are you really ninja?"

It was the boy from earlier. He'd caught up to them, like a puppy tailing a kind human who might give it scraps. After the abuse he withstood from his sister, Sakura could understand it.

Kakashi and Sakura answered in unison: "No."

"You are, aren't you?" He looked like he was about to break into dance. Sakura gave him as patient a smile as she could manage, given that she'd been walking for ten hours.

"You can understand why we couldn't tell you even if we were."

"Nah, it's okay," he said eagerly. "I know it's important that you keep your cover. So where're you from?"

"Konoha," Kakashi answered, apparently deciding that this mission was not all that important. To his credit, the boy didn't look shocked or repulsed. He just nodded.

He wasn't bad looking, really. She was surprised she hadn't recognized him as Terumi's sibling even earlier; he had the same sun-kissed skin and smooth, dark hair. His enthusiasm reminded her a bit of Naruto at that age, with a hint of pretension that achingly reminded her of Sasuke, before he, well, turned psycho.

"How old are you?" Sakura asked him kindly. She was feeling generous. She could see something, a blip in the distance, and if there was any justice in the world it had to be the Ishikawa manor-town.

"Seventeen," he said.

"Just turned. He's practically a baby," Terumi put in from her perch on the wagon. Terumi was only twenty. Sakura didn't know if she was one to talk.

Also, if Kakashi could stare at the boobs of random twenty-year-olds, why couldn't he give the (nearly) nineteen-year-old Sakura the time of day?

Her heart ached for a moment, but that was all she allowed it. "So why'd you stow away here?"

"I figured if I hid long enough nee-san wouldn't be able to send me home."

"He doesn't know a thing about fireworks," Terumi said shortly, as though this explained it all. Maybe it did. "Not even that he shouldn't light a match near them."

Daichi had the grace to look sheepish. "I just want to see the world, you know? See if town is… any different," he whispered. Apparently he really didn't have interest in the fireworks business.

"Kakashi-sensei, give him back his cigarettes."

"No."

She knew she was asking for an argument. She couldn't see his back – he was walking in front of her – but she imagined his face was about as expressionless as his voice.

"Come on."

"You really want another smoker in the world?"

"I don't, but I don't think this is going to change anything. And I don't think you should take things that aren't yours, either."

Kakashi took out a cigarette, lit it with a discreet seal, and put it in his mouth.

"Don't ignore me!"

"Hey, wait. It's cool. I can buy another pack in town. Can you do that hand thing again…?"

Sakura sulkily fell behind. Admiration showed clearly in Daichi's eyes whenever they rested on Kakashi. Was she really that much less impressive a ninja? She probably didn't even look like a ninja, with these floppy sandals and this thin dress… Hell, she must not be much of a woman, either, if she couldn't keep a naïve seventeen-year-old interested for more than two minutes. Now you're just being ridiculous, she told herself. This whole thing with Kakashi had put her nerves – and her self-esteem – on edge.

As they walked, the Ishikawa estate came into better view. More caravans flowed into theirs, tributaries flowing into a river. Down the hill from the house, which loomed large and white, was a smattering of color that Sakura guessed was tents. A chain of wagons and pedestrians crowded the way.

They started passing rice paddies, where workers became more and more frequent. Sakura found herself nodding and smiling at the land workers, whose straw hats tipped up to their caravan in greeting. A few children even ran up to plead for sweets, which the candy cart yielded. Sakura began to get the sense, for the first time, just how important the Moonfire Festival was to these people. Her spirits rose.

The farms tapered out as they came to the outskirts of the manor town. A few trees had been planted here, and were bursting into vivid color overhead. Sakura couldn't stop staring.

As they got closer, Sakura realized that the smattering of colors was indeed a batch of tents, hastily erected for the Moonfire Festival. Sakura wondered if Daichi would be disappointed: it wasn't very large, as towns went. It was hardly even a town, more like an outpost, unless a tent-town counted. The tents bore the bright colors of the autumn around them. Sakura noted that even the tents of these dealers seemed to advertise – one had a swirl on it that clearly indicated sweets, while another had a mask. It all led to a large square, where various vendors were already lining their carts and putting up lights. Sakura could almost believe she'd been spirited away but for a large inn, relatively new-looking, hanging back from the rest.

"They're trying to attract people," Terumi commented harshly.

"Why would that be a bad thing?"

"Why? The Moonfire Festival isn't a business venture." Sakura thought this was ironic, coming from the mouth of woman who probably earned most of her yearly income for her displays here. "It's a tradition. You shouldn't have to invite anyone who wasn't in it to begin with."

Sakura wondered if she just didn't want competition for her fireworks business. There were a lotof vendors there, after all…

"What makes the Moonfire Festival here so special?"

"It started here. The old story is about the Ishikawa, who held the first Moonfire Festival hundreds of years ago, when, believe you me, no one had any desire to come this far southeast." Terumi examined the square with sharp eyes. "They took all the good spots," she commented savagely.

"What's it about? The tale?" Sakura tried not to sound too curious.

"Oh, you know. The usual. A love greater than – hey!" Terumi barreled forward, breasts bouncing, and flung herself out on the ground. Sakura stared, appalled. No one else batted an eye.

"This is my spot," she growled. The man who'd attempted to take her spot – a seller of mochi – drew back and left to find a different spot. Sakura thought it was too bad. She was hungry from travelling, and could have gone for some food.

From the square, if she looked up, Sakura could see the further incline of the hill. Up a bit from them was a manor, poised to look over the square, and at least as big as it. "Is that the Ishikawa estate?"

Terumi shook her head, which Sakura took to mean 'yes, but I don't like them'. "They own most of the land around here." Sakura thought she understood. The workers she'd seen must be working the Ishikwa's land. Daimyo in Rice, especially in truly rural areas like this one, tended to be old-fashioned. Many still adhered to feudalistic traditions.

"I don't think I've heard of the Ishikawa before coming here," Sakura said.

"They've never been all that hot, although they used to own more land than now. It extended all the way into what's now the northern Land of Fire. Where my family moved. Then the ninja villages came around."

Sakura remembered this. "Rice splintered in the new international climate, although the various daimyo continued their business as usual without a centralized leader. They oversaw their estates with, at worst, petty disputes. At least, until one daimyo beat out his competitors and tried to unify…" she trailed off from her recitation. The result had been disastrous: the new daimyo, eager to keep power, had welcomed Orochimaru and the ill-concieved village of Oto.

Terumi cast her a dark look. "I bet you read that in a book somewhere," she said. "Glad to know you Konoha nin are well-informed of everything you've put our country through." Orochimaru's name remained unsaid.

Sakura shrugged, falsely modest. She didn't bother mentioning that most of what she knew about international history and politics didn't come from the Konoha curriculum. In fact, when it came to history outside of Konoha, the Academy curriculum was conspicuously scant.

Terumi wouldn't let her end with the last word. "The only remainders of the Ishikawa family are the son and his old mother. His dad kicked the bucket pretty recently. They have a ton of servants, but few of them come into much contact with the family."

Sakura looked up at the manor with renewed interest. She wondered if the stories were true. A good mystery always had that effect on her.

"You guys can help us set up," Terumi said firmly.

"Of course," Kakashi said, "I'll be back in an hour. I just need a quick nap, first."

Sakura narrowed her eyes. She knew that if Kakashi said he'd be back, it meant, If I do come back, it'll be after all the work is over. But… her feet hurt.

"Me too," Sakura said. "I'm exhausted. I can only work after I take a nap."

Terumi didn't seem to care, although she scowled at them anyway before telling them to do what they liked, she would fix up the stand (with Daichi's help) and she wouldn't be hiring any Konoha nin in the future. Perky boobs or no, Terumi was a mean old lady on the inside, Sakura thought resentfully.

Especially after she explained to them that they had to share a room.