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Previously: Suzu meets the rest of the Earthlings; an unexpected visitor shows his displeasure; Souhei and Suzu meet again for the first time since their fight.
Tsubasa, after I visited again the following week and was on my way out, pestered Kyouya to give me a room in the same hall as his.
"Oh no, I couldn't," I tried to refuse.
"I insist," Kyouya laughed. "Everyone has one. Even Isana has one and she swore never to use it. You're under no obligation whatsoever to stay in it, of course, but regardless of what you say I'm setting one aside for you, so you might as well accept it."
"You should just humor him," Tsubasa said to me later as he saw me off at the gate. "There are a hundred empty rooms in this place. His family's all dead except for Nana and her parents, really. It makes him happy to have people around."
"Oh," I said. "That's…"
"He's really chill," Tsubasa added. "He'll be pleased just seeing your face, to be honest, he doesn't care much if you talk to him or not. Though that makes him happy, too."
"Is that why you live here?" I wondered. "You two seem pretty close."
"Yeah, I'd say that's a good part of it," Tsubasa replied meditatively. "I could definitely live on my own if I wanted. But Kyouya's a great housemate. And you know, this place is huge so you can give a lot of space if you need to, and it's really private, so I don't have to worry about people dropping in on me, either. There's freedom," he added. "It's a free sort of place."
"It's beautiful, too," I offered.
"Yeah. You should see it in the fall. The autumn leaves are great."
There was a short silence as we stood together at the entrance to the estate. It was quiet even with the large wooden door hanging ajar. It was still early enough that the birds were singing, so we spent a moment listening to their music.
"Hey, good luck today," Tsubasa said after the pause had passed.
"Yeah," I replied. "Thanks. And… good luck to you, too."
Tsubasa flashed a crooked grin at me. "Oh, it's all business as usual for me," he told me lightly, pushing on the gate so we could step out side-by-side. "No luck needed at all."
I smiled. Tsubasa smiled, too, and we bumped fists.
"I'll see you around, then?"
"Yeah. I'll come back when I'm free."
The hush that fell as I passed was like a strange inverse swell. The noise would dip and rise and return to its original volume, and the effect fanned out from me in a cone as I walked the hall to the Hokage's office. Faces turned away when my eyes slid past. I wondered what they were saying—bad gossip, like the kind I'd heard from my former instructors, or something else? I considered the eavesdropping techniques but then decided I'd rather not distract myself from the confrontation.
"Imouto-sama!" a secretary flew out to meet me when I came to a stop before the office door. I did my best to suppress my grimace and wondered if there was a way to disavow myself of the title without sending the wrong message.
"How can I help you today, imouto-sama?" the woman asked as she clutched her clipboard. "Have you come to meet the Hokage?"
"Yes, if he's not busy," I replied. She shuffled through her papers.
"Let's see, his next appointment… he should be free until the afternoon," the secretary determined. "Shall I let him know—?"
"That's all right," I said, already fixed on the door. I knocked twice and opened it without waiting for a reply. "Thank you for your help."
The woman was still blinking owlishly as I shut it behind me. It was rude, but it was best not to give Minato the chance to suddenly find urgent business before I had the opportunity to say my piece.
He was eyeing the door expectantly when I turned around, but his expression quickly morphed into shock. He hadn't heard me coming. That made me feel oddly prideful. Even though I already knew I could dodge ANBU, for me, Minato was the original sensor. If I could hide my signature from him, I thought with absurd pleasure, was there anyone I couldn't hide from?
His jaw was still hanging slightly agape when I went and stood before his desk. His eyes flickered as he looked me head to toe. I'd had to requisition new gear. Earlier I'd gone to put on my uniform and found that, from my sandals to my vest, nothing fit me anymore. I'd had a growth spurt in the past half-year. I was getting pretty tall; I'd probably be approaching my final height soon.
"Hokage-sama," I said.
His jaw snapped shut and his face immediately schooled itself into blank neutrality.
"Good morning," he said softly.
"Good morning," I replied.
"...It's been a while. How can I help you?"
I felt my eyebrow tick but fought to keep my expression neutral. How could he help me, he says. Was that the game he was going to play? Did he think I came here to play games?
"I am going to the Missions Desk for work today," I said flatly. "Please remove my ban."
Minato flinched. I narrowed my eyes as he fell silent. He set down his pen and leaned back in his chair.
"Yes, I understand," he murmured after a long moment. His eyes skittered to the side, refusing to meet my stare. "You… are granted permission to return to work."
Easier, I thought, than expected. How surprisingly meek of him. Maybe Tsubasa's good luck was more efficacious than I'd expected.
I let out a long breath through my nose. It would be nice if that was it.
"Thank you, Hokage-sama," I uttered as I turned away. Whatever was going on there I'd figure it out another time; I had no mind to linger. "I'll take my leave."
"Wait," Minato said.
I paused and looked over my shoulder.
"I—" he began. He stretched a hand out as if he were going to say something. I raised my eyebrows.
"I—have something to assign you," he uttered as he replaced his hand on his desk, looking cowed. "A mission, I mean. It's… been put off for too long."
That was unexpected. From indefinite suspension straight into a personally assigned mission, and from the man who had suspended me no less. I turned to face him fully.
"Report to the eastern briefing room in a half hour," Minato said. "You'll… get the details then." He paused as if he wanted to say more, but then he shuffled his papers and looked downward. "That's all."
I, for my part, was not controlled enough to keep the resentment out of my reply. Six months starving his cousin out of the Forces, piling financial burden on the House that raised him, spitting on my efforts to save his life, and that was all? Not an acknowledgement of anything? No apology, no regret?
"Good day, Hokage-sama," I uttered.
"Suzu!"
I found myself being swept up in a pair of very strong arms. I made a squeaking noise as my ribs were crushed against Kushina's. She laughed and pushed our cheeks together.
"Oh my gosh, what happened to you?" she exclaimed after she had released me and begun comparing our heights. When I'd last seen her I'd barely cleared her waist, but now I was standing just about equal to her shoulders. "This is insane! What in the world? You weren't this size before!"
I opened my mouth, blinking in bemusement, before a patch of white caught my attention. Jiraiya was standing on the other side of the briefing table. He was scrutinizing me intently. His eyes flicked towards Kushina; then they flicked back to me.
"It's not looking too hopeful, kid," he finally said after a long moment. I was stumped as to what sort of greeting this might be and worried for a moment that something about the mission was going to go sideways. Before I could say anything, though, Kushina let out a noise of affront. She was across the room and driving her fist into his face in the blink of an eye.
"You can't say that to a teenager, Jiraiya-sensei," she hissed. "What are you even trying to compare? I just had a baby!"
I blinked. And then I put my hand on my face.
"Seriously?" I asked. "You cannot possibly expect a thirteen-year-old to have a chest in any way comparable to the mother of a six-month-old."
"Disgusting," Kushina added with a scowl.
"What?" Jiraiya complained, rubbing his cheek as he got up off the ground. "It's not like I tried to watch her change or feel her up or anything. She's a kid, that's gross."
Kushina threw her hands up as she walked back over to me. I just sighed again.
"So what's going on, Kushina-nee?" I asked. "Are we going on a mission together?"
Kushina's thunderous expression immediately brightened. "That's right," she enthused. "You catch on quick. It's a mission for just you and me! And that lech over there, I guess."
"Hey," Jiraiya said sulkily. "That's not true. If anything this is my mission. You two are just support."
"What are we doing?" I asked as Kushina reached for me again. I held out my arms and let her smother me in another hug. "Are we—oof—are we going somewhere?"
"That's one way of putting it," Jiraiya snorted. "Pack your bags and tell your folks, kiddo, we're gonna be gone for a while."
I blinked. "Why?"
"We're going on a search to bring Princess Tsunade home," he replied.
"The Tsunade search isn't meant to take place for another twelve years," I mused over my packing.
"And at this point in time she's only been gone for a few years," Uncle added thoughtfully as he sealed an extra whetstone into a scroll for me. I regarded him with surprise.
"She didn't leave as soon as the war ended?"
"Hm, no, she didn't…" He stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. "She waited for Shizune to obtain her field certification, probably. In the Third War it was made permissible to take journeymen medics out of the village on duty, but during our time it wasn't allowed. If she wanted Shizune with her she had to have waited."
"But they're not on a mission. They're just wandering the country, gambling and running from debt collectors," I replied quizzically. Uncle gave me a wry look.
"That's the reality of it," he agreed, "but since Tsunade is on sabbatical and that counts as village travel, Shizune is technically on duty as long as she's accompanying Tsunade as an apprentice."
My eyebrows shot up. "But in the original series she was gone for almost two decades, wasn't she? Sabbaticals don't last that long."
"You would have no way of knowing this because it was never explained in the story," Uncle began, "but the truth is the village cut a deal with Tsunade. She was going to leave either way, so as a reward for her contributions to the war, they sent her out on an 'extended sabbatical'—" here he made air quotations— "because they didn't want to have to declare her a missing-nin."
"Is that true?" I said, shocked. "I… I suppose it could make sense. She was pretty apathetic about Konoha as a whole by the time Naruto and Jiraiya got to her. I never thought she would be willing to become a nuke-nin, though."
"Nobody else wanted to think it either. Lucky it didn't come to that, I suppose."
"You're quite well-informed."
"I was a medic on the Suna front. Tsunade was our commanding officer for the majority of the war," he pointed out. "She returned to Konoha almost immediately after Katou-san died. It was a huge debacle—she would've been declared AWOL if not for her status. There was no way we couldn't have known… we were just ordered not to spread it around."
"Oh." I stared over at him. "That makes sense. She did make herself famous by no-selling all of Chiyo's poisons, after all…" Still, to think Uncle Souhei had been serving side-by-side with Tsunade herself, reporting to her on a daily basis.
"Her knowledge of toxicology is second to none. She created countless antidotes… Before she left she even pioneered a procedure to physically remove poison from the body by hand." Uncle Souhei's expression turned a little distant. "For all the good it did us. By the Battle of the Black Sands the number of medics was only an eighth of what it had been originally. They told us that as long as we had that procedure we wouldn't have to worry even if we couldn't engineer an antidote. But there weren't nearly enough of us to treat every poisoned combatant by hand."
"So there was no choice but to try and devise an antidote anyway," I concluded pensively. "Without her."
"We did do our best," Uncle sighed. "The senior medics. But we had all been brought in for different specializations—trauma, chakra pathways, genjutsu neurology, you know. They had meant the senior council of iryou-nin to compliment one another without overlap. She left on such short notice that we had no time to acquire another toxicologist to replace her. It was a failure of logistics to not have a backup specialist in place, I suppose."
"From what I understand, logistics at the end of the war was mostly failure everywhere," I said softly.
"True. The losses were unsustainable at the end. We were just lucky that Suna gave out first. The bigger village wins the war of attrition, I guess," Uncle Souhei sighed again. Then he gathered up the scrolls around him. "Here. You should be good for at least a month with these provisions. I imagine you'll restock along the way if your journey lasts any longer than that."
"Thank you," I replied. "Jiraiya-sama said it could be a long time, so I imagine we'll have to."
"Suzu?" Auntie's voice called from downstairs. "Kushina's here, she's waiting for you, are you ready?"
"Yeah, I'm coming!" I called, stopping at the mirror to quickly grab a ponytail holder and twist my hair into a low bun.
"Here," Uncle Souhei said and handed me a shiny braided dark blue cord, tipped at both ends with teardrop-shaped beads. My eyebrows shot up, but my puzzlement faded the moment it touched my fingertips.
"It's wire!" I stared at it, agape. "Ninja wire! What?"
"If you undo both beads at the ends it'll unravel. If you only need a loop, just undo the cross-notched one."
"Wow," I breathed as I channeled chakra and found the telltale low resistance of conduction. "I cannot fathom how long it took to make this." The cord was probably as long as my arm, if not longer. "How many meters?"
"Four spools, so…" Uncle furrowed his brow. "2,600, I guess? But it's the smallest gauge on the market, so if you use it for anything other than cutting, you'll have to double or triple it up."
I looked at him in awe. 2.6 kilometers of wire. Over a mile of chakra conduction in my hair. This, I realized, had the potential to be one of the most expensive weapons I'd ever laid hands on. Chakra conductive wire itself was not cheap, even in the thickest gauges; I knew this personally, having purchased several coils myself for the Strings of Fate seals. The craftsmanship and labor required to not only make the metal this thin but to color it too was unimaginable.
"Where did you get the money?" I asked in a hush. Six months of financial hardship were still heavy on my shoulders. I didn't know how to react to the thought of someone dropping such a small fortune on me, not when I had been putting the House into the red for the past half year.
"Kyouya," Souhei replied. "Though Isana was the one who suggested it. She is, apparently, friends with a Special Forces smith who specializes in disguising weapons as hair ornaments."
My mouth popped open. Souhei smiled a bit as he tugged on my shoulder and began pulling me downstairs.
"I was told there is seal work on the beads," he added, "so if you do end up undoing the whole thing you can re-wind it."
I just shook my head and lifted my arms to tie it in a bow around my bun. I had to thank Isana and Kyouya when I next saw them. To think there was fuuinjutsu incorporated into it, too. It was probably even more expensive than I'd initially imagined.
"Why?" I asked as we began making our way down the stairs.
"I asked Kyouya that a lot when I first met him," Uncle Souhei replied, dropping his voice as Kushina and Jiraiya appeared in our sights.
"What did he say?"
"'Why not?'" my uncle answered. We reached the bottom of the stairs and he leaned forward to press a kiss to my forehead. "Travel safely, Misuzu."
Uncle smiled at Kushina and briefly took her hand as he swept past. He even managed a cordial nod towards Jiraiya before he slid into the kitchen and out of sight.
"Hey, ojisan seems different," Kushina remarked as Auntie let out a happy, disbelieving laugh and followed after her husband. Jiraiya stared after them with unconcealed shock.
"He does, doesn't he?" I smiled in reply.
We set out from Konoha in the midmorning. Jiraiya, for all his bluster, had spoken the truth in the briefing room—this was his mission. Neither Kushina nor I had any earthly idea where Tsunade might be or even how to begin searching for her. He was the only one who knew how to find her.
I encountered a spymaster in his work for the first time that day. I knew in an abstract way how the intelligence machine functioned, of course, and I knew distantly that Naoto had spent a lot of time coordinating people in the same manner, but it was another thing to see it in person. Following the Toad Sage across roads, waiting in nondescript corners of the country for nondescript folk to drop nondescript packages, watching him sit in contemplative silence and uncipher reports entirely in his head…
"Kid," he said one day while we were sitting idle after breakfast at a roadside inn. "How far along were you in your training?"
"Formally? Not terribly," I replied wistfully. "I wasn't with the unit long before I was forcibly reassigned. They sent me off with study materials, though. I kept up with those."
Though lately even that cache had dwindled into its last remnants. I had saved the jutsu for last, but with all my recent misadventures in total erasure and chakra tracking, there was little material left.
"Sounds like your training's more on the infiltration than the espionage side of things," Jiraiya concluded upon hearing this. "Fair, I guess. Can't learn to run before you learn to walk. Still, if this is your chosen field, it probably couldn't hurt to learn how to compile data. C'mere, I could use a second set of brain cells."
Managing direct reports and raw information from several different sources was never something I had expected to do. The internal intelligence network in Fire Country—the one which held jurisdiction over all domestics—was fully populated with spymasters already and most of them already had successors at their sides, training and familiarizing themselves with the particular roles of their teachers so they could take over their respective rings in the web with minimal disturbance. Those were people whose names had never reached the international stage. As a wanted Bingo Book mark I was thoroughly disqualified from ever holding such an office, so I had never given it much thought.
But the external network—well. That was an entirely different beast, and one magnitudes larger than the internal network, too. In the external network international infamy didn't matter a whit. Case in point—Jiraiya was about as infamous as a man could get on this continent. The domestic scene was too small and too easily disrupted to have big names wading about, but abroad…
"That's the reality of it, kiddo." Jiraiya waved a hand. "Honestly, now that Minato's the Hokage and your face is attached to his, you might have to give up your dreams as a domestic. It was different when you were just another minor clan orphan, but now you're just too big a fish. The pond can't hold you."
"I'm going to disappear off the face of the planet," I replied sourly to this. "Just give me a few years. They'll forget me if I don't show my face outside the village long enough."
"Also a viable option, I guess. I know some folk who did similar things when the Second War ended—pretending to retire from injury, faking their deaths, stuff like that. You could buy some anonymity back if you manage it."
"You don't plan on sticking in the general platoons, Suzu?" Kushina asked curiously. She picked up her chair and moved with me as I went to sit beside Jiraiya and his table full of scrolls. When I had settled she resumed braiding my hair.
"No. I never wanted to go back," I said bitterly. "I've had enough of the platoons. Intel suits me better."
"Huh. I'd thought you'd stick with Team 7. Kakashi will be disappointed to hear it."
What a perplexing thought that was. Kakashi and I had made peace, true, and in these days we could probably even be considered fairly good work friends; but I didn't think he was that invested in me as a member of Team 7. Even if we had become more familiar in the wake of the Sakuya mission, I was not actually entirely certain he really cared much for me beyond my utility as a competent squadmate.
"Cold!" Jiraiya chuckled. "Glad to see the new generation's just as full of heartbreakers as the last."
"You make it sound so sordid," I rolled my eyes. "We haven't spoken since I got suspended, really, it's been half a year since I've even seen the guy." He hadn't shown his face once since my ban had been handed over. I'd just assumed he'd gone the way of the rest and was trying to avoid losing face through association.
"Oh boy," Kushina began to laugh. "Well, that makes sense. Hey, Suzu?"
"Yes?"
"The thing about Kakashi is that his work friends are his friends," she informed. "By his standards, you're fairly close. The problem is that he has zero clue how to initiate social visits, and since you got suspended he doesn't have a reason to see you. That's why it seems like he's been ignoring you. He only interacts with people through work or when they invite him first. "
My eyebrows shot up. Jiraiya snorted.
"Prodigies," he scoffed and shook his head. "You will never find more lopsided people. Anyway, can you shut up a second, Kushina? I need to teach this brat how to read reports."
Kushina pouted but resumed twisting my hair into buns. Jiraiya took a stack of scrolls and dropped them in front of me.
"All right. The first thing you want to do after picking up a drop…"
After several hours had passed my brain was swimming with classification questions. Is it a primary source or is it hearsay? Is it political news? Economic? Ninja or civilian? Domestic or foreign? Is it geographically relevant to our current area? Is it news from an informant or was it gathered in-house? Who gathered it? Why?
"—and once you've triaged all that, you can start categorizing what's useful to your current objective—"
"Oh, enough!" Kushina groaned and gave Jiraiya's shoulder a shove. "Let's go eat, old man. We can argue about whether or not some B-rank missing-nin loose on the other side of the country is relevant to looking for Tsunade-sama later."
Jiraiya grumbled but acquiesced. He set down the scroll and stood. Then he blinked at me and stared.
"What?" I asked as I stood and stretched myself.
"You look like Mito-sama," he replied. "Or, well, your hair does."
"Eh?" I asked. Kushina clapped and rushed me over to a mirror. I was treated to the sight of dango buns on both sides of my head, each with two loops of braided hair hanging beneath.
"Lots of Uzumaki girls wore this hairstyle," Kushina explained happily as she patted the buns. "I did too back when I lived in Uzushio. You're actually supposed to hang talismans instead of hair," she added, pointing to the braids, "but I don't have any, and they're too annoying to use day-to-day anyway. I always got in trouble for getting mine wet."
That was a fun piece of trivia. Odango hair wasn't unusual in Fire Country but it was interesting to hear it had history for Kushina. I turned my head from side to side contemplatively.
"I never saw you with your hair like that," Jiraiya said quizzically.
"Well, I guess that's not a surprise." Kushina took on a bit of a wistful look. "I wanted to fit in in Konoha so badly. I never did my hair like this because I thought it made me look like an outsider. I'd always take it down when my mother came to visit and did my hair this way…"
I stared a little harder and the construction of the hairstyle before I nodded. "I can do your hair like this later, if you want," I told her. Kushina regarded me with surprise. Then she smiled.
"Ah, Jiraiya-sensei, she's such a sweetie!" she laughed and pinched my cheeks. "Hey, think we can keep her after the mission's over?"
"That's on you. I don't want any brats in my house." Jiraiya held up a hand and made a pass motion. "She's all yours."
"You're all mine, Suzu!" Kushina sang, delighted.
"Oh, dear," I said, but I laughed, too.
