Me, a liar: It'll be short! It'll be out soon! (takes an entire year to write the longest chapter yet)
Is this... technically... a Halloween chapter?!
Mild content warning for Tori referencing a... porn trope that's usually dubcon?
xXx
Kayaba Castle was not as impressive as Tori had hoped. It sat in the middle of acres and acres of flat grass farms dotted with little houses and bales of hay. The building was less of a castle and more just a rather large house. The only thing that set the castle apart from the surrounding farm homes was that it was much bigger, that its roof was tiled rather than thatched, and that it was built on top of a man-made hill with a thin strip of forest along one side to block it off from its closest neighbors. A lake spread out at the base of the hill, its still waters pitch black in the night.
Tori thought the lake would have looked especially pretty on the night of a full moon. It reflected the half-moon and surrounding stars of that night perfectly, like looking at the entire galaxy spread out at their feet. The surface of the lake was only interrupted by some sort of raft sitting at its middle and a small dock jutting out into the water.
"This place doesn't look that haunted," Tori remarked, just a little disappointed. She'd wanted something spooky.
No one replied, as the Akatsuki fanned out, ignoring each other in favor of scoping out their new space. Next to her, Kisame stretched his huge form, then grinned down at her. His pointed teeth glinted in the moonlight in a way that Tori thought would be frightening if she didn't know him.
"Why don't you leave me the drinks before you go ghosthunting?" he asked.
There were a handful of dilapidated pieces of furniture by the edge of the lake, all wooden and half-rotten and clearly abandoned for a long time. Tori followed Kisame down to the lake shore and pulled the rest of her ill-begotten alcohol from her shirt, lining the bottles up on the single picnic table even as it groaned under the weight. In total there were twelve bottles plus the dart board, which Tori set aside.
"Oh good, we can all get alcohol poisoning, yeah," Deidara said, appearing behind Kisame and grabbing for one of six sake bottles.
Tori had been taking from a single shelf of the storage room, so they were six bottles of the same sake because the store room had been organized that way. The rest were a variety of hard liquors and liqueurs.
Hidan turned from inspecting the dock and then was suddenly next to Tori. Alcohol had dulled her reaction enough she didn't startle, but she was used to interacting with ninja in controlled, indoor spaces. They rarely just casually flash-stepped around inside.
"You didn't grab any mixers?" Hidan asked, reaching over her to take a bottle at random.
"No," Tori replied dryly. "God wants you to suffer, Hidan."
"This is supposed to be served cold, yeah," Deidara complained of his bottle of sake, turning it over in his hands.
"What are we supposed to drink out of?" Itachi, also spontaneously appearing, asked.
"This isn't very good whiskey," Kisame observed.
"Beggars can't be choosers! " Tori stressed, throwing up her hands. "Fuck you guys. I'm going to go find a ghost."
She grabbed a violently green bottle of melon liqueur for herself and stomped up the hill. The castle had a low stone wall around it, enclosing what was probably once a well-manicured stone garden and now just looked like a sad mess of weeds and gravel. Tori made it right to the edge of the circular gate in the garden wall before some sort of invisible force suddenly made all her hairs stand on end and somehow made gravity increase. It probably would have only disoriented Sober Tori, but as it were, she was knocked on her ass and dropped her drink.
"It's warded," Itachi told her, squatting down next to her. He picked up her bottle. "We should share this."
"What?" Tori said dumbly. Itachi opened the bottle and sniffed it. A ghost wall?
"Are you kidding me?" Deidara asked, having apparently followed them up the hill. "Are you telling me civilians think this stupid barrier is the work of a ghost?"
Ah, right, fuinjutsu existed out in the wild too.
"I don't think we know enough to conclude that," Itachi replied mildly. "We don't know how long the wards have been up compared to how long the ghost stories have existed."
"Gods, you're so full of yourself, yeah," Deidara sneered.
Itachi drank directly from Tori's bottle. She wished she'd spat in it first.
"I didn't say you were wrong," Itachi replied. "Just that you could be wrong."
It was unclear to Tori if Itachi was intentionally baiting Deidara or if this was just what his personality was like or both. Either way, Deidara ended up flopped down on the ground next to them, snapping at Itachi that he was a pedantic asshole.
Tori would have perhaps indulged in the fantasy of getting them to fight each other, except Deidara had put her squarely between himself and Itachi. She did not want to get in the way of him losing his temper.
"Here," she said, pulling out her pen. "You wanted that cold, right?"
Deidara paused in the middle of a mean quip, raising his eyebrows at her and letting her ease the sake bottle out of his hands. Tori chewed her lip as she turned it over in her hands, looking for a place on the label she could write.
The label was textured in a way that took ink easily and was easier to write on than her shirt had been, but the space was smaller and the lighting poorer. The seal was shitty, but also making things cold was the first seal Tori had ever learned. The bottle likely didn't go all the way down to four degrees celsius, but it got markedly cooler.
"Ta-da," Tori announced, passing the bottle back to Deidara. "Problem solved!"
Deidara stared at the bottle in his hands like Tori had just passed him one of Sasori's poisons.
"What?" Tori asked, and then Itachi was suddenly in her space, grabbing the pen out of her hands. His eyes were red.
"This is a pen," he said tightly. "You did that with a pen."
"Yeah…?" Tori said slowly.
"That shouldn't be possible." Itachi sounded ever so slightly stressed. He turned the pen over in his hands, staring down at it with his sharingan.
"Well, obviously it is; you're looking at it," Tori responded. "What are you freaking out about? Fuinjutsu has never needed inks and brushes."
Fuinjutsu was, at its core, just a set of instructions for moving chakra around. Specialized ink and brushes and paper were just, you know, traditional writing tools and easiest to work with both in terms of drawing and chakra conduction. She didn't think she could do anything complicated with a pen, especially since the blood inside was surely clotting and its chakra fading.
Itachi dismantled the pen, picking off the back of it just like she'd done to make it. Deidara watched in curious silence.
"You infused chakra," Itachi observed. "How? You can't mold chakra."
His tone, tight and controlled with only the smallest of affects, was vaguely accusatory, like Tori was keeping secrets. Which, to be fair, Tori was keeping a lot of secrets, but not about this.
"Blood," she said, opening and closing her injured hand at him. "How do you think I smuggled out half a bar?"
Itachi's lips thinned ever so slightly. Deidara seemed to be getting over his own confusion over… whatever they were confused about, and he smirked wickedly at Itachi.
"You didn't know she could do that," Deidara concluded smugly. "You thought Leader-sama was just letting her paint storage seals into her clothes for fun, yeah."
Tori, even drunk, thought it was rather obvious this was just what Deidara thought she'd done.
"Blood is considered an unstable chakra source," Itachi said, clearing expression from his face altogether and passing the pieces of the pen back to Tori. "I wasn't aware Tori could make working seals with it. I don't think Leader-sama realized either."
"Oh," Tori replied, blinking down at her dismantled pen. She hadn't… she'd been politely letting Obito infuse chakra for her because it was easier and safer, and the Akatsuki were going to have to use their own chakra eventually anyway, so she'd might as well streamline everything for a ninja's chakra. She'd thought they'd known she'd always had back-up options if she wanted to disobey Konan's ban from her practicing unsupervised.
(Which, to be clear: she hadn't disobeyed the ban because she liked being alive with all her limbs attached, thank you very much.)
Itachi, stretching out his legs in front of himself and eyeing her warily, had definitely watched her kill two ninja with fuinjutsu. Maybe Tori going rogue was… actually something even a shinobi might be worried about.
Tori started to put her pen back together. She probably shouldn't mention to him the number of Zetsu clones she'd exploded into horrible mixtures of blood and goop that smelled like boiled turnips.
"What, you thought I was helpless this whole time?" she asked, adding an affronted tone just for show.
Itachi took another swig from the liqueur bottle. "'Helpless' isn't the word I would use."
Deidara tilted his head back and cackled. Itachi did nothing to stop Tori from prying the melon liqueur out of his hands and taking her own sip. It tasted nothing at all like melon, and more like children's cough syrup.
"This is vile," she assessed, then took another drink.
"I like it," Itachi said.
"What would happen," Deidara asked, turning his sake bottle over in his hands, "if you used the seal on a person?"
"Nothing," Tori supplied. "Their innate chakra would fuck it up."
She mused for a bit out loud that she could, if she really wanted to, screw around with modifying it to work on a person's body and make some sort of… hypothermia seal? She didn't really see the point.
"I'm sure there are medical reasons to adjust human body temperature," Itachi said blandly.
"Also murder reasons, yeah." Deidara leaned in drunkenly, grinning meanly at her.
Itachi tilted his head. "Not everyone is so dedicated to creativity in murder."
Tori crab-walked backwards on all fours towards the castle gate before Deidara completely lost his shit on Itachi. She took the liqueur with her, balanced on her stomach. She couldn't believe that only recently she'd been working hard to get into a medical school. Now she was sitting around with murderous assholes and talking about the merits of giving people hypothermia.
Whatever, she thought. Ghost time!
The invisible barrier, now that she expected it, didn't knock her over. It still made her stumble a bit, and she scanned the wall for whatever was powering it. There was a piece of sealing paper stuck to the inner part of the gate, glowing ever so slightly in the night. Tori squinted at it.
"There's nine of them," Kakuzu said, suddenly appearing on the inside of the gate. "All identical."
"That's a lot," Tori said, taking two very careful steps forward. She swayed in place, eyeing the seal. The hairs on her arms stood straight up from a buzz of static that did not let up.
Tori did not think she was good enough to recognize any random piece of fuinjutsu shoved in front of her, but these were clearly meant to be a barrier, and she has very rapidly made herself somewhat of an expert in that topic. Not such an expert she could tease apart anything too obscure or complicated without a lot of time and references, but. Well.
Whoever made this was not very good. The brushstrokes were smooth and controlled, but the seal was just a tweaked version of one she'd seen dozens of times in basic fuinjutsu references. It was not very strong, easily broken, wore off within the day if not reapplied, and now that she had felt it herself, she wasn't sure why manuals recommend it for anything besides deterring civilians and animals from accidentally wandering in. Kakuzu, evidently, had simply walked through like a dog ignoring an electric fence. She thought any competent ninja with enough determination could break it, including any of the Akatsuki, and she felt a flash of confusion that Kakuzu hadn't done so himself.
"The seal's effects continue throughout the property," Kakuzu told her, crossing his arms and sounding deeply aggravated. "It's annoying and distracting. Get rid of it."
"You know," Tori said, picking at the scab in her palm again, "all this needs to be disrupted is a pulse of chakra. Any ninja could do it."
Kakuzu twitched. "Analyzing fuinjutsu and what needs to be done with it is your job. Go on."
Tori shrugged and slapped her hand– now bleeding again– over the paper, smearing blood across it. Using a lot of different seals for a barrier could either mean the barrier was really dangerous, or that the person trying to set it up just really sucked and needed more to cover their deficiencies. She supposed that for someone who didn't know how to tell the difference, or who maybe felt unconfident in their knowledge, just brute-forcing your way through a slightly uncomfortable barrier was less risky.
Tori smushed her hand into the paper a few times, and then an electrified zing made all her hair stand on end, and then… there was nothing. The night was still again.
Kakuzu disappeared without so much as a thanks.
Further down the hill, Deidara was staggering up to her, sake sloshing in his bottle.
"Yes!" he whooped. When he caught up to her, he slung his arm around her shoulders, and Tori tensed. "Let's find us a ghost, yeah!"
He dragged her, unsteady but friendly and yelling about ghosts, through the front garden of scraggly, overgrown plants. Tori found herself relaxing, leaning into Deidara as he related some Earth Country super superstition about how whistling at night could attract ghosts and other bad omens.
"Do it," Tori told him. "Whistle, then. I dare you."
Deidara stopped, right in front of the main door, and whistled. He wasn't very good at it, letting out three sad little tones.
Nothing happened. The castle continued to be frustratingly un-spooky.
"I thought you'd be better with your mouth," Tori drawled.
"Oh, shut up, yeah," Deidara replied, but there was no heat behind his words. He let go of her and pushed the heavy front door open. It wasn't even locked. "You try it then."
"It's just a superstition," Itachi said dully behind them. "Tori, we were sharing that."
He reached for the bottle of liqueur dangling from her hand, and Tori let him have it in favor of pushing under Deidara's arm to get into the castle first. Deidara elbowed her in the back of the shoulder harder than was probably necessary, but didn't actually stop her.
The interior of the castle was lit only by moonlight filtering in through the windows, and the front room was wide and filled with ominous shadows. What was left of the furniture was covered in thin white cloth that swayed ever so gently in a breeze from a window missing a pane. The castle was quiet except for the groan of floor boards under Tori's feet, and the whole place smelled distinctly of dust.
Tori's mind buzzed in anticipation. This was she was talking about!
They stood there in silence, just taking in this supposedly haunted place, and then Itachi sneezed.
"You are drunk?" Deidara demanded.
"No," Itachi answered immediately.
"Hey," Tori said, a faint note of hope in her voice. "I was thinking, just now. Are ghosts in this world, like, real?"
Both Itachi and Deidara stared at her.
"What?" Deidara asked, sounding like he couldn't decide if he wanted to laugh or not.
"Because you have a shinigami," Tori continued, completely serious even if they were making fun of her. "You can summon him and give him your soul, so you have souls and some sort of afterlife is real. And you can like–" she mimed putting her hand through a C formed by her other hand, as if it might clarify what she was saying– "put your chakra in things and then later a spirit or whatever comes out."
Itachi continued to stare at her, unblinking and nonplussed and possibly secretly drunk. Deidara squinted.
"I don't think that's real, yeah."
"It totally is!" Tori waved her arms. "I saw it." After a beat she added, just to credit herself, "In my future vision."
"Uh huh," Deidara agreed, unimpressed. "C'mon, I wanna see if there's anything interesting here before Kakuzu ransacks the place."
They did indeed find Kakuzu in a bedroom on the top floor of the castle, rifling through a dresser drawer by drawer. He was uninterested in talking to them beyond informing them that he'd laid claim to any valuables left in the castle.
There wasn't much of anything to look at, really, except seeing that rich people had giant bedrooms. Someone had come in and bothered to cover the furniture on the ground floor, but no such care was taken on the floors above. In one room they found a bed frame collapsed under a rotting straw mattress; in another they found a tray of molded-over silverware and a bowl and a plate, abandoned in the middle of a meal; in one room Itachi had to stop Tori from waltzing directly into a hole in the floor.
It was empty in a way that was more sad than spooky. Tori did not know much about Grass's history specifically, but Rain was supposedly covered in abandoned homes like this. When war hit, those that had the means to leave left, and those that stayed behind risked being driven out unwillingly or killed. All the noble families in Rain, including Mizukawa Asa's family, had vacated the country or been killed, and only Asa had come back to reclaim her birthright.
Grass had allied early on in the Second Shinobi War with some of the major countries, and therefore faired better overall than Rain. And yet, the castle was still empty.
The only really interesting thing they found was in a backroom of the ground floor. There were a few piles of ratty blankets on the floor, along with two travel packs and a meager number of personal items strewn around.
"Oh!" Deidara cried. He squatted in front of one of the packs, and a mean grin tugged at his lips. "What's this? Is someone living here?"
Itachi, swaying just slightly on his feet, toed what looked like someone's toiletry bag, lying next to one of the bundles of blankets. "I suppose we found the source of the wards."
"Distinctly not a ghost," Tori diagnosed, grabbing the pack that Deidara wasn't going through.
She wondered if the owners of what was clearly ninja gear were still actively camping here. If she'd been here by herself, the risk of them coming back would make her vacate the building immediately. Fortunately, she wasn't by herself, and she felt perfectly at ease rummaging through other people's things.
"But, okay," Deidara leaned back on his heels, a tin of instant coffee from the pack in his hand. "If ghosts were real, don't you think one of us would have seen one by now?" He waved vaguely at Itachi. "This guy would definitely be haunted by his sins, yeah."
Tori thought this was a good point. If ghosts were real, at least one vengeful Uchiha spirit would be floating around, ruining Itachi's life. It was just statistics.
(You know… discounting Obito.)
Itachi, for his part, ignored the conversation to loom over Deidara. "Are there snacks?"
"Are there–" Deidara started and then continued in a high-pitched, mocking tone that sounded nothing like Itachi: "Are there snacks? What are you, a child?"
Itachi blinked down at him.
"So you're not going to eat those chips?"
"Back off, Uchiha! Obviously I'm going to eat them, yeah!"
Tori's pack was more "useful tools" than food, and so she dug out two flashlights and carefully balanced them on the floor between them to give them more light. Deidara eventually let Itachi and then Tori dig through the food bag, and then they sat there in the half-lit room, eating some random ninja's abandoned snacks.
"Deidara," Tori started, "did I tell you about grass facts?"
She started with the fact that apparently if baled incorrectly, hay was at risk for spontaneous combustion. That Kenta guy had not elaborated on the science behind this, and Tori wanted to pick Deidara's brain on his theories for it. Somehow, she found herself listing increasingly unexciting facts about alfalfa.
"Wait," she said, cutting herself off. Why the hell was she still talking about grass? "Itachi, did you genjutsu me again?"
Itachi chewed and swallowed a potato chip.
"I'm testing how much of a liability you are," he said. "You have a lot of important information to the Akatsuki, you have no relevant training, and you enjoy running your mouth. It's a dangerous combination to let out of the hideout."
Tori scowled at him. Deidara's eyes flitted between them, eager to see how this confrontation was going.
Tori knew Itachi didn't trust her– Obito had reported he'd advocated for killing her over what she knew, even if Itachi never acted violently towards her or anyone else. She knew he had more personally at stake than anyone else if she did go around blabbing Akatsuki-related secrets, because Itachi's insane Sasuke-themed plans involved certain aspects of his life staying very secret. However.
"Itachi," Tori said, very seriously. She reached forward and put on hand on his in a comforting gesture, which seemed like a natural thing to do now that she was a little drunk. "I'm not going to reveal any of your secrets, because I do not give one single shit about them. I give a shit about ghosts."
Deidara let out a loud guffaw. Itachi slowly withdrew his hand.
"Thank you," he said, because he too was drunk. "I too would prefer not giving a single shit about you."
With that settled, they lapsed into a comfortable silence. The room was sort of pleasant, softly lit by flashlight and a bag full of snacks. Definitely no ghosts.
"What if we made a ghost?" Tori offered eventually. "Empirical testing."
"What, like kill someone and then see if a spirit comes out?" Deidara asked through a mouthful of chips. He said this with the bland attention of someone discussing ideas for a band name.
"No," Tori answered, wiping dust from her weird crab-flavored crackers on the floor and then reaching for the ninja pack to dig through it more. Her stomach was starting to hurt a little, likely from Sasori's poison, but… meh. She'd be fine. "I think you could just seal someone's chakra into something and then– I don't know– let it back out?"
Itachi had taken a travel mug out from the ninja pack and was currently sanitizing it with isopropanol from his medical kit, his face screwed up in deep concentration.
Oh my god, he isdrunk, Tori thought.
"I think you could use a bijuu seal to shove someone's 'soul' into a lamp," Tori concluded.
"Huh," Deidara said, opening a second bag of chips. "You jumped right from snacks to fucked-up murder. I love it, yeah. Who are we killing?"
"I'm not sure that counts as killing," Itachi said, sniffing his newly cleaned cup.
"The body would be dead, wouldn't it?" Deidara snapped back.
"Sure," Itachi said, now carefully pouring liqueur into the cup without so much as looking up at Deidara. "And yet Sasori lives."
Tori was pretty sure, if they were getting technical, Sasori had simply reduced himself to a sad flesh chunk that was indeed technically still alive. She opened her mouth to tell Itachi as much, had a vision of Sasori peeling her like a banana for revealing secrets, and instead went with:
"Are you volunteering, then?"
She leaned forward on her arm, putting on her silkiest Orochimaru voice, and then waggled her eyebrows. Itachi's lips thinned ever so slightly.
"I bet Danna could puppet a lamp if you trapped his soul in one, yeah," Deidara said thoughtfully, ignoring whatever was going on in front of him.
Deidara went on for a bit about what he thought Sasori might do if tramped indefinitely in a lamp as a malignant spirit, and Tori bit her tongue to prevent herself from asking for everyone's opinion on what would happen if they carved out one of Kakuzu's hearts and used that chakra to make a ghost. Would they get a Kakuzu-ghost or a ghost of the guy whose heart he stole? Didn't matter! Tori was too drunk to remember if anyone knew Kakuzu was made of tentacles and stolen organs, and she wasn't going to give him another reason to murder her.
Instead what eventually came out of her was: "I bet Hidan would volunteer."
She had also found, in a side pocket of the travel pack, the sealing ink and paper that whatever ninja had been camping out here had used to make the barrier.
"No," Itachi said flatly, eyeing the things now in her hands.
"Why not?" Tori asked, pouting. "If anyone's going to live through it, it'd be Hidan."
"Great," Deidara said, tossing aside his empty chip bag and stretching his arms over his head. "Tori, I'm voting you least likely to murder someone on purpose, but also most likely to accidentally murder an immortal, yeah."
"What kind of a ranking is that?" Tori asked.
"It's two separate rankings, yeah," Deidara informed her with the air of someone very confidently making things up on the spot. "For example, Danna is extremely likely to murder someone on purpose, but he's not ever going to murder someone on accident."
"Contrasted to your body count being largely the by-product of careless art," Itachi said lazily.
An argument broke out– well, it was more Deidara yelling at Itachi and then nearly falling over from a failed attempt to drunkenly kick him in the head, while Itachi made very quiet and calm but also very mean replies. Tori took it upon herself to gather up their discarded trash and arrange it neatly in a pile of one of the blankets. Then she slung the 'useful tools' pack over her shoulder and grabbed one of the flashlights.
"Okay!" she announced, standing. "Now we have to look at the murder basement!"
It was a testament to how engrained she'd become in the group that Deidara, rather than ignore her in favor of continuing to yell at Itachi, took a break from his rant about how his art was always with purpose, to glare at her and ask, "What fucking murder basement?"
"There were stairs down, weren't there?" Tori asked. "Aren't ghosts most likely to be in the basement?"
"...because that's where the murders would be?" Deidara repeated, high voice getting louder at the end, like he thought Tori's train of thought was both very stupid and also very enteratining.
"Where else would you murder someone in your home?" Tori asked. "The bedroom? Come on."
"If we're operating on the theory I am most likely to be haunted," Itachi said, getting to his feet with just slightly less grace than usual, "then yes, I think the bedroom."
Tori gawked at him, feeling as if she'd very firmly put her foot in her own mouth. Deidara broke the silence by bursting into hyena-like laughter.
"Alright," he said, propelling himself to his feet also with much less grace than normal. "Let's make it an experiment, yeah? Ghosts weren't in the bedroom– will they be in the basement?"
The stairs downward, which Tori had spotted in the kitchen, led to what looked like a food cellar. The floor was packed dirt, and rows of what were probably once dried meats and vegetables hung from the rafters, although most were shriveled beyond recognition and some animal had been chewing on them. Likewise, a sack of rice almost as big as Tori had been burst at its seam, leaving grains strewn about the ground.
It was just as boring as the castle proper, with more of a stale mildew smell.
"Not a murder basement," Tori said in disappointment.
"What does it mean," Deidara drawled, jabbing Tori in the side with his elbow, "if your experiment gets negative results?"
"It's just a design flaw," Tori countered. "If we really wanted to test it, we'd have to murder someone in every room and track how many became ghosts."
In the light of the flashlight, Deidara's lips quirked upwards. "What if some are just more vengeful than others?"
"I'm sure we could figure out a way to induce even vengefulness across subjects," Tori replied. Then as a joke she tilted the flashlight under her chin and added in her spookiest voice, "That's what they teach us to do in Oto."
The door above them creaked, and Kakuzu stood in the doorway, blocking what little light came from the kitchen.
"Is there anything down here?" he asked.
"Rotting food," Itachi answered dryly.
"We found non-rotting food, yeah!" Deidara called back, holding up the other backpack.
Kakuzu was not impressed. He'd even tried pulling some paneling off the walls to see if there was wiring with valuable metals, but the best thing he'd found was a designer tea cup that might be valuable if it weren't cracked, and a literal silver spoon that had gotten lost behind the stove.
"The whole country is filled with useless buildings like this," Kakuzu said darkly as Tori fumbled her way up the stairs, followed by Deidara and Itachi. In frustration, he put a fist through the wall, and Tori's foot slipped on a step.
"Don't you dare fall on me, yeah!" Deidara snapped, shoving her back into her feet.
With the castle a bust and Kakuzu having gained a dark aura about himself, they headed back out to the front garden. Tori put a wide distance between herself and Kakuzu.
At the garden gate, Hidan and Sasori were engaged very intently in conversation. As they approached, Hidan beamed up at Kakuzu in what was nearly child-like glee.
"Oi, Kakuzu!" he called. "Sasori said he could take all my skin off in one piece!"
Kakuzu snarled wordlessly and unnecessarily shoved Itachi to the side to stomp over to his partner to intervene.
"Do you think if you grafted Hidan's skin onto someone else–" Tori started, but Itachi put both hands on her shoulders and spun her around to face the lake.
"Don't," he commanded, voice very firm. "Focus on whatever useless thing Deidara wanted you to do."
"HEY–!"
They stumbled back down to the lake, where Kisame was sitting cross-legged on the surface of the water in the shallows. He had his head tilted back to look at the stars, and had creatively cooled off his own bottle of sake by sticking it in the water. The neck poked out of the surface next to him.
Deidara kicked Itachi, who melted into several crows that weren't quite loud enough to drown out Deidara's swearing. Tori decided she didn't want to have anything to do with this developing situation, and propelled herself toward the table of booze.
The dart board was still there. Nice. She moved it aside to make room on the table, setting the sealing supplies she'd stolen out in front of her. These included several very small bottles of ink, two brushes, and an assortment of papers in varying sizes. Behind her, she could hear the ongoing argument between Itachi and Deidara, now with Kisame's input, and she half-paid attention to it while she picked the scab off her palm and did her best to get blood into one of the jars of ink.
It was dark and she'd been drinking and blood got…. Everywhere. It was fine.
Tori drew one of the cooling seals directly on the moldy wood of the table and then shoved all the alcohol onto it. Behind her, Kisame's efforts to organize a "formal spar" to replace the argument had collapsed into him suggesting Deidara make a bonfire for them if he wanted an artistic outlet, and Deidara had stomped off muttering.
"Are you drunk?" Kisame asked Itachi, sounding resigned. "Your cheeks are pink."
"No enzyme!" Tori found herself yelling. "He doesn't have the enzyme! Lightweight!"
Itachi simply swayed slightly in place.
"I can still operate normally," he said.
"Aldy… aldeyhyde…" Tori stuttered out. She totally knew this one. Hold on.
Kisame pinched the bridge of his nose. To Itachi he said, "You don't need to demonstrate you can still do genjutsu. Stop that."
"Aldehyde dehydrogenase," Tori finally managed to pronounce. "You don't have it."
"It's rude to diagnose people when you have no medical expertise," Itachi told her.
The rest of the Akatsuki reappeared, Deidara and Hidan dragging furniture behind them. They both gleefully broke down two side tables, and assortment and a chest of drawers in an impressive display of physicality. Deidara set the pile of splintering wood on fire and then went back up to the castle to drag down a mouth-eaten couch.
"Why is there blood all over the booze?" Hidan asked once the bonfire was going. He stood at the table, examining the bottles that now almost all bore at least one of Tori's bloody handprints.
"I made it cold," Tori said.
Hidan accepted this answer at face value, grabbing a new bottle. There had been a tin of canned peaches in the bag of food they found, and Hidan poured liquor directly into the can, presumably to use the syrup as a mixer in possibly the worst cocktail anyone had ever made in the history of cocktails.
"Can you heat things too?" Hidan asked through a mouthful of peaches.
"The difference between a heating seal and a cooling seal is really interesting," Tori started.
"I don't care," Hidan replied before she could talk about how a cooling seal was essentially draining energy out of a system and could therefore sustain itself by recycling that energy for longer than could a heating seal, which was adding energy into a system. "I want ramen."
(Deidara had deemed the couch too gross to actually sit on, and he was busily prying off pieces to feed to the fire.)
There was a single styrofoam cup of instant noodles in the food bag, and Tori plopped down on the ground next to Kisame by the bonfire. She very carefully drew a seal on the cup to see if she could heat it to one hundred degrees celsius for boiling water.
It caught fire.
"Fuck," Tori yelped, tossing the flaming cup away from her. Since she'd been using the light of the bonfire, it ended up in the fire proper. "Oh, hell–"
"What are you doing?" Kisame asked while Hidan laughed hysterically at her. Tori had grabbed a stick and was kneeling next to the fire, trying to pull the quickly melting cup out of it. "Just let it burn."
"It's styrofoam," Tori said, flipping the cup out of the fire and then stomping on its blackened carcass. "Burning it is horrible for the environment."
Kisame still looked perplexed.
"Have you not reached the 'destruction of the environment' part of human technological progress?" Tori asked dully.
"Melted styrofoam is awesome though," Deidara cut in, having been pulled out of a conversation with Sasori by Hidan's guffaws. He picked up the blackened cup, spilling the dregs of burnt dry ramen across the grass. "Danna, here's proof even styrofoam doesn't last forever, yeah!"
He threw it at him. Sasori snatched it out of the air, crumpling it in his hand and glaring at Deidara.
"As immature in action as you are with your artistic theories," Sasori sneered.
"Styrofoam does last forever, even if you burn it," Tori said, watching in resignation as Sasori tossed it into the fire anyway. "You're just breaking it down into environmental toxins."
"Why do you care about one cup?" Sasori sniffed.
It was obviously meant to be a rhetorical question criticizing her for making a big deal out of something they all saw as inconsequential, and Tori felt her face settle into a sour expression.
"You people have no sense of environmental stewardship," Tori complained. "Just you wait, soon you'll have an island of trash bigger than Rain country in your ocean, just like we do. And don't even get me started on the hole in the sky–"
"That can't be real," Deidara accused her. "Of all the shit you've said, that's the most fake sounding thing yet."
"I think," Hidan said, a lazy smirk spreading across his face, "she's just mad about disgracing her Cup Noodle family legacy."
Both Hidan and Deidara laughed at that, and Tori rolled her eyes and retreated back to the table. Itachi had kidnapped her liqueur, and she refused to sober up under these conditions. There was a sour apple liqueur the same brand as the melon one, and she pulled it toward herself as she sat at the table, right in front of the dart board and facing the lake.
It tasted almost exactly the same as the melon liqueur, all artificial sweetness and vaguely fruity. Gross.
The table creaked as Sasori sat next to her. "There's blood on your face," he sneered at her. "It's in your hair. You're disgusting."
"Oh, like you've never been covered in blood," Tori answered testily. "First you poison me, then you criticize–"
He cut her off. "Has your stomach started hurting yet?"
Tori's pursed her lips, flipping the dart board over to examine its back side.
"You sound exactly like Kabuto," she told him. "'Oh, are the drugs I didn't explain to you taking effect yet?' Next you'll be acting like it's my fault if I puke on your sandals."
Sasori twitched. "You agreed," he said.
Which… was kind of true? He hadn't exactly asked, but he was also perfectly capable of poisoning her without obviously handling her drink in front of her and then waiting for her to drink it. Perhaps this was Sasori's deeply fucked up version of asking for consent. Maybe he did respect her, just a little bit.
Obviously this theory required further testing.
Tori stuck her nose in the air and, deliberately to be aggravating, said, "You wouldn't even give me a dosage curve. Didn't even ask for my height and weight."
Sasori rolled his eyes. "I already know."
Tori paused. "Wait, how?"
She pestered him, noting out of the corner of her eye as Kisame literally tugged Itachi's ponytail to drag him away from Deidara trying and failing to physically push Hidan, currently in a power stance with his shirt tied around his head, into the bonfire. They were… they were drunk. All of them. Holy shit.
"My stomach does hurt a little bit," Tori finally admitted as Kisame dragged his partner back toward their table.
"I don't think Tori's stomach is normal," Itachi observed, "based on what she eats."
Kisame pushed him down into a seat. "Alcohol really turns off your filter, huh?"
"No," Itachi replied. He swayed in his seat, cheeks pink. "I am simply feeling talkative."
I can't believe you accused me of running my mouth when you're the same, Tori thought. Then again, Tori etting chatty meant her telling you everything she knew on a topic, which probably seemed like a potential for information leaking, and Itachi just… got really mean.
Tori pointed at her seal. "I made all the drinks cold."
Kisame turned to the cluster of bottles, touching one experimentally. It was humid enough that the bottles had begun to gather condensation.
"Why is there blood on them?" he asked, just a tad more concerned than Hidan had been. Kisame did not, after all, have a god to protect him from bloodborne pathogens.
"Tori can use blood for sealing," Itachi answered dully. He turned to Sasori and said, "Did you know?"
Sasori sniffed. "Figures. She made a storage seal with yogurt. Why wouldn't she be able to do this?"
"Yogurt?" Itachi repeated.
"That reminds me!" Tori exclaimed, slamming both hands down on the table hard enough to make the bottles rattle. Pain shot through the arm of her injured hand. "Sasori, I wanted to talk to you about different types of chakra in seals."
"I really, really don't want to hear you yell about yogurt again," Kisame said, picking up the bottle of low-quality whiskey he'd insulted earlier.
"No, because," Tori made a vague hand gesture in the air loose and wide enough Itachi had to lean away to prevent her from smacking him in the face, "I have most of the bijuu seals done, but also like, you guys have to make it work."
Or, well: she had a pretty good stasis seal, and about fourteen different versions of a chakra-siphoning-and-sealing technique she needed to either pick to streamline or reconcile, and she still didn't know how she was going to crack a jinchuuriki seal open.
Sasori eyed her up and down. "And you want my input about what, exactly?"
Tori had encountered a new problem while attempting to churn out seals even Tobi couldn't fuck up. The best way to eliminate user error from seals was to make them more complex, to prevent someone from accidentally pumping the wrong amount of chakra into it, or trying to fluctuate their chakra the wrong way, or adding elemental chakra. The trade-off was that the more complex a seal became, the more chakra-intense it became, because the transfer of chakra across components almost always lost energy even when drawn perfectly, the exception being completely self-sustaining seals, which were supposed to be so difficult and rare Tori barely had any literature on them.
To make up for this, most fuinjutsu users relied at least in part in manipulating their own chakra throughout the seal, fluctuating it manually rather than let the seal do all the work. Tori, of course, couldn't do shit with chakra without fuinjutsu, and so none of her seals required user manipulation of chakra within them.
Tori could make something incredibly complex and chakra-inefficient on a small-scale, which was user-idiocy-proof enough that even Obito trying his hardest couldn't ruin it. The issue was they'd needed to scale it up by a lot to make it practical for sealing a bijuu, and therefore would need a lot of chakra.
She explained this in as much detail as she could, waving her arms as she went. She knew Sasori was supposed to be the one most versed in fuinjutsu, so he probably didn't need every part of the conundrum explained, but also…
She did like talking about her interests.
"See," Itachi said to Kiasme, "she gets talkative with alcohol too."
"Shut the fuck up, Itachi," Tori snapped at him, this time purposefully swatting at his face. Itachi simply leaned away again, without even a blink. Turning back to Sasori, Tori concluded, "Basically, I have no sense of scale. I don't have the slightest idea how much chakra a normal jutsu uses. I think I could jerry-rig it to use the bijuu chakra to help power it, but then your chances of everything literally blowing up go way up."
"I don't think requiring a lot of chakra will be an issue for this group," Sasori said, his eyes briefly darting over to Kisame, who flashed his teeth at them. "However, I do find it concerning that it turns out you don't even know the basics of using a jutsu. How did you learn anything without knowing that?"
"Uh," Tori replied. "Trial by fire…?"
She pulled out an ink jar and a brush they'd found in the castle. Kisame changed the subject by asking Sasori if he'd gotten any leads on some of the more elusive bijuu, a responsibility he shared with Zetsu. This somehow transitioned to Sasori griping about Gaara becoming Kazekage.
His main complaint was that getting to someone who had the security detail of both a jinchuriki and a Kage would be annoying. His secondary complaint was that Gaara was a child.
"Giving the title to the most powerful fighter with no regard for wisdom is how Suna picked Rasa, and he was a fool," Sasori said.
"Yes, too bad someone murdered the Third," Itachi said in a perfect deadpan. Sasori twitched ever so slightly, and Tori let out a barking laugh.
Sasori shot her a look, then glanced down at where she'd been drawing random radicals and notes into the wood of the table in ink.
"What are you doing, anyway?" he said. "Did you open your wound again? It's going to scar, and then you'll be uglier than ever."
"Wow, rude," she replied, even as he grabbed her wrist and pulled her fingers back. He wasn't rough enough to make her fingers themselves more than uncomfortable, but the movement tugged painfully at the skin of her cut. "Actually, I'm going to make a seal and then see how it does with one of you activating it, as a test."
Itachi leaned forward to peer at her notes. "Because Tobi is not an adequate test subject?" he asked.
"Absolutely not," she replied.
"Is this your stupid accuracy seal?" Sasori asked, now poking blue chakra into her hand. Unlike medical chakra, it stung, and her fingers twitched.
"It'll be similar to the bijuu sealing seal," Tori answered, eyes on Sasori's hands. "What are you doing?"
"I'm fixing your hand," Sasori replied. "You already have a hideous scar on your neck, and I won't be able to stand looking at you if you get uglier."
"How nice," Kisame drawled. "What, exactly, are you doing with the bijuu seal and a dart board?"
"I'm going to make it so a dart hits the bullseye every time," Tori answered. "It's basically the same thing."
Kisame's eyebrows shot up. "It's not."
"No– see–"
Deidara wandered over to them, now with scorch marks in his pants and a sloppy grin across his face.
"Hidan and Kakuzu went to hunt down some meat," he said, sitting next to Kisame. "Hey, are you making a ghost?"
Tori opened her mouth, closed it, and spread a hand over the back of the dart board. "Sealing a bijuu, making something hit a target, and sealing a human soul are all basically the same thing–" she started.
"They're really not," Itachi told her.
"Let's play a game," Deidara proposed before Tori could argue. "Would you rather listen to Tori explain literally anything for an hour, or listen to Hidan explain Jashin for an hour?"
"Would you rather listen to Deidara explain his art for an hour," Tori shot back, "or listen to Sasori explain– OW!"
Sasori had squeezed her wrist so tightly she'd felt the bones shift. She glared at his offending hand, but also, her cut already looked better from his efforts. So maybe she would not antagonize him.
(Kisame looked her dead in the eyes, grinned, and picked Hidan. Traitor.)
Sasori released her hand, and Tori experimentally opened and closed it. It was tender, but she couldn't see any visible evidence she'd injured it at all.
"Thanks," she said. Sasori just turned back to the conversation at the table, seemingly losing interest in her.
They traded would you rathers for a while (or, rather, Deidara and Kisame did while Itachi made increasingly bizarre commentary and Sasori made increasingly cranky criticisms), and Tori listened with half an ear. She hovered her brush over the backside of the dart board, debating how she wanted to do this.
The chakra-siphoning technique she'd been working on to seal bijuu should… probably be able to guide a physical object to a set mark. The version of the technique she was currently leaning towards was a pair of seals, one to identify a body and a matching one to draw chakra from it, but it had started the design process as one seal that pulled at a specific chakra, set within the parameters of the seal. She thought that, if she were a proper ninja who could mold her own chakra, she could coat a dart with her own chakra, and then have a seal on the target board that would guide her chakra to it. The object holding the chaka could theoretically get dragged along with it.
If she had access to more resources on fuinjutsu, she thought maybe she could modify the seal itself to attract objects of a certain specification instead of chakra– a specific material or size, or projectiles moving at a certain speed. There was definitely literature on such subjects, usually scattered throughout readings on making traps that Tori had not paid enough attention to remember off the top of her head. But moving chakra around was definitely something she could… well, that she could theoretically do while sitting around in the middle of nowhere with no other resource than her own slightly inebriated brain.
She had, after all, been spending the last weeks driving herself crazy making different design tweaks, and she was itching to test some of them.
So… how to mark a specific object with specific chakra…? Bleeding all over something seemed like a bad idea…
("So?" Deidara prompted Kisame. "Where do you rank?"
"I don't usually kill people on accident," Kisame said.
"You drowned a whole family last month," Itachi said, sounding bored. "Remember? You flooded their farm."
"Oh yeah. Bummer.")
Hidan solved her problem in his usual Hidan way, by being the most obnoxious person in the immediate vicinity. He snuck up behind her, pulled the collar of her shirt back, and dropped a live animal down it.
"Are you five?" Tori yelled, on her feet with the thing in her hands before its squirming body had time to make its way out of her shirt. It was… squishy.
Hidan laughed in her face, even as she stared down at the frog now clutched in her hands. Its fat little body dipped under her fingers, its limbs twitching. Tori stared down at it thoughtfully.
When she didn't freak out over the frog, Hidan's joy faded from his face and he stepped up into her personal bubble and threatened to open its guts over her head. Tori felt her upper lip curl back into an ugly snarl her parents had made fun of when she was younger.
Now, she was just annoyed and drunk and brasher than was smart.
"Do it," Tori snarled back, shoving the frog into his chest. "Go on! I want you to!"
"Ugh," Hidan replied, slouching away from her like she'd offended him. "It's not fun if you're into it."
He wandered back towards the bonfire, where Kakuzu was currently disemboweling a deer, tossing its innards into the fire. The smoke smelled like meat.
Tori turned back to the table to find no one had been interested in her and Hidan yelling at each other at all. The frog was still in her hand, cold and soft and just a little slimy. She stared down at it, and it stared back with wide eyes. She could feel its heartbeat in her hands.
Oh no, I've imprinted on it, Tori thought. Now she'd feel bad if she killed it.
"Can I borrow a senbon?" she asked Sasori as she took her seat again.
"Are you going to do something stupid with it?" he asked snidely.
Tori looked him dead in the eyes and replied, "Yes."
He rolled his eyes at her, but a bundle of senbon were dropped in front of her nonetheless.
Tori pinned the frog down by its feet. This was undoubtedly cruel, but she'd release it eventually, and it would probably be fine if not a little traumatized. Animals had survived worse. Besides, frogs could regenerate stuff. Or… at least, she'd once read a paper on how African clawed frogs could do some sort of tissue regeneration.
She poked the frog's fat belly with a senbon enough for a tiny bubble of blood to well up and dabbed a brush directly into it. She only needed a little to tell the seal what to recognize. The frog would be fine. It could regenerate.
Ah, wait, maybe it was only tadpoles that could regenerate…
(Deidara and Kisame were currently arguing over if Itachi or Sasori should rank higher in "kills people on purpose." The exact parameters of this ranking were unclear. Itachi was not engaging with the conversation except to make the claim that he'd never hit someone with friendly fire, which Sasori immediately called bullshit on.
"It's a literal giant fireball," Sasori hissed. "Either you're not using it as often as you claim, or you've hit someone you didn't mean to with."
Itachi blinked placidly back at him. "Are you so sure of this fact because you've done this, Sasori?")
If any of the Akatsuki thought it was strange she'd decided to torture a frog, they didn't comment on it. When Tori was satisfied with her work, she stood at the table and presented the dart board in Deidara's general direction. Or, well, she meant to offer it to Deidara because he'd been part of the planning process, but she ended up proffering it to the space between Deidara and Kisame.
Kisame took it politely.
"Thank you?" he said, clearly confused.
"I need you to activate that," she said, "for the test."
"Oh…" Kisame looked much more dubious of the board now.
To his credit, he did amiably stand and step away from the table, smiling at Tori with a sense of bewildered doubt as he went. This was good enough for her, and she turned back to her captive frog while Kisame flipped the board around and examined it. The frog had died, possibly from stress and being stabbed, or possibly because Sasori had given her poisoned senbon. Both options seemed equally likely.
I don't know what I expected, Tori thought, unpinning the frog corpse. She felt bad, but bodies retained chakra for hours after they died. The experiment was still fine.
"I think I activated it," Kisame said. "What exactly–"
Tori threw the frog at him.
It was not a very good throw, and the frog body sailed much further to the right than any sober person would manage. Kisame was holding the dart board in front of him like a tray rather than face-out like a proper target, which is also something a sober Tori might have requested.
The frog changed direction mid-air, and all the ninja visibly tensed. Kisame actually tossed the dart board away from himself like it was electrified, and the frog sailed after it, smacked into the board midair, and then both objects thudded quietly into the grass.
There was a long silence.
"Huh," said Kisame.
"Success!" Tori whooped, throwing her hands in the air.
"I think you've proven some sort of point," Itachi observed calmly, swaying in his seat, "but I'm not sure what it is. Congratulations on a pointless achievement, Tori."
"I want to see how universal it is," Tori said, pushing herself away from the table. If the seal worked on all sorts of animals and people, maybe it truly was universal, and she wouldn't need some convoluted plan to fake demon chakra. Then again, bacteria chakra seemed to not work as well in seals made for human chakra, and who was to say demon chakra was more similar to humans than frog chakra? Weren't they from the moon or something like that?
"Fish insulin is only fifty percent effective in humans," Tori said, and then took two steps forward and realized that in the past few hours, she'd somehow become significantly more drunk than she'd realized. "Someone catch me more frogs."
First she'd try other frogs to see if it was species-specific, and then… and then…
"What are you talking about?" Kisame asked as she staggered forward in the vague direction of the lake, and no one made any move to help her catch more frogs.
Tori sort of… walked off the pier and found herself abruptly submerged in cold water. She flipped herself around and kicked a bit in an attempt to stand up, but the floor of the lake was soft silt that only threatened to swallow her sandals. She resigned herself to floating, her sandals strangely buoyant and pulling her feet upward.
Kisame had had the right idea earlier, she thought, floating on her back with her face to the sky. The moon and the stars were very pretty. Behind her, she could hear the vague chatter of people talking.
The night sky on the lake's surface was so pretty, in fact, that Tori felt the urge to swim out further, into the black expanse of the lake. Her head swimming from the effects of alcohol, she rolled herself over and started at an unsteady doggy paddle over to the raft floating in the middle of the lake.
Tori was a rather strong swimmer for someone with no appreciable athletic talent, and it didn't take her long to get to the raft. It looked like it had once been a platform to maybe fish or relax upon, but it had long decayed and somehow become partially submerged. The water over the submerged platform was warmer, and absolutely teaming with tadpoles.
Ah, yes, Tori thought as she remembered what exactly she'd walked into the lake for. Frogs. Yes. She grabbed for a handful of tiny black tadpoles, and they all swam away.
"Boo," Tori muttered, then pulled herself up onto the raft and laid on her back to stare up at the sky some more.
She stayed like that for what felt like a very long time, and then suddenly the raft was flipped over and a hand was holding her head underwater. Tori panicked for a few seconds and swallowed some gross lake water, but the hand wasn't actually gripping her or her hair, so she simply swam down and then away, just like a frog.
"Fuck, you can swim," Hidan said when she resurfaced.
Tori coughed lamely, treading water to stay in place. Hidan was squatting on the surface of the water, watching her curiously. His jacket and shirt were long gone, and his Jashinist pendant looked dark against his pale skin.
"Of course I can swim," she answered once she was done coughing. The temptation to try and grab one of Hidan's feet and drag him down was high. "Don't tell me you all let me walk into a lake thinking I couldn't."
Hidan's teeth flashed in the moonlight as he grinned at her.
"Assholes." Tori heaved herself back onto the raft. The wood was slimy with algae under her hands. Her wet blouse was heavy and cold on her skin, and Tori pulled the fabric away from the skin of her arm. Well, if Hidan didn't want to wear a shirt…
Tori peeled her blouse off and tossed it away from herself with a heavy splash. She'd ruined it with blood anyway, and her sports bra was hardly anything for anyone to get too excited about.
Hidan didn't say anything or move to try drowning her again, just cracked his neck and tilted his head back to stare up at the moon himself. It was kind of weird for Hidan to purposefully stay in her company without the goal of physically tormenting her, and it was novel to see him calm. He'd come out to see if she'd be easy to drown and got distracted by the view, she supposed.
Tori watched him, sitting cross-legged in several inches of slimy lake water, and the tadpoles slowly wiggled their way back onto the raft. There were two different types– little black tadpoles not any bigger than her thumbnail, and larger gray ones that reminded her of the bullfrog tadpoles she used to catch as a kid.
"Hey," Tori said after a moment, watching as tadpoles slowly dared to get closer and closer to her still legs. "What does Jashinism teach about ghosts?"
Hidan turned his face to stare at her, eyebrows raised. "What's with you and ghosts?" he asked.
"Ghosts are cool," Tori said, slowly scooping her hands under a mass of tadpoles. My children, she thought.
Hidan watched her for a few seconds, and Tori slapped her hands closed around the tadpoles. Water splashed around her hands, and all but two of the little black tadpoles slipped through her fingers. Tori did her best to shove her captive tadpoles into the pocket at the hem of her leggings.
Oh right, she'd stuck a tube of lipstick in there earlier. Well, that was certainly ruined.
"First of all," Hidan started, raising from his crouch to his full height, "Jashin doesn't deal in souls or death. Other gods rule over that. Jashin is all about the experience, about living–"
"Living in torment?" Tori asked, turning her attention to tadpoles gathered at the other end of the raft.
"Life is suffering," Hidan replied, then took several paces toward her, so he could stand over her and lecture her on how pain was the one unifying human experience.
His ideas and Pein's goals are oddly aligned, Tori thought, watching mournfully as Hidan scared the tadpoles away.
"So if Jashin isn't in charge of death," Tori interrupted when it was clear that Hidan was just going to list his favorite types of corporeal pain indefinitely, "why are you immortal?"
Hidan looked affronted she'd interrupted him for a moment, then dropped back into a squat beside her, his lips tugged up in a knowing smile.
"Because Jashin chose me," he said. "Unlike you assholes, I belong to him, and no other god."
"Huh," Tori replied. After a beat she said, "Jashin's specialist boy."
Hidan splashed her, and the last of the tadpoles disappeared into the depths of the lake. Tori stared down into the dark water for what had to be a full minute, her inebriated brain processing the sudden disappearance of the tadpoles.
"Hey," she said, craning her neck to peer up at Hidan. "If you're Jashin's specialist boy, why'd you try to summon a shinigami?"
Hidan kicked more water at her, guaranteeing a further absence of tadpoles. "Just because I'm Jashin's chosen doesn't mean I don't live in a world with other gods," he said. "Ninja summon the shinigami to spread suffering all the time, or at least that's what that Haruaki bastard said–"
Tori listened to Hidan rant, his words washing over her without much actual comprehension on her part. Tori had always kind of assumed Jashin was the one and only god in Hidan's religion, but in hindsight she had very little to support this beyond the assumptions made by someone growing up with very Catholic grandparents. Part of her wondered, briefly, if her being here in this world made her Jashin's specialist girl, but she let go of this idea immediately. Surely she would already know if that were true.
Realizing Hidan was the closest she had to a religion expert, Tori opened her mouth to ask about priests banishing evil disease-causing spirits from ponds, and also was there a difference between a soul and chakra, but Hidan suddenly turned on his heel and said, "Holy shit, someone's here."
Tori twisted herself around. There were indeed several new figures on the shore, now surrounded by Akatsuki. Hidan skipped across the lake's surface gleefully to meet them.
Tori pushed herself over the edge of the raft and swam back to the shore much more slowly. By the time she had staggered out of the water and over to the group, Hidan was already arguing with Itachi about human sacrifice. The newcomers looked distinctly nervous, but in a sort of oh god, we can't let these people smell fear sort of way.
Tori felt a little bit bad for them. They were basically royally screwed.
There were three people, one woman and two men, now unfortunately encircled loosely by six Akatsuki members. All three were ninja, and they stood much closer to each other than necessary, their bodies tense and eyes weary. They wore Oto headbands.
"Oh, hey," Tori greeted from the shore of the lake.
The Oto-nin, for reasons she did not understand, looked even more panicked. Perhaps it was because she had emerged from the lake like a shirtless swamp witch, with pond scum all in her hair?
"Friends of yours?" Kisame asked as Tori came to stand unsteadily next to him. By her calculations, Kisame was one of the more likely to intervene if one of the Oto-nin decided to attack her specifically. Then again, apparently they'd all watched her drunkenly wandering into the lake fully expecting her to drown, so who knew?
Kisame eyed her bare arms briefly but didn't say anything.
Tori looked the Oto-nin up and down. They were all around her age or younger, and she didn't recognize any of their faces. They had a certain dustiness to them that made Tori think they'd been camping out for a while, although she wasn't sure why they'd still bother with Oto headbands when the village no longer existed.
Sasori and Zetsu, who'd both used their own methods to try and track down anyone who might be able to resurrect Orochimaru or had a cursed seal Orochimaru could be resurrected from, had reported that the village had broken up into vaguely nomadic factions of Oto-nin. They mostly ran around trying to set themselves up as missing-nin groups for hire and occasionally fighting each other, and Tori was aware through her casual eavesdropping that Pein had sent more Ame-nin sentries to Rain Country's borders to prevent any of Oto's dregs from trying to start shit in Rain.
"I don't recognize any of them," she said. The older of the men tensed ever so slightly, and she raised her eyebrows at him. Waving vaguely at the group, she asked, "What hideout were you in?"
None of them answered.
"They're not being very chatty," Kisame said. "We were hoping they'd want to talk to an old comrade."
"Contrary to popular belief, I wasn't very well liked in Oto," Tori answered, eyeing the Oto-nin that had tensed the most up and down. What would be the true Oto-nin, Orochimaru-approved move here? Ah, yes. Psychological tomfuckery. "If they met me, they'd be having their spleens cut out."
The shinobi clenched his fist. Bingo.
"It was nothing personal," Tori told him. He didn't seem soothed. That was fair, really. She felt a little bad she'd helped perform nonconsensual experiments on him and didn't even remember his face.
Or would it be worse if she'd done that knowing exactly who he was…? Hmm.
Sasori turned to Itachi, evidently unimpressed with Tori's failed attempts to make conversation, and said, "So are you going to interrogate them or not?"
Itachi just sort of… stood there, swaying.
"Am I the only sober person here?" Sasori snarled.
"I can still do it," Itachi said.
"I don't see why you need to interrogate us," the younger boy said, looking deeply pained. "When you already have her here. What else could you need to know?"
"See?" Itachi said, facing Sasori and barely paying attention to their captives at all.
"Have you been holding out on us, Tori?" Kisame asked, teasing. "Secrets about your old village?"
Tori had no idea what that guy was talking about, really. She might have had a front view seat of what went on in lab, but she'd been purposefully blocked from seeing how most of the hideout worked. She didn't even know what was happening in other hideouts.
"Do you want a point-by-point analysis of Orochimaru's personality?" she asked.
Kisame's face took on strained quality, like he did in theory but perhaps not at the cost of having to listen to Tori enumerate her various observations.
Everyone but Sasori's attention to grilling the little Oto-nin group for information dwindled quickly. The exact details of how they'd branched off from a larger group after leadership disputes wasn't the most riveting story, nor was their account of how they'd been living off petty robberies for the past month in lieu of having to compete with other low-budget missing-nin for… whatever dumb missions people who couldn't afford Akatsuki hired missing-nin for.
Tori stayed and watched, arms crossed, even after Kisame got bored and drifted back towards the lake, because… well, even if she didn't know them personally, she was interested in what had happened to Oto. Plus, if Sasori went and reported this back to Pein and Konan, keeping track of information was just going to become her problem anyway.
Hidan paced in a loose circle around the Oto-nin and Sasori, grinning ferally at them, a tiger pacing its enclosure. Sasori ignored him easily, but the Oto-nin kept their eyes on him, nervous and fidgety even as Itachi's illusions provoked them into confessing all sorts of things. Hidan had, after all, been the one yelling about ripping lungs out earlier.
She was sure Hidan didn't care about the politics of a collapsed village. He just cared about inserting himself directly into people's nightmares.
The Oto-nin seemed to also be inexplicably fearful of Tori, which was sort of hilarious. When she started shivering and moved to stand closer to the fire, one of the Oto-nin visibly flinched.
Really? What did they think she was going to do?
Sitting on the picnic table and watching the proceedings with his usual impassive expression and his elbows on his knees, Itachi set his chin in one hand and stared at her.
What? Tori mouthed at him, and he didn't even blink. She wasn't sure he could even see her properly while backlit by the bonfire, although his sharingan was now active.
Itachi was… kind of intimidating with red eyes and bathed in shadows. But also Tori was pretty sure he was staring because he was drunk. So. There was that.
It was rapidly becoming very obvious this particular group of Oto-nin didn't know anything particularly useful. Akatsuki was not interested in what happened to low-ranking ninja who just happened to fall in with Orochimaru. These guys didn't know shit about where Orochimaru or even Kabuto had even run off to.
"The oni-baba doesn't know?" one of the ninja asked, face pinched in confusion.
"Who?" Sasori asked, voice turning sharp. This phrasing had clearly piqued his interest, but then the Oto-nin pointed in Tori's direction. Sasori's nose wrinkled in disgust.
"She was clearly one of his favorites," the Oto-nin said. Another one supplied, "I never saw him once since I joined. The lab people saw him every day."
Wrong, Tori thought.
"Don't worry about her," Sasori said. "Itachi, I want to know what they know."
Itachi finally looked away from Tori, straightening his back and then pulling his shoulders back into a stretch.
"Oni-baba?" Hidan hissed from behind her, and Tori startled. Hidan hip-checked her as he stepped around her. "That's your moniker, seriously?"
"It was more like an insulting nickname," Tori defended, aiming an elbow at his ribs. He hopped out of the way with an shit-eating grin on his face. "'Cause most of Oto was just kids, so I seemed old, I guess."
"No," Itachi interrupted from his perch on the table. He still seemed bored, staring dully at the Oto-nin. "Oni-baba was a witch who ate the livers of children. I'm sure it's a reference to your research."
Tori paused. She frowned.
"We cut out spleens," she corrected.
"I'm glad that's the part you object to," Itachi replied.
"Spleens!" Hidan crowed. "And what did you do with them?"
"We…" Tori imagined skin bubbling and then bursting as bone broke through. She blinked several times. "Experimental gene-editing of osteogenic–"
"Fuck, nevermind," Hidan cut her off. He eyed her for a few moments. "I think you and Sasori should race."
"Race?" Tori repeated. Sasori was currently ranting at Itachi that either his genjutsu wasn't up to snuff or the Oto-nin were the most useless ninja he'd ever interrogated.
"To take out their spleens," Hidan said, nodding at the Oto-nin. He said this very loudly, and two of them whipped their heads around in horror. "I wanna know who can do it faster."
"Get me a scalpel and I'll take out your spleen," Tori snapped back. Why was everyone here like this!
Maybe I'm a little like this, Tori thought, remembering the dead tadpoles in her pocket. If Hidan stood still long enough, she probably would like to try and remove his spleen. There were a lot of experiments she'd like to try on his impossible immortal biology.
"No!" Deidara yelled from directly behind her, and Tori actually shrieked in surprise. "She said she was going to make a ghost, yeah!"
"Yeah?" Hidan repeated, jeering. "Is that why you were asking me about them, Chibigami?"
"I am not drunk enough to deal with both of you at once," Tori decided and stomped over to the array of alcohol next to Itachi on the picnic table. She was sort of starting to feel the beginnings of sobriety creeping up on her, and she had no interest in engaging with that while everyone else turned into giant messes.
She paused on her way to the table to note that down by the lake, Kisame appeared to have spread himself out in the grass and was snoring loudly. She didn't even know where Kakuzu was.
There were a lot fewer bottles on the table. They were… how drunk was everyone else?
"Are you sure you should keep going?" Itachi asked. "You're very short."
"At least all my enzymes work," Tori replied immediately and much more forcefully than she meant.
Being briefly distracted was apparently enough for her to miss key decisions happening elsewhere. Deidara's hand slapped against her back with a decisive thud. Tori nearly dropped the bottle she'd just picked up and wheezed.
"GHOST," Deidara yelled. He wasn't yelling at her. He wasn't even yelling at Hidan, who was very distractedly putting his arm directly into the bonfire. Deidara was yelling at Sasori.
"You are all extremely intoxicated," Sasori snapped back. "I will be disposing of them, because I'm only one with any sense–"
The Oto-nin looked extremely upset. Oh no. Well, Tori had kind of figured they were all going to die horribly the second she'd seen them.
Tori opened her new bottle and chugged. It was straight liquor, and chugging was a mistake. Deidara smacked her back again as she choked and then hissed in pain.
"Tori said she could make a ghost, yeah!" Deidara insisted in a tone that was definitely not an indoor voice. "Don't you want to know if the soul is eternal, Danna, or are you afraid she'll fail and you'll have to accept that life is fleeting–"
"You want me to fail?" Tori interrupted.
Deidara turned to her, his eyes bright and dangerous in the light of the bonfire.
"Life is all you get, yeah!" he yelled. "Even if you torture those guys, none of them are going to last forever because ghost aren't real–"
"That's not what I said," Tori half-screamed back, even though she barely remembered how that conversation went at all. She waved the liquor bottle emphatically and sticky liquid splashed out and onto her hand. "I said we could definitely seal a person away and release them in ghost form–"
"What?" Sasori said. "That doesn't make any sense."
"Wait, if we're killing them," Hidan cut in, bounding up to them, "I want to do it–"
"Fuck you, Hidan," Tori replied, feeling frazzled and somehow significantly less sober even though there hadn't been enough time for new alcohol to hit her bloodstream. Apparently if sufficiently pushed by the insane personalities of the people around her, Tori just turned into whatever mess Drunk Tori was regardless. "I'm pro-ghost now. We're making a fucking ghost, Deidara."
"And how do you intend to stop me?" Hidan asked, stepping directly into her personal bubble and looming over her.
"I'll stop you," Sasori said, taking several steps toward them. "I said I wanted them."
Behind him, the for Oto made a break for it. Itachi tilted his head to the side, and then all spontaneously tripped over some unseen force. Sasori clicked his tongue and summoned two puppets by unraveling a scroll with a snap of his wrist. They went after the confused, genjutsu'd ninja, Sasori puppeting them with one hand while the other 99% of his attention was on arguing with them.
Tori paused, watching four ninja be ever so casually corralled and tied and gagged by a guy who was barely even paying attention. She took another bottle shot.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) for her, Deidara was on her side, and he continued to argue for ghost-making even as Tori struggled through a sudden-onset existential crisis.
"I mean," Itachi said lazily, "There's three of them and three of your ideas."
Hidan looked comically thoughtful at this proposal.
Tori shook off her fear of her coworkers and said, "No. I want biological replicates."
Sasori snorted. "Greedy. You are simply unsure if your inane scheme will work, while Hidan and I are sure ours will."
"It's science," Tori retorted.
"Yeah, Danna," Deidara said. "If you had any artistic integrity, you'd understand the importance of experimentation–"
They argued. Tori found herself not quite up to screaming as much or with as much energy as Hidan or Deidara, and so she carefully set the liquor bottle back down and settled for letting Deidara argue her case for her. It was kind of nice, having someone on her side for once, even if they were a shrieking violent maniac.
It would be even better, Tori thought, if she was more confident other people had her back. She felt like half her interactions with them were energy-zapping uphill battles of will.
Besides, it's not like she had to be the one to kill their sorry victims. And it wasn't like she wanted the bodies afterwards, either.
"Wait!" Tori yelled, significantly louder than necessary. She had not meant to be that loud. Sasori gave her a deeply disgusted look. It did, however, make everyone else shut up. "I've got it! I've…"
She paused. Her head swam with alcohol. Sasori teeth ground together.
"The ideas are not mutually exclusive," Tori said.
"How are you pulling out all these big words this drunk?" Hidan asked.
"Big words?" Deidara repeated, incredulous, and Tori put up both hands and said, "No! Shh! I'm having a thought. It's like that riddle. You come to a river and you have a fox, a chicken, and some grain."
"And one only tells lies and one only tells truth, yeah!"
"What? No…"
"I think she is trying to say," Itachi said, sitting serenely above them in his own haughty inebriation, "that you can all accomplish your goals without interfering with each other by doing them in the right order."
"Yes, that's what mutually exclusive means," Sasori snapped. "How are you all this stupid? How much have you had to drink?"
"We have to," Tori realized, and she groped forward and clasped Deidara's shoulder as tightly as she could, "use the power of friendship."
There was a long, pregnant silence.
"She means temporary cooperation," Itachi provided. "For your very creative method of murder."
"Are you her translator?" Hidan asked, and Deidara reached up to pry her fingers from his shoulder and said, "When was the last time you trimmed your nails? You have talons, yeah."
Itachi leaned back on his hands. "Talons like the Oni-baba."
It took… perhaps an embarrassing amount of time, but they eventually organized themselves so everyone got what they wanted. They herded the poor Oto-nin back into the castle, where Kakuzu appeared to be amusing himself by punching through things on the floor above them. Like walls. And the ceiling. There was a lot of frightening crashing noises.
"Ah, yeah, he's just blowing off steam," Hidan said, eyeing the ceiling fondly. "Don't mind him."
"Uh, okay," Tori said, stepping sideways to stand closer to Deidara. "I thought there would be more furniture left. I wanted to seal someone into a lamp…"
Anything on the first floor that could be removed had been dragged out and fed to their bonfire, which was now raging outside unattended. The place felt distinctively empty now, and the banging noises of Kakuzu destroying things above them just added to the haunted house ambience.
"Holy shit," Deidara said, turning around from telling Itachi his ears were red and ugly. "You look so happy."
Tori felt her face go hot. It wasn't even an insult, she just…
"Ghosts are cool," she muttered. Turning to Hidan, who'd pulled a collapsable pike out of the weapons pack at his side and was twirling it casually, she said, "Your… ritual… isn't going to be messed up if I pull of all their chakra, right?"
Hidan cocked his head. "No," he said. "Why would it?"
"I don't know," Tori said, turning to pick a good piece of wall to paint seal on. "I thought maybe you were feeding their souls to Jashin or something."
This statement triggered a wildly outraged theological rant from Hidan, which was quickly cut off by Sasori stabbing him in the stomach.
"Ow, bastard!" Hidan yelled, staggering back. "That better not be poisoned."
"It's a paralytic," Sasori hissed.
This did shut Hidan up for them to work, as he collapsed into a twitchy mess thirty seconds later. Tori wanted to take the time to be careful with her seals, and also she wanted Sasori to watch her, since she was just going to modify the bijuu seal aain and he'd theoretically be the one setting those up once they moved onto capturing jinchuriki.
"Here," she said, handing a bottle of sealing ink to Deidara. "Put your chakra in that."
"I can do it," Sasori said, because he was a control freak.
"I want to make sure it works even with the guy who has explosive chakra," Tori replied. Sasori twitched but didn't argue further.
"So I should try to blow it up, yeah?" Deidara said, entire face lighting up.
"No."
The problem with Sasori observing what she was doing was two-fold. One: Sasori immediately started on a critique of how she held her brush, and then the angle at which she started on the skeleton of her seal. Two: it left Deidara with no one to talk but Itachi, which almost immediately turned into noisey yelling.
Tori's grip on her brush tightened. How had these people gotten anything done as a group?
"So there was this famous artist in my world," Tori said loudly, which had both the effect of making Sasori click his mouth shut and immediately drawing Deidara's attention away from Itachi.
Too easy, Tori thought. Outloud she said, "He'd lived through a war and become disenfranchised with humanity, and so he moved out into a country house and painted the most fucked up things on its wall…"
She babbled, describing the fantastical horrors of Saturn Devouring His Son and WItches' Sabbath . Sasori and Deidara both made frequent interruptions with judgements or questions, but "man paints his own loss of faith in humanity into the very walls of his home" was a compelling topic for them, and Tori found she could work while they were talking at level tones and not actively criticizing her in particular.
Itachi… stood in a corner and ate the last of their snacks. Okay.
Tori distracted herself with a fantasy of trying to shut up Itachi's criticisms of her by tossing a package of candy peanuts away from her and Itachi running after it to retrieve them. She got so distracted by how funny this scenario would be, that when she tried to refocus on the conversation about art on walls, she'd forgotten what the point of it was to keep Deidara and Sssori calm.
"You know," she said, standing back to eye her work, "sticking people in walls is a porn trope. I'm surprised Jiraiya never used it, since he's absolutely obsessed with his own powerlessness–"
Deidara had to wrestle Sasori back from doing something horrible to her.
"You cannot divine an artist's entire personality from their art alone," Sasori said once he'd calmed down. Well, once he'd backed off threatening to slice her like an apple and switched to just sounding very intense. "It doesn't work like that."
"Could you not look at Deidara's art and divine his entire personality?"
"Hey!" Deidara replied, although he didn't look particularly offended.
Sasori's nostrils flared, because clearly Tori was objectively correct.
"I think Goya and Jiraiya are similar like that," Tori said, crossing her arms. "They used their art to wrestle through some really nasty feelings about war. Except instead of actually wrestling with his feelings, Jiraiya throws up stupid distractions like women wrestling homoerotically, and all actual problems in his narratives have easy solutions the hero can solve by just trying hard enough–"
"Stop trying to tempt me into talking about porn," Sasori snapped. "Are you done? I'll give Hidan the antidote."
"Wait," Tori said, turning to the three Oto-nin they'd just sort of left in the middle of the room and whose quiet sobs they'd been ignoring. "I have to paint a seal on them too."
The younger of the two men stared up at her with wide eyes. She paused. Oh shit, she thought. It was one thing to talk about murdering someone in the abstract, but it was another entirely to be actively drawing a seal meant to kill on someone.
"Oh," Deidara said, tucking a strand of golden hair behind one ear. "Do you need us to hold them down or something?"
"I have more patalytic," Sasori said, sounding bored.
"I don't think Hidan would like that," Tori replied automatically. Hidan gurgled from his place on the floor.
She wondered what she looked like, to the Oto-nin. They already knew her as an instrument of Orochimaru's lab, where less valuable ninja went to be eaten up and spat out by horrific experiments. Did she seemed powerful to them, someone acting as one of Orochimaru's hands? Had she been higher on the pecking order than she realized? She'd gotten frequent face time with Orochimaru, after all. Were the lives of run-of-the-mill shinobi in Oto just as pathetic as hers had been, even with luxuries like free-access to the bathroom?
Did she still seem powerful to them, now, taking the lead on doing something even more horrific to them than cut out a spleen? She didn't feel powerful. She felt like she'd been tossed into a tank of piranhas who would turn on her the moment she stepped too far out of line.
But she'd moved the line, hadn't she? She'd proposed something silly and Deidara had backed her up. Sasori had healed her hand. Itachi and Kisame were happy to let her in on movie nights; Kakuzu was making her churn out sealing scrolls instead of murdering her. Even Hidan had answered her weird questions about ghosts. They'd all let her run her mouth and call them assholes to their faces. Even Zetsu was babysitting her cloned heart for her.
I'm becoming one of them, she realized, and if I want to stay one of them, I can't hesitate now.
"Yeah," she decided, "hold them down."
The Oto-nin didn't actually fight them. Orochimaru had trained them for this, after all.
She still tried her best not to make eye contact with the Oto-nin. She went for the older of the two men first, and rolling up his shirt revealed a scar across his abdomen from his splenectomy.
"Just like old times, huh," Tori said. She meant it to be comforting. As soon as it came out of her mouth, though, she realized it sounded exactly like Orochimaru making a bad joke.
Welp.
"Your stitches were sloppy," Sasori sniffed as Tori got to work painting. "What are all these radicals doing? These are for medicine."
Tori hummed. "I thought it'd be more efficient to hijack the host's chakra, the way medical seals do. Save you guys some chakra. This way you just need a little exogenous chakra to start it up, and the seal and the host do everything else."
"Huh," Deidara said.
By the time they were done, Hidan was recovering from being poisoned. He told them their conversations were horrible, and took a knife to the inside of the arms of their victims.
"You think they're all pretentious assholes too, right?" Hidan said, and the woman whose arm he was sliding a kunai over looked up at him with glassy, hopeless eyes. "This is really the start of our divine bond," Hidan told her. "We get to suffer together."
"Be careful with her," Sasori said. "She's very pretty. Don't mess up her face."
Hidan rolled his eyes. "Whatever. Are you ready to meet god, motherfuckers?"
"Remember you have to activate the seal," Tori piped up. "You can do it remotely with–"
"Yeah, yeah, a standard tiger seal," Hidan rolled his eyes.
Hidan's ritual was interesting for about the three minutes it took him to bind himself to his victims and then stab his pike through his ribs and into his heart. He did take the time to make a one-handed tiger seal before plunging the blade into his body, with a crack of bone that made Tori wince. Then he flopped onto his back and… prayed.
He prayed for a very long time.
"Did the seal work?" Deidara asked.
"Yes," Itachi said, stepping out of his little corner. "There's chakra moving from their bodies into the seal on the wall. If they'd had more, I'd imagine you'd be able to see it."
Tori perked up. "It's working?" she said, unable to stop the happy grin spreading across her face.
"Aw, you're excited," Deidara said, sounding indulgent, "you absolute lunatic."
The entire process still took time, and so Tori gathered up the rest of the fuinjutsu supplies and asked if anyone wanted to help her set up an even better barrier.
"I want to see if it works with frog blood," she gushed.
"You know what," Deidara said, "why the fuck not?"
Sasori refused to help them, but when they ran down to the lake to catch more frogs, Kisame woke up and joined in without complaint. Both he and Deidara went about it with a certain juvenile glee, which was largely motivated by the faces and yelps Tori made as she was pelted with frogs.
"STOP!" she screeched, holding up a forearm to protect her face. Why did they always go for the face? "No! This isn't helping!"
Also, it hurt. Why!
Eventually, she thought to retrieve the accuracy seal she'd made. There was a certain sweet spot, between "frogs too far away for it to work" and "so close a small misdirection still ends with a frog hitting you," but if she set it a little over a meter away from herself, most frogs missed.
They were confused and stunned after hitting the ground (or Tori herself), and were easy to scoop up and gut with a kunai left on the ground from… something.
More frog blood and innards got on her than in the ink, but it was still in there. The accuracy seal was rapidly working less and less well with time and repeat activation, so more and more frogs were hitting her. The whole thing was getting very frustrating, and Tori wondered if she'd sacrificed enough frogs to her experiment.
Itachi eventually reappeared.
"IS THIS ENOUGH CHAKRA?" Tori demanded, holding the bottle up in front of him.
Itachi blinked down at her. "I came to tell you I successfully convinced Kakuzu to go into the forest rather than bother Hidan and interfere with your experiment." He stared at the bottle for a moment. "Why are you covered in blood?"
"If you cover yourself in enough frog blood," Deidara asked, stepping up beside her, "Will you be attracted to the frog seal?"
Tori looked thoughtful.
"Your seal finished, by the way," Itachi said.
Tori got through giddily painting all five parts of her five point barrier on sealing paper before they convinced her to go back up to the castle. Sasori was inside, pestering Hidan to finish up even as he laid spread across the floor.
The three seals she'd painted on the wall looked like nothing more than intricate pieces of graffiti. But Tori knew they were each quietly thrumming with a whole person's worth of chakra, pushing into a defined space in the wall the way the bijuu seal would hold chakra in the gedo statue, tied up and held tight. If they left the seals, eventually they'd degrade and all the chakra would run free, because a random castle wall wasn't designed to hold or absorb chakra the way the gedo statue was. But Itachi said the seal had worked with "frightening efficiency," and so whole people were in there!
"I'm losing patience," Sasori said, which was a hilarious way to imply he had any patience to begin with.
Tori had her sealing papers clutched to her chest. This was going to be so much fun.
"C'mon, Hidan," she said as Sasori attempted to pry him from the floor. "Don't you want to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension?"
"Woman -made horrors beyond your comprehension," Deidara corrected. He said it with a sort of cheeky tone, clearly just teasing Tori.
"Actually, I was thinking of what Sasori does with the bodies," Tori answered, and a senbon whizzed by her face and embedded itself in the wall.
"Bitch -made horrors beyond your comprehension," Hidan mumbled from the floor. Then he groaned and rolled himself over. "Fuck, you guys are too distracting. Fine, I'm done."
Tori was vibrating with excitement, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Kakuzu was no longer making the house groan with delightful spooky ambience, but that was fine. She might get to see a ghost! She might have made a ghost!
"Do you want to do it?" Kisame asked, looking down at her with something like a mix of apprehension and amusement.
Tori opened her mouth to say that no, one point of the experiment was to see if people who weren't her could activate the seal. But Hidan had activated one half himself, and the other half hadn't exploded even though it was mainly using Deidara's chakra, and the next step was to undo the seal and release all the chakra. They didn't need to be able to do that part.
"Yes," Tori said, slapping the sealing papers into Kisame's chest for him to hold. She skipped forward, fumbling with her bottle of ink in anticipation, and set about deactivating the first seal with a few brush strokes.
Deactivating a seal meant the chakra had to go somewhere. Tori had designed the seal so that when inactivated, it would all go out into the air the same way at once. This part she was less sure of, because she'd made it up tonight. But still! It was just a reversal of a seal she'd thought about so much she saw it when she closed her eyes, and she had a good feeling about it.
Nothing happened when she undid the first seal. Nothing happened when she undid the next one either. Kisame yawned. Hidan stuck a finger into the hole in his chest. Undeterred, Tori moved on to the third seal.
This time, just for a moment, the apparition of the older man appeared. He looked horror-stricken, standing right in front of the wall with his mouth gaping open in a soundless scream, his eyes bulging. Then he vanished.
He did not vanish before several people screamed.
Tori screamed in triumphant delight. Kisame let out a noise that was not a scream, but was definitely something like a "panicked snort." Deidara bellowed for them all: "WHAT THE FUCK?"
"I told you!" Tori bellowed right back, pointing vigorously at her comrades. "I fucking told you!"
"Holy fucking shit," Deidara reiterated, coming up to the wall to admire her sealwork. The rest crowded after him, with Sasori elbowing his way to the front and Kisame looming over all of them.
"I know!" Tori whooped back.
"That's awesome," Deidara said, turning to look at her with genuine fondness, and something in Tori's heart hitched. She did feel happy, and supported for once in her horrible little life with ninja. Affection bloomed inside her, and she reached out–
"Did you just slap me?" Deidara screeched, jerking back and making Sasori swear at him. He rubbed at his face. "Why?"
"I don't know!" Tori replied, the adrenaline of making a ghost and having people actually happy to interact with her coursing through her veins. "I was overcome with emotions!"
"I'm bleeding," Deidara said, bringing his hand away from his face and blinking down at his fingers. "Did you cut me with your talons?"
Somehow, Tori ended up in headlock, and Deidara dragged her outside, the rest of Akatsuki following along. It wasn't… well, it wasn't Tori preferred way of bonding with someone, but he wasn't actually hurting her. He yelled insults and threats at her as he did it, but she was not under the impression that he meant to follow through on any of them.
"How did Tori even manage to slap you?" Itachi asked, and Deidara dropped her to try and put him in a headlock. "Are you really that drunk?"
They calmed down after that, with Kisame packing up their extra alcohol into one of the Oto-nin's backpacks. Sasori packed the Oto-nin's bodies into black scrolls.
"Do they not go into regular storage seals?" Tori asked, and Sasori dipped his head at her in askance.
"How can you not know?" he said. "There's only one supplier who knows how to make the body-safe storage scrolls. It's why Kakuzu was so mad at you for wasting one."
"Huh," Tori replied.
An argument broke out between Itachi and Deidra over putting out the bonfire, which Kisame watched while rubbing his temples. Tori paced around the castle, slapping her sealing paper onto the wall as she went. Her previous fervor had died a bit, but she still really wanted to see how well a seal worked with animal blood.
Kakuzu staggered out of the tree line.
"Where's Itachi?" he demanded. He looked… furious, even for him, with muscles all tense and eyes scowling.
Perhaps Itachi had not so much "persuaded" him as stuck him in an illusion. That sounded like Itachi.
"Do you want to test out how strong my barrier seal is?" Tori offered.
Her first attempt to activate didn't work, because it turned out there wasn't enough chakra in her ink to power a large-scale barrier. If fact, now that she was considering it while less high off success and further away in time from her last shot of alcohol, she wasn't sure why she thought frog blood would have enough in it to power anything bigger than her little test attempts.
Frog-powered seals not working was disappointing, but then Kakuzu slammed his palm against the activating seal and it lit up with blue chakra. Ink spluttered out of the page, racing down the side of the wall and then disappearing under the wall. Two more streaks of ink zipped along the wall itself, out of sight within seconds. Tori couldn't see it from here, but if everything was working right, the ink would join the other four points of the seal, and they'd drawn out the full seal across the area of the castle.
It was a very dramatic process of events to watch. She'd only ever done it over the space of a single room, but there was no reason scaling bigger would work differently, besides the increased chakra cost.
A solid dome of translucent, dark purple flickered to life. Kakuzu wasted barely a second before slamming his fist into it. Nothing happened.
"Huh," he said, and then stepped back and gathered a ball of fire into his hands.
Tori fled very quickly.
"Did the frog blood work?" Itachi asked, sounding very skeptical as he looked the barrier dome up and down. The bonfire was out, and Deidara was sitting off to the side, pouting.
"No," Tori said. "But Kakuzu did."
"Huh," Kisame said, new backpack full of booze slung across his back. "Should we wait for him…?"
"I'd like to," Tori said. "He's trying to see if it's breakable. I'm cold, though. What happened to Hidan's jacket?"
"You can't wear it," Hidan immediately objected. "I don't want your smelly armpits–"
"I could restart the fire, yeah–"
"Deidara, you juvenile child–"
Kisame and Itachi left, but not after Hidan insisted the booze bag be turned over to his custody. Tori ended up cold for the next thirty minutes, during which Hidan and Deidara returned to playing would you rather. Sasori stayed for some reason that seemed to revolve around burying his hand in Deidara's hair and insisting it be brushed out. Tori sat in the grass with her arms wrapped around herself, missing her shirt and hoping drinking more would give her a "liquid blanket," as the kids said.
"Okay, okay," Deidara said, waving Sasori's hand away from his face. "Would you rather: fuck one of Itachi's exploding clones, or fuck Samehada?"
Tori blinked up at the night sky as Hidan snorted with laughter. "How does clone detonation work?" she asked. "Is it definitely going off, or is there a chance I'd get all the way through?"
"Oh, Uchiha is definitely going to go off before you finish," Deidara answered, and Tori could hear the smirk in his voice.
"Deidara, I know you like explosions," Tori replied primly, "but I don't need to hear your sexual fantasies."
"I think I'd fuck Samehada," Hidan said, dead serious.
"You're all disgusting," Sasori said mildly, then started on a braid with Deidara's hair.
Kakuzu eventually came back down the hill, panting and much more calm.
"It is impervious to all five elements," he reported.
"Itachi said it's eating up chakra quickly, though," Sasori said, yanking at Deidara's hair. "It might not be practical for long-term use."
Tori bit her lower lip. She'd been afraid of that.
"Oi, oi," Deidara said, pulling himself free of his partner. "It can't be completely impervious."
He was on his feet and halfway up the hill before Tori had even completely processed what was going on. Hidan followed, whipping out his collapsable pike again. Tori felt… tired. She was tired.
"Can one of you take me back?" she asked of Sasori and Kakuzu, but they were already following their partners up the hill.
Hidan had abandoned his jacket randomly in the grass. She pulled it on, and it was comically large on her, the sleeves eclipsing her fingers like a child wearing their parent's clothes. Still, she felt a lot warmer as she headed up the hill herself.
"Maybe it is impervious," Hidan said after his pike bounced off the barrier for a third time.
"Why would that work, and not a lightning bolt?" Kakuzu demanded. "Moron."
"Jackass!"
"Hmm," Deidara said thoughtfully, and took a step back.
"Do not," Sasori commanded.
Deidara smirked. "Too late."
The entire castle exploded. The shockwave was enough to send Tori tumbling back down the hill, heat hitting her in the face. Her hearing went strange and she threw her arms out to stop herself from rolling down the hill further, but she could still make out a roar of fire. The side of her body pointed towards the fire was hot, and she stared up at Deidara's creation in something like awe.
It was a huge, swirling vortex of fire. It hit the side of the barrier and then stopped, taking on the perfectly dome shape it was trapped in.
"Wow!" Deidara cried, impressed with himself.
"What would you have done if the barrier hadn't worked?" Sasori demanded, grabbing his hair and yanking much more violently than before. "You could have killed us all!"
Tori got unsteadily to her feet and approached the barrier hesitantly.
"It works fine though," she said, and rested her hand against it. It was only very, extremely hot and she yanked it back immediately. "Ow."
"It works topside, but I could still burrow under it, yeah!"
Sasori pinned Deidara– who was drunk and uncoordinated– to the ground easily enough, but Deidara slapped a handful of mud into Sasori's hair and Sasori let out a noise like a teakettle.
The fire kept burning. It was impressive, Tori thought. Maybe she should apologize to Deidara for slapping him.
"At least we know it's oxygen permeable now," she mused. "It would really suck if I accidentally suffocated all of you." Then, a horrible thought hit her. "The ghosts!" she cried. "Where will the ghosts live?"
"Ghosts don't live," Kakuzu pointed out. He had been completely unmoved by the explosion, although his skin had gone obsidian black from his Earth Grudge Fear jutsu. "They're dead."
"Are you wearing my fucking jacket?" Hidan demanded.
He wrestled her out of it. The barrier still held. The fire, having no access to new fuel, started to slowly decrease in size.
"I'm done with this," Sasori announced. He turned to Tori. "Did you say you wanted me to take you home?"
Home… weird.
"Or!" Deidara countered, getting to his feet. There was a gaping hole in his pants now, from which blood was freely flowing. "We go find an actual club!"
"No," Sasori said. Kakuzu rolled his eyes and added, "Too expensive."
"I'm in," Hidan said, shrugging on his jacket. "Chibigami?"
Tori thought about her options. She was tired, but she was also pleasantly drunk and no longer cold. And this time, she'd actually been invited.
"Sure," she agreed.
xXx
END NOTES: This was supposed to be a chapter of 90% dumb bullshit dialogue for my own amusement, but then it grew all this stuff about... shifting relationships and character development... ew.
