So, I just wanna say: thank you everybody who supported me at that last update. Both with my ko fi and just in the reviews, giving me some well-needed positivity. You guys are awesome. Like, mind-blowingly awesome. I was able to pay my phone bill on time and help with gas and grocery money with the money you guys gave me.
And thankfully, I was able to get a clutch part-time position at a grocery store which is a bit scary because I live in a Corona hot spot but! Money is money. I should be making enough that things will be a little bit more comfortable for the next few months, until things settle down.
Thank you guys so much! Made my heart all warm when things were looking really shitty.
Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a
horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work.
It does not consider him, during the time when he is
not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal
law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.
"I don't like sand… it's coarse, rough and irritating. And it gets everywhere."
"Sounds like somebody I know."
Akari, crouched on the dune, lets the handful of sand sitting in her palm cascade down between her fingers. "Shut the fuck up, you bougie scum dipshit. You don't know me or the prequels; you don't know my culture."
Juri, the Suna jonin tasked with babysitting Akari, casts her a baleful glare. He's a middle-aged man—middle-aged by ninja standards, at least. Probably thirty years old.
She would swear he's seventy, though, for all the fun he is.
He met up with her at the midway point between Kumo and Suna, and in the day and a half she's known him, a solid image of who he is has formed in Akari's mind. He's an old fucking fart of a bitch with a flagpole so far up his ass that Akari's surprised she doesn't catch a glimpse of Suna's insignia flapping in the sand-encrusted breeze when he opens his mouth.
Ay handpicked him to serve as her escort for the next three months. Birds of a feather, she supposes. Or pricks of a tiny dick size. She's seen what Ay is packing and Juri has some mighty tight pants on beneath his stupid, billowy man skirt—she'd be bitter too.
"Am I supposed to know what those words mean?" he drawls.
She jabs a finger towards him. "You will." She jabs another finger at the beige buildings, standing stout on the horizon behind a wall of stone. "They all will, too."
Juri brushes a strand of highlighter yellow hair back underneath his shawl and rolls his eyes. "Just shut up and follow me. Don't say anything stupid—if the gate guards take a shot at you, I'm not saving you."
Akari sneers at him. "Don't need you to, piss baby. The proletariat saves themself."
.
.
Akari gets two steps into Suna when her oppression senses go off.
People trudging through the streets with bowed heads. Desperate folk shoving their wares at anybody who passes by, the words passes through chapped lips and formed in sallow cheeks. Even the ninja guarding the gates, a couple of genin, have a sag to their shoulders like the weight of the worlds sits on them, not a few stray grains of sand and thin cloth shawls.
The grin that unfurls over her lips is slow and curled by mischief.
"Honey… you've got a big storm coming," she mumbles.
Juri gives her a funny look. His gaze flicks from her to the sky, and he shakes his head. "There's no signs of a storm on the horizon."
"Not that you can see, no."
Carefully, he says, "Okay."
She turns to stare at him dead on. "But you will."
"Is that a threat?"
Akari hums. "Why don't you show me to my quarters, swine? I'd like to see whether or not you fucks cheaped out on me."
A breeze rolls over them. It carries the smell of freshly baked flatbread, spices, and vanilla, a combination that scorches Akari's nose in the loveliest way. She tucks a strand of green hair behind her ear, unabashed as Juri grows stiff.
"Chop chop," Akari says, clapping her hands. "Before I'm forty." She's ready to settle down in her quarters and get started on the outline for her newest pamphlet. Hopefully there's a long walk to wherever she's staying—she'd like to get more time to observe and gather a bit more information, so she can tailor it to the masses needs.
Juri's hand ghosts over his waist before it settles down at his side. "Very well."
She cocks her head.
From the steel in his eyes, Akari has no doubt that it was an intentional movement. A threat for a threat, it seems. But he doesn't scare her—she'll let trash like him intimidate her over her dead red spirit.
She gestures for him to lead the way and he starts through the worn, grooved slabs of stone that make up the pathways of Suna's streets, and she trails along behind him.
She has three months in this village.
Akari's grin widens.
That sounds like a challenge, to her.
.
.
She finds a desk in her room that is stocked well with paper and writing implements. Intended for her correspondence with Kumo, no doubt.
Perfect.
She knows that'll come in handy later, once she's ready to mobilize.
"... continued attempts to—"
"What are you doing to help your people keep from starving?"
The elder's mouth clicks shut and he blinks.
Akari raises an eyebrow at him. "Well?" she asks. "I've been here four days and all I see are people who look like they haven't had a proper meal in months."
And yet, all four of the men sitting around her (whose names she can't be bothered to learn) look like they've been eating just fine, and she's sure their kage looks the same.
Not that she'd know. She's never met the guy, even though the council'se now had a meeting each and every day since she's gotten here. Unsurprising, that the oppressor can't make time to meet for the benefit of those he's oppressed.
"That's not pertinent to the current discussion—"
"Yeah, but this discussion is boring as shit and I don't care about helping you guys recoup your militaristic interests."
Old Man One frowns. "But that's what you're here to do."
"No, it's not," Akari says. "I'm here to work out what Kumo can offer Suna—"
"And we're in need of work for our ninja as we're being economically choked by lack of work."
"Why give you resources if I don't trust you'll allocate them fairly."
Off to her right, Old Man Four, the oldest of them, scowls at her. "It is not your place to dictate that, nor is it relevant to your village's interests. This is a negotiation of mutual benefit, correct? We are here to discuss what you may offer us and counter it with what we can offer you in return."
"Bold of you to assume that you can match us in contribution," Akari says. "You can't give Kumo back what Kumo can give you. So, if you can't match us, what you do get from us has to be used in a way Kumo approves of."
And she does care about what Suna can give Kumo. She knows they have very little to offer, and she wants to make sure what she takes from them won't be yanked out of the pockets of those who can't afford to give. She wants to take their manpower and their knowledge: specifically, their poison mastery and armouring skills, both of which Kumo could use improvement with. But she wants nothing financially from them. Which she doubts Ay will agree with, but Ay sent her so that's his own fault.
Old Man Three sighs. "Can we call a recess? This is going nowhere."
"What, you old geezers need a nap? Gotta change your diapers, or something?"
"Watch your tongue," Old Man Four hisses. "You are here on grounds of mutual respect."
"Respect is earned, not owed. Earn my respect and then we'll talk."
The tension in the air bubbles and burns and Akari knows they want her to wilt but they'll bend over and suck her left nut before she'll ever let an oppressor intimidate her.
Old Man Three stands up and the metal legs of his chair screech against the stone. "Enough. We'll take a recess and pick this discussion up again in two hours."
Akari leans back in her chair, watching the men whisper to each other as they file out the door.
She knew they'd never come to see things her way. She knew they'd resist the redistribution of capital and scoff at any attempts she might make to do so. And all it does is cement her desire to find a way to give the people the tools they need to force the issue.
Rasa eyes the pamphlet placed down on his desk like it has the destructive potential of an unstable explosive seal. Pinched between his thumb and index finger, he dangles it in front of his face, expression pinched. "What is this?"
Crouched in front of him, the ANBU agent answers, "It was found in her room, my lord."
He frowns. "But what is it?"
"A call to action for the civilians to 'unionize' and for the genin and chunin to fight for equal pay with jonin."
"Unionize?"
"We believe it means gather as a work group to argue for better pay."
Rasa drops the pamphlet like it burned him and raises an eyebrow at the agent.
The ANBU agent shrugs.
With a sigh, Rasa leans back into his chair and stares up at the ceiling. Three weeks in and she's already causing him a headache. Though, from what he's seen of her, he supposes that he should be glad she didn't start in on this sooner.
He's only been able to make it to a handful of the meetings, occupied as he has been with getting the village back in order. Organizing the hospital and taking stock of the supplies one day, checking in on the schools another, more than a few spent supervising the fuinjutsu work being done in preparation for his wife's pregnancy, and a week he lost to his trip to the capital on a fruitless meeting with the daimyo to try and squeeze even a single shipment of grain out of the tight-pocketed child.
And now he gets to come back to this mess.
"And how long has she been working on this?"
"Since she entered the village," the agent says. "She began circulating them last night after retiring to her room."
"Bold of her. She thinks we wouldn't notice?"
The agent remains silent.
Rasa sits up. "What?"
"She escaped out the window in her quarters and left a note on it indicating that she understood we were watching and would know she left her room."
His eyes narrow to slits.
What can he do?
This is an act of disrespect to his rule, and a dangerous one. He's not been Kazekage long—brought to power in the middle of the war, his rule is still on shaky, young feet, not yet fully beneath him. Suna lost the war Rasa was supposed to win for them, that the masses think his predecessor would have won. They're vulnerable to something newer and more appealing.
But Suna's desperate for money and supplies, and if this visit goes well, Kumo will provide them with jobs and aid. He needs to keep Kumo happy; this deal has to go through.
And he can't imagine kicking out that girl will win him any favors with Kumo when she's known to be close with the Raikage.
"Tell me," Rasa says. "If you were in my position, what would you do?"
"I'm not sure that's my place to say, my lord."
"I'm making it your place. What's your opinion?"
The ANBU agent goes quiet and Rasa watches her roll her shoulders.
She's older—one of the few remaining veterans of ANBU. At thirty years old and having never gone past chunin, Haru is as innocuous and seasoned as his agents come.
"I think I would tread lightly," she says.
With a wry smile, a mere quirk of the corner of his mouth, he asks, "Not remove her immediately?"
"I would like to. But an assassin's instincts can't be that of a kage's. And if I'm in your position, I have to look at the bigger picture." She lets out a breath. "I would keep an eye on her and observe, then make a more permanent decision."
He nods. The words turn over in his head as between his fingers, he fiddles with a clean brush. Take a measured, careful approach, and prepare to strike like a viper should the need present itself. "Thank you. Dismissed."
Haru bows low and disappears in a hot gust of wind, leaving nothing but a few stray grains of sand on the rug.
He will watch, and he will wait, but he will not do it idly.
Rasa raises a hand.
From behind him, one of the ANBU agents detach themselves from the shadows and appears in front of him. "Lord Kazekage."
"I want all writing implements removed from Akari's quarters. She will be permitted to take notes in supervised environments, but she is not to be given any chance to write privately."
"Right away, my lord."
.
.
When Akari walks in, the room looks untouched. Her covers are askew and the chair to her desk is pulled out at a thirty-degree angle. The window is open a crack to keep the room from growing musty in her absence, a potted cactus sat on the sill. One side of the deep maroon rug on the dusty dirt floor is curled up from when she kicked it on her way out this morning.
But she knows in her bones that somebody else was in this space while she was gone.
"What kind of fuckery do we have here?" she asks, to herself and to the handful of assholes trailing her at all hours of the day.
And then she sees it. Her desk that had this morning sported an impressive stack of paper for her to use—so she could communicate with Kumo, they had said, but she knew it was a sort of flex, in its own right, because paper isn't cheap in a treeless land—was now bare. No brushes, no ink, no paper.
Akari shoves the rug aside and kicks her heel against one of the boards. She loosened it early on, in one of the brief periods where she's been able to lose her trails and make it back to her room without any eyes on her. It's where she stashed her more important notes, some emergency supplies, and extra paper, just in case something like this came to pass.
It was empty.
"You dusty bastards."
Not that she expects any less from them. Stealing from the proletariat is in their nature.
She'll just have to get a bit more creative then, won't she?
It comes to her a few days later.
She's out getting a drink in one of the village's bars. There's no better place to get a handle on how the people feel than in a bar, so it makes an ideal place for her to brainstorm about how she wants to handle this whole thing.
She takes a sip of whatever kind of alcohol they make in this part of the world, letting it burn her throat, unbothered as her body will metabolize it before it can intoxicate her. The glass clinks as she sets it down on the 'table', a literal hunk of rock, just like everything else in the bar is. The entire bar seems to have been carved out of the side of a mountain, leaving raised chunks of rock to serve as seats, tables, the bar table, and then nooks chiseled out along the sides to serve as shelves. It's exactly the kind of ingenuity she expects from the working folk that occupy the place. A sandstorm that wore down the stone until it became a home.
Juri sits across from her, empty-handed and unabashed as he watches Akari nurse her drink.
Beyond the time she gets alone in her quarters, the dumb fuck hasn't left her side for a second since her tools of trade were wrenched from her. He's there outside the door as she takes her first piss in the morning, at her back as she sits in on the bougie meetings where officials bitch about what they want and not what the people need, and even to this dingy, dank cave-like bar that reeks of cheap alcohol and mold. All with no pretense of doing this for any reason other than to spy on her.
She can't knock them—surveillance is important, after all. One must always know what's going on in their village. But she'd rather not spend her day with his filth breathing down her neck.
"When do you think they're gonna yank the beast out of that old man?"
And at that, her ears perk up.
They're on the other side of the bar, murmuring amongst themselves. From the lack of reaction on Juri's face, she doubts he can hear them, or that if he can, he's paying their words much mind.
"I hear soon. I got a friend in the Seal Department, and he said Lord Kazekage has been inquiring about their research progress again."
"Jeez. Man, I'm kinda surprised the geezer hasn't croaked already, down in that shitty basement." From behind her, she hears a scoff. "At least it's probably nice and cold down there."
"Ha. Yeah. Bet it is. Better than he deserves."
"I've seen that place—it's exactly what those monsters deserve."
A grin stretches over Akari's face.
Juri scowls at her, leaning forward in his seat. "What is it?"
"Oh, nothing." She chugs what's left of her drink and slams the glass back down, wiping her mouth off on her arm. "Care to get me another?" she asks, holding her glass out to him.
"No."
Akari rolls her eyes. "Dunno what else I expected."
She hauls herself up and saunters over towards the bar, the grin on her face growing, curled in at the sides, all cheshire cat and promise of chaos.
She has her new plan.
It takes her another few weeks of wandering Suna with an open ear to get the pieces she needs to hunt down her mark; like a puzzle coming together, she forms an image.
An old man. A dungeon. A teapot.
But she also knows that she can't jump right into this. The bourgeoisie guards their capital with prejudice, and she has no illusions about what kind of adventure breaking him out is going to be. Once she makes this move, there'll be no going back.
So, she'll wait. Bide her time. And when she can cut her losses? She'll make sure that she goes out with a bang.