The sun is a strange thing to children who have known only the shadows of Hashirama's great forest.
"He was here. My brother, I mean."
Tōka looked at her cousin side-long before surveying the room again. There was a small fortune in high-end glass, smashed to pieces on the floor; another fortune in ceramics, similarly destroyed; and a suspicious lack of notes—any notes, of any kind. There were other rooms just like this one all throughout the compound—and underneath, there was... well, cellar didn't really describe it. It was a whole underground counterpart to the rooms above, filled with room after room of vats and mixers and a rather cunning heating and cooling system, all of it presumably dedicated to the mass production of the liquid known as "weed killer". It had taken three days and a very dedicated team of Akimichi to uncover it—whoever had placed the explosives to collapse the tunnels had known exactly which supportive struts needed to fall for maximum obstruction.
There had been strong hopes that the outlaw who called himself the Alchemist would be caught up in the final sweep after the walls fell, either within the city proper or by the zetsu traversing the Forest. Fortune had not favored their hopes, however. None of the prisoners knew anything of worth. But at least the fall of Kurashiki's walls had led to this: the destruction of a large part, if not the entirety, of the Alchemist's productive capacity. Without a new patron, it was unlikely the man would be able to rebuild. No new weed killer would be produced for a long time, if ever again.
"What makes you say that, Hashirama?" Tōka questioned, a little skeptical. "Last I heard, Subaru's team was hunting him out in Iron Country—wasn't he seen in one of their towns, hiring ronin?"
"My honorable father-in-law has reported that a white-haired man was found in the town of Ye, gathering ronin to his banner, but it turned out to be the first cousin to the current daimyo—some kind of argument regarding the succession, I think?" Hashirama rubbed the back of his neck and laughed in embarrassment.
"Subaru killed him, didn't he," Tōka said flatly. "How large an indemnity are we paying to Iron's daimyo?"
"Oh, I don't really know..." Hashirama said. "I left that to Jingwei, you know she's much better at negotiating than I am."
"That's a really low bar to pass, cousin. And shouldn't Jingwei be on bedrest? I'm not sure bullying the delegation from Iron is good for a woman in her condition," Tōka responded, more than a little doubtful. "Actually, never mind. Jingwei is always happiest when she has a new skull to add to her throne."
"Tōka!" Hashirama exclaimed, half-shocked and half amused. "You know Jingwei is very selective about her trophies—she won't settle for just anyone's head!"
Tōka pretended to think for a moment, before solemnly nodding in agreement. "You're right. Jingwei has very rarefied taste. She absolutely won't settle for anybody less than the daimyo himself."
There was a moment of absolute silence between the cousins, and then both of them burst out laughing.
"But seriously, why do you say that Tobirama was here?" Tōka asked again a moment later.
Hashirama just scanned the room again, eyes a little unfocused. "Just a lot of little things. The layout of the room feels familiar; the way everything was so meticulously destroyed is reminiscent of his habits when we were children..."
Tōka just raised one eyebrow, skeptical.
Hashirama just heaved a sigh and shrugged a little helplessly. "You're too young to really remember him, Tōka. It's not obvious, but it's there."
He turned and began walking to the exit, passing from the darkened rooms to the blazing light of the late afternoon sun. Sunset was still several hours away by Tōka's reckoning. Maybe less, or maybe more; she spent so much time in the Forest, it was hard to gauge time from the passage of the sun. A lot of the younger members of the Senju coalition had the same problem. As Tōka shadowed her cousin as he began walking through the main boulevard to the center of the city, she kept glancing at the sky again and again. It was quite novel to see it, she had to admit, but she did miss the comforting twilight of the Forest.
"It's a little disappointing," Hashirama said suddenly.
"What is?" Tōka replied absentmindedly, one eye still on the empty streets. Trees were already sprouting through the roadway; in a few months, Kurashiki would be totally overtaken. Maybe faster, if Hashirama applied himself.
"Tobirama being the Alchemist," Hashirama answered, and behind him, Tōka choked. "I was hoping to convince him to return home, but—"
"Cousin," Tōka stated in a flat tone. "Did you really think a kinslayer would ever return willingly?"
"He's my brother," Hashirama replied tightly, and loosened his hold on his monstrous chakra just a tad. Just enough for Tōka to feel as though she were suffocating. He clamped it back down after a moment, and waited another moment for Tōka to catch her breath.
How considerate, Tōka thought sarcastically. He's letting me recover.
"Anyway, it doesn't matter anymore," Hashirama continued, as though there hadn't been a break in the conversation. "What does matter is capturing him as soon as possible. If Tobirama is the Alchemist, he'll probably start production again within a month; faster if he already has a patron in Wind Country. I think I'm going to reassign you to a new team, cousin—a strike team designed to capture him once and for all."
Before Tōka could say anything in response they reached the central square. A selection of half a dozen prisoners were waiting there, guarded by a detail from the Fourth Battalion. It wasn't particularly necessary, however: every single one of them were merchants and craftsman, just like the rest of Kurashiki. There wasn't a single warrior among them.
"Good afternoon!" Hashirama called exuberantly. "Now, I've been informed by my generals that you're all that remains of Kurashiki's Guild Council. Do you have a spokesman?"
There was a long pause, and then an older woman shuffled forward. "Tsujimura Moeka. Mistress of the Rice Merchants," she said dully.
"Excellent! I'm very glad to meet you, Mistress Tsujimura. Do you speak for the council, or just yourself?" Hashirama enquired politely.
"Both. Cut to the chase: you've conquered the city. What do you want?"
Hashirama faltered a bit, before regrouping his never-ending cheer. "Ideally, I would like you to swear an oath of loyalty to me and my village," he said, with a winning smile. "In return, Kurashiki would remain standing, and you and your people would continue living and working here—"
"—with some conditions, of course," Tōka interrupted, giving her cousin a very specific glare.
"—with some conditions," Hashirama parroted, already rubbing the back of his neck. "How do you feel about that?"
The old woman glanced at Tōka before looking back at Hashirama, totally dismissing the girl beside him. Tōka tried not to bristle. Old people always did that, as though the idea of a teenage girl leading an army was so much more unbelievable than, say, a man who made forests spontaneously grow out of meadow and plain.
"No," the woman answered, and within her eyes Tōka saw something unexpected: a deep wellspring of resistance.
"No?" Hashirama repeated, puzzled. "I assure you, these are very generous terms, you're not going to ge—"
"I said no. Terms from an oathbreaker mean nothing," the old woman reiterated. "There will be no deal."
"You should reconsider, Mistress Moeka," Hashirama said, frowning a bit. "I don't know what you've heard about me, but—"
"She said no. That goes for all of us, as well," another man said, middle-aged and a bit thick around the middle. "There will be no deals with an oathbreaker."
One by one, the other four prisoners voiced their agreement. Hashirama paced up and down the line, staring them straight in the eye.
"Are you sure there's no way we can discuss this?" He asked forlornly. None of them bothered to answer.
Hashirama sighed deeply, disappointed to his very bones. Touka had heard his sighs so many times over the last few years. By now, she could categorize them based only on length of duration and depth of the sigh in question. "Very well. You leave me no choice."
And in the space of a single breath, the guildmasters transformed. The old woman didn't scream, but she was the only one.
"How magnificent: a cypress," Hashirama marveled, one hand on the trunk of the tree that used to be Tsujimura Moeka. "It's such a waste, though. She would have been an incredible asset to the village."
Tōka only nodded her head in response, then gestured to the captain of the guard detail. "Shihei," she called out. "Bring in the next group."
"Maybe we'll have better luck with them," Hashirama said hopefully.
Tōka just made a noncommittal sound. She rather doubted it.
"You'll burn if you don't get out of the sun."
Ying almost didn't understand the words, distorted as they were by the weirdly melodic cadence in the language of everyone west of the Yan River. But after a moment, she puzzled out the meaning—and promptly burst out laughing. Master Koji would scold her for what he called her unbearable rudeness, but honestly, Ying didn't know how she could have stopped herself. After all, who'd ever heard of burning in the sun?
"Hey, stop laughing," the sand-nin girl sighed in response. Her voice wasn't angry like Ying would have expected, just tired. "You don't know how many flatlanders I've seen laid low because they didn't understand how strong the sun is the closer you get to the desert. Why aren't you with the others in the shelter I made?"
Ying didn't turn her face towards the kunoichi—another scolding offense from Master Koji, although only if he caught her doing it. Sometimes it annoyed her, because turning her face towards a person necessarily meant turning her ears away from them, and it's not like Ying could see them, anyway. But Master Koji wasn't here. He was too preoccupied with keeping a watchful eye on the Uchiha lord to pay too much attention to Ying, his first and favorite student.
So Ying stubbornly kept her face turned away from the sand-nin, and listened as the older girl picked her way over the scree towards Ying's perch at the edge of the hill's steep slope—not that it really helped. All the stories had said the shinobi who lived in the Great Western Desert wore cloaks of white and walked as quietly as a whisper in the night wind, unheard by ordinary folk until it was far too late. Ying didn't know if Shigeru even wore a cloak, but she could attest the stories were true on that last part: an ordinary person would never hear them coming. Even Ying, trained for years in the shinobi arts by Master Koji, could barely hear Shigeru's light footsteps, or even the sound all clothing made when it was in motion.
But out here in the desert, Ying could use another talent to track her, one she'd had few chances to use while living within the smothering confines of the Forest—she could sense Shigeru's chakra, just as Master Koji had said. Ying leaned back a bit, the palms of her hands in firm contact with the sandy earth, and opened her inner eye. There! Shigeru's chakra was like a spinning top moving slowly across the empty land between the thorny brush around their camp and the hillside drop-off Ying was sitting upon. Shigeru's chakra felt both light and heavy in equal measure, and Ying spared a few seconds to wonder why that was. Master Koji's chakra always felt heavy and overbearing, exactly like that time Ying had hidden in the bottom of a crate full of linens to escape from Pingcheng, and Lady Samsi always felt sort of coiled up and sharp at the same time, exactly like the heavy gauge wire Mama had used in her work. But there was no more time to think on that, for Shigeru was upon her.
"I asked a question," Shigeru said, her voice lilting up a little at the end of her statement. Ying listened closely. If Shigeru spoke like other Westerners, then Ying was determined to be an expert in what their tones meant by the time she reached Lanshi. "Or has your Master not taught you the manners of a little baby in a cradle?"
Ying smiled very widely, and lied through her teeth. "Oh, well, if it's an answer you're wanting… I wanted to see the sunrise."
There was a moment where Ying could feel Shigeru's chakra suddenly spin much, much faster— and just as soon as Ying noticed it, the spin slowed to the original slow pace.
That was interesting, Ying thought. Does all chakra do that when people get mad? I'll have to pay attention to the others and see.
"Fine," Shigeru said with a huff. "Be that way. But I'm not joking about the sun burning you if you stay out. At least put a hood on."
And without so much as a by-your-leave, Yang felt a heavy mass hit the top of her head.
"Hey!" she shouted indignantly, pulling her hands off the ground to scrabble at whatever had been thrown at her head. "What'd you do that for?"
"I told you to cover up," Shigeru said unsympathetically. "So cover up, I don't want to listen to your crying when you get burned so badly you blister."
Ying ignored Shigeru in favor of pulling whatever she'd thrown on her head off. It was some kind of fine-woven fabric, and as she rubbed it between her fingers, she frowned. It felt like simple cloth, but Ying didn't recognize the texture. It wasn't silk: it was too rough against the pads of her fingers. It wasn't linen: the cloth was too limp for that. And it wasn't wool: that always had a particular rough feel this lacked. So what was it?
"What is this?" she demanded. "It doesn't feel like any cloth I've felt before."
"It's cotton," Shigeru replied. "Now wrap it around your head in a turban so you don't get sun-sick."
"Tell me more about cotton, first," Ying bargained. "Animal, plant, or mineral?"
"It's a plant they grow in Tenjiku," Shigeru answered impatiently. "It's part of the payment we get from each caravan we escort across the desert. But I guess you've never seen it, huh? It's pretty expensive on the open market—"
"But the plant—this cotton—it was grown in Tenjiku, right?" Ying interrupted. "All the way across the Great Western Desert?"
"Yeah, you heard me the first time," Shigeru snapped as she stepped behind Ying's back. "Now let me put that hood on for you, if you won't do it yourself."
Ying obediently let Shigeru wrap the cloth around her face and head. It made her skin crawl just thinking about it, the idea that a possible weapon was so close to her nose and mouth, but she didn't say anything out loud until Shigeru had finished wrapping and tucking the cloth to her satisfaction.
"That's better," the older girl said, satisfaction oozing from her voice. "But you should still get to shelter until we leave for next night's travel, this is only going to protect you so far—"
"You answered my question, so let me trade you some information, kunoichi to kunoichi," Ying said. She was proud she hadn't hesitated when saying the word kunoichi. It was strange to think that's what people would see her as these days... "You know the leader of the Senju controls all plants, right?"
"Yes…?" Shigeru replied, drawing out the word. "I'm pretty sure everyone knows that."
"Well, let me tell you something not everyone knows: he doesn't just control all plants, but everything made from plants, too," Ying explained slowly. Luckily, she didn't really need to say it again—Shigeru caught on quickly.
"So he can control cloth made from plants, too. And I guess wooden objects, too," Shigeru stated flatly. "Have you seen this?"
Ying shook her head. "No, I've never seen it myself. But you know Yasukoki, the tall boy with the nasally voice? His village was destroyed that way. Everyone's clothes and fabric just strangled them in an instant. He only survived because he was skinny-dipping in the river."
For the first time, Ying could hear Shigeru's breath. It was an uneven gasping wheeze. It filled the air between them for a moment before Shigeru crouched down beside Ying.
"Why?" she finally asked. "Why kill all those people? That kid is just a peasant! His family can't have been any threat?"
"You act like there has to be a reason," Ying said reasonably, plastering her fake smile back onto her face. The cotton fabric felt strange against her lips "But the only reason Senju Hashirama does anything is because he can."
"What kind of answer is that?" Shigeru hissed directly into Ying's ear. Ying fought the urge to flinch in response. "That's a horrible thing to do to people!"
"So it would be better if there was a reason?" Ying asked curiously, leaning back on her palms once again. It also had the benefit of getting her head away from Shigeru's too-close voice. "What if they were rebelling against his rule? What if they refused to pay their taxes? What if they were saying rude things about his wife? Would that make it better?"
"No," Shigeru said fiercely. Her chakra now felt like the windstorm they'd been caught in on the third night of their journey towards Lanshi: very fast and very, very strong. Ying could still feel the pinprick-pain of that terrible wind throwing grains of sand into her face, before Shigeru had made a shelter out of the earth for them to huddle in until it passed. "No, it doesn't make it any better. It's still a horrible thing to do to people!"
"What if he was getting paid for it?" Ying said, as reasonably as she could. "Shinobi do all sorts of awful things to people for money. Isn't that how you people earn your daily bowl of rice?"
"You people?" Shigeru repeated, a twist of revulsion in her voice. "Maybe that's what lowlander nin are like, but you don't know anything about the desert, and you sure don't know anything about me or mine!"
It was a little easier to hear Shigeru leave than arrive. Her footfalls weren't any louder than before, and her clothing still didn't make a sound, but this time, Ying could hear the sound of her audible breath moving further away, heaving as though the other girl had run miles upon miles. Ying waited until she couldn't hear Shigeru at all, and then waited some more, watching with her newly-opened inner eye as the the sand-nin's furiously spinning chakra core moved closer to the brightly burning stars that were probably Master Koji and Lord Madara.
Then, and only then, did Ying take her hands off the ground. Only then, assured of her privacy, did she make the sign of the Snake, fingers intertwined and palms together. And only then did she stop smiling, letting a frown of concentration appear on her face instead. New place, new ground, and new techniques to practice. This was the pattern of her life, every since she had come into Master Koji's care, and Ying saw no reason to change it now.
Not yet, at least. Not yet, at least. Not until she can protect herself from all the enemies the strong and powerful could throw at the poor and weak and useless of the world.
My thanks to everyone who has read so far; your comments here and directed towards my tumblr have made me so very happy :D Special thanks to hissori . yori, who is still reviewing - I thank you from the depths of my heart. And I have finally achieved simultaneous posting on both AO3 and !
The next arc: "the tempest in a teapot", where Tobirama and Madara travel to Lanshi, the gateway to the Western Desert, and together find far more trouble than they ever would have found apart.
