PLASTICITY LIVES! Last time: Tori started experimenting on Zetsu clones and also bacteria and thought about culturing penicillin-producing fungi. This first scene in this chapter picks up directly from the last scene of the previous chapter, so I suggest rereading that if you haven't looked at this fic in a while (it's pretty short).
A note: the ongoing epidemic of "Dead Water Fever" is a feature of this fic that was developed pre-pandemic and will not be going away. I'm giving a heads up because Tori gets into an argument with someone about it, and I know infectious disease-related discourse is more exhausting in 2021 than it was in 2018 when I started publishing this fic.
Oh, also warning for a whole lot of drinking and someone's drink having… things added to it.
xXx
"If I could mimic a bijuu, we wouldn't need to steal them, would we?" Zetsu pointed out not for the first time in their now mostly redundant evil plotting, and Tori pouted.
"But if you know what they feel like, why can't you fake it?" Tori asked for what felt like the fifth time. She needed a working demon model, or else they were all going to go into the whole bijuu-sealing thing on guesswork. She knew from various old reports from across the continent that that usually ended with a bunch of people dying.
"It's been a while."
Tobi- or Obito now, because he'd gone all quiet and thoughtful- was leaning back on a greenhouse table, drumming his fingers across the bottom of his mask while Tori and Zetsu continued their dishearteningly cyclic conversation.
("You're making a very toxic work environment," Zetsu complained of Tori's demands.)
The fronds of the potted Zetsu next to Obito were wilting. The pot had a piece of right red tape stuck to it, indicating that clone was currently keeping Tori's cloned heart alive. She eyed it even as she opened her mouth to argue her point about the utility of models in research.
"What if you were just in proximity to a bijuu?" Obito asked, cutting off Tori demanding Zetsu explain his biology to her.
"Maybe," Zetsu said after a few moments of muttering to himself. "You'd need to lure the demonic chakra out of the host, though."
Obito groaned, like Zetsu had just told him needed a lift to the airport at 6AM.
"We could find the sanbi," Obito suggested after a few more moments of thought. "It should have reformed by now."
Reforming…? From Yagura's assassination…? Is that how it worked? Was there just a giant demonic turtle stomping around the countryside somewhere? Tori wracked her brain for any memory of what the manga had said on the topic of bijuu, and remembered something else instead.
"The mask," Tori said, snapping her fingers. "The funky death mask."
Both Obito and Zetsu stared at her.
"It's a, uh… Shinigami mask?" Tori tried. She didn't really remember this part of the manga, but she did know lots of people on the internet were mad about it. "You can use it to bring things out of the Shinigami's stomach."
She kept talking. The Fourth Hokage had sealed half the kyuubi into himself, and then he'd been eaten by the shinigami. Ergo, there was kyuubi chakra floating around in the Shinigami stomach.
Probably. Tori was pretty sure.
"Finding a bijuu so we can develop a way to seal a bijuu is awful circular planning," Obito observed, sighing dramatically and crossing his arms.
"Well no one else is offering up any better ideas," Tori answered snidely. "Worse comes to worst, maybe you can genjutsu the Fourth Hokage's undead soul into explaining how he did it."
Obito… giggled. Why.
"Where's this temple?" Zetsu asked.
"Uh," said Tori.
Obito laughed at her. It wasn't a nice laugh.
"Zetsu can find it," Obito decided. "Very cute of you to only remember your doujutsu when it'll save your skin."
He patted her shoulder, and Tori gritted her teeth to stop herself from rising to Obito's baiting. He'd already hinted he thought she wasn't wasn't telling the absolute truth about her "future vision," and she didn't want to give him more ammunition for that theory.
"I'm right," she answered, after Zetsu melted into the floor. "You'll see."
"Oh, I don't keep you around because I think you're wrong," Obito answered, then grabbed her hand and said, "Come on! Tobi wants to make red bean buns!"
Tori felt oddly relieved "Tobi" was back, and resolutely didn't think about Obito while she helped him look for azuki beans in the kitchen.
xXx
Tori's morning routine– if no one bothered her, which happened often– was to work on mission requests and replies over breakfast. One morning Hidan sat across from her and pulled her plate of half-eaten toast toward himself.
Tori kept her gaze focused on the letter in front of her. Hidan was just trying to mess with her, and she was already full anyway. She was not going to let him pull her into a petty fight.
Hidan shoved the entirety of her last crust of toast into his mouth and asked, spewing crumbs, "Anything interesting today?"
Tori opened a plain white envelope. It contained a postcard, which was… weird, because that wasn't generally how one packaged postcards.
Hidan kicked her under the table. She finally spared him a glance, sneering at the shit-eating grin on his face.
"Not really," she said. "No disembowelments or baby barbecues for you."
The postcard had a generic print of a cottage with a garden overflowing with an absurd amount of flowers. A black cat sat in the cottage's front window. Tori flipped the card over. Instead of a message, someone had drawn a cartoon penis.
Real mature, Tori thought, and she set the postcard aside.
"What the hell is a baby barbecue?" Hidan asked. "Is this one of your crazy other world things, like OSHA?"
"No, it's…" Tori started to answer, then suddenly felt a wave of vertigo. "Like, if you barbecued… babies…"
She'd really just said the first absurdly evil thing she could think of, but she was seeing spots and her fingertips were going numb and her brain was shutting off, and she couldn't think of a snappy retort to Hidan being obnoxious.
She missed whatever Hidan replied.
Oh no, she thought, pushing herself out of her chair and falling to the floor. Shit. Fuck.
Someone was supposed to check all their mail before bringing it to Ame– they pretty regularly got letter bombs and tracking seals– but it was a cursory check that didn't toss out weird spam or death threats. Apparently they also didn't check for poisons.
Tori made a wild grab for the kitchen counter and hauled herself up.
Flush the affected area with water for at least fifteen minutes. That's what every set of lab safety instructions said, ever. Tori turned on the sink with her elbow and stuck her hands under the water, putting her weight on her elbows on the sink's rim to keep herself upright.
Her head was swimming, and her vision was very quickly turning into blinding brightness punctuated with dark spots.
"Don't touch that," she managed to say, because she was very explicitly told not to kill Hidan. Or maybe she'd just been told not to carve seals into him? Those seemed like they should go into the same category, but her thoughts were jumbled. Her voice sounded too loud in her ears.
"What, this card?" Hidan asked.
Through very great effort, Tori managed to turn her head. A less-bright shadow that was probably Hidan reached forward and picked something up. He laughed. It was basically a cackle.
"Chibigami, are you freaking out because you saw a dick?" he asked.
Tori didn't have an answer for that, because she suddenly had to focus very hard on not falling over. Hidan kept prattling about… whatever Hidan prattled about… and then he said:
"Oh, fuck."
There was a thud, followed by silence. Tori assumed he had died. That seemed to be the only way to get him to shut up.
She still couldn't see properly. She focused on the feeling of the cool water moving over her hands.
"Tori," a voice said behind her. It sounded mildly disappointed. "Did you kill Hidan?"
"Don't touch the card," she said. It came out garbled, and the words might not have been in the right order, but she was pretty sure she'd conveyed the message.
Except maybe she hadn't, because a blob that was some type of person was bending over to touch something next to the probably-Hidan lump. She tried to explain No, you idiot, that's what killed him , but what came out of her was just a nonsensical scream.
Whoever was talking to her must have understood what she meant though, because instead of dropping dead like Hidan, they left.
Tori didn't know how to tell if fifteen minutes had passed, but it sure seemed like a lot of minutes went by. Standing was hard. The probably-Hidan lump groaned. Tori blinked at it a few times, confirmed it actually was Hidan, and then realized her vision was returning.
She decided that was good enough and slumped onto the floor. The water continued to run.
"You fucking bitch," Hidan said, and rolled over sadly onto his back.
"I told you," Tori replied. Her head hurt, but it was starting to feel clearer.
There was movement in front of her face– very little noise in terms of footsteps, because ninja were assholes who walked like cats– and then Deidara was yelling, "Hidan, you jackass."
He sounded delighted, crouching over Hidan's body. Next to him, Sasori picked up and examined the post card.
"Hng," Hidan replied.
Kisame stepped into Tori's vision. "You okay?" he asked.
Tori squinted at him. She was still seeing spots, but she could make out parts of his blue face. "Maybe," she said.
The spots were bright light now instead of dark. That was an improvement, right?
"I hate dying by poison," Hidan said, and made a pathetic attempt to sit up. Deidara snickered as he flopped back over. "Why'd the bitch get to live?"
"God won't let me die," Tori deadpanned.
"She washed it off," someone supplied, and Tori blinked more spots out of her eyes. Itachi was here… somewhere…
Oh fuck, it's a party, she thought. She might have said it outloud. No one reacted.
"No," Sasori disagreed, moving to stand over her. "It likely assisted with her recovery, but it's too fast-acting for that to work."
Sasori stared down at her, assessing. The stupid postcard was in his hand. Maybe becoming a puppet was a good idea– Tori was sick and tired of getting drugged or poisoned every other week.
Oh, but my toast this morning was really good, she thought. There'd been peach marmalade. Sasori didn't get to enjoy peach marmalade.
Sasori was still talking: "How did you even make it to the sink?"
Tori had no idea what he was talking about. "With legs," she tried. "Do you miss peach marm- murma- jelly?"
Sasori poked her with his foot. At some point in her life, Tori would have felt embarrassed to be pathetically stuck sitting on a kitchen floor, sick and disoriented, while a bunch of men talked about whether or not she should be dead. Now it was just a regular Friday morning.
My life has gotten stupid, Tori thought.
"What was Orochimaru doing to you?" Sasori asked, and he sounded genuinely curious.
A loud argument broke out between Hidan and Deidara, and Kisame moved over to it.
"You know," Tori said, waving a hand vaguely. The movement made more white-light spots appear in her vision. "'Speriments. If 'm dying right now, I'd like an- an anny-dote."
"If you're lucid now, you'll be fine," Sasori said, sounding dismissive. "Do you know what mithridatism is?"
Sasori really wanted to give her low doses of poison to build resistance. His goal did not actually seem to want to help her or make her stronger, but rather thought that non-lethally poisoning her over and over sounded fun.
Not that Sasori would ever outright use a word as trivial as "fun" to describe his hobbies.
"I think you should know," Tori told him, carefully articulating her words as her head swam, "that me agreeing to experiments while drugged is not consent."
"So?" he said.
"So you," Tori answered, "are a bastard."
There was the telltale sound of a table cracking in two, which ended her decidedly awful conversation with Sasori.
"Fuck!" Hidan swore, stumbling back from the broken table. "Kakuzu's gonna be pissed."
"Hold on," Deidara said, looking around the room. "Are we all here?"
It was very rare for the entirety of Akatsuki to gather in one place, even with them all living in the same building. That day was no exception: Zetsu was off looking for the Shinigami mask, and Konan was in Earth Country meeting with a super secret envoy from the Tsuchikage. Tori knew this because keeping track of where they all went was literally her job. The specifics of Konan and Zetsu's missions were need-to-know-only, but she informed Deidara that at least Zetsu was off fucking around.
"Yeah, but all the fun people are here." He paused and then addended, "Except for Itachi, of course. We should all do something fun, yeah."
Hidan, looking incredibly unsteady on his feet and leaning on the partially destroyed dining table, agreed very loudly and added, "Let's get shitfaced!"
Tori pulled her knees up to her chest and examined a stray thread on her leggings. The men made plans to go barhopping that night, in a town just over the border in Grass Country so Pein and Konan wouldn't get mad if things got out of hand. Eventually they all drifted back out of the kitchen, and Tori laboriously got to her feet.
The dining table had not actually cracked in two; one of the legs had somehow been reduced to splinters, and now the whole thing was lopsided. Tori stared at it for a few minutes. This was definitely going to end up her problem to solve, but her brain was currently too scrambled to figure out what the solution would be. Probably calling someone? Hidan was right; Kakuzu was going to be pissed if she had to spend organization money on a replacement.
Tori's pile of mission requests had been scattered across the floor and she slowly gathered them back up and moved into the living room to keep working through them. The plate she'd been using for her toast and her empty coffee mug were both left cracked and abandoned on the floor.
The next letter she picked up was from someone she called Ghost Lady, a woman in Rice Country who was convinced her house was haunted and wanted a ninja to take care of the problem. Tori's gameplay for missions that were physically impossible (or just stupid) was to keep coming up with excuses for charging higher and higher rates until the person could no longer afford to hire Akatsuki and backed out. Ghost Lady seemed to have unlimited funds.
Money is no object, Ghost Lady's letter started, and Tori collapsed back further into the couch. Tori liked ghost stories, but they weren't real and therefore couldn't be exorcised, and she felt too drained and queasy to deal with this right now.
She picked up another letter. It was addressed to Itachi and contained a long and insane-sounding description of the writer's violent sexual fantasies. It was the third one from this person that week. Tori dropped it back onto the pile.
Tori couldn't deal with this right now. She took a nap.
xXx
Tori spent exactly forty-three minutes of her afternoon trying to make progress on the massive bijuu sealing process. She had set aside Step One (put host and demon into stasis) for now- she had streamlined and perfected it about as much as she could with the materials she had. For now, she'd turned her focus to Step Three: seal the bijuu into something. This seemed like something she'd need to do before she could set up to practice Step Two: crack open a jinchuriki's seal.
And, also: she might have to seal kyuubi chakra into something alarmingly soon. Had she really suggested they go pull kyuubi chakra out of a god? Had Obito really gone along with it? What were any of them doing?!
She'd done some practice trials sealing kiddie Zetsus into each other, and that had gone well, but the Zetsus she had were all genetically identical and might be prone to just melt into each other anyway, and it was still unclear to her how different a demon's chakra was from a human's and how that difference would affect fuinjutsu. After a bunch of arguments with the stupid librarian jounin in charge of making sure she didn't go digging through something she wasn't authorized to see, she'd obtained a very esoteric piece of writing on using animal chakra in jutsu, and… well, the answer seemed to be "they sure have chakra!"
Thanks, random past ninja scientist.
She wondered if, maybe, having all your research and techniques carefully compartmentalized and kept secret from other organizations prevented anyone from churning out cohesive theories or more comprehensive writing on high-level fuinjutsu. Would she still be having this problem if she were in a bigger village like Konoha? The thought was increasingly bothering her, because surely- surely!- someone else had already done all of this. Surely there was a how-to guide out there for transferring a bijuu from one host to another.
On the other hand, the fact that no such document seemed to exist was exactly why Tori was being permitted to stay alive and sit around all day drawing glorified fancy pictures. So. Maybe she shouldn't be complaining?
She had to give up on her fuinjutsu rather quickly, because she wasn't completely over being poisoned and thinking too hard made her head spin.
She went down into her dungeon to check on her fungal cultures, stored in one of the cells no one was using. She'd poured her potato-and-agar medium into a bunch of randomly sized plastic containers she'd recycled from her mouse experiment, then done her best to smear fungal spores from Kisame's rotten lemons onto her make-shift agar plates.
"Ah, Penicillium, my old enemy," she very clearly remembered a graduate student in her old lab saying of fungal contamination on a petri dish. It's how she knew Penicillium fungus was the blue-green stuff that grew on food, and that it was the genus that made penicillin. She also reasoned that Penicillium fungi should be pretty easy to grow, given one could just grow it by accident in a sterile lab.
(That's what she was pretty sure happened to that one guy. (Flamel? No, he was an alchemist. Fleming? Fleming.) He'd come into lab one day to find that a spot of Penicillium contamination had killed the surrounding bacteria on a plate.)
And then, because fuinjutsu was absolute bullshit and you could write commands like "isolate all bone-related genes," Tori figured she wouldn't need to know shit about chemistry to isolate penicillin molecules. Worst case scenario, Sasori would probably have some ideas about doing it by hand.
Tori had indeed grown more blue-green fungi on her make-shift dishes. She'd also grown a bunch of other stuff on all her plates, of various colors and consistency.
Tori had never had this much contamination on any experiment she'd done in her life. She'd carefully wiped down everything with rubbing alcohol and done the spore transfer next to the open flame of the gas stove to sterilize the air, and yet...!
How disgusting was the Akatsuki dungeon? The kitchen? Should she be concerned?
She'd retried the whole process a few days before, carefully picking up Penicillium spores from her plates with a flame-sterilized senbon she'd found under the couch and transferring them to a new plate, but… nope. Everything was contaminated again.
She squinted down through the plastic wrap she'd stretched over the tupperware. Perhaps triple layering cling wrap was insufficient for keeping airborne spores and bacteria from contaminating her stuff.
"Are you gonna kill the contaminants?" she asked of her fungi. "Please?"
Tori liked having her own project that was hers and not just a gear in her bosses' world-domination plans, but it seemed like she couldn't even get this working easily. Exhausted again, Tori closed the door to the cell and went to take another nap.
xXx
By evening Tori decided she was feeling much better and could probably stomach alcohol. No one had actually invited her, but Tori decided she would annoy someone into letting her tag along on their little adventure that night.
Tori heated up some leftover chicken Tobi had baked and ate it right out of the tupperware as she sorted through her clothes, which she kept in a hard plastic box in one of the dungeon cells. She was too young for bars in her country, but she'd been to shitty university house parties and assumed the dress code was about the same. All her clothes were picked for functionality over fashion, so she didn't have anything particularly sexy, but…
She ditched her T-shirt for a form-fitting shirt with a huge scoop-neck that was so low-cut she normally wouldn't even consider wearing it without a camisole underneath. Then she painted way more dark make-up over her face than necessary, tucking her wine-red lipstick away in the little pocket in the hem of her leggings for touch-ups. Bam, sexy.
Another thing she learned in university was this: one always drank a little before going out.
There were always a few beers in the fridge, because Kisame liked to drink. Tori found she didn't much like the taste, so she pulled down a bottle of sake that had been on top of the fridge since she'd gotten there, likely forgotten by whoever had bought it.
She'd never had sake before, but the back of the bottle said to serve it warm. Feeling too impatient to heat up a pot of water for a water bath, she poured the entire bottle into a glass measuring pitcher and microwaved it. Alcohol could explode in a microwave, but… well, the volume was probably too big for that.
Luckily, it didn't explode and she didn't have to figure out how to blame Deidara.
The sake had a delicate, thin flavor, ricey and just a little sweet. It wasn't as strong as she had expected it to be and went down smooth.
"Oh good, you're coming," Deidara observed, giving her a once-over as he entered the kitchen with a dirty plate that he dumped in the sink. "Danna said he wouldn't come if you weren't there, yeah. Is that sake?"
Deidara picked up the pitcher from where she'd left it on the counter and sniffed it. Deidara had also dressed up to go out- he had pulled back his bangs to show off more of his face (and his eyeliner) and was wearing pants that were much tighter than necessary.
"Do you want some?" Tori asked.
"Serving it this way is probably a crime, yeah," Deidara replied, but still pulled a cup from the cupboard and set it down on the counter in front of Tori.
Tori raised her eyebrows. "Do you really expect me to serve you?"
"Pouring your own sake is bad luck," Deidara said as if it were obvious. When Tori continued to stare at him dubiously, he continued, "You're so fucking alien sometimes. Here."
He topped off her cup and then poured his own. "You gotta serve everyone else before you drink, or someone's gotta serve you. It's just polite, yeah."
Itachi silently wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later, and Tori noticed Deidara tense up like a cat before she saw Itachi.
"You're already drinking?" Itachi asked. He didn't sound judgemental, but Tori interpreted his comment as judgment anyway.
"This is a special technique I learned at university," Tori said, leaning against the counter. "It's called pre-gaming."
Having to just stand like weirdos at the kitchen counter because the table was broken also seemed like an aggressively "I am a penniless student" move.
"Yeah, Uchiha, it's an academic practice," Deidara said, grinning meanly. "Very cultured of us."
"I assumed you were drinking because you have no money to buy drinks, Tori," Itachi said, and Tori nearly choked on her sake.
"Don't worry so much," Deidara told her, reaching to pour the both of them more sake. "Danna will buy you a drink, yeah. He's very excited about poisoning you now."
"Fuck," Tori mumbled to herself and moved to rub her eyes with her palms. Remembering she had spent a lot of time applying make-up to her face, she went for downing her whole cup of sake in one go instead.
Tori ended up drinking half of the sake, and she had to hold onto the railing of the stairs extra hard as she stumbled her way down. Deidara made fun of her a couple times, but he was easy to ignore.
The only other person who made any effort to dress up besides her and Deidara was Hidan, who had a ridiculous fur-lined leather jacket and a v-neck shirt cut even lower than Tori's. Everyone else was just in their usual Akatsuki cloaks.
...well, Sasori was not in Hiruko like he normally would be to leave the base, which might be something like dressing up. Deidara bragged he'd made him agree to not use the battle puppet, as "they'd get into a club, yeah."
"Very bad boy motorcycle gang," Tori told Hidan.
"Are you drunk?" Hidan asked. He sounded jealous.
"Just a tad," Tori answered. She felt lightheaded, but she could make whole sentences and everything.
"I think we should race to Kayaba, yeah," Deidara proposed. "Loser buys a round of drinks."
"You're only proposing that because you can fly," Hidan snapped back.
"And you're only arguing because you know you're the slowest-"
Tori watched passively while they argued, and Kisame rolled his eyes and left out the door, Itachi following him like a shadow. Honestly, Tori was surprised Itachi had any interest in going, but she supposed he had showed signs of wanting to be social. Well… sort of. He at least liked hanging out with Kisame, she was sure.
Kakuzu moved to loom over her, and Tori was surprised he was interested in socializing too.
"You still owe me money," he said. Behind him, Deidara and Hidan fought like children for the door.
"I've made a couple working scrolls," Tori told him. "How many do you need?"
"Kakuzu," Sasori cut in, suddenly at Tori's side. Hidan finally threw Deidara off and raced out the door. "I want her for an experiment. Don't you dare-"
Tori's eyes slid back and forth between Kakuzu and Sasori as they both postured for her attention. Kakuzu wanted her attention to make threats and investigate her progress on paying off her debt; Sasori wanted her unmaimed and functioning so he could try poisoning her.
Tori thought the stereotype here would be that she'd feel flattered to have two men fighting over her attention. Except, both men wanted it for completely fucked up reasons. Tori, mostly, was interested in fantasizing about if she could goad them into a fight to the death. That would totally make her night.
The argument ended with Kakuzu hefting her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and Sasori following behind. As they ran, Kakuzu quizzed her on how much material she'd wasted making storage scrolls, and how many scrolls a day she could make, and if they were any good.
"You're not going to be able to sell them for much until you improve your calligraphy," Sasori said.
"But they work," Tori insisted. "You said they were perfect."
"No one's going to believe they work well until they try them," Sasori countered. "They look like they'd be awful."
"I'll worry about selling them," Kakuzu growled.
They passed Hidan on the way. He screamed swears at them as they went.
"I HOPE HER DRUNK ASS VOMITS ON YOU, YOU STINGY BASTARD!" he screeched as he faded into the distance.
"I don't get carsick," Tori assured Kakuzu's back.
"I don't know what that means," Kakuzu answered.
The town of Kayaba wasn't very big, but it had a long stretch of packed-dirt road filled with bars. The street was filled with tipsy people, either at outdoor standing tables or moving between bars, and the air was loud with banter and laughter and muffled music. The town was a big draw for smaller farming villages, and Tori realized very quickly that she was somehow over -dressed. Most of the women only had the lightest make-up and were dressed rather conservatively.
Tori did her best to brush her hair in front of her cleavage. Oops.
Deidara, being the one who could fly, had been the first to arrive and therefore the one to pick the bar. It was swanky, with mood lighting and loud pop music and a mural of bales of hale in a field painted on the wall behind the bar.
"This has to be the most expensive one here," Kakuzu muttered darkly.
"Deidara has no sense for subtlety," Sasori sniffed.
Deidara, Itachi and Kisame already had a table, tucked in a corner. Kisame sat between Deidara and Itachi, looking rather unhappy as Deidara yelled enthusiastically at Itachi about some perceived slight. Itachi sipped quietly at a bright red cocktail. It had a paper umbrella in it, and a whole strawberry hanging from the side.
When Hidan showed up a few minutes later, Kakuzu bullied him into going through with Deidara's proposal of buying everyone a round. There was a lot more yelling, and Tori slunk across the cushioned bench at the table to steal a laminated menu from Deidara.
"I want something that's pure alcohol but tastes good," Tori said when Deidara paused in his own yelling about the town's one club being closed to raise an eyebrow at her. "What's your equivalent of a Long Island Iced Tea?"
"Why do you keep saying things like that as if I'll understand them?" Deidara asked her.
"Because I am drunk," Tori answered very seriously, and he shoved her lightly and went back to explaining to Itachi that assuming a club would be open on a Friday was actually very smart of him, and the club owners were the stupid ones for having a weird schedule, and also Itachi should stop looking at him like that.
"Here," Kakuzu offered, pulling the menu from her hands. "I will calculate the optimum alcohol-to-ryo ratio for us all."
Sometimes, Kakuzu was a man after her own heart.
The tray of drinks he and Hidan came back with tasted awful.
"Why did you order me one?" Sasori sneered. He'd perched himself at the end of one side of the table, staring out across the bar like he was checking the other customers out. He probably was, Tori thought, for prettier puppets.
"I-" Hidan started, then turned to Kakuzu. "Fuck you, you bastard, you know he doesn't eat-"
Kakuzu, who had an odd sense of fairness when it came to others being owed something, topped off everyone's drinks evenly with Sasori's.
In an incredibly transparent act of politeness, Sasori picked up one of the glasses and slid it across the table to Tori.
"Here," he said.
Tori stared down at the glass, filled with syrupy amber liquid, and then back up at Sasori.
"Do you honestly think," she deadpanned, "I'm going to drink anything you touch?"
Sasori just stared back at her. "It won't kill you," he said eventually. "That's the point."
Hidan burst into laughter, and Itachi nudged his glass- the umbrella-less one Hidan had bought- an inch towards Tori.
"You can have mine," he offered.
Tori kept defiant eye-contact with Sasori as she took the glass, and Sasori let out a derisive snort.
The conversation died after that, with everyone focusing on their drinks (except Sasori, who turned back around to people-watch). It had more of an awkward feel to it than a comfortable silence. They rarely ever hung out as a group like this, and Tori was sure none of them were exactly social butterflies. Honestly, they were more like a bunch of co-workers at an awkward office party than a group of friends going out together.
She wasn't a social butterfly either, but at least she'd grown up in regular civilian society.
"Okay," she said, tapping her nails against the side of her glass. "Fuck, Marry, Kill: Pein, Konan, Zetsu."
There was a long silence as everyone stared at her.
"...do you not have this game?" Tori asked slowly. Maybe, if you had never heard of Fuck, Marry, Kill, her sentence sounded insane. She was pretty sure she'd heard people in Oto play it, though. Maybe. A lot of time not in-lab was a drugged-induced haze.
"You shouldn't talk about your boss that way," Itachi told her.
Tori leaned back in the booth and crossed her arms. "Shouldn't be a boss if you don't want your employees talking shit."
"Ha!" Hidan laughed, slamming back the rest of his drink. "Yeah, okay. Kill Zetsu, fuck Konan, make God-of-Rain or whatever he's calling himself have a custody battle with Jashin-"
"What the hell are you talking about?" Kakuzu interrupted.
The game devolved into a lot of yelling, and no one else got their answers in. Deidara eventually managed to pitch two more FMKs with celebrities Tori had never heard of, and then Kisame produced a deck of playing cards from his cloak. There was some arguing over what to play, and then:
"You always have weird ideas," Deidara said, turning to Tori. "Know any card games?"
Tori straightened her back slightly, surprised he was asking her. She'd sort of slouched into her chair to listen to them brag and bicker at each other without giving her a single thought, and she'd been anticipating being stuck like that until they got bored with this particular bar.
"Uh– yeah, we could play rummy," she said. She reached for the deck of cards and got about half a sentence through an explanation of the rules before she realized Kisame had not brought a standard playing deck. "What the hell is this?"
"A card deck…?" Kisame answered.
"Were you expecting karuta?" Itachi asked.
Tori had absolutely no idea what that meant. She sorted through the cards, which all looked like some sort of bizarro-world version of a standard playing deck. There were five suits, each having the numbers one through nine and then six face cards featuring characters that meant nothing to her. One was a goddamn nine-tailed fox. What was that supposed to be? The ace? The king?
"Oh, I do not like this," Tori breathed. Itachi leaned over her.
"It's shinobi themed," he said, sounding approving.
This did not answer any of Tori's questions.
Since she was failing to explain a game, the cards somehow ended up eased out of her hands into Deidara's, who shuffled and dealt everyone two cards and then set seven cards face up in a circle around the deck.
"I… have no idea what this is," Tori admitted, and Kakuzu took her cards right out of her hand. One of the seven face up cards was removed.
Tori sat back and pouted for several very rapid-fire rounds where it seemed like the goal was to build a complicated pattern on the face-up card in front of you, and playing certain cards let you steal from other people's piles. The face cards were actually shinobi ranks, but drawn in very old armor that meant nothing to Tori.
Tori had finished her drink from Itachi and the one Sasori gave her was starting to seem… tempting. Tori took a single, miniscule sip. It tasted nasty, but the non-poisoned drink had been gross too.
The actual rules of the game very slowly unraveled themselves to Tori even as she watched intently, although everyone's home country had different variations and they all argued and shoved cards at each other. At some point one of the cards ended up pinned to the table with a kunai, and she thought for a minute Kakuzu might be doing breathing exercises. Even Sasori became so invested in the petty arguments that he told Itachi he wasn't allowed to have opinions, because his country used different cards.
"Why did you even come if you're not going to do anything?" Hidan asked Tori loudly when Itachi finally won the game. It was a very contentious win, and Kakuzu shattered a glass in his hand as Deidara muttered darkly to himself.
"I didn't think your card games would be crazy-town," Tori shot back. "Who the hell has five suits? I'm used to four."
"This isn't Fire Country," Hidan snapped, which made! No! Sense!
"We should play again," Kakuzu said through gritted teeth. "With standardized rules. And for money."
A clay centipede was crawling up Deidara's arm, his glare fixated on Itachi.
"You know what?" Tori said. "I think I'll go get another drink."
She still didn't have any money, but no one stopped her from crawling over Kisame and then walking up to the bar. She took the drink Sasori gave her with her, so she could leave it with a bartender and stop feeling tempted to drink it.
Walking across the room was slightly more difficult than it should have been, and Tori had to pause and blink a few times to get the lights out of her eyes. The beat of the music pounded in her skull. She was drunker than she thought she'd been.
Behind her, there was a burst of yelling about the rules to a card game.
Tori decided that she did not need another drink. She needed some normal conversation with a normal human. She scanned the bar for a moment, then walked up to two women seated at the bar.
"Your dress is super cute," she told one of them, and the woman looked at her like she'd just slapped her.
"Um," Tori continued, backpedaling. "Sorry. I'm new in town. I'm just trying to make friends."
In a polite but awkward tone, the woman replied, "I hope you find some." Then both women shuffled away.
Tori stood there, feeling awkward and dumb, which was a stark constrast from how loose and warm her limbs felt from the alcohol. Well. That hadn't worked. She sat down in one of the seats the women had vacated, unsure what to do while the pop music the bar was blasting thudded through her brain. A man sat down next to her and waved down a bartender, and someone tapped her on the shoulder.
"If you wanted a drink," Sasori said testily, "I already offered."
He set a brand new cocktail down in front of her on the bar, where it joined the one she'd already refused to drink. This new one was clear and had several dark berries floating in it.
"I told you," Tori said flatly, "absolutely not."
"It's not-" Sasori started, but then the man next to Tori turned around and interrupted:
"She said no, dude."
Sasori looked mildly affronted anyone had dared to speak to him. Tori preened.
"Yeah," she said, more aggressive than she'd usually dare to speak to Sasori. "Back off, dude. I'm not interested."
"Stupid," Sasori muttered, and then walked off. Tori, drunk, waved after him.
"Thanks," Tori said to the guy. He had dark messy hair and a plain face, and he was eyeing her up and down with evident interest. "That guy's been bothering me all night."
"You're here alone, then?" the guy asked.
"Oh yeah, I'm new in town," Tori replied. "Haven't made any friends yet. You from here?"
The guy introduced himself as Kenta and he was… very boring. He'd been born and raised in the area and had never traveled further than the Grass Country capital, and he did not seem to care enough about Tori's made-up backstory to listen to her say more than that she'd moved in with some cousins for financial reasons. He talked for a very long time about growing hay for thatching roofs, which wasn't particularly exciting but was at least interesting from the perspective of Tori not having the slightest idea how hay farming or thatching roofs worked.
It was a relief at first, hearing the thoughts of someone so boring and normal. Tori had missed this, being able to just talk to someone and not have them threaten to murder her or someone else. She trotted out her best "you are a fascinating creature" Orochimaru impression and asked a lot of genuine questions. This, it seemed, was the best way to make someone feel special and clever and inclined to keep talking to her.
Kenta's drink came, but he didn't touch it in favor of his ongoing monologue about grass. Grass Country, he lectured to Tori in excruciating detail, was called Grass Country because they had a lot of grass.
"I read the other day," Tori said, feeling like she needed to take control of this conversation before he started to explain that water is wet, "ice grass is the northernmost growing species of angiosperm."
She had actually read this in Jiraiya's obscure charity novel Icha Icha Aurora, fact checked it in Ecosystems of the Northern Countries, and then spent a lot of time being upset that she couldn't remember how many species of angiosperms grew in Antarctica. She was pretty sure it was either two or three, and that they were all grasses, but now she could never confirm it.
(It had used to be one of her favorite fun facts, and now that knowledge was gone.)
Kenta stayed quiet, staring down at his drink for a bit, and did not acknowledge her as she babbled about what she'd read about the thermal range of angiosperms, and how it was so amazing they could grow so far north. Tori wondered if maybe even though Kenta knew everything there was to know about local grasses, perhaps he did not know the word angiosperm, the scientific term for flowering plants, off the top of his head. It was jargon she probably sounded very pretentious using.
"An angiosperm is-" she started, and Kenta rolled his eyes.
"Do you own a TV?" he asked, cutting her off.
"Um," Tori said. "Like I said, I prefer reading. Have you read Icha Icha Aurora because-"
Kenta started to describe a plot of some TV series to her, and Tori found herself very annoyed. She hadn't come over here to learn about some show about ninja that didn't even make sense.
Her rambling about angiosperms was totally super interesting, though!
She decided, if she was to put up with this, Kenta owed her a drink and a science experiment.
"Hey," she said in her sexiest voice when he paused for breath. She continued in her silkiest tone, pushing her first spiked drink from Sasori forward. "Trade you."
She did her best impression of looking flirty and mischievous. Should she wink? She always felt like winking was a good idea. She ended up closing both eyes in a very purposeful blink. Fuck.
"You don't want it?" Kenta asked, looking down at his own drink he'd only taken a single sip from.
"Well, I can't drink something some sleazeball ordered for me," Tori countered. "It's the principle of the matter."
Kenta shrugged and handed her his drink, which consisted of lemon soda and some sort of liquor Tori wasn't an experienced enough drinker to place. Tori drank it very quickly as Kenta determinedly continued describing his little ninja show.
"It's based on our own legendary missing-nin, Batta-san," Kenta told her.
Behind him, Tori watched Hidan tilt his head back and balance a glass on his forehead while the rest of the table argued. Deidara managed to knock the glass off completely by accident as he waved his arms emphatically.
"You like missing-nin, Kenta?" she asked innocently. "Aren't they a bit, you know, scary?"
She said this with a definite tease to her voice and waggled her eyebrows. She thought it sounded like fun banter, but Kenta very enthusiastically took her entirely at face value.
"Oh, very scary," he said seriously. "Batta-san had seven confirmed kills of Kusa-nin, and those are just the ones we know about."
"Just seven?" Tori repeated, holding her glass up to peer conspicuously into the bottom. It was empty save for the ice.
Kenta did not take the hint and bowled along in the conversation. He talked about the show, and what it got wrong and what it got right, including some fascinatingly incorrect takes on what the limits and possibilities of ninjutsu were.
"If I were a ninja," he started, and Tori started to feel her brains melt out of her head.
"Why don't you trade me another drink?" she interrupted, pushing the drink with the berries from Sasori toward him. Perhaps it would be safe to accept a single drink from Sasori after all, if Kenta was still going on like this.
Kenta did not stop talking about Batta and his reign of terror across Grass Country while he ordered her another drink. He expressed disappointment that the third season of the TV show was being delayed due to Dead Water Fever. Most of it was filmed in Water Country, where there were lots of travel restrictions and quarantined towns due to the epidemic.
"The fever isn't even that bad," he complained, sipping the second of the spiked drinks.
"Doesn't it make your organs melt?" Tori asked. The news reports she'd seen made it sound awful.
Kenta shook his head. "My cousin was in an affected town. He said they just called in a priest and it went away. Anyway, Batta-san-"
"Hold on," Tori said, frowning. "What do you mean, it went away when a priest came in?"
"You know," Kenta said, sounding oddly condescending for a man who thought seven was an impressive body count, "a priest came in and blessed the pond with the bad water and all the evil spirits left."
Tori, drunk as she was, was almost certain her spirit left her body for just a second.
"Kenta," she said slowly. "What do you think the causative agent of Dead Water Fever is?"
Kenta very clearly did not understand the question, as he started explaining how priests worked to her. Granted, Tori didn't know a thing about any local religion but Jashinism, but she understood that blessing water didn't do anything unless it was somehow simultaneously getting rid of whatever was causing the disease.
She said some of this outloud, and Kenta answered in a very exasperated tone, "Yes, they got rid of the evil spirits. Keep up."
"Did they…" Tori's head was spinning. "Were they those chara-using priests?"
Maybe the "ritual" Kenta's cousin had watched, where he claimed he'd literally seen the spirits leaving a pond, was chakra sterilizing the water and he'd mistaken the glow for something supernatural. Tori had assumed the fact that the disease was associated with stagnant water meant mosquitos were the vector, but now that she thought about it, no news report had actually said what the causative agent was, and maybe if it was a waterborne bacteria or a worm or something, chakra could cleanse the water somehow?
"Were they drinking the pond water?" Tori wondered, and Kenta made a face like she'd suggested something disgusting. She guessed not.
But… surely sterilizing water to that extreme would cause a small ecological disaster?
And surely even such an aggressive strategy wouldn't make Dead Water Fever disappear immediately, even causing the lessening of symptoms in the currently afflicted, the way Kenta's cousin claimed.
"Are you sure your cousin wasn't bullshitting you?" Tori asked. "Or are you bullshitting me?"
Kenta looked offended.
"Rude words, for a lady," he chided. "No offense, but I don't think you understand how disease works very well."
Kenta changed the subject to explaining to Tori how even though most of his stupid show was filmed in Water Country, some scenes were filmed on location at Kayaba Castle, which was famously haunted.
"Oh, but you probably don't want to hear about that, since you're afraid of missing-nin and disease and all," Kenta blabbered on.
Tori did, actually, want to hear about a haunted castle she could potentially go visit. That sounded like something she'd love.
But, also: she was done with talking to Kenta. No amount of normalcy was worth this.
"Oh, it's late," she said. "My family will be expecting me."
She turned to leave, drink in hand, and Kenta grabbed her other wrist.
"Don't be scared," he said, smirking up at her. "You're being silly. Nothing can get you out here-"
Tori stared down at his hand on her wrist. Kenta's breath was sweet with alcohol.
You don't have to put up with this shit, a voice in the back of her head reminded her. He's not even a ninja.
Tori didn't think about it further. She slammed her glass into his face as hard as she could, and it shattered on impact. Cold, sticky alcohol washed over her fingers. Her skin burned as the glass cut into it.
Kenta yelled in surprise and pain, letting go of her and holding his hands up to his now bloody face, and it occurred to Tori that even if he wasn't a ninja, he was larger and stronger and worked on a farm, and she probably couldn't take him in a fight.
Tori picked up the nearest barstool and set it between them, as if such a meager barrier would help, and two guys turned to ask Kenta if he was okay. (He wasn't.) Tori ducked around a woman, turning away from flagging down the bartender to see what was happening, and elbowed her way through the crowd to get to the opposite corner of the bar.
This was… this was okay. This was fine. She'd just forgotten that boring normal people could also be their own brand of unbearable, that was all.
That guy deserved a drink in his face, okay?
"What are you doing?" Sasori asked, suddenly in her face. "I only brought so much of that poison, so if you're going to waste it–"
Tori opened her mouth to ask if Sasori had anything to bandage her hand and also, could he please shut up about poison, but was cut off by her Kenta reappearing.
"HEY," Kenta yelled, shoving people aside to glower down at Tori and Sasori. His face was bleeding freely, a shard of glass sticking out of his cheek. "You little slut. You had a boyfriend? You think you can just hide behind him?"
Sasori looked offended, his lips curling back to snarl something mean and derisive at the man.
Hiding behind Sasori was a good idea, though, and Tori took an unsubtle step back to put the puppet master between her and Kenta. Kenta looked at her, his eyes dark with fury, and then down at Sasori spitting very mean insults at him.
Sasori, for all his frightening strength, was small and had a pretty, delicate face. This must be the reason Kenta made the stupidest decision of his life. He decided to punch Sasori.
Sasori stepped out of the way of the mad swing, grabbed Kenta by the face, and then rotated ninety degrees to slam his head into the wall.
"Oh, Jesus," Tori said, hobbling back further. She retroactively felt terrified for sassing Sasori earlier.
Kenta slumped, and the whole half of the bar went dead silent. Two minutes later, they found themselves being asked to leave.
"Why did you guys all insist on matching uniforms?" Deidara complained. Staff had asked their table to leave too. "They knew we were together, yeah."
"It's regulation," Itachi replied.
"I can't believe you got us kicked out for fighting and didn't even invite me," Hidan whined.
Kakuzu, who had been a major player in forcing his coworkers to leave the expensive bar when asked, had taken the initiative to find the cheapest bar in town. They were currently milling around on the street while he searched.
"What even happened?" Kisame asked.
Tori was sure they were all paying at least enough attention to their surroundings to see she'd spontaneously decided to throw a glass in someone's face, even though she felt justified about it. In hindsight, now that she was considering how to explain her reasoning, she had no idea why she'd thought that was a good idea. They'd been in a crowded place, and she didn't think he was intentionally threatening her by grabbing her, and her motivation had definitely been more that she'd felt annoyed that he was too into Batta-san to be discussing cool facts about grass. Spending all day considering murder and torture and sabotage was getting to her.
(On the bright side, Kenta would likely think twice about trying to physically trap a woman in conversation with him again.)
Then again, "he was annoying me" was sound reasoning for attacking someone amongst the Akatsuki. She didn't have to explain herself.
"I can only assume," Sasori answered for her, eyes narrowed, "that Tori is so obnoxious that anyone engaging in conversation with her is moved to violence."
"Checks out, yeah," Deidara agreed, smirking at Tori.
"Does anyone have a bandage?" Tori asked, rolling her eyes. She had cut up her hand pretty badly.
Itachi produced a whole first aid kit from his cloak. After Kakuzu led them to a sleazy bar with an empty table, Tori worked on picking glass out of her palm and then tying up her hand while the rest of Akatsuki re-started their card game. This bar was stickier and less well-lit than the previous one, and the drinks were cheap enough that Kisame bought one for her and told her to pour it over her injury.
"What's the proof on this?" Tori asked. "If it's too low, it can make it worse-"
"You're such a fucking nerd," Hidan cut her off. "Jashin states that wounds should be let to fester whenever possible."
"You know," Deidara said, cocking his head at Hidan. "I still have no idea what the draw of your religion is, yeah."
Kakuzu groaned and then got up from the table and just left, even before Hidan started on a rant about suffering being the one true unifying force of mankind.
"It's about solidarity," Hidan insisted. "Not everyone likes to drink or fuck or read the bitch's little nature books for pleasure, but everyone understands suffering."
Tori watched them go two more rounds of their weird card game while messing with her hand. She flexed it experimentally a few times, then downed the shot Kisame gave her and asked to be dealt in.
"You don't know how to play," Kisame said doubtfully.
"Nah, I got it," Tori said with all the confidence of a drunk person. "Five times fifteen is seventy-five and the guy with the weird hat is high."
"That doesn't make sense," Kisame said, but gave her cards anyway.
Tori made a few illegal moves in the first game, embarrassed herself in the next one, and then won the third one.
"How," Hidan demanded.
"I'm real good at cards," Tori slurred. "Fifteen times five is seventy-five."
"I believe she's saying that calculating probabilities for this game is not particularly difficult," Itachi offered.
Hidan threw up his hands and went to go bother Kakuzu, who was drinking alone at the bar and glaring at anyone who got too close. He had a very scary glare, and there was an impressive radius of empty seats around him.
"Okay, real talk," Tori said as Kisame shuffled cards. She blinked spots out of her vision. "You guys know germ theory, right?"
Kisame paused, then turned and grinned at her.
"Did you break a civilian's face because he didn't know about germs?" he asked slyly.
"No!" Tori answered, slapping the table. It hurt her injured hand. She didn't care. "But also: why did he think evil spirits cause hemorrhagic fever?"
"You often seem to think people should have an intrinsic right to knowledge," Itachi observed, picking up the cards Kisame had dealt him.
"What do you- of course they do!" Tori started, waving her arms, and Kisame very gently pressed her hands further towards her chest so she wasn't showing her entire hand to the table. "People have a right to know what causes disease. It's part of nature, not some fucking state secret!"
"If you're talking about Dead Water Fever," Sasori said, drawing a card and starting the game, "Water Country has been keeping research related to it classified. Even my spies don't have good reports on it. They probably want that man to think it's evil spirits."
"Oh my God," Tori half-yelled, and Kisame fixed her hold on her cards again. "Why?"
"I don't get what you're so upset about," Deidara said. "It's not like it affects you if some backwater town doesn't know about bacteria, yeah."
"You should be allowed to know things about the world you live in!" Tori yelled, waving her arms even more. "This is why you jackasses don't have vaccines! This is why there's no unified theory of fuinjutsu-"
"You are not going to do well at this game," Kisame told her over her rant.
Tori spent the rest of the round ranting about John Snow taking the handle off the pump of a well contaminated with cholera in London in 1854, and how that had pioneered epidemiology, and how people benefited from understanding what caused disease and how it spread and how to avoid it. No one did anything to acknowledge anything she said, but also no one interrupted her.
She came in second, after Sasori.
Deidara leaned back in his chair, sighing dramatically.
"Welp," he announced, "if I'm too wasted to beat a drunk person flashing their hand and screaming nonsense at me the whole game, then I'm out, yeah."
"That was a bit humiliating," Itachi said mildly after Deidara basically fell out of his chair and stumbled away, not sounding humiliated at all. "Although a large part of this game is luck."
"Yeah… luck," Kisame, who had not won a single round yet, muttered. "Actually, I don't want to just play with the three of you."
He, too, left. Tori grabbed his cards and took over shuffling and dealing.
"What else did you talk to that man about?" Itachi asked, watching Tori's hands as she shuffled. Tori did, in fact, love card games, and she could shuffle like a pro even when so drunk she could barely read the cards.
"Types of grass," Tori said, focusing very hard on counting out the correct number of cards. "His entire life story. Someone named Batta."
"The missing-nin?" Sasori asked.
Tori paused. "So is he actually famous?" she asked.
"Not really," Sasori answered. "I only know him because I killed him. He was not as handsome as the rumors made him out to be."
Oh my god, Tori thought, blinking down at the card deck. Spoilers for season three!
"What did you talk about, with Batta the missing-nin?" Itachi pressed.
"He's a monster that killed seven ninja," Tori said, dealing the three face up cards the game required for three players. She turned to Itachi and very meaningfully added, "That we know of."
Sasori snorted.
"Itachi just wants to know if you mentioned us," Sasori drawled. He shot Itachi an annoyed look and added, "She didn't. I was eavesdropping."
"I want to know her mindset," Itachi murmured back. "It appears she gets talkative when drunk."
("Loose lips sink ships!" Tori crowed and was ignored.)
"Why does that matter?" Sasori sneered. "I told you, I was watching her."
"If she was thinking about it, there's a risk she'd reveal something under other circumstances-"
Tori watched, baffled, as Itachi and Sasori proceeded to bitch at each other over her conversation with Kenta, even as they played. The point, it seemed, was not that either felt a certain way about Tori- they both just felt that their method was the best one, regardless of what anyone was trying to accomplish.
Could she goad Sasori and Itachi into a fight over her? No, she wanted to play cards. Card games were fun.
"I will tell you my thought process," Tori informed Itachi. Sasori scowled at her. "Listen very closely."
As they played several rounds, Tori related all her fun facts about grass along climatic gradients, and then transitioned into the really interesting part she hadn't been able to tell Kenta about.
"Icha Icha Aurora contains a random aside about ecology that's almost verbatim from an Earth Country textbook-"
"Are you still talking about that?" Sasori snapped.
"Why is he plagiarizing a textbook, Sasori?" Tori shot back. "I have four theories-"
She only got through one- that he'd been in Earth Country when he wrote it and possibly more concerned with something else than writing- before Itachi won the round. Sasori declared he was done with this "waste of time" and broke off a chunk of the table as he stood.
"We can't play with just two people," Tori complained. "Why'd you all quit when I started?"
"I'm getting you a drink," Sasori told Tori. He sounded very aggressive about it.
"Fuck you," Tori told him, despite vowing only an hour before to be less sassy to him. She got up, nearly tripped over her own chair, and staggered away in a random direction.
The bar was fairly big, and the clientele skewed toward rough-looking men. There were a handful of men playing pachinko machines against one wall, and against another wall were some targets for darts, where Deidara was amusing himself alone.
What sort of entertainment could a ninja get from bar darts? Tori, drunk and easily distracted, headed over to him.
"Your partner is still trying to poison me," she said, "and he won't listen to my literary theories."
"Hmm," Deidara replied, and chucked a dart. It made a bullseye. "Do you know how to play?"
He passed her a dart and watched as Tori threw it in the vague direction of a target. It hit the wall sideways and then clattered to the floor.
"I'm gonna blame being tipsy," Tori told him.
"Sure," Deidara replied, eyebrows raised. He clearly thought this was funny.
"Why are you even playing this?" Tori asked. "Surely it can't be… target practice?"
She had no idea what Deidara or any of the Akatsuki did when they practiced ninja stuff. She assumed practicing throwing knives had to happen at some point, but she also assumed Deidara was way beyond the level of practicing with a close-range, stationary target.
"Habit, yeah," Deidara told her, and a smirk tugged at his lips. "Not actually interested in anyone here, but it's one of my many pick-up tactics, yeah."
"Oh yeah?" Tori asked. "Because men who are good at darts are just so sexy."
"Hey," Deidara replied, hurling another dart at a different target with pinpoint accuracy. "You came over here, didn't you?"
"Wow," Tori replied dryly. "Nevermind, I'm going to go play with the pachinko guys instead. Maybe they want to hear my Icha Icha headcanons."
"I'm sure they'll love to hear about epidemiology too, yeah."
Deidara offered to show her how to throw darts. He was actually bizarrely nice about it, checking her hand to make sure she was holding them right without insulting her like she expected. After a few hilariously bad throws, she managed to actually get a dart in a target.
"Victory!" Tori declared.
"See?" Deidara told her. "Incredible pick-up strategy, darts. Now you're basically in love with me, yeah."
Tori snorted with laughter. "Does this- does this make you a pick-up artist, Deidara?"
She then nearly tripped over her own feet when Sasori was suddenly next to her, shoving a cocktail into her hands.
"Itachi said you'd like this best," Sasori said. "It's got cream and coffee liqueur."
Tori stared down at the drink. Unfortunately, that did sound really good.
"Only if we play more cards," Tori said. She had a chance at winning that, and she liked winning sometimes.
Sasori did a sort of full body twitch. "If you keep resisting, I will make you-"
"Danna, that's no way to make friends, yeah."
"We're not friends, we're coworkers-"
Tori watched as they argued, wondering if she could goad Sasori into fighting Deidara. It definitely seemed she should be able to get Sasori to fight someone by the end of the night. Oh, but he'd fought Kenta for her, hadn't he? No, that didn't count as a fight…
Tori absentmindedly took a sip in her inebriated haze, and then instantly regretted it because it tasted really, really good.
"Okay," she said, interrupting the artists. "I will drink this if you tell me what poison you used and show me a dosage curve."
Sasori eyed her for a second. "I don't have one," he said eventually.
"You don't-" Tori gestured so emphatically that the drink sloshed out of the glass and over her hands. Sasori hissed at her. "If you don't have a dosage curve, how the FUCK are you deciding how much to give me, you piece of SHIT?"
"Tori," Deidara said, barely containing laughter. "Clearly he's lying, because Danna is too much of a paranoid piece of shit to share, yeah."
"It's not lethal," Sasori insisted. "It's…" He paused, tilted his back ever so slightly, and leveled Tori with a fierce glare that probably should have scared the shit out of her, but she was drunk and unfortunately acclimated to Sasori being pissy. "One eighth of the usual dose. You might feel nausea, although I imagine it may be indistinguishable from your determination to spend the night inebriated."
Deidara's lips twitched. "Danna," he said, "have you ever been drunk?"
"No, of course not- why are you smirking?"
Tori eyed her drink, taking a big step back when Sasori looked like he might take a swing at Deidara. A body couldn't develop resistance to every type of poison, but mithridatism was certainly a thing. Not a thing she knew a lot about, but she imagined it was along the same lines of the extreme caffeine tolerance some of her high school friends had developed in college, and she was now demonstrably more resistant to certain drugs than she had been when she'd first become a human science experiment. It would probably work, if they did it properly.
Plus, Kenta had had two of Sasori's drinks and not keeled over dead. Symptoms were probably as mild as Sasori was promising, right?
Making her decision, Tori took another sip. If Sasori was downplaying the adverse side effects of his poison, she'd simply vomit her drink back up on him, like a vulture defending itself.
"Hey, I was wondering," Deidara said to Tori a few minutes later, suddenly pulling his attention away from making fun of Sasori's arguments for why alcohol was a disgraceful poison. "Remember when you said art and science were inseparable?"
"Uh," Tori answered. Sasori looked for a moment like he was going to tell Deidara off, getting all twitchy the way he did when he couldn't decide how exactly he was going to act on his irritation, then schooled his features. "No?"
"It was when we first met," Deidara said. "You know, when we kidnapped you, yeah."
Sober Tori might have been offended he'd say that so casually. Drunk Tori did not care.
"Right," Tori agreed. "You owe me a muffin for that, by the way."
"You said it was because they were both creative, yeah," Deidara continued, ignoring her comment. "Which is a phenomenally bland take. But I've been watching you work away at your weird fuinjutsu experiments, and I was thinking maybe you were on to something, yeah. Did you mean science is art because they're both acts of creation?"
Sasori twitched like he wanted to add his own two cents but remained silent. Both of them stared at her. Tori thought this might be the first time any Akatsuki genuinely wanted her personal opinion on something.
(...unless you counted Tobi quizzing Tori on her opinions on a sitcom they'd been watching together the evenings he was around, but she didn't. She was pretty sure everything about creating a situation where there was a "their show" was just some sort of convoluted psychological warfare on Obito's behalf.)
"Well," Tori said slowly. "No. Science can- um, you know- can lead to creation, but it isn't necessarily about creation. It's about understanding how the world works."
Sasori broke his silence, cutting in with, "That's what she said. She posited art and science are both methods for understanding the nature of things."
Deidara rolled his head back in thought. "But you've been creating things, Tori. That's why I was like, 'Hey, maybe there's some art here,' yeah."
"Right," Tori agreed. "I-"
"Are you saying art necessitates creation?" Sasori asked. He pointed accusingly at Deidara. "Yours is nothing but destruction."
"Destruction is creation, yeah!"
Tori finished her drink while the three of them debated the roles of creation and invention and seeking new understanding in art and science. Sasori's facial expressions and body language were tricky to read when he wasn't being outright aggressive, but he was definitely invested in the conversation. There was also an excited air to Deidara as he talked, like he'd found some juicy new things to think about. Tori agreed- this, she thought, was the kind of conversation she had actually been craving all evening.
"What if," Deidara posited, "Tori took a seal someone else designed and repurposed it. Is that creation?"
"Give me an example," Sasori snapped.
This, somehow, ended with Tori pulling one of the dart boards off the wall with the intention to make a seal that would ensure a dart hit the bullseye every time.
"It'll work," she insisted.
"You're proposing to use an incredibly advanced chakra funneling technique in the stupidest way possible," Sasori griped. "It's not going to work on a dart."
Tori was pretty sure she could use the technique she was trying to make for funnelling and then sealing bijuu chakra into the Gedo Statue for numerous stupid activities. Deidara leaned against the wall next to her, looking like he was watching his new favorite movie.
"They did it with a kunai in an Icha Icha book," Tori said, examining the plastic back of the board. "Jiraiya's a sealmaster, isn't he? It's gotta be possible."
"Do not start talking about that idiocy again-"
Sasori trailed off as a group of men ambled over to them. Or rather, Kenta from the previous bar stomped up to them looking pissed, while five or six other guys ambled along behind him. They all carried make-shift weapons- butcher's knives and a few scythes. They fanned around Tori and the two Akatsuki.
"You," Kenta growled. He had a bandage tapped to one side of his face, and several fresh cuts across the rest of it.
"Us!" Deidara replied. A mean, dangerous sort of grin spread over his lips. "Can we help you?"
Kenta held up his own scythe. It had a much shorter handle and a smaller blade than Hidan's, and was probably one of Kenta's tools for harvesting grass.
"Yeah," Kenta said. "Your two friends lured me into a trap and attacked me. That sort of behavior doesn't fly in Kayaba."
Tori eyed him up and down. It was actually unclear to her how much danger she was in right now. Deidara didn't move from his position to cover her, nor did Sasori, and she wasn't sure if either of them would actually step in if one of the men attacked her. She was sure they'd flatten the group if they were attacked, but she just couldn't see them going out of their way to defend her. Even if they were playing nice with her tonight, they were both still murderous assholes.
Tori cocked a hip and put a hand on her waist. She might as well try to take care of the situation herself and scare him off, then.
She thought she could probably just diffuse the situation by crying and apologizing, or maybe making a scene to get help from onlookers. She refused to do that in front of the Akatsuki, though.
"Have the adventures of Batta-san gone to your head?" she asked. "You're being ridiculous. What are you even planning to do, show how manly you are by beating up a woman and two pretty boys with no weapons? You need all your buddies and a bunch of knives for that?"
A few of Kenta's friends had reactions to that- shifting and looking doubtful- but Kenta was dedicated to the idea that Tori had no idea what she was talking about. He glared at her, opened his mouth-
-and then vomited all over the floor and collapsed. There were a few moments of silence. Kenta did not move.
"Wow," Deidara intoned.
"Sasori!" Tori accused, even as she dove to hide behind him before any of the men figured out what happened.
"Were you giving him your drinks?" Sasori asked, annoyed.
"And look what it did to him," she half-screamed. She'd already ingested the stupid poison because she'd thought Kenta had been fine!
"I don't see why you're mad at me," Sasori answered snidely, "when you're the one who poisoned him."
"A witch!" One of the men cried, looking at Tori in a sort of hateful awe usually reserved for scary ninja.
Tori did not get to see if being a witch meant people fled in fear or tried to burn her at the stake, because Deidara announced he was going to demonstrate that destruction was art, and Tori turned and fled before he could properly finish his declaration. An explosion- relatively tame and small for Deidara- went off, and Hidan yelled something like, "NOT WITHOUT ME THIS TIME" and threw a chair. Chaos erupted, and Tori ducked around two scraggling looking men rushing to intervene in Hidan bashing an employee's head against a table.
("This is pointless," Itachi sighed, continuing to sit at their original table and serenely drink a daiquiri without making a single move to intervene.)
There wasn't anywhere in the bar that wasn't in violent motion- Kisame and Kakuzu were squaring off and she didn't even understand why- and Tori threw herself through the closest door. She'd been hoping for an exit, but it just led to a cramped storeroom with not even a window.
There was a lot of horrified screaming in the bar behind her. She slammed the door shut.
She was still holding the dart board. Why.
Her heart was pounding, and Tori wondered if she was panicking. She'd gotten good enough at ignoring and then shutting down the physical symptoms that she couldn't always tell. She supposed the current situation was one in which she could get seriously injured, or even killed, and also she might have signed up for more than she thought with the poison.
Yeah, okay, that was definitely panic.
There was no way she was going back out into the bar to try and find another way to escape, so Tori decided to distract herself until things calmed down. She pulled the bandages off her hand.
Her plan was to use blood from the cut on her hand to try the seal she'd been planning on the dart board. She got as far as picking some of the scabbing off before she realized she had nothing to write with. Her finger would not be able to write fine enough to make the seal fit on the board. She'd used her own hair, once, but that had been hard to control…
There was a pen on the ground next to her feet. Tori picked it up. She pulled off the back of the pen with her teeth, exposing the ink cartridge, and did her best to bleed into it.
Come on, capillary action, she urged the blood, tapping her palm on the end of the cartridge. Blood didn't want to go in the narrow tube at first, but once she'd managed to tap a single droplet in, more blood wanted to follow. She shook the pen and tapped it against the back of the dart board as hard as she could to get the trickle of blood down into the ink.
Since her hand now had a bunch of blue stains on it, she assumed things were getting… mixed. Maybe.
The pen didn't actually write on the smooth plastic of the dart board, but now that Tori had made a blood pen, she wanted to see if it worked. She pulled back the collar of her blouse and set to slowly etching lines into the underside of the material. Halfway through she realized that just because she was writing on the inside of her shirt didn't mean she wasn't staining it forever, but, well, she'd already stained the outside…
Tori had managed to seal the dart board and an entire shelf of liquor into her shirt when Kisame pushed open the door.
"There you are," he said cheerfully, and behind him, the bar was a bloody mess. "We were going to head out."
The bar was strewn with bodies and broken furniture, with a few ominous scorch marks next to the dart boards. Hidan had drawn one of his Jashinist symbols on the floor, but instead of doing a ritual, he and Kakuzu were wrestling. Kisame chivalrously put himself between Tori and the tussling pair as they walked by.
"Nice spar, Kakuzu!" Kisame called.
Itachi, Deidara and Sasori were outside, where Deidara was complaining loudly that no one else in town was going to let them in. It had gotten a lot darker outside, with the streets of this town poorly lit by just the windows of its buildings. It was chillier now, too, and Tori shivered. The sound of the bar behind them was muffled.
"It's nice to see stars," she said, blinking up at the sky. Leaning back made her drunk body unsteady, but there were so many, like someone had just spilled a whole jar of them.
"Yeah, the sky gets a little claustrophobic when it rains all the time," Kisame agreed.
"No, I mean," Tori said, "my hometown barely had any stars. Too much light pollution."
"Every story you tell about your country is weird, yeah," Deidara told her. "What the hell is light pollution?"
Word about violent bar fights hadn't spread very quickly, apparently, as a bar further down the street did let them in. Hidan staggered in a few minutes later covered in blood, and they were asked politely to leave. Tori thought that if the group were just Hidan and Deidara, they might have used force to stay, but somehow the combined might of Kisame and Itachi herded them back out.
Kakuzu was outside, counting a wad of bills.
"Did you mug people at the bar?" Kisame asked, sounding bemused.
Kakuzu grunted.
Two policemen walked by, seemingly did not even see them, and continued on in a hurry. Itachi blinked after them, his eyes red.
(Genjutsu? Genjutsu.)
The group managed to move half a block further into town before they got into an argument about what to do next, and Tori ducked into an alley as soon as fists started flying. She leaned against the wall, examining the seal work she'd done on the inside of her shirt. The ink had bled a little bit, making the lines go all fuzzy, but it was surprisingly still intact.
Suddenly, someone grabbed her, and Tori yelped and swung her arm wildly. The person shifted slightly to dodge her flail, their hands still firmly on either side of her waist. With a grunt of effort, her assailant lifted her over their head.
"JOIN YOUR BRETHREN," Deidara cackled, raising her above a dumpster.
"WHAT THE HELL," she yelled back, planting one foot firmly on the lip of the dumpster. Deidara pressed her forward over it. She locked her knee.
"'M sending you home," Deidara said, pushing harder, "into the garbage, yeah."
"You're not funny," Tori retorted, managing to get her other foot on the dumpster's edge as well. She assumed this was some sort of joke and Deidara wasn't being serious about throwing her in the dumpster, as if he had been, she'd already be in its putrid embrace and also on fire. Still, he was pushing her awfully hard.
"I'm hilarious, yeah," he insisted. It occurred to Tori that part of the reason he was holding her so easily was that her body was naturally trying to balance in his hands. She jerked herself to the side and he dropped her.
" Ow ," she stressed at him from the ground.
"You're no fun," he pouted.
"You're not funny ," she repeated, because there wasn't much else to say. She'd slapped her hand down automatically to break her fall, and she'd succeeded in both hurting her wrist and re-opening the cut from the broken glass. Even if he was being nicer than normal tonight, Deidara was still a certified asshole.
"We're going to try drinking somewhere outside, yeah," Deidara said. He was rubbing his jaw, presumably from where someone had hit him.
"Buying from a store is much more cost effective," Kakzu was saying when they rejoined the group.
"But there are no hot girls if we go drinking in the woods," Hidan complained. He gestured at Tori and added, "All we've got is that."
Kisame wrinkled his nose. "I don't want to drink in the woods. Can't we go down to the river?"
The argument started again, and Tori swayed on her feet, eyes darting between yelling men as she debated going back to hide in the alley. Eventually, they decided whoever agreed to chip in the most on booze would decide where they went.
"Oh, wait," Tori said, and then reached her bleeding hand into her shirt and pulled out a bottle of amber liquid. A lot of smoke came out with it, because writing on one's shirt made a functional but not very good seal.
There was a very long silence in which she had enough time to pass the bottle to her other hand and pull out a bottle of sake.
"What the fuck, Tori," Deidara said, sounding delighted. "How much do you have in there?"
"So much," Tori replied, swaying. "Do I win?"
She made them take her to the town's haunted castle. She was just a touch tipsy, and she wanted to meet a ghost.
xXx
END NOTES:
Itachi: It would be really bad if Drunk Tori decided to give our (my) secrets to someone.
Drunk Tori: HERE ARE ALL MY OPINIONS ABOUT GRASS FACTS FROM A PORN NOVEL. JOHN SNOW-
Itachi: Hmm.
Itachi: Never mind.
It's been a while! I had some writing burnout for several months (except for a few brief stints where I very feverishly worked on other projects), and this was probably the most frustrating chapter to write yet, but this fic is not dead! I hope this relatively silly and meandering chapter appeases you, lol. It was meant to include them hanging out in a supposedly haunted castle, but I stopped here due to length. So the next chapter will cover that and therefore may or may not end up shorter than normal, depending on how long Castle Shenanigans go.
Don't microwave alcohol unless you wanna risk it exploding. It was not the smartest thing Tori has ever done.