I do not own Naruto.
Ryuishi spends an inordinate amount of time doing dumb shit with Naruto.
It isn't the innocent and affectionate playtime she has with Gaara, where she retains at least a fraction of her maturity. With Naruto, it is like she is shedding all of her accumulated age, and for the first time in years, longer than this body has been alive, she is a child again. She shows him cool tricks she discovered when she was young, loping through cliffsides and woods in another world. She plays with him like she remembers playing with her brothers, wrestling and insulting and being generally crass. Ryuishi plays pretend, and she picks him up and spins him around the same way she spun her sister.
It aches deep inside her ribs when she does things like that. She almost feels like she is trying to replace them, and part at her is livid at herself, ashamed and guilty for the behavior. It tells her that she must not have loved them at all, to do such sacred things with other people.
The rest of her says that no one can ever, ever replace her family, not in a thousand lifetimes. She feels like crying half the time she plays these melancholy games anyway, and she constantly has to remind herself that she is honoring them, honoring their memory.
So, sneakily, because they're avoiding patrols and shinobi groups, she takes him to the creekside and shows him how to catch crawfish with his bare hands without them pinching him and determinedly enjoys it. She teaches him how weird slugs are, and how much weirder they get when you put salt on them, and then regrets because he throws one at her. They laugh when she belches after breakfast one morning, and then absolutely lose it when he does the same after.
In all honesty, she is a week and three quarters in and feels like everything is going great, which is probably exactly why it takes a steep turn for the worse.
She and Naruto are coming back from a day of playing in the woods where she taught him the joy of gymnastics when she feels it. It prickles along the back of her neck like a tick and crawls down her spine in a distinct and uncomfortable way.
She is being watched.
She turns her head discretely, still smiling her trademark grin, but her dark eyes are narrowed a little bit more than usual. She scans the crowd of civilians they are blending in with, passing over unfocused faces and nonchalant social activities until she locks on to a hooded figure with dark glasses staring right at her.
Her skin crawls and she knows that face. Aburame. The one from the river side, and he probably knows exactly who she is now.
Oh dicks! Oh dicks! Seventeen wieners on a stick in a shit-storm! Fuckfuckfuckfuckity fuck FUCK— she screams inside her head, squeezing a bit tighter on the little hand in hers. A part of her immediately struggles to take control, and several thoughts dance through her head.
The Aburame can't attack, not here, not surrounded by civilians. He would not only endanger every one of their lives, but set off a village wide panic and deal a huge blow to the trust people put in village security. He can't see Naruto clearly because the boy is too small, at leg level in the crowd, which might have changed that fact.
She can't bolt because Naruto is right fucking here, holding her damn hand. She can't fight because of the same reasons he can't, but more importantly, she doesn't trust herself to be able to do it without losing control. She doesn't know the beetle user's rank, but usually, taking out missing nin is left to those capable of completing B to A-rank missions, especially in a village whose strength lies in teamwork. More than likely, she has a short window of time to get moving. She is suddenly very glad that she is carrying her bag with her.
Naruto is staring up at her, eyes wide and maybe a little scared. She knows he is picking up on how tense she is, how very nervous she has suddenly become. Sky blue orbs peer around at thigh level before glancing up at her.
She stares down, and he looks like he has never seen her before.
He really hasn't, she thinks to herself. Not this part, and she hopes he never sees this part in whole, because already she can feel something inside of her sliding back, regressing into a wartime mentality. She has to consciously not clamp down on his hand hard enough to hurt, the way she knew Kisame or Zabuza would let her. She kneels down in front of him, and the Aburame is already gone, nowhere to be seen.
"Sunshine," Ryuishi whispers, her free hand going to his face, "Beautiful, precious Sunshine, I have to go."
He looks stricken, but still frightened by this new side. "Why?" he demands. She lies before she even knows she is doing it.
"I'm a garbage fairy, right?" He nods. "So I have a lot of important stuff to do, and right now there is some trash that needs to be taken care of."
The hidden meaning amuses her than more than she thought entirely proper. Hot damn do Aburame freak her the fuck out.
"I'll be back, I promise. As soon as I can," she says hurriedly, eyes darting around. His grim countenance brightens a fraction, and the small smile he sends her warms her heart. Naruto looks a little teary eyed, but more than that he looks scared. She doesn't know if it is that he is afraid she will leave him forever or if he is still picking up on her fear.
She tugs him close and he stumbles into one of her hugs, warm and tight. She prays that no one knows why she is here, that everybody assumes she is spying or sabotaging or whatever in hell's name regular missing nin do.
"Go straight home Sunshine, and try not to tell anyone about fairies. We're supposed to be secret." He sniffles and nods against her shoulder, and shit, that's two kids she has made cry. Good one, asshole, she thinks to herself.
"Stay safe," she whispers, pressing a quick kiss to his forehead and taking off before he can stop her. Time is ticking away, and she has no idea when backup will arrive. She wishes she could do this better, make him more dinners and meals, teach him more games. In the future, she has to remind herself. There will be more time.
She jogs through the streets, plastering a frustrated, exasperated expression on her face. More 'civilian that forgot her keys' than 'missing nin with PTSD repressing symptoms and also running from authorities'. Nobody is alarmed, and she makes it to the residential apartment areas before she spots her pursuers.
The shadows appear in her peripherals and for a second, in her stressed state, she mistakes them for her old teammates, but that isn't right. Kisame didn't move like living liquid on rooftops, lightning fast with the face of a canine. Zabuza did not stare at her through a bone white cat mask. Not for the last time she wishes she had learned to fight in glasses, or actually remembered to bring them other places than her house in Suna.
ANBU, she thinks deliriously. She can do this, there's only two of them. No need to even get violent, just shake them off her tail.
They follow her from either side, a classic flanking maneuver meant to herd her more than anything else, feinting from the rooftops above like they're going to attack. Her hind brain snaps and hisses inside of her, wanting to lash out, but she keeps moving. There is a fork in the road ahead, and she is coming up with a plan.
Ryuishi puts on a burst of speed, suddenly sprinting far above the everyday laborer's level, and comes to the center of the forked roads, her hunters thrown for a second by the change. They are thrown again when she uses the momentum of her legs, punches the ground with her feet, and flings herself through a fifth story apartment window.
Ryuishi notices a startled man with a child on his lap, hangs a hard left, and starts picking random stuff up on her way. She bursts out of a door and into a hallway, and she begins picking doors at random, flinging whatever she has behind her. She keeps going, pushing forward through another apartment with a bored woman eating lunch, before jumping out her bathroom window to the next building. She sacrifices speed for maneuverability, using her dexterity to jump and spin over furniture and through rooms, hurling miscellaneous objects all the way. Hardcore parkour, she snorts inside her head.
The hunters are just as trapped as she is in these close quarters and must do the same, only she bets they are having a harder time jumping over sofas and tipped fridges and through random windows and broken walls. She knows the path she is taking, they do not, and she is throwing shit at them.
ANBU's specialty is secrecy, but hers is chaos.
"EAT MY DICK, ANBU!" she screams, flinging something behind her. It is only a second after it leaves her hand that she realizes she has picked up an inordinate amount of toilet paper. Her subconscious is probably trying to tell her something, but for the life of her she has no idea what.
A dark haired woman with a book in her hands looks up at her, stunned, and Ryuishi throws her a wink before breaking down the wall with a well-aimed kick and diving through, twisting midair and pelting the duo behind her with white fluffy hell. They swipe at each one and pieces of soft, sturdy two ply explode around them like downy feathers as they fall. She laughs, because half of her is telling her to kill them while the other part is expounding on how ridiculous this is.
She take the rooftops this time, because she can feel how close the damn city walls are at this speed. The forest she takes Naruto to is never far away from them in the first place.
She sprints through houses, and each one holds a new group of people to be stunned, but the ANBU are gaining again, and she has to throw them off balance somehow. They can't get too used to things. She breathes in deep, swallowing a huge amount of air.
"I'LL TELL THE WHOLE WORLD YOU'RE THE BABY DADDY, YOU CHEATING BASTARD," she screeches, and one man clutches his chest in shock as they speed past, looking absolutely scandalized. The taller of the duo, the one with the canine (or vulpine, or marsupial, whatever) mask stumbles at her words while the other one powers through. His misstep costs him precious feet between them, and she has to keep going, pushing this past the point of believable. She knows that it can turn horrendously, ridiculously violent, and she isn't ready to do that, not here, not around non-combatants.
So she makes it unbelievable, makes it weird, makes it uncomfortable. She emulates social faux pas in a society that values politeness and privacy in intimate matters. She gets raunchy in a world where losing face is a heavy burden. She attacks their honor, their pride, because she knows how much it can throw them. The fact that it's fucking hilarious also factors in.
"I SAID NO THREESOMES," she shouts, spinning like a top and hurling the last big roll of toilet paper, watching the glorified butt napkins unfurl and stream out. This time a whole family gasps as they blur through their living room and out the wall, onto another rooftop. The black hooded figures both flinch at this, and she gains even more ground. Surprisingly, the roll hits the tall one in the mask and knocks it to the ground, but she is turning too quick to see a face, running like a bat out of hell for the village wall that is looming overhead.
She channels too much chakra to her feet and pushes off the same time she lets it explode the tile underneath, propelling her forward like a rocket. The sudden thrust into multiple G-force whips her bangs back from framing her face and pushes her breasts flat into her ribs. It is only a momentary discomfort, because she is hurtling towards the towering stone structure like a fucking bullet.
She compresses down, outstretching her hands and feet as part of her coats her hands and feet with sticky energy and tenses her muscles, slamming into the concrete like a fist to the face. She releases the tautness in her muscles, using her limbs to change velocity. She springs upward, using the unspent inertia to leap up the wall on all fours like a leopard on the savannah.
One, two, three great bounds and she is suddenly high above the world, and the view is fucking fantastic. Trees and rivers for miles ahead of her, a sprawling expanse of lush green forests and mighty blue waters. The horizon is far away where robin's egg blue melts into blasts of emerald. She loves shit like this, because it's so close to flying. She can't help the little whoop that escapes her lips as she flips over the wall, letting herself tumble gracefully as she freefalls downward.
Her hands go to her calves underneath her pants, and they rip through the bandages that were binding the end of her meteor hammer to her legs. Gleaming silver bladed chain erupts out of her pant leg like a particularly weird snake and she pulls tight, tugging the length free.
On a side note, it had been a ridiculously hard task to hide approximately eight and a half meters of heavy ass steel chain, including weighted blades, on her person. It most likely doubled as weight training at this point, too. In the end though, she discovered that not only could loose-fitting, baggy black cargo pants hide shit tons of candy in their pockets, but shadows fell on them in such away that nobody would notice if you had lumpy legs if you got them in a shade dark enough. Which she does.
She palms the chain in her hand and sets it whirling as she falls, flinging it out like an extension of her body and letting the weight drag her out of free fall, trailing behind it as she slides into the canopy between branches. Her free hand lashes out to grasp a young branch, supple and flexible enough to not break as she forces herself to spin on it, dissipating the force of her fall in three rapid circles.
She flings herself forward again, pushing herself to sprint as fast as she can go. She bought time by being unpredictable, but now she has to flee for real.
Ryuishi ruminates on how much she hates sprinting as the trees blur around her, instead focusing on how familiar it feels.
She isn't in the war, she thinks. She cannot smell blood and feces—the sharp tang of fear and desperation does not hang in the air beside mist and fog. She is here, surrounded by trees and nature and peace.
She can feel the shadows, those ANBU assholes, closing in.
They have changed tactics, nipping at her heels instead of herding her in. She knows this one too. They want to wear her out, push her until she is too exhausted to fight well enough. And she knows she isn't fast enough to lose them, doesn't have enough endurance to outlast them. There is no time for clever escape plans. The world is forcing her to do what she does best.
She has to fight.
The only advantage she has is that she gets to choose where she makes her stand, and she knows where she has always done best.
Ryuishi dashes to the nearest source of water, the snaking river she saw from high above. She leaps from the branches of an old tree and flies through the air, landing on a single foot. The young criminal whirls on her heel to face the incoming, planting the other leg a shoulder-width apart, and bends slightly at the knees, another quip falling from her full, plum colored lips.
"You know—" she starts, only to startle to a stop when she catches sight of her hunters. Oh merciful fucking Christ on a bicycle, she thinks to herself, she is as fucked as a cat in heat.
Ryuishi really should have made the connection when she saw the dog mask. Really, it should have been obvious who the fuck was chasing her. Thinking about it, she might have had the passing thought that it was an Inuzuka, but the lack of a familiar by the figure's side should have given it away.
Now, faced with silver hair that defies gravity and a half mask that covers the bridge of his nose to the bottom of his throat, she really wishes that she had come at this diplomatically instead of accusing them of being her baby daddy. It's still weird, she thinks, to see these two dimensional characters as living people.
"Hatake Kakashi," she laughs, "As I live and breathe. What an honor it is, to meet the Copy-Nin himself."
The stone-faced man doesn't react as he crouches on the branch she just leapt from, staring her down with one eye. He thinks that she looks nothing like the photo in the bingo books anymore, the one taken before the growth caused by puberty.
Watanabe Ryuishi looks deceptively normal. Bronze skinned and muscular, she could pass for almost civilian, a laborer perhaps, but he knows better. She is the Kiri no Ningyo, part of the infamous Chigiri no Kaijuu, the Monsters of the Bloody Mist. An intimidating title for the group that had cut its teeth on the blood-soaked battlefields of the front lines in the Third Shinobi War.
By bingo book standards she was the weakest of the three, but it would be hard not to be when competing with two of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist's apprentices. The years she has spent on the run and in hiding will have only made her stronger, with or without her team.
Kakashi curses the fact that all the data he has to work with is outdated and unreliable, because the Mist was never completely forthcoming on why an eleven-year-old girl had such a high bounty placed on her head upon defection, let alone the A-rank status. Looking at her now, he wishes he knew, because he doesn't believe the teenage girl using whore's sign language at his partner deserves that high of a rating.
"Why is that missing nin asking you if you enjoy fellatio?" he asks Tenzo under his breath, hoping that his partner might fill him in on something he missed.
The blank mask that turns toward him answers nothing, and Kakashi realizes that his partner probably doesn't know Kiri's dirty sign language. This is actually probably the first he is hearing about the propositioning. There will be a talk later, he can feel it in his bones.
She pauses in the hand signal for a moment, appearing to consider something. "Wait, how old are you two again?"
Kakashi and Tenzo say nothing to this, and she takes a moment to do some math in her head, based on old, half forgotten trivia facts. Okay, Zabuza was the same age as Kakashi when they met. She is two years younger than both Kakashi and Zabuza. If she's fifteen then that makes Kakashi seventeen. God dammit, why is telling ages so hard for her?
She has no clue what age his partner is, because to her, he looks anywhere from nineteen to twenty-five. Just to be safe though, she is going to stop this. Maybe. Probably? Perhaps she should try and run away again. When she takes a step backward, both eyes are glued on her. What is her life even—?
"Don't suppose you'll let me go? Because despite Konoha's reputation as morally haughty, uptight bastards, you're actually nice guys?" she tries, and judging from the look on their faces, that's gonna be a no. Well, that's kind of her last shot for now. If she dies here, she's had a good run… she guesses. Not really. She regrets not taking up that pretty brunette woman's offer of a one night stand, and maybe all the bullshit she has done to other people. Also, she really wishes she had splurged on that ice cream yesterday, even if it would have made her sick.
"Well this is some bullshit," she announces to her quiet companions, spinning the chain in her hand to life, listening to the noises that become warped through the action. She can't kill them, because she actually has some idea of what at least one of them can become, and it's kind of important. She can't run because they're faster than her. She's having to suppress mild flashbacks, she left a little kid crying, she can't hit on anybody and nobody is answering back.
This is all that stupid fucking Aburame's fault. If that whole clan didn't scare her more than almost literally anything else in the world, she would do something about it. As it stands, she's going to start leaving tribute on their property in the hopes that her gifts will appease them and they will never touch her with their awful, bug-filled bodies again. The thought of it alone makes her want to cry.
Ryuishi takes a second to be proud of herself for never letting Kisame and Zabuza find out about her intense and full bodied revulsion to beetles. Kiri would have burned a lot faster if one of them had so much as shoved a June bug in her general direction. She remembers giving her best friend from her past life a solid bruise for that type of dickery.
Kakashi watches as the missing nin readies her stance. He knows for a fact that she is the lone survivor of the Mist Academy Massacre, a monster born in dark heart of Kiri, nursed on deception and cruelty. A genjutsu mistress and a taijutsu expert, not to mention her skill with the bladed chain in her hands and subterfuge. He cannot go into this fight half cocked, not even with a partner by his side.
He tenses subtly and Tenzo follows his lead, everyone on the field observing each other, waiting for the first strike, or an opening to deliver one.
He blinks, opens up both eyes, and then immediately regrets it as her chakra pathways reveal themselves. It is only years of training that keep him anchored to the tree branch below him. He wobbles and wishes he could look away, but the horrifying sight in front of him keeps him fixated.
He lets out a wet choke, and the young man beside him stiffens further, calling on the trees around him as he launches wooden beam after wooden beam. She dances away with a shout of "Oh what the fuck, you too?" and, disregarding how unsettling it is that she can identify wood release on sight and connect the dots to who wields it, he thinks watching her move is even more awful.
Her eight gates look like something out of a horror movie, writhing with tentacles of a contamination he cannot name, and the limited precognition of her movements given to him from his sharingan show him afterimages of those undulating horrors, breaking every natural law possible. They move when they should be still and infect places that should have killed her long ago, and even as he watches he grows more nauseous. He doesn't know what they are or what they can do, but looking at them is foul and unnatural. Something in the most basic, primordial part of his brain wants him to flee from it, this nameless substance that somehow feels hungry and empty and forever based on appearance alone.
Kakashi watches the outline of her body sail over a thick wooden beam, flipping upside down to land on it with her hands, her legs kicking a bladed edge towards Tenzou. He promptly rips off his mask to projectile vomit down the side of the tree.
Closing his crimson eye, he slips the mask back over his face, noting how polite it is that she hasn't attacked him while he heaved. He doesn't relish the taste of bile in his mouth or the smell of stick he will never be able to pick out of this mask, but now that he can only see her physical appearance, the horrible feeling in his gut seems to settle down.
He wonders what living with that tainted chakra must be like.
"It's really hard to not make boner related wood jokes right now!" she informs his partner, and he rethinks his pondering. It's probably not that hard.
Kakashi leaps down, ignoring his queasiness to join in the fray. A barrage of kunai are streaming through his fingers before he fully acknowledges he made the choice to do so.
Ryuishi back-bends from the handstand and pushes herself to her feet, treating the thick wooden length as a balance beam, twisting around with the other half of her weapon, letting it sweep them from the air and hurl them in some random ass direction. With hands full of chain she flashes through signs—monkey, rat, tiger, dragon, horse, dragon—and molds her chakra like a net, feeling the river water rise to her call like a heady shot of whiskey in her veins.
"Suiton: Ja no Kuchi!" she expels, her husky command accented by the sound of raging river. An large snake emerges from the liquid, its mouth racing towards who she now knows to be Yamato… or Tenzo, or whatever the fuck his name is. She mentally jots down 'thank Orochimaru for forcibly teaching her jutsu' right underneath 'berate Orochimaru for performing experiments on children, then letting them grow up to assault future students.' She isn't sure when she'll get around to it, but it might happen. One day. Maybe. Perhaps? Oh look, Hatake has grabbed part of her chain. That can't be good.
She smells ozone in the air and feels her hair beginning to stand up on its own as he channels chakra to his hand. Shit, she forgot that bastard had lightning nature, and she quickly pumps her chakra down into the metal. Water will amplify the attack and make it go both ways, not to mention most people get grossed out by the Void touching them. It's why medic-nin hate her, and why she can't learn any iyro-ninjutsu herself. She makes eye contact and gritty onyx meets storm grey in the world's trickiest game of chicken.
"First one to let go is the biggest bitch," she remarks.
The chakra meets in the middle and Ryuishi can feel her nervous system begin to scream out in agony as a circuit completes itself in her body. She wraps her denim insulated leg around the chain stretching between the two and tugs it back and down with her calf. The man… boy… teenager with gritted teeth stumbles forward, refusing to let go. Somewhere in the background, Tenzo lets out a strangled yelp as a giant snake made of water crashes him against a tree.
(He will remark later that the attack could have, should have, killed him. That much crushing force located on one area should have left him broken. Instead he was soaked to the bone and his ribs were bruised to hell, but still in fighting condition.)
Electric shock is one hell of a thing, she thinks. Memories of tasers and friendship hijinks from a past life float by, followed closely by the smell of sickly sweet corpses cooked alive on the front lines. She shakes the thoughts loose and kicks sideways with her chain wrapped leg, off the beam and over the river below, watching the man refuse to give in. His fist coils tighter and he follows the chain as it tugs him over the edge.
If she hadn't counted on him doing it, the weight of him literally swinging from her weapon below the beam would have sent her tumbling. As it stands, she just coats her foot in chakra and weaves from the waist up around the wooden beam coming from behind. That shit could have taken her head off.
Instead, a solidly plated foot finds itself in her kidney from the back, followed by what feels like the graze of a kunai. She is going to bruise tomorrow, she just knows it. She immediately stops channeling the chakra to her foot, letting the force of the kick push her off balance and to the side, out of the way of the blade. The action causes her to tumble off the beam. Her chain catches over the top of the wooden structure and untangles from her leg. Kakashi is promptly tugged up as she falls down, still holding tight to one end. It is the weirdest set of human weights ever, electricity and all.
Another leg comes rushing toward her as the teenager on the other end of her weapon tries to literally kick her face off as she dangles, but she manages to twist out of the way just in time.
"Stop with the face!" she cries out, feeling defensive of her good features. Orochimaru already ruined her long slender neck when he cut her vocal chords, this is just adding insult to injury.
A barrage of kunai from above is her answer.
She looks up, and the bright blue sky is imposed with overcast grey clouds. She hears explosions in the distance and the screams of the dying. Her shirt is stained with sticky blood that oozes across her hands, making her grip slippery and slick. She can see her breath in the cold and she can't feel her fingers anymore, not with the snow on the ground and chill in the air.
Her vision is full of blades like rain coming toward her. Her hands are full of chain and chakra, and the only option is her legs. She contorts, her legs going over her head once more, her arms parallel the weapon in her hands, wrists bent unnaturally. Her feet kick out rhythmically, batting the weapons away.
The shock of blue river beneath her shakes her from her memories. She can't keep fighting like this. These two are prodigies, stronger than she can ever hope to be, and they are kicking the shit out of her. She needs another distraction.
She feels a tug on the chain above her and a yelp. "Is this electrified?!" she hears the mokuton user cry.
Oh right, she had managed to lock the screaming agony running through her body in a little box in her head. Huh, she is probably going to regret that, because she can vaguely feel her heart protesting in her chest and her hands are numb. She should fix that.
Ryuishi turns her head towards Kakashi, who is dangling away from her, still not letting go of the chain. At this point, she isn't sure either of them can let go anymore. Electricity is kind of fucked up like that. Either way she breathes in deep, molding chakra without hand seals. This isn't a jutsu, more of a trick. She feels the nature of it build to an unbearable pressure inside of her gut. Her cheeks bulge out and she purses her mouth.
A raging blast of water erupts from her lips like a geyser, knocking Kakashi back. Some of it may be puke, she isn't sure. Technically it's the first step to another jutsu, but she thinks this way works also.
The teenager goes flying and without the counterbalance the chain in her hand slips around the wood. As she drops head first to the river below, she is very glad that she had managed not to lose control of her bladder while being electrocuted.
Thoughts flood her brain as she narrows her body and braces for entry into the water, her hands like stiff claws around the metal links. She needs a distraction, one big enough to stop two professionally trained hunters from following her trail. What can stop two teenage boys from attempting to pursue?
She formulates plans as the river swallows her, liquid frothing white from the force of her entry. Underwater, the noise quiets and she swims like her title, propelling herself with undulations from her lower body, moving in weaving, zigzagging pattern.
Kakashi can't electrocute the whole river, not with so much moving water, but they are still raining down metal and jutsu nonetheless. She has to dodge around tree roots bursting up from the river bottom, but it is nothing to her. She has spent years honing muscle groups and pushing past lung capacities. Everything about her body is a weapon now.
An idea slides into place. If Zabuza can do it, then she can too. The bronze skinned woman explodes from the surface like an enlightened spirit, her eyes glimmering with mirth and determination. Grey and brown eyes lock onto black and she smiles big and wide, letting her plump lips stretch across her cheeks. A single hand detaches from the chains and rises to her top, centering over the layers of cloth. If her body is a weapon, her breasts are flash grenades.
Ryuishi rips off her shirt.
And then Hatake Kakashi—seventeen year old jounin, ANBU captain—loses his grip on reality. Because missing-nin don't just rip their tops off in the middle of battle. Right?
B-B-But there they were, a pair of breasts out in the afternoon sunlight. It is like a… a…
"Kai!" he shouts, flaring his chakra out. But it isn't a genjutsu.
His face heats and he chokes loudly, eyes desperately trying to look away. Boobs! She had just—and now there were… He ducks an incoming kick to his head and reflexively sweeps for the attackers feet. She jumped over and—Oh! Oh! Oh… They jump with her, the perky mounds—
A heel drop catches him square in the jaw and he tumbles back. He sees the taut figure of Tenzo attempting to come to his defense, awkwardly advancing with close range fighting, only none of the jabs or grabs seem appropriate anymore. Every time he ducks and weaves he gets on breast level, and every bone in his body is screaming against touching a woman's chest without consent, even if it is with a fist. Even if she is an enemy.
The fighting begins to lose intensity and structure. The nuke nin seems to be the only one willing to go in close anymore, and she is soaking wet and topless.
Kakashi feels like his world is upside down as he flings a bewildered handful of shuriken at the target. She dodges nimbly, dancing out of the way of most of them while lashing out at his kohai with a chain wrapped fist. She manages most, but hisses as one grazes her chest.
"Fuck! Right in the tit!"
He swallows the urge to apologize, trailing the line of red down the swell of her breast.
Not too big, not too small, just average—but now the shallow cut (more of a scratch, really) exists and it must sting because he can see the sweat beading on the curve of it, slowly sliding down just around the dusty peak of a nip—FOCUS! He needed to focus! He isn't some upstart teenager, he is a shinobi, a jounin and that meant that Kakashi can handle this missing nin, even if she is half naked!
Tenzo's stiff defense is broken by a particularly punishing knee to his already jutsu bruised ribs and he stumbles back, giving her room to flash through more hand seals.
"Mizu Bunshin no Jutsu!" her husky voice cries, and then there are fifteen topless criminals, swarmed around the two, each one with a jiggling set of breasts and a teasing smile. They move like one and the tables turn as the two teenagers are put on defense, trying to tactfully and non-offensively take down multiple opponents in a way that can be written in reports that won't drag them in for questioning.
The thought of the report for this makes Kakashi's head hurt.
It takes them much longer than normal to smash through a taijutsu expert's water clones, and by the time they are done they are soaked to the bone and thoroughly embarrassed. They are put to even greater shame when they realize that the original is nowhere to be found after the chaos. On his signal they move out, setting up a grid pattern to search.
They spend two days attempting to make out a trail, only to find that there is none to follow. The topless woman had most likely waited under the waters surface the whole time until they left and followed the river back out the other side of the village before disappearing.
Kakashi will never be able to forget or repress the memories his first encounter of that toilet paper wielding, foul-mouthed, breast-baring missing nin. Years afterward, he will wake to the awful feeling of awkwardness and confusion and oh-god-what-do-I-do-make-it-stop. Tenzo will block the event from his memory in its entirety, locking it away in his head somewhere no one can ever find it. When asked, he will state his first encounter with the missing nin is entirely different from this, but something in the back of his mind will squirm unpleasantly.
The report does end up raising many questions, and quiet rumors will spread. Not about the ANBU agents themselves, because everyone knows Mist nin are tricky. Especially genjutsu using Mist nin.
But the legend of the bare-breasted brawler is born.
AN:SO, if somebody wants to know, this is Ryuishi's life now. Strong enough to keep up with two prodigy children at an insane level, but more likely to turn everything ridiculous to get away. No shame in that, or being topless. I think Tenzo might have shown up a little earlier than cannon, but there still are no timelines, so I'm fucking lost as hell. If anything, we'll call it a ripple effect of Ryuishi's shenanigans. This is also the start of a very weird arc. Also, I defend myself and say that having been in many fights myself, making them weird has always worked well for me, no matter the skill of my opponent.
Thank you to all my reviewers, favoriters, followers and Lurkers. It's you guys who keep me going.
Another big thanks to my beta Enbi, who is the tranquil zen at the center of my tsunami storm. Bless her face.
As for the fun question at the end of this chapter: What do you think the other cannon/non-canon characters think of Ryuishi? Even the ones she hasn't met yet?
