Author's notes: Let us hearken back to the article I quoted in regards to how strong a dog's sense of smell is. In canon, Hatake Kakashi is said to have a nose 1000x stronger than a ninken's. If we understood that in light of the scientist explaining that a dog is able to see from three thousand miles what a human being can see from a third of a mile, then Kakashi could track the entirety of the continent. Therefore, Tsume's oflaction, in this story and based on the scale established by the scientists and Kishomoto himself, is actually weaker than Kakashi's's canon oflaction. However, oflaction has been so greatly underplayed in canon (until it came time for Kiba to be tracking down Team Taka), that the descriptions I've created on Tsume's skills will just have to stand. In some ways, I have written 300k words just to highlight why having the oflaction of a dog is an amazing ninja skill.

Now, in this story, is Kakashi's oflaction still insanely powerful? Yes, yes, it is. When you look at the statistics and data of Kakashi as a shinobi - good grief, he was a fully graduated genin at the age of five, and a chuunin by the age of six - his skill level, natural talent, and intelligence are abnormally strong, and I try to highlight that randomly, between Kakashi using his own chakra to create a henge when he's not even a week old, to tree-walking before most toddlers can string a coherent sentence together. But in the great grand scheme of things, oflaction is so invisible compared to his other skills that it's not even registering as a blip on other people's radars.

o-o-o

o-o-o-o

o-o-o-o-o

Dawn came far too early for Danzo. He kept his body still while letting his senses roam. He was able to pick out some ground squirrels and a fox, but no other moving life in the general vicinity. Tsume was still curled up against him, asleep. His body ached from lying in one spot on the hard, uneven ground, which he expected. Other long-time muscle knots had relaxed away from last night's orgasm, but he had no intention of indulging again, whether due to necessity or leisure.

And most certainly not with Tsume. Danzo concentrated his senses on her, and was pleased to note that he didn't feel any desire. (What did he want out of sex? He wanted to find the largest, hairiest man willing to be on the receiving end of a hard fuck in a back alley behind some random bar, and obliterate the entire memory of an eager preteen girl.)

What he felt now… well, he could live with the shame and guilt better than the desire. He'd been living with such ever since the Second was killed. It seemed that his impromptu add-on to Orochimaru's original seal was still holding up, but it wouldn't last much longer than another day. He didn't have the ingredients to make chakra ink for sealing, so he was going to have to continue the slapdash patchwork modification until he was able to obtain the necessary ingredients for a more permanent solution. Next time, he'd had to use more blood to make up for the loss of semen.

The strong wind was gusting from the east when he nudged Tsume awake. She grumbled and curled up tighter in a ball, and then squeaked when he yanked the blanket from beneath her. "We have to get moving," he told her, tucking the blanket into his pack. "Take a sniff – is anyone chasing us or anyone around?"

Danzo watched as she closed her eyes in concentration and lifted her nose in the air. Then she frowned, eyes still closed, moving her head east, and then west for several long moments. "No one's behind us, I think. It's hard to tell when we're upwind, but I don't think I can smell anyone coming. I think they're concentrating on the mines." He certainly hoped that they would – many of the mines south of Tetsuzanshi were abandoned, which made them ideal hiding locations for bandits like he had pretended to be.

"Are you positive?"

Tsume glanced to the west, where they had come from, but spent more time turning her nose to the east. "Well, not really. I mean, I can smell the town from here, no problem…" She pointedly wrapped her arms around herself and shivered from the cold wind.

Here in the copse was at least forty kilometers away from the town. How much easier would it have been just to drag Tsume hither and yon all over Grass with her nose in the air until they actually found the enemy forces, instead of going through this damn farce?

"…but if they sent out a really small search party, like three or four people, I don't think I'd know until they were closer, unless the wind dies down, or I try harder."

Danzo studied her as a chill settled in his stomach. Now was probably not the time or place to be asking questions (especially when she kept glancing worriedly to the east), but the suspicion was going to nag at his thoughts and concentration if he didn't find out. Besides, strategies were best made knowing the tools one had at hand. So far, he knew he was working with a literally fearless twelve year old genin who had memory issues and a very distracting seal. The odds of survival didn't bode well in their favor. "As far as ratios go, what's the sense of smell of the Inuzuka ninken compared to the average human?" He knew the answer already based upon past questions and experiences working with the Inuzuka women (and their unclaimed sons) in ANBU. Oyubi was always much more precise than anyone else he had ever worked with, and he hoped that she had tried working with Tsume.

Tsume wiggled her feet. "Gosh. Well, we breed the dogs to maximize stamina and scent receptors, so I think… Stupid numbers. Humans have an average of five million? Aunt Natsumi said that our dogs have a sense of smell that's about one hundred times better than humans. Or is it a thousand? Anyway," she waved her hand, "Dogs have about five hundred million receptors, which is, like, way more than five million."

Now to establish her baseline. "How much greater sense of smell do you normally have over your dogs?"

Tsume frowned and pursed her mouth in a grimace. "Dunno. Never really thought about it. For what I can normally do? Gosh. I asked Nagumi once – that's Kuromaru's mom – and she said it was like twenty times hers, at worst. And she's got a really good nose."

He knew that the clan's sense of smell was generally half that of their dogs, but they could readily increase it with chakra enhancement – a hundred times greater than the ninken was the best he'd ever been able to have any Inuzuka who wasn't the current Clan Head own up to – and they did so enjoy their bragging – but it was something they could only handle for short periods of time. ("Have you ever tried staring into the sun for hours without blinking? Magnify the sun until it's the only thing in your vision, and stare endlessly into it, and that's what it feels like to us when our olfaction is fully enhanced, Captain, except it's a thousand different suns all at once, and you don't know which sun is casting which blinding light.").

On a normal day, Tsume's minimum normal sense of smell was one billion times greater than a normal human being. Danzo's mind whirled at the magnitude. "By how much can you enhance it? What's the most you can do?"

"Uh. A lot? You mean like in actual numbers?" Tsume scratched her head and thought. "Well, I dunno."

"A hundred times that of a ninken's?"

Tsume pressed a finger against her chin and rocked back and forth. "I think that's what Cousin Oyubi can do when she's tracking. So, definitely more than that," she said decisively. "Aunt Bashira made me have a contest with Oyubi after she joined the ANBU, and I could smell way more than she could." Her eyes kept flickering east with an expression of worry. Danzo knew that the cause of her distraction would be the next thing he addressed.

"Two hundred times?"

Tsume's answer was confident. "More."

His horror was growing in leaps and bounds. His voice squeaked in a way that hadn't been possible after puberty thirty years ago. "…five hundred times?"

Tsume's rocking stopped. He could see her toes flexing as she gave the math some strong consideration. "More."

In this stupidly fearless little simpleton were the secrets of everyone in the entire village, and she had no idea. The First had been wise in seeking out the Inuzuka clan and talking them into joining Konoha – perhaps wiser than joining forces with the Uchiha and Hyuuga – at least the Inuzuka clan was as notorious with their loyalty as they were their sense of smell and lack of clothing. Well, minus that one incident when Tsume was born, but Shinzou had never strayed from her clan treaty and never made any active attempt to harm Konoha when that happened.

"How could you know if you can't understand how to actually measure your sensitivity?"

The expression she gave him was flat. "Because I've got the best nose – even Grandmother admitted it, and she would never say anything nice about me! Grandmother and Aunt Natsumi and Tsunade-hime and others always said that the reason I nearly died in the Nara forest, the reason why my brain turned to mush, is because I pushed the limits of my senses, and it caused so much internal pressure that everything bled, or clotted, which caused organ failure and other stuff like that. It's very complicated, I guess. Yuu-san said that's not true, that someone shredded my brains instead, and Grandmother said she never told me… whose limits I pushed, but still… I don't remember much of that day – don't even remember going into the forest. But I do remember smelling salt and snow in Wind. Everyone told me that was impossible, that I had to be smelling salt from the sea from the east and Wind to the west and snow from the north, but not all in the same place. But I know what I smelled. There was a lot of salt, and there was a lot of snow, and it was in the same damn place in Wind. And it was pink. Don't ask me why I knew the salt was pink. The nose knows what it knows, okay."

Wind's far western border was a tall mountain range known as the Suna Salt Range due to its high levels of rock salt. The Suna Salt Range was not unknown, but it was uncommon to hear about it because Konoha rarely had the need to go that far into Wind's territory. Danzo knew the existence of mountain range only because he had seen it once, decades earlier in his youth while traveling with Squad Tobirama during a three-month long A-class tracking mission – a brief falling out with Natsumi that led Tobirama on a fucking soul-search – that took them all over Wind. They had discovered salt flats at the bottom of a valley. They were camping beside it when a snow storm came through, and in the morning, the flats had become a lake of salty water, its salinity too high to freeze despite the frigid cold. And since he had lost the rock-paper-scissors and was forced to share his blanket with Hiruzen that night, Danzo sometimes wondered where he'd be if he had attempted to drown the future Third Hokage in the salt lake.

It was not only more than two fucking thousand kilometers away from Konoha, but the salt had been as pink as a summer sunset.

Damn Orochimaru.

"I don't know the exact strength of my nose, really. But I was told never ever to push the limits again, that I was lucky to survive what I did with what little brain I've got remaining. And the brain is an important organ, you know, so I'm trying to keep what I've got left. Um…" Tsume nervously tugged at his sleeve. "I know this sounds really weird, but I can smell Uzumaki Kushina-chan with some Kumo nin, way over there." She pointed east.

He felt his heart thud as his mind flew off in two different directions. How did Sakumo manage to lose our jinchuuriki? "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely. I'm really sorry I can't do better with the village we came from, but the wind is coming from Kushina-chan's direction, and it's faint, but I know what I smell."

"Can you smell any other Konoha nin?"

"No, sir. I don't think there's really a pursuit, and she doesn't smell like she's hurt, I think. It's very far away though, and Kushina-chan's scent is…unique?"

He was unable to keep the wry tone from his voice, despite the thrum of worry and the rapid flurry of thoughts and suspicions. "I thought we all were."

Tsume blushed and ducked her head, looking shy and somewhat embarrassed. She wouldn't blush when faced with a man's erection, but she blushed at the thought of Kushina's unique scent. Curious. "Well, yeah, but… but she's different. Kushina-chan is Kushina-chan, you know? She's the Red Hot Habanero. She's… I don't know. She's different. Oh!" Her expression became one of absolute worry. "But what about the information I have, about Iwa? We have to go away from Konoha's Grass camp to save Kushina-chan! Do you have a summon or something we could send to Orochimaru?"

"No, I don't have a summon. Summons are not something that are readily handed out left and right to shinobi." How well he knew precisely how different Kushina was. He was one of the privileged few in Konoha that the Hokage had informed of Uzumaki Kushina's status. He didn't know if jinchuuriki had a unique scent given what they hosted, and whether Tsume was detecting that difference without being aware of it, or if it was because Kushina was one of her few friends. (He made a mental note to ask Oyubi about Kushina's scent at his next opportunity.) But how could Kushina have been successfully separated from her sensei, unless that idiot was dead or incapacitated? Which meant the fate of Kokoro was equally uncertain. "How sensitive is your nose to be catching Uzumaki's scent? Would you say you're about five hundred times a ninken right now?"

She crossed her eyes in thought. "No, not nearly that."

"Let's think of this in percentages." Danzo knew they didn't have time for him to be walking Tsume through a process that her clan should have already established when she first entered the Academy. The last thing they needed was Konoha's jinchuuriki in the hands of Kumogakure. He could just imagine the level of destruction and mayhem if the nine-tailed beast was used against Konoha. But a small part of Danzo wryly pointed out that Uzumaki Kushina was probably a week's travel away, so a delay of a few minutes would hardly make a difference, but knowing the tools at his disposal would. "Where your nose normally is – that would be zero percent. The point where you… would be pushing the limits, that's one hundred percent. Understand?"

Tsume pressed a finger with uncertainty to her lips. "Yes? Yes, I think so."

He held up his hands – ten fingers. "As you increase the chakra at your nose, you increase your sensitivity. The point of pushing your limits is where you've increased your chakra to one hundred percent. Theoretically, if you halve that chakra, it would make your sense of smell half of your hundred percent. For the purpose of this exercise and for future references, half of your chakra is fifty percent of your sensitivity." He closed one hand into a fist, leaving the other hand open and unwavering.

"Yes?" she said, probably because she wanted him to know she was still following.

"Do you know what your one hundred percent is?"

"No. I've never tried pushing it again. I was told never to go past the point where the world spins and spins, so I've never really tried boosting my sensitivity that much."

"Do it right now."

Tsume frowned and glanced towards the east. "Why? What about Kushina-chan? Shouldn't we be leaving for her?"

"I'm establishing a baseline. If I can calculate the sensitivity of your olfaction by using known set geographical points, based upon established percentages of the chakra you're directing to your nose, I can roughly estimate the distance between us." As she blinked in confusion, Danzo sighed and translated. "I'm trying to figure out how strong your nose is so I can tell exactly how far away Kushina is."

"Oh, okay! So, uh, what should I be smelling?"

"Bring your sensitivity down to where you normally have it."

"All right. It's done."

"Can you still smell the village we left?"

"…No? The wind is too strong."

"If there was no wind, could you smell Tetsuzanshi?" As Danzo talked and instructed Tsume, he stripped bark from several of the trees with his kunai, and reshaped the strips to Tsume's feet. He ignored the hunger in his stomach and the dryness in his mouth. He could hear the fox rustling in bushes as it moved, ignoring them once it decided they weren't a danger.

"Yeah. I could last night before the wind started."

"How well could you smell it?" That was the difficult part – words like "faint" or "strong" were subjective and impossible to measure.

"Sort of okay, I guess." Hopefully the subjective would become more objective with time and experience.

"Could you smell individual people or places?"

"If I know them – I could smell Madame Haori and some of the staff readily enough, because I was looking for their scents. She's really pissed off, too, by the way."

"Could you smell enough to know its approximate size?"

"Before I saw it when Grandmother sold me there, I could smell Tetsuzanshi had to have at least five thousand people. But all those smelts and the burning coal smudges everything up, because they're strong and overwhelming, so it was a little hard to get smaller scents. Like, I smell all of that really easily, right now even with the wind blowing, and I know where the smelts are, but smelling the village itself beyond the smelts is harder from here." Danzo forcefully stamped down his anger at the thought of a supposedly loyal Konoha kunoichi selling her own granddaughter into sex slavery.. "It's like trying to read a book that's covered up with a thick comforter. You can see the shape of the book, but the words are really hard. What? Am I doing this wrong?"

"No. A thought – different thought – occurred to me. Did anyone in your clan ever work with you on your nose?" Danzo yanked her socks off, and slid the shaped wooden strips in between the bottom layers. It would work now for shoes, until he was able to procure a sturdy pair at some point.

"My sister did, before the accident. Nagumi tried before Kakashi was born, when Kuromaru and I were first partnered, but ninken aren't any better at math than I am. Aunt Natsumi never stopped trying, but she can't smell anything anymore, and it's really frustrating for her. Aunt Bashira used to, until Grandmother squashed that, so Oyubi does it on the sly."

He waved a hand impatiently. "Never mind then. So with a percentage of zero – your normal, everyday baseline – you can smell the village faintly from a distance of forty kilometers without contending with wind." He would work with her later in Konoha to establish what, within the confines of zero, her nose could detect, when coal-powered iron smelts weren't involved. "Now, increase the chakra in your nose to one hundred percent – push it all the way to your limits, to where the world spins – but does not hurt – and then drop just below that so the world isn't spinning."

"Okay." She squeezed her eyes shut for a long moment, and then shuddered. "Oh. Wow." She peeked one watery eye open for a moment, looked at him, and then shut it. "The world isn't spinning, but it's really… wow."

"This will henceforth be your maximum of one hundred percent." He braced himself. "Can you smell Konoha from here?"

She whimpered and rocked, shoulders tense and hands tightened into fists. "Yes."

("Have you ever tried staring into the sun for hours without blinking?")

"You're in pain. Drop it back down now to zero." After he saw the tension in her shoulders leave and the rocking stopped, he said, "If I have our position and the map in my head correct, Konoha would be approximately eight hundred kilometers southwest of us. Could you smell any individuals in Konoha?"

"Yeah. I could smell the Hokage smoking. And he was drinking oolong tea with two cubes of sugar and a bit of cream, and also he was eating a banana with some ink-stained sugar sprinkled on it, and he'll probably get a rumbly tummy because the banana was still really green. I know mine does. And he was talking to three Uchihas, including Fugaku and his father – I guess the police were having a meeting with the Hokage. Fugaku and his father didn't have breakfast, but the other – I don't know his name, but he's just a cousin – did of left-over fried rice and milk, no tea. Uh, eight hundred kilometers sounds really, really far away."

Danzo bitterly realized all Orochimaru had to do to get the information he wanted was prop Tsume on a hillside in Grass with the wind blowing slightly towards her, with her olfaction at one hundred percent for a few moments. I will kill him slowly. And strong words will be had with Inuzuka Shinzou for her failure in measuring Tsume's abilities. All of that gone to waste in a fucking brothel. Knowing what her olfaction might be like was even more shocking that that damn seal. He had no idea how to calculate such a level of sensitivity compared to the average ninken. Would her maximum be that of a thousand times a ninken's, to smell the Hokage's breakfast of ink-stained sugar from over eight hundred kilometers away?

Fuck it all – two thousand? "Now—"

"Oh, and also there's four male Iwa shinobi on our trail from Tetsuzanshi. They're at the rocks where I said I'd fuck Orochimaru if I have to."

His mind immediately switched tracks. "We're leaving. Now." He handed her a handful of dried meat from his pack before hefting her to her feet. "We need to go get your little friend."

"Mmmmm! That's right!" she said as she stuffed the meat into her mouth. "Sakumo-senpai said that those who abandon their teammates are worse than trash." Then she gasped and nearly choked. "But what about the information we have that Orochimaru wanted?"

Personally, Danzo thought that those who abandoned Konoha were worse than trash. And to let Konoha's jinchuuriki fall into enemy hands was even worse than abandoning Konoha – that would qualify as active treason to destroy Konoha, as far as he was concerned. "Konoha has waited for two years to take care of Iwa. A few extra weeks won't matter at this point. Get on my back, now."

"Um." Tsume's cheeks, puffed up from where she had stuffed the meat, burned red as she shyly poked two fingers together. "Do we have time for me to pee?"

That was… reasonable, he supposed. He couldn't have her say in the middle of their run, "I have to go now!" Much less announce that in a fight if they were caught. He lifted a hand and pointed. "Make it fast."

Chewing rapidly with her mouth open, Tsume ducked into the bushes – her movement startled the fox, making it sprint across the copse. There was a long pause. "Can you step away, Danzo? My bladder is shy."

Danzo rubbed the bridge of his nose as he turned his back and walked in the opposite direction, bare branches dusted with frost dragging at his clothes. "I am shocked that you even have a bone in your body that's shy, much less an organ." Let alone a polite bone or organ – it was the first time she'd referred to him by his actual name since they escaped, and she did it with a familiar casualness that shouldn't be acceptable between twelve year old subordinates and their forty-five year old superiors. Granted, he supposed she had more right to her familiar casualness than most other people, since he hadn't been sexually intimate with anyone in Konoha since Torifu was KIA eight years ago. (Really, the only people who called him Danzo these days were his old remaining teammates and the Sannin. And Sakumo, who didn't count, because Sakumo was a subordinate who had absolutely no respect for other people's personal spaces. Small wonder then that Hatake Sakumo got along so well with the Inuzuka sisters.)

"Oh, my vagina's quite open – usually for business, as Madame Haori told me once – but I've never had to piss with a guy around, before. Sorry."

He quickly attended his own ablutions in private before joining her once more. Tsume was shifting her multiple layers around, trying to find some way of creating pockets in which to stick her cold hands. He yanked the bottom pair of socks off her feet to act as gloves, and then told her to mount up.

"This would be more comfortable if I wore the pack," Tsume said without moving. He rolled it off his shoulders and shoved it against her.

"Fine. Now get on." She obeyed after making sure the pack was secure on her own back, still chewing on the dried meat. He made another bunshin duo and sent them scampering south, as if heading for Grass. He turned east, towards Lightning. He wanted to fight – wanted to kill something – but a battle would be too much of a delay with rescuing Konoha's jinchuuriki.

"Those shinobi following us – I know two of them." Danzo heard the reluctance in Tsume's voice. If he wasn't absolutely assured that Tsume was utterly incapable of feeling fear, he would've thought she sounded fearful.

"They hurt you." But he knew better. Reluctance wasn't the same as fear.

She squirmed on his back, almost as if trying to distance herself. He felt the muscles in her legs flexing – undoubtedly she was wiggling her toes again. "Well, you were the only one who didn't."

An image – stark beneath the glow of the naked light bulb, blood smearing his thighs and penis – flashed through his mind as a voice hammered at his soul. TWELVE FUCKING YEARS OLD. "I also hurt you."

"Then why did it feel good with you? Some of the older women would talk about the orgasms they'd have from generous customers, but most of the girls thought they were lying, because we never had fun. I knew that the women weren't though, because orgasms pump out this huge wave of pheromones. I like the women's pheromones better than the men's."

He… really should not be having this conversation with her. But if he didn't, then who would? "I'm experienced with pleasuring women in bed. It's a necessity for certain reconnaissance and infiltration missions." The thought that he had given Tsume her first… blood smearing his body – TWELVE FUCKING YEARS OLD – well, there went another piece of his soul, shriveling into ash. He didn't need it anyway.

"Oh! So you were a whore, too! Why are you angry – oh. Uh, sorry for calling you a whore."

He forced himself to calm down. He had met a few kunoichi who had become chuunin and jounin at very young ages. Of those who had taken similar reconnaissance and infiltration missions to his when they were significantly young – thirteen was the youngest he could remember – they had unhealthy ideas of sex. And they had only seduced a few men, let alone become a darling of a brothel. Not that his ideas of sex were any healthier, since he viewed it only as another weapon in his arsenal, to be used as required in missions and against the enemies of Konoha. Battle rape was still a brutal psychological weapon.

"Conversation over. I have to concentrate on putting distance between us and the Iwa shinobi."

oOoOoOo

"Okay," Tsume began, after an hour of awkward silence, "the Iwa nin split. The two that hurt me are following our trail, and the other two are following the decoy's trail." The first hour they traveled had been spent with him focusing again on her sense of smell and running her through various exercises to help train her understanding of distance and age of scent. It had proven to be a frustrating experience, since Tsume constantly balked at the idea of involving numbers.

Danzo said nothing to her comment – he was two hours ahead of the enemy, which meant they were gaining fast. When he remained silent, she said, "So… you don't have a summon?"

The intrusion of her tactless question momentarily derailed Danzo's planning processes for directing Tsume's olfactory training, strategies against the following Iwa shinobi, how to prevent Tsume from forming exceptionally unhealthy ideas of sex from her abnormal sexual experiences, and rescue of the jinchuuriki. Never mind the fact that he suspected, given her clan and utter disregard of fear, Tsume probably would've eventually developed unhealthy ideas of sex anyway. He still felt oddly violated whenever he thought of Inuzuka Natsumi in all her battle glory and how she deliberate antagonized everyone. He had a true moment of thankfulness when the notorious Hell Hound retired some fifteen years ago. "No."

"Why?"

Danzo remained silent a moment as he slid down the steep side of a canyon, skipped the river, ran up the gully until they hit a sparse forest of pine, and then doubled back to the river. He ran north on top of the choppy, churning water. The wind was just as fierce as it funneled through the canyon, but it was at his back pushing him, instead of at his front. Small blessings. A storm was brewing above their heads, the thick clouds steel gray and silver – even he could smell the impending snow. He calculated the efficacy of running through such a storm when it finally unleashed its fury, especially when he could feel Tsume shivering against his back, wet from the river's splashing rapids.

Despite his ongoing silence, Tsume wouldn't be deterred from her current line of questions. "There's lots of ninjas who have summons. I thought it was the thing for powerful shinobi."

At least this conversation was much safer than their previous one regarding sex. "Summons must be freely given – you can't just steal a scroll, since it's a breach of contract even before the contract can be signed. The original holder of the summon must have a great deal of trust to pass it on, and the person receiving the contract requires a deep-enough chakra reservoir to even be able to summon. It can be very draining."

"So…" He felt Tsume's claws scratch his shoulders as she flexed her fingers in thought. "So no one trusts you?"

Of all the things…! "I see your listening skills have become rusty," Danzo said through gritted teeth. Trust – bah. Sex was probably safer to talk about than trust.

"You've got loads of chakra, Danzo."

"Not the point."

"So… no one trusts you."

"Also not the point!" He took advantage of the wind's lift to propel him upward as he scaled the cliff wall. He could hear waterfalls in the distance, and didn't want to run more risk of getting drenched further than they already had from the spraying waters.

"But that's what you said!"

"Summons are typically given through a mentor. I've never been mentored by someone with a summon. To ask someone with whom you don't have an established, trustworthy relationship is to expose a desire that could be exploited." Even to ask someone with whom he did have such a relationship would open him up to exploitation. Asking would require offered favors. He didn't want to owe anyone anything, because debts interfered with his relationship with Konoha.

It was also utterly beside and beyond the point that there were very few persons with whom he had a mutually trustworthy relationship, let alone such persons having contracts that they were willing to share.

"Oh." They reached the top of the cliff. Danzo pulled himself over the edge with his hands, and stopped long enough to take in his surroundings. They had left the alpine tundra and entered the sharp, jagged mountains that marked the territory of Waterfall in the last half hour. It was warmer than Earth, but not by much. The soil was dark and rich in the valleys, the vegetation lush and vibrant in all its vivid autumn colors, and the forests of evergreen trees were just as large as Fire Country's deciduous forests. The many waterfalls and rivers fed from the glaciers blanketing Waterfall's northern mountains made it humid. "Still sounds like it all comes down to trust to me, even if it's because you're the one who doesn't trust."

He ignored her startlingly accurate insight as he skirted the edge of the canyon, moving towards the river that tumbled over the edges into a magnificent waterfall.

"My Great-Aunt Natsumi – she's really into summons. Studies them all the time. She's been trying to figure out how to turn our ninken into summons, so that way, we can call on them after they die."

Impossible. Summoning contracts had been made in the time of the Sage of Six Paths with techniques that were since lost. The only ways to obtain them were either through someone who held an active contract, or from a summon creature that deemed a person worthy, usually when a person attempted to summon without a contract in place and unexpectedly found themselves at the summon's home. And while summoning dead things or persons was possible… you didn't always get what you reached for.

After all, there's always a lot of things in the darkness eagerly reaching back.

"Aunt Natsumi likes me, you know. She said I could have my pick of any summon that I wanted – I can have up to four!"

Also impossible. "You can only hold one contract at a time."

"Nuh uh!" Danzo could imagine Tsume's outraged expression to match her voice. "Aunt Natsumi said you can hold as many contracts as you want, just so long as you never sign them the same way. I could sign a contract with my left hand, and my right hand could sign the contract to summon squirrels, and then my right foot – if I hold the brush in my toes – can sign a contract so I can summon cats!"

He could just imagine the chaos that would ensue. "Hopefully not all at the same time."

Tsume's feet wiggled. He was beginning to realize that Tsume's feet gave away her thought process as well as her face did. "Oh. That would be messy, I suppose, what with cats and dogs and squirrels and all that," she muttered. He felt her breath puff against the back of his neck. As desire bloomed lazily in the pit of his stomach, he realized that his slapdash modification was wearing off. He began looking less for a viable crossing over the river, and more for a sheltered area. "But I don't really want cats or squirrels. I want something awesomely cool to use in battle – like a hedgehog!"

"Not conventional," Danzo said as he paused a moment, balanced perfectly atop a boulder slick with river spray as he surveyed their geographical surroundings. "But would probably be quite effective in battle." If he had to decide between slugs or hedgehog, he'd probably pick the hedgehog, too. Unless you had to ride the hedgehog, the same way that he had seen Jiraiya riding his toads. But in most situations, hedgehogs would be a far more useful weapon.

"Hey, the Iwa nin stopped." Danzo remained silent as Tsume sniffed the air. "Yeah. They're hunkering down against the storm, since it's hitting them now. And they're making a fire."

How fortuitous. A blizzard would effectively cover their trail, and delay pursuit. "We're pausing here then." He dropped Tsume off his back, and then grabbed her shirts as she lost her footing on the rock. She dangled from his grasp as he hopped down to more solid ground and walked to the forest. "Go gather me some firewood." As she ran ahead, his pack bouncing against her back, he inspected the ground. Too close to the river. He retreated further, bypassing Tsume as she got tangled in the thick underbrush in her quest for dry wood. The sight of her bending over to sift through the thick blanket of fallen leaves made him want to bend over with her, pressing skin against skin.

Arousal was beginning to curl within just as the desire, but it wasn't rapid. He could deal with that.

Deeper in the woods, where the ground felt less damp, Danzo's hands flashed through multiple seals. Earth release: Earth Pit. The ground rumbled beneath his feet, and then a split opened up in the earth. Steps that led downward into the darkness formed.

"Cool, this is even better than Orochimaru's pit! Someday, I'm going to do really awesome ninjutsu just like that."

Ah, the fleeting fancies of youth and simpletons everywhere. "Follow me," Danzo said without looking over his shoulder as he descended the steps. The steps led into a large, empty, flat space that he lit with another jutsu, placing glowing hand marks against the solid earthen walls. Tsume followed after, her arms filled with multiple branches. As Danzo made a fire, Tsume left to gather more wood. Danzo left the taller, thicker branches in a separate pile. A gentle wind jutsu over the fire filtered the smoke as it left through the pit, so it wouldn't be noticed.

Tsume made two more trips for the firewood, and then brought back a dead rabbit on her last trip. "I suckered him out of his hole," she said, holding it up by one plump leg. "I thought maybe he'd make a good dinner."

Danzo really had no intention of cooking or staying long enough to cook – he really only made the fire to obtain the needed charcoal, and the warmth it provided was a welcome side effect – but shrugged anyway. He saw a ten-year-old Tsume in her currently eager, cheerful impulsiveness to help and obey, and it was gratifying in light of everything that happened. She was a resilient child, and may come out of the recent experience without too many… hmm, how had he told Sakumo last year? If Tsume could come out of her experience as a child-whore without becoming an emotionally-stunted misbehaving deviant with antisocial tendencies or any combination thereof, he would cook her any number of rabbits.

"You skin it, I'll cook it."

"Okay!" She was also intent on getting warm and her clothes dried out while the opportunity was available, as indicated by the socks she stuck on some of the taller branches Danzo had put aside and strung over the fire. "Can I take these off too and dry them?" Tsume asked, plucking at her shifts and shirts – the temptation to strip them off himself loomed in his mind. Danzo poked at the fire and carefully withdrew a flaming ember.

"Might as well. Go ahead and strip down completely, since I need to look at your seal again. Its effects are… leaking."

The look she gave him was knowing; he wasn't surprised – his arousal was impossible to hide from the nose of someone who could detect the Hokage's tea from four countries away. As Tsume stripped her many layers off and spread them out to dry, he carefully cooled the ember with water from his canteen and methodically crushed it into a fine charcoal paste. He then lit six of the long branches he had set aside earlier and arranged them as flaming torches in a lopsided oval close to the fire.

"Lay down there," he told the naked Tsume as he indicated the center of the oval. She obeyed without hesitation, her head tilted and eyes curious. Beneath the flickering light from the burning torches, her skin aglow and shadows prominent in the hollows of her cheeks and eyes, Tsume looked ethereal and older. He ignored the aesthetics – he appreciated beauty, but not of a twelve year old.

The arousal and desire weren't as forceful as the previous night, so he was able to coax her seal open and inspect it more closely without a hurried frenzy. Danzo had already acquainted himself with the larger characters of the seal, so he concentrated on the smaller characters and their intended influence. Fuuinjutsu was a complicated and difficult art to master; Danzo didn't consider himself a slouch, but he also wasn't a prodigy like Jiraiya, or a genius – like Orochimaru. Twisted, diabolical, but a genius nonetheless.

"One thing I don't understand is the medium he used to attach the seal to you," Danzo muttered as he traced the markings on Tsume's skin. She shivered at his touch, and seemed to uncurl and relax as his fingertips traveled over her body. He could see the degeneration of his earlier temporary modifications. The edges burned bright as they flaked away from her skin.

"What's a medium?"

"Did he use ink? Charcoal? Did he paint it directly on you, or did he transfer it from a scroll?"

She looked confused. One uncertain finger pressed against her chin as she arched minutely against his tracing touch. "Um. You mean how did the seal get on me in the first place? Dunno. Orochimaru said that only someone with a foot fetish would notice it being on my toe, so he bit my toe, and there the seal was." Her own toes kept curling and uncurling.

Danzo froze. "He bit you?" His desire was torn – on one hand, he wanted to keep touching Tsume's skin, stroking her like a fire, igniting sparks in her eyes and fanning the flames of her pleasure. On the other hand, he wanted to hunt Orochimaru down and disembowel him for biting Tsume like he was marking her as his territory. Mine snarled a voice, as another voice boomed, TWELVE FUCKING YEARS OLD. He was disturbed to find his normal thought process and justifications happily aligning themselves with the seal-induced desire.

(His arousal, on the other hand, twitched in approval at the general idea of biting, and imagined love bites scattered across her body.)

"Yeah. It was kinda disturbing."

It was even more disturbing that Orochimaru had transferred a seal directly into her blood and body using… whatever medium he used. How does one prepare and store a seal on one's teeth? Danzo had never heard of what the actual implications of such a move would be, but he suddenly knew that such an action permanently etched the seal into Tsume, like gold being stamped into brass.

Condemned even before she was a teenager.

"Don't be mad," Tsume whispered, reaching out to Danzo. She touched the back of one of his hands, and then pointed directly at his nose. His hairs stirred at the unfamiliar gentle touch. "I'm not mad, so you can't be mad, either."

"You should hate him for what he did." Danzo knew the error of hate though. Hatred led to wars – wars tore Konoha apart, paper cut by bitter, bloody, paper cut.

"You know, Grandmother told me I should hate the Uchiha for what he did." Tsume raised the hand that was touching his arm to point at her head. "But I can't hate this Madara. I don't even know if I could hate Grandmother. I think…. I think it's hard for me to feel hatred, almost like I can't feel fear, you know. Are the two things connected, hate and fear?"

In the midst of the blooming arousal and desire, he marveled at her simplicity. "We often hate what we fear. If you cannot fear, I imagine that leaves little to hate. What must it be like, to live without such burdens of fear or hatred?" It was a rhetorical question, one which he never should've uttered out loud, especially to a child. It revealed too much of his own internal conflicts. But the shock of being told that someone in the Uchiha clan – someone who should've been dead, even though Shinzou always claimed it was Madara – was responsible for Tsume's traumatic brain injury made his mind spin. After all, the greatest traitor/defector had been an Uchiha. Who's to say that Uchiha Madara hadn't left behind some slow-acting poison in the clan that targeted others?

And who's to say that Shinzou's claims weren't made from an overemotional, nearly hysterical state of a guardian seeing her beloved child so ruthlessly hurt and near death?

Tsume took his question as an actual inquiry. "I think it's all right. It seems like fear gets in the way of people doing stuff, and that's something I don't have to worry about." She had the audacity to sound cheerful. "I do get stuff done!"

He dragged his mind out of the gutter where her words made it take a sharp dive, and forced his attention back to her seal. He could address only one earth-shattering revelation at a time. He had no fear of her trying to take exploit his probing questions and manipulating the information for her own personal gain. Tsume was an honest girl with honest intentions, and still behaved as though the rest of the world (or maybe just Danzo) should respond the same way. Such strange, helpless naivety.

"You won't be getting much 'stuff' done with this permanent seal. You'll spend most of your life on your back, knees spread to whatever grunting brute manages to get past your defenses."

"But you turned it off last night."

He traced the modification he applied, left hand sliding down her abdomen, over her left thigh, and then stopping to rest against her left kneecap. "Temporary, only." And the gods help him if his temporary modification collapsed in the middle of a battle. He needed to know what he was dealing with, if there was anyway he could aim Tsume as a distraction without getting either of them killed, or his mind tangled in the snaring effects of the siren call. "This character, here," with his other hand, he traced the scrollwork that surrounded her umbilicus, "will deteriorate and eventually eliminate any and all attempts to permanently turn off the seal since it's designed to protect the seals from sabotage. It's known as a suicide stop – very common in many seals. This character," he traced the one spread across her left breast, "reinforces attention of any man who tries to dismiss his interest in you." He supposed that was one small blessing – the seal was geared to attracting adult men, not women and/or children and/or animals.

"The more you fight, the more you want?" In her oblivious boldness, Tsume stroked his bulging arousal.

Danzo shoved her hand away. "Roughly speaking, yes." It helped that he wasn't so much fighting his desire for her as he was redirecting his interest to the actual seal. He estimated that he had less than ten minutes before the modifications collapsed completely. "This character," he laid his right hand over one that spread elegantly across her right hip, "converts your chakra signature into desire. The more you flare your chakra, the stronger you are desired."

"But what if I shut my chakra off completely?"

"Unless you deliberately make sure you die in the process, there's no way to permanently shut off chakra – it's part and parcel to life itself. You can only mask it from being sensed. These characters," he deftly touched the left side of her ribs, where he could feel the vibrations of her heart, "ensures that no matter how well you mask your chakra, you will always be sensed if visual contact is made. These characters, on the other side, react to the chakra of the onlooker – the more the onlooker has and can harness, the more it lures them. Between that and the characters that ensure you're sensed and the conversion of your chakra, I shudder to think what would happen if you flared your chakra into a wave of killing intent against someone very powerful.

"Here," his hand moved down her side, "is where desire invokes arousal. Beside it, this character," the palm of his hand rested against her pubic bone, "is probably the only reason why you haven't been fucked to death – it helps spins your allure into making the ensnared feel a sense of… hmm, not quite possession, nor protectiveness. More like a guardianship." It was just easier to explain it as a character – in truth, it was actually a seal within the seal, designed to ensnare the victim and forcefully bend their will to meet Tsume's whims and desires, as a slave to the larger seal's inflicted lust. He wondered if it was a concession Orochimaru had made to keep Tsume relatively safe.

"At first glance, this is a one-part seal, but there's three layers to it, all reinforcing the same thing." Danzo's hand swept down her ribcage, across her abdomen, and down further. His touch was gentle in its exploration as he cupped her sex with sliding fingers. "The seal is deliberately designed as a siren call to anyone with power. Very overdone, quite frankly, since men already usually function with the head below their belts."

Tsume gasped and her knees parted wide at his touch. Her toes curled. "What does that say about you?" she asked as her hips began moving against his hand.

"I can't reapply my temporary modifications until my old ones deteriorate completely. Besides, I'm testing something." The desire was controllable as long as he bent his will towards meeting Tsume's needs – that was the purpose of the deepest layer, the seal-within-the-seal. He had been able to focus and escape with Tsume on his back, instead of forcing her onto her back, because she had wanted to leave. And she had implied before, with some disturbing eagerness, about how he had been the only one to make her feel good…

Danzo watched her face and the seals – felt her fluctuating chakra-desire-lust – as he massaged and stroked her. "Close your eyes. Concentrate on what your body is feeling," he whispered.

She did after a moment of hesitation. She arched beneath his deft touch, her breath quickening. Danzo traced the seals with his other hand, stroking her beasts and rolling her nipples between his fingertips. He watched how the chakra flared in different characters, and wondered what the play of chakra rippling across her skin would look like if the seal wasn't on display. If he could have Tsume sated and sleepy by the time his modification wore off, then it might be enough to control his own arousal and desire against the workings of the seal, because she will have nothing left to desire – her satisfaction would be complete. He ducked his head to suck a nipple. It was disturbingly small in his mouth. He had managed to escape her room the previous night and flee, after all, when she had been sated. It wouldn't hurt to try.

Except that it did. (TWELVE YEARS OLD. Yes, conscience, I'm quite aware of what I'm corrupting – TWELVE FUCKING YEARS OLD. Shut. UP!)

Tsume's orgasm was swift in coming – more quickly than the older women whose bodies he'd coaxed in the past. Unfettered by embarrassment, endowed with the vigor of youth, Tsume reacted quickly to his touch. Her body quaked around his hand, knees clenching tight as she arched her back into a tight bow and her breath came in short, squeaky pants. Her seals flashed purple in the firelight as multiple characters lit up momentarily – especially the seal for guardianship. His suspicions proved correct.

Tsume's unmarked face was also lit up, more from an unexpected blissful happiness than anything else, as she pushed herself upright and looked at him with an expression that… Danzo resolutely turned his face away, to the nearby pile of crushed charcoal. He dragged his hand away from her pelvis, and lifted it to his mouth. He ignored the stench of her musk as he bit his thumb bloody, and then coated his hand with it. Then he dragged his hand through the charcoal until it was a bloody, sticky paste.

At that moment, the last of his temporary modification deteriorated completely. The bud of desire that had been nestled inside his chest bloomed into a rush of desire. He tilted his head back and let it wash through him. He was finally at leisure to sort through the myriad of subtle layers attempting to influence him, and he pinpointed each to a portion of her seals. The desire to protect. The desire to possess. The desire to yield. The desire to hide. The desire to consume. Because Danzo gave Tsume the attention she desperately craved – attention of any sort, particularly acknowledgement of being wanted – the seals didn't exploit his own desires to a mindless frenzy that stroked arousal to unbearable heights.

The arousal was still there, but was bearable.

Until Tsume started stroking him through his pants. It took a moment to redirect his mind after it recovered from his shock. "Stop." He lightly pinned her arm beneath his knee, and fought down the desire to shove her hand down his pants.

"But I can smell you!"

The more he fought her desire to please him, the more his own lust worked against him. "That can wait until I've replaced my modification to turn this thing off."

"Oh. But won't it cause you any pain?" Danzo remained silent as he infused his hand with chakra and began retracing his modification from last night. The seal he made didn't glow like the rest of her body, but it would do until he could get her to a fuuinjutsu master who was not Orochimaru. Tsume appeared to be making up for his silence with her own chatter. "That's what some of the other guys told me, you know. That having an erection for a long time hurts, and that it's my job to make sure that there was pleasure instead of pain."

He thought of her tongue sliding up and down the shaft of his erection. "Shut up."

Tsume did so, fuming resentfully. Danzo's arousal and desire flared.

"Talk to me about the summons you'd like and why." He started the multiple modifications to her seals, trying to tamper down their effects for when the "off" modification wore off. That would make modifying it in the future easier, especially if he didn't have to pleasure her first to ease the seal's effects.

"Okay! So, I was thinking of the hedgehog summon because they'd be really awesome to use in a battle, see…" As Tsume resumed her chattering, toes twitching restlessly and the arm he wasn't pinning with a knee waving in the air to punctuate her words, he felt the arousal and desire ebb backwards, like a rolling boil coming down to a gentle simmer. The more he opposed her own desires, the more his revved up. It seemed deliberately undermining and cruel to have that sort of seal on a child prostitute in a brothel frequented by vicious and cruel shinobi.

"So then, of course, I also have to get a contract for dogs. You know that's to be expected…"

He focused on his modifications, careful not to make a mistake even when she absent-mindedly wriggled beneath him.

"…so then, I thought, hedgehog and dogs are really practical, you know, so I thought of getting something that would be absolutely cool to have, that no one else would ever think of having! I couldn't decide if I wanted dragonflies or butterflies…"

He swiped clean one messed up seal modification with the sleeve hem of his other arm. "Hold still," he grumbled, focusing on redrawing the modification. She did, somewhat.

"…so then I thought, what would be cooler than a dragonfly, but a real dragon! So I asked Aunt Natsumi if she had any dragon summons, but she said no. She did have a unicorn summon, but that wouldn't do me any good unless I stayed a virgin the rest of my life. Good thing I didn't set my heart on that, huh, Danzo?"

Since her prattling paused then as if she wanted an answer, he murmured a wordless acquiescence.

"She said she did have a Baku summon, but I didn't know what a Baku was. Aunt Natsumi said that they're mythological beasts that eat dreams and nightmares. But what if I wanted to give someone nightmares? That seems more like a ninja-thing to do, so I told her I'd think about it, but not really, you know."

And as Tsume prattled on, nothing more than a seemingly innocent child, Danzo did what he could to make sure she'd stay that way for just a little longer, even though he didn't particularly like children. (They were, as Tsume so readily demonstrated, irrational and overemotional creatures.)