NOTE: This chapter was incredibly frustrating to write, but at some point you just have to scream GOOD ENOUGH and post it to move on. As a wise man once said: when in doubt, yeet it out.
ANOTHER NOTE: One of my rules for writing this is that Tori's not allowed to know anything about canon that I don't know off the top of my head. So, there's a part where she gets canon a bit wrong. This is on purpose, and not a mistake you need to tell me about. :P
Chapter 8: Fake it 'til you make it
Tori followed up Itachi up the stairs, and as soon as she stepped into the corridor at the top, there was an awful crash from below that could be nothing but the chandelier hitting the floor.
Itachi's expression remained as apathetic as always.
He led her past several doors with frosted-glass windows that gave off the impression of being offices, emblazoned with metal plaques that listed the room number and a blank space where a person's name could be engraved.
Tori checked every plaque for a name. If any of the Akatsuki had regular offices with their names engraved on the door, she was going to lose her shit. That was the weirdest, funniest thing she'd ever thought of. A strangled half-giggle escaped her, and Itachi turned slightly toward her.
Tori schooled her face. Right, her imminent demise. She needed to focus on that.
It was hard to be afraid of Itachi when he had so far displayed no aggression. No threats, uninterested body language, a blank face. She wondered what he'd do if she just turned around and walked away. Based on what she knew of him, probably… something really terrible involving genjutsu. Yes, that seemed in character. She followed him obediently.
The door at the end of the hall was marked CONFERENCE ROOM A. They had a conference room. Worse, the "A" indicated the possibility of a conference room B. What did they even do in there? Give seminars on murder? Present powerpoints on pillaging?
If anyone tried to show her a powerpoint in the Akatsuki base, she was going to expire on the spot.
"You know," Tori said, because she said stupid things when she was nervous, "I was expecting a cave."
Itachi didn't grace that with a response as he opened the door. The meeting room wasn't the dim underground cave Tori had envisioned: the room was lit by dim mood lighting ringing the ceiling, and was dominated by a dramatic dark-wood table.
Pein sat very dramatically at the head of the table, his hands folded in front of him. His orange hair caught the soft light of the room and haloed him in bloody red. Konan sat at his right, and she looked up as they entered, her indigo hair swaying around her chin. They both watched them with reserved, ominous eyes.
Tori felt her knees go a little weak and her stomach did a backflip of nervousness. This was it, this was–
Suddenly, Deidara's finger was in her face. His entire arm was bandaged and a piece of gauze was stuck to his cheek.
"You've got some nerve, you fuck-hat," he said, teeth grinding together, possibly in all four mouths. "Who the fuck runs away to the country that's after them, yeah?"
Pein sighed deeply. "Deidara."
"No, really," Deidara kept going, his voice steadily rising in volume, "who the fuck tells border control they invented cup noodles, then goes around town telling people their name is Cup Noodles? You think a ninja village can't figure that out, yeah?"
"Deidara."
Deidara huffed and sat down, kicking a chair as he passed. He took a seat next to Sasori, at the table in his own body, drumming his fingers against the glossy wood in an oddly human gesture.
"I said my father invented cup noodles," Tori mumbled.
Itachi gripped her forearm and steered her into the chair at the end of the table, opposite Pein. Her skirt, covered in mud and soaked by the rain, made a distressing squelching noise as she sat. Her muddy hair was unnaturally heavy around her face, and she suddenly became acutely aware that her sling what now filled with mud and water.
Itachi dropped her soggy backpack in front of Konan, who flipped it open. "There's a chemical smell," she observed.
"It's not caustic," Itachi replied.
"It's just heart goo," Tori supplied helpfully. Konan sent her a brief but sharp look like, Who said you could speak?
Tori clicked her jaw shut, suddenly feeling very small. The weak-kneed, stomach-churning feeling from before crept back into her.
Deidara waved in her direction and said, "You see? Everything she says is like that, yeah. I paraded her all over town and all I found out was that she doesn't know how money works and Oto is filled with sickos—"
"Can we start this properly?" Sasori interrupted, and Deidara pouted at him. "I have work to do." He shot Tori a look that made her want to hide under the table. "Repairs to make."
"Where's Kisame?" Konan asked, turning to Itachi. She'd removed all the notebooks from Tori's bag and piled them up neatly on the table in front of her.
As if to answer her question, Kakuzu kicked open the door and entered, Hidan's head swinging from his hand by his hair. A wad of fabric was shoved into his mouth. Kisame followed them in, Hidan's body over his shoulder.
"What is this?" Pein asked.
"The only way to have a productive meeting, apparently," Kakuzu answered and dumped Hidan's head on the table.
Kisame propped the body up in a corner, and Tori noted that one leg warmer was missing, and that it would be the same color as the cloth Hidan was currently trying to scream through. The veins in his neck were taught with anger.
Where is the blood coming from? Tori thought, mesmerized by it.
"It's Hidan's turn to take minutes," Konan was saying. Tori had not previously considered Akatsuki might behave in any way like a regular organization, but she guessed they had to keep track of themselves somehow.
"Why do we even bother–" Deidara started to say.
"It's necessary for organizational purposes," Konan said, her voice final. "Kakuzu, put his head back on."
How did Hidan even talk with his head detached, anyway? Tori wasn't exactly an expert on human anatomy, but she was pretty sure talking required lungs.
"I can take notes," Itachi volunteered.
"No, I want to do it," Deidara insisted, in the exact contrarian tone a child might use to say, No, me. "My handwriting is better, yeah."
"It is not," Sasori objected. "And you doodle."
An argument broke out, impressive in its childishness. Pein said nothing, even as Sasori grabbed Deidara's ponytail to stop him jumping across the the table. Instead, he stared Tori down, his grey-purple eyes intimidating even from this far away.
Tori kept her eyes on Hidan's head, trying to ignore the fact that she low-key wanted to vomit with nerves, and focused on contemplating how divine intervention in human physiology might work. Perversely, it made her miss Orochimaru, which somehow made her feel even worse. No, she wasn't going down that train of thought. She lifted her gaze and met Pein's eyes.
Pein hadn't yet blinked. That was an animated corpse, she remembered. He was just like Sasori– too still, unblinking, a little unnerving.
Under the table, Tori clenched her fists in her lap. This was a different game from Oto. No one was going to think she was cute because she knew some college level biology; no one was going to brush her off and ignore her if she broke down crying. The only way she was living through this was if she could convince them she had something they wanted, and that she needed to stay alive to give it to them.
"The girl can do it," Pein said. Everyone shut up.
Now that Tori had locked eyes with him, she wasn't going to look away until he did. She felt one eye twitch.
"You can read and write, can you not?" Pein asked.
"I can," Tori agreed. What the hell kind of game was he playing?
Konan sighed and slid a notebook with a pen tucked into it across the table. It was a completely normal composition book. Tori didn't know what exactly she had expected, but given Akatsuki kept meeting minutes, she thought the notebook would be more… evil, somehow.
Not that Orochimaru's notes had seemed particularly evil until you actually read the contents.
Itachi leaned over and flipped to a blank page for her. Some part of Tori was insulted by the gesture, but another part of her would kill to read the rest of that notebook. Those minutes had to be at least as interesting as Orochimaru's notes.
"Zetsu," Pein called, and Zetsu emerged up to his shoulders from the ceiling. Tori glanced up at him briefly while she dated the page.
Zetsu's presence was upsetting. Tori knew he was the source of all evil in the world (or... something), but right now he just looked like a pair of golden eyes peering out between a couple of fern fronds. She elected to ignore him. She had more immediate problems to worry about right now, like whatever type of half-assed psychological torture "take notes on our meeting on whether or not to murder you" was supposed to be.
"We called you all back to discuss Orochimaru," Konan started. "Sasori and Deidara located a base and confirmed rumors of his death."
Tori glanced up, even as she wrote Orochimaru's death and started a bulleted list under it. Should she say something? She definitely wasn't going to say anything unless asked.
"We found a body, yeah," Deidara said. "Pity Danna wasn't the one to–"
"Start at the beginning, brat," Sasori interrupted.
Deidara leaned back in his chair and crossed his feet on the table while Sasori recounted summoning Kabuto to confirm rumors of upset in Oto, Kabuto's subsequent betrayal, and Tori running off into the woods. While that had happened, Deidara had scoped out the base and investigated that himself.
"It was a little further west of the fake village than we thought," Deidara said, and Tori wrote down the exact location he gave. "The base went to shit fast, yeah," he continued, eyes lit up like it was great entertainment. "The whole fucking lab was on fire, it was great–"
Tori paused writing briefly. Had she done that? She'd lit a fire in the middle of a lab full of chemicals and just left it unsupervised...
She went back to writing; it was oddly soothing to have something to do with her hands. Deidara had found Orochimaru's body, still in bed with a single stab wound through the shoulder. Burns around the wound and across the body indicated a lightning jutsu, the likely cause of death.
"And then I blew it all up, yeah," Deidara concluded, sounding extremely proud of himself. "It was all carved into a mountainside, so I think mostly I just collapsed it, but from the outside, you could see the whole cliffside cave in and rocks went everywhere and there was an avalanche–"
"And then you went after this girl?" Konan said, gesturing at Tori.
"Uh, yeah," Deidara said, frowning at being cut off. "Danna thought she'd have more information since Kabuto was dragging her around, yeah."
"You said she could see the future," Pein prompted.
Kisame leaned forward. "Wait, seriously?"
"Let's talk about that later," Konan interrupted, and Pein glanced at her briefly. "Did you not say you suspected Orochimaru wasn't dead?"
"Orochimaru had several theories on immortality," Sasori said blandly. "Even as my partner, he was very secretive, but I'm fairly confident he had provisions for the death of his body." Sasori's eyes darted in Tori's direction. "That's why I brought his lab tech."
Suddenly, everyone's focus was on Tori. Even Hidan had stopped trying to yell through his gag and was glaring at her half-heartedly. She paused in the middle of writing provisions in the event of death.
"She was pretty evasive about her rank in Oto," Sasori said, drumming his fingers on the table again. "But she showed enough insight into Orochimaru's character that she most have worked one-on-one with him."
Are you FUCKING kidding me, Tori thought, nervously setting down her pen. She barely remembered what she'd even told Sasori. She licked her lips. "Um– yes, I did," she said.
"Then tell us," Pein said, and even though his voice was completely flat, Tori got the impression he was making fun of her. "How has Orochimaru avoided death? And don't stop writing," he added.
Sasori's eyes narrowed ever so slightly, as if he too thought their leader was poking fun of the situation.
Tori's mind scrambled to try and put together an answer that would make sense. "Um, Orochimaru spent a lot of time, um…"
Pein gave her a pointed look, and Tori picked up her pen to keep writing her own defense of her right to be here.
This was very mean.
"He spent a lot of time working on how to transfer chakra networks between bodies," Tori finished.
"You think he's in a new body," Konan said.
"Well," said Tori, "maybe."
"Maybe?" Konan repeated.
Tori sounded like a blabbering idiot. This was not going well.
"Are you familiar with his cursed seal technique?" Tori asked.
"A bit," Itachi said, "It's a method to enhance physical abilities."
He sounded incredibly unimpressed. It was possible Itachi just sounded like that when he talked, but Pein and Konan also seemed increasingly unimpressed with her. In fact, Tori could feel the room getting more and more bored with her with each passing second. Kisame was picking at a scab on his hand, and Deidara was examining his hair for dead ends.
Sasori was staring her down quite intently, as if her floundering was embarrassing him.
Should have thought of that before you kidnapped me, Tori thought.
"Orochimaru's cursed seal technique works by grafting his own chakra into the host," Tori said, taking a deep breath to steady her voice. "The chakra maintains itself by feeding off of, um… I think you call it nature chakra?"
Tori stood, leaning across the table and pointing at the pile of notebooks in front of Konan. "I have notes on it on one of the loose sheets of paper; it says something like 'exogenous chakra extraction'..."
Kimimaro had had a cursed seal, and since she had been working with his genetic material, there had been some concern the cursed seal could interfere with genetic manipulation. Sometime before she'd gotten there, Orochimaru had figured out a way to decouple his own chakra and Juugo's… enzymes or whatever else was in the seal… from the source tissue. Tori had never had to do anything with it herself, but at some point she'd been pointed to the protocol he scribbled down. She'd pulled those pages to take with her when she'd run.
Konan stared at her. She had a very intense stare, with her hooded, golden eyes, and Tori felt vaguely like she was reading in her mind.
Well, there was no way Tori could make Konan do what she wanted, so she just kept talking.
"Anyway, it wouldn't be too difficult for a dedicated shinobi to pull Orochimaru's chakra from a cursed seal and revive him."
Tori sat back down. Konan's gaze glided down to the notebook she'd indicated, and very slowly, she started leafing through it.
"How many people have the seal?" Itachi asked.
"Not many; the survival rate was really low," Tori said. Surely Itachi knew Sasuke had one. Maybe he was worried he'd be a target? "In the future I saw, Kabuto used Mitarashi Anko to revive him."
"I'll find them," Zetu rasped from the ceiling. Then in a decidedly scarier voice he added, "We'll hunt down every last delicious morsel."
Itachi continued to look uninterested, despite Zetsu threatening to literally eat his brother.
"Right," Kisame chimed in, grinning meanly at Tori. "You saw the future. You're really sticking with that story."
Tori scowled. "Yes," she snapped.
"We'll come back to that," Konan said. "Sasori, Deidara, how did she get away from you?"
Deidara dropped the strand of hair he'd been eyeing and slammed a fist down on the table. "By being an underhanded bitch–"
Through the gag, Hidan started screaming again.
"She's smarter than she looks," Sasori said, followed by an extremely succinct summary of events. Belatedly, Tori remembered she was meant to be taking minutes, and she grabbed her pen.
It occurred to Tori as Sasori told his story, that she'd only mentioned one S-rank missing-nin to the ladies who had helped her. Maybe if she'd mentioned Daidara, they would have sent more ANBU and she'd be free. Or maybe they would have considered it too much trouble and not sent anyone at all. Either way, she'd gotten a lot of people killed. Troubling.
"Why does Hidan hate her, though?" Kisame asked, ripping Tori out of her thoughts.
The question was clearly geared toward Kakuzu, who'd spent the whole meeting glowering at the opposite wall, his arms crossed over his chest.
"We've met," Kakuzu answered after a very long pause. "He summoned her."
"WHAT?" Deidara practically screamed at the same time Sasori said in a much more level tone, "How?"
Konan made a sharp noise of exasperation, leaned over the table, and ripped the gag out of Hidan's mouth.
"For FUCK's sake–" Hidan yelled.
"Hidan," Konan snapped, and he glared furiously at her but went silent. "Give a proper report," she commanded.
"Well, I didn't summon her on purpose," HIdan said. "I was summoning a shinigami–"
Deidara burst into laughter. Hidan gnashed his teeth at him and let out a few choice swears.
"Boy, did you miss the mark," Deidara jeered, wiping tears from his eyes. "A shinigami? Seriously?"
"She came out of a coffin full of blood," Hidan protested, which elicited for laughter from Deidara.
Kakuzu stood, circled around the table, and easy plucked squawking Deidara out of his chair and threw him across the room. Sasori, sitting right next to them, watched it happen with the vaguest interest.
"For what it's worth," Kakuzu said, as if he hadn't just committed an extreme act of violence, "She is from another world."
Deidara looked shaky as he picked himself up form the floor, but he didn't seem otherwise bothered. "Aw, are you defending poor Hidan's honor–" he started.
"Kakuzu," Konan said, cutting off Deidara. Her voice was very tight. "You found a girl from another world who could see the future and didn't say anything?"
He had also made a deal with their defected member Orochimaru when he definitely wasn't supposed to, Tori realized. That might be good blackmail. Or… it might make her a murder target. Extremely troubling.
"We didn't believe her," Kakuzu simply shrugged.
"It does seem far-fetched," Kisame drawled.
"This is off-topic," Pein said, and Konan raised her eyebrows at him. She'd been the one keeping the meeting on-task, but it seemed even she could get derailed by this insane place. Deidara staggered back into a chair, Kakuzu took his old one next to Sasori. "First, we deal with Orochimaru."
He reiterated that Zetsu was to find everyone with a cursed seal, and assigned Sasori and Deidara to hunt down Kabuto.
"Is there anyone else who could revive him?" Pein asked Tori.
She blinked up at him from her notes, which she was still taking, even if it felt like an overwhelmingly futile task.
"I can't think of anyone else with both the knowledge of motive," she said slowly. "There are other people who'd know how, but I don't think any of them are loyal enough to go to the trouble."
"Lower priority missions, then," Pein concluded and watched Tori write that down. It felt oddly like taking notes for a difficult class that had an extremely important test looming. "Now you can argue about what to do with the girl."
Hidan started yelling again, and Deidara joined in almost immediately. Tori shot Pein an affronted look, but he simply stared back, face blank. Right. He was the terrifying, big-bad of this group, and he was going to let a bunch of people who hated her decide her fate.
Tori had not played this well. She wanted to dig a hole in the ground and hide forever. Or maybe just burst into tears?
"Do any of you have any constructive comments?" Konan called over the din of Hidan bellowing that if Tori had crawled back to him, it was his divine right to send her back to Jashin.
"I believe her," Sasori stated. "If she convinced Orochimaru and Kabuto, then she really can see the future, or she's the world's greatest infiltration specialist."
He said this last part as if Tori simply being a good liar were nigh impossible.
"It is true that she'd be unlikely to survive Orochimaru without some sort of special ability," Itachi spoke up. "We should interrogate her for any more insight and then kill her."
What the FUCK? Tori thought. Itachi was supposed to be a pacifist! A nice guy! Another, more bitter part of her thought: Then make sure the interrogator learns all of his dirty secrets.
Unless the interrogator was Itachi. But, no– working on the premise that they believed her future vision, Obito and Zetsu wouldn't want him to learn their secrets either–
Oh, fuck,Obito. Where was he? Tori's brain wheeled.
Of course if they didn't believe her, she'd just go right to whoever normally did their interrogations, and they'd learn all sort of interesting things from her, which might be better for the world in general, but then she'd be tortured and maybe dead. Surely there was a way– Obito and Zetsu and Pein were all lying to each other and playing each other, but if she could convince one of them without pissing off the others, maybe she could–
It was a complicated, stupid mess with too many moving parts, and her mind swam trying to fit it all together. Around her she was only dimly aware of every member voicing opinions on how they should kill her. Except for Sasori, who wanted her as one of his living puppet sleeper agents. Thanks, Sasori.
"Tori," she heard Konan call. "You stopped writing."
Tori stared at her, mouth half open.
"Aw, don't you have anything to say?" Deidara asked, voice dripping with mock sympathy. "Surely a clairvoyant would be able to-–"
Tori couldn't hear the rest of his teasing through the sudden roar of blood rushing through her ears. She was going to die. She couldn't think of any lie good enough to make all of them want to keep her, and she was going to die for it. If only she had more time to think–
"I was just wondering," Tori said, her voice oddly calm even as she could hear her heart pounding in her ears, "if you're going to kill me– who's going to do it?"
The room went so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Then, in unison, both Hidan and Deidara yelled: "ME–"
"No," Sasori snarled, "I want her–"
"As a neutral party," Itachi started, and was cut off as Kakuzu leapt onto the table to intervene in Deidara chucking Hidan's screaming head across the room.
Feeling oddly like Eris tossing the golden apple, Tori picked up the notebook and pen as the table cracked beneath Kakuzu's fury. She scooted her chair back from the table as the whole thing collapsed. Both Kisame and Sasori were entering the fight now, as Hidan's head sailed across the room.
There. Now she had time.
She picked up her pen and finished up her notes, her mind racing.
"Stop," Pein finally commanded. His voice was pitched louder than normal and filled with authority, but he sounded almost resigned. Kakuzu got in two more punches before the fight stopped; even Itachi was holding a kunai. "Everyone out. Konan and I will handle this."
"This isn't fucking over, bitch!" Hidan screamed at her as he dangled from Kakuzu's hand. Kakuzu dragged his body out after him, and Deidara flipped her off as they left.
"This is our third table," Konan muttered, irritated.
Zetsu, conspicuously, did not leave his position in the ceiling. "I think our mutual acquaintance will be interested," he said when Pein shot him a look. By that, he could only mean Obito.
"Do you want me to take minutes on this too?" Tori asked.
"Let's keep it off the record," Konan said, arching an eyebrow at her.
"Okay," Tori said, and carefully closed the notebook in her lap.
There was a very long, awkward silence as Pein leaned back in his chair and studied her over the wreckage of the table. Tori spread the fingers of her good hand over the notebook, pressing down to stop her arm from shaking, and stared right back.
"You definitely shouldn't kill me," she said confidently.
"Why," he asked flatly.
"You're all going to die," she said.
"We're all going to die," Pein repeated, sounding bored with the notion and not at all like he believed her.
"Yes," Tori said, and then paused. That hadn't come out as smoothly as she'd meant. "Orochimaru didn't keep me around to tell fortunes about everyday events, and I can't see those anyway. The one common denominator in my visions that we found was, well, death."
Pein's expression was perfectly blank, but Konan furrowed her eyebrows into the tiniest, most unimpressed frown.
"Enlighten us, then," Pein asked, and yes, he sounded a bit like he was making fun of her. "Tell us one of your visions of death."
Tori took a few seconds to steal herself so she sounded rational and not at all hysterical or confused. It would be difficult to sell the future as something believable and not the slightly dumb plot of a shonen manga. "You get talked to death by Uzumaki Naruto" was definitely too far-fetched, and "You will be murdered by your friend Madara" could get her in trouble with Obito. But, a vision of murder was also a vision of death.
"You kill Jiraiya," she said evenly. "He's been monitoring Akatsuki on his spy network, and when he realizes you're the leader, he'll come to confront you."
"Why would he come alone?" Konan asked. "Not even Jiraiya is powerful enough to confront Akatsuki's leader by himself."
"I assume for sentimental reasons," Tori said, eyes flicking between the two of them. Truthfully, she didn't remember the details of that arc very well. "You were close once, weren't you?"
There was a long silence.
"I'm not convinced," Pein said. "Orochimaru could have told you this, a lie designed to play on feelings."
"If you're a true clairvoyant," Konan added, "why isn't Orochimaru still alive?"
"Circumstances made it so he died a bit prematurely," Tori said, licking her lips. "Circumstances are, um, easily influenced, if you know what I mean. Which is why you should definitely keep me alive."
That was it, that was her bid: a mix of ominous promises and a bit of a threat. They were going to die, and just having her tell them how wasn't enough to save them, plus the implication that maybe she'd had a hand in Orochimaru's death. Technically, not a lie.
Konan let out a soft little snort that was definitely laugh at Tori and not with her.
Of course, none of Tori's wild stories mattered if they didn't believe her.
"I'd like to talk to your mutual acquaintance," Tori said very quickly, before Konan decided to flick her fingers and kill her.
Pein tilted his head to the side ever so slightly. "And who do you think our mutual acquaintance is?"
Tori's eyes darted up to Zetsu.
"Uchiha Madara, of course," she said. "Your true leader."
"Ah," Zetsu made a tiny noise of interest. Konan's face was back to be being stoney and blank.
"I don't really like airing other people's dirty laundry in public," Tori said. "Which is why I didn't say anything in the meeting."
"You want to appeal to a higher power," Konan said, the corners of her mouth twitching into a smirk. "Because you know you already lost here."
Tori felt her stomach doing a weird sort of flip. "I–well–" she hedged. She been called out rather quickly. "Well, yes."
Konan turned away, leaning into Pein as they had a whispered conversation.
Tori did not know if she'd made a good move or not. She stared at her hand on the notebook. If she hadn't made a good move, she might as well be dead, and she still really wanted to read the other notes…
She opened the cover. The first page was dated a month ago, and contained such incredibly vague notes she didn't know what was going on. It took up half a page, and the next entry was a bunch of very messy, cramped notes written in paragraph form. Who the hell took notes in paragraph form?
The next page was a very detailed table of Akatsuki expenditures. Tori's eyes roamed over it. Kakuzu– and it must have been Kakuzu's– had surprisingly neat handwriting.
"Tori," Konan called, and Tori snapped the book shut and looked up guiltily. Pein was watching her like she'd finally done something interesting. Konan simply quirked an eyebrow and gestured at the lab notebooks that had been knocked off the table and scattered around the floor in the fight. "Tori, can you read these?" she asked.
"...Yes?" Tori asked. "I mean, yes," she repeated more confidently, "of course I can. It was my job."
"I think that should be reason enough," Konan said to Pein, who nodded.
"I'll inform Madara," Zetsu said, and sank into the ceiling.
"Tori," Pein said, standing. "Pick those up and follow me."
Tori had expected to be quizzed more– on things Pein already knew, to prove her ability, and then on her ominous promises of death and destruction. She had absolutely no idea what was happening, but she clumsily fumbled to gather the notebooks as quickly as possible with one arm in a sling. Behind her, Konan picked up her backpack, frowning at it minutely. Pein lead the both of them up another flight of stairs and into an office, and Tori didn't get a chance to see if his name was engraved on the door.
Tori dumped the notebooks onto the desk where he indicated, and then stood there awkwardly as he flipped open the meeting minutes and skimmed through them. Konan peered over his shoulder in an oddly intimate gesture.
"This is satisfactory," he concluded, and dropped the notebook on his desk.
"Thank you?" Tori asked, at a loss for what else to say.
"If anyone asks," Pein said, "you're our new secretary."
"With all due respect," Tori said, feeling emotionally like she'd just been hit by a truck, "What?"
"There are a lot of tasks around here that aren't really suited for shinobi," Konan said boredly. "I don't think anyone will complain if you pick up their slack. We were talking about hiring someone from the village anyway."
Tori thought of the disastrous first pages of that notebook. She guessed since none of them had much beyond a fifth grade education, it would be silly to assume any of them were great at more academic skills, like taking in large and potentially boring pieces of information and simultaneously summarizing them in writing, but still.
Still! What!
"We also might need someone who can interpret these," Pein said, picking up one of the lab notebooks. Behind him, Konan was shoving envelops and scrolls into a cardboard box. "And if we do take on a secretary… I think it fits with Akatsuki's image if she happens to also be from another world."
The tiniest shadow of a smile crossed his face. The Akatsuki's image was, of course, being an organization of otherworldly monsters. Right. Okay. So all Tori had to do was make sure Pein never figured out how painfully boring she was.
Tori was already internally screaming.
"So," Pein concluded, "you better come up with a convincing argument for our acquaintance."
Aaaah!
"I'll show you where you'll be staying," Konan said, pushing past her to the door with her box of random papers.
Tori glanced between her and the stack of notebooks on the desk. She really needed to reign in the sass, but also she'd dragged those across the country.
"Can I–" she started to ask, giving the notebooks a look of yearning.
"No," Konan answered flatly. "Follow me."
On the way out, Tori confirmed that Pein did not have his name printed on his office door. Thank god.
Tori followed Konan down into basement sublevel three, which was a dungeon. A literal dungeon, with prison cells that were even smaller than her cell in Oto, with chains hanging ominously. Inside each one was a narrow, metal shelf that was probably supposed to be a bed, and a small, seatless toilet. The doors, all currently hanging open, were solid metal sheets with a tiny barred window. Each one had a little slat at the bottom, that could be opened and closed and locked from the outside.
"We're not keeping anyone else here, so you can pick your cell," Konan said mildly, dropping her box and Tori's backpack on a table that was probably meant for some sort of guard.
"How kind," Tori said dryly.
"Hmm," Konan said vaguely. "I suppose you can work here," she said, waving at the table. There was a single stool behind it. "And there's a real bathroom and showers through there if you want." She gave Tori– who was still damp and covered in a mud– a critical look. "Maybe take care of that before you start working."
"Uh–" Tori said, feeling overwhelmed. "Working?"
"These are mission requests we've gotten this week," Konan said, placing a hand delicately on the box. "Read through them and summarize what they want and where they want it done. You have food, right?"
"Y-yes," Tori teetered out. "I'm sorry, did you say–"
"Good, I'll figure out who's in charge of feeding you later." And with that, Konan made to leave, but paused at the door. "Make sure you're done with those by morning," she commanded. "In cause our acquaintance decides to to kill you."
She pulled the door to the dungeon shut behind her, and Tori stood stupidly in the middle of the room for several minutes, trying to process what the hell had just happened.
Apparently whispering 'Uchiha Madara' was enough to make a girl his problem, and not Pein and Konan's. It was a pretty well-kept secret, she supposed, and not one they thought she could have picked up from Orochimaru. They probably trusted Obito to figure out if she really had future sight or not… Which. Fuck. This had escalated so terribly from pretending to a shinigami for Hidan.
Tori realized she was panicking– her pulse all weird and out of control, and her brain filling with unwanted fantasies about Obito killing her in various creative and terrible ways– and she went to find something to distract herself with.
First, she tried opening the dungeon door. It was locked. She wasn't sure she'd have the nerve to make a bid for freedom if it had been open. She certainly didn't have the nerve to try setting off another explosion with a poorly made blood seal.
Next, Tori picked up the first document in the box Konan had left her. It was a letter on light blue stationery, and it began:
To whom it may concern, Having spoken in detail to Mr. Hoshimaki, your previous client whose payment and candor I'm sure you quite pleased with, and please let the reader note that we did this with THE UTMOST SECRECY, I have endeavored to contact the friends, or shall we say the 'dear friends,' of Mr. Hoshimaki, who spoke very highly of the services rendered, and who I should note is a very good friend of mine–The entire first page went on like this. The second and third pages were about his sister's marriage to someone else who had once contracted the Akatsuki. The final paragraph was a request for the Akatsuki to contact the letter writer, making no mention of what they wanted– if anything– from the group. The entire letter was all of five very long sentences. No wonder no one wanted to read these.
Tori set the letter aside and picked up a scroll. It was written in code. She dropped it, grabbed her backpack, and went to check out the showers.
The showers were actually a tiled room with five faucet heads and absolutely no partition or curtain between them. A single knob by the door, which Tori guessed was meant to be operated by the guard, controlled all five. How wonderfully dehumanizing.
Having the entire room to herself, however, was actually nice. She paraded through all five stream of water, humming showtunes and scrubbing down all her cuts and burns and bruises, and combing an impressive amount of mud out of her hair.
She washed out her muddy clothes and sling next. Most of her extra pieces of clothing were filled with heart goo, and she washed those out too. She then dutifully applied the various ointments and bandages the clinic had given her and changed into the least goo-stained items at the bottom of her bag– clean underwear and a tunic-style shirt. She pulled her damp sling back on and spread her cleanish, wet clothes around the dungeon, hanging them over the doors and across the prison beds.
It seemed a bit counter-intuitive to let a prisoner read through Akatsuki's potential future missions, but Tori guessed they were reasonably confident she didn't have the means to do anything with the information. She carefully balanced herself to sit cross-legged on the stool, opened one of her squished ration bars, and started going through the letters.
Konan had left her a pen, a pile of index cards, and some paper clips to affix her summaries to each letter. Tori went through the first four requests before she decided on a uniform way to format her cards with the requester, the location, the requested objective, any missing information, and then extra information provided. A lot of requesters promised political favors, for example, and one guy offered "riches beyond your wildest dreams." Tori also had to leave a lot of notes along the lines of, "They were not very clear, but reading between the lines…"
As it turned out, a person only contacted the Akatsuki if they themselves were insane. Even the more coherent letters wanted things like "the utter destruction my friend Satoshi's cake delivery service" and "to exorcise a ghost."
There were also, of course, a lot of requests for murder. Just… so much murder.
There were two written in code that she set aside.
When Tori was done, she had absolutely no idea what time it was, but she felt a wave of exhaustion hit. She pulled her camping blanket, with its minor goo-stains, out of her bag, staggered into the closest cell, and then passed out on the bed.
xXx
"Good morning, Tori-chaaan!"
Tori pulled her camping blanket further over her head. Someone was being way too loud at whatever o'clock in the morning, and the light was on. Had she forgotten to turn it off? Whatever. The person was still being rude.
"RISE AND SHINE," the voice yelled with an infuriating amount of cheer, and then the blanket was ripped off.
"Fuck," Tori swore groggily, blinking furiously as she tried to figure out who had ruined her sleep, and who she now had to murder.
"Tori-chan!" a man in a swirling orange mask chirped. "Are you awake now?"
Oh, it was just Tobi. Tori let her eyes fall closed again and flopped back down onto her prison bed.
Wait.
Tobi!
Tori was on her feet in three seconds, every sense suddenly alert. Why would they do this to her first thing in the morning? Was it even morning? What was going on?
"Nice to meet you, Tori-chan!" the man cheered, even as she plastered her body against the wall furthest away from him. He jumped forward and threw his arms around her, bringing her into a tight hug. "Tobi is Tobi, a lowly underling of the fearsome Akatsuki!"
Tori let out something like a wheezing squeak. Maybe her soul was escaping her body.
What the FUCK.
"Is Tori-chan alright?" Tobi asked, stepping back and dipping his head innocently. "You look a bit peaked."
"I'm fine," Tori squeaked out, sounding exactly like a dying and very scared mouse.
"Good!" Tobi clapped his hands excitedly. "Konan-sama sent me to tell you to come up to the fifth floor in half an hour! Tobi will leave the door open!"
He danced away, leaving Tori to stare into space, wondering if she was suffering a fear-induced heart attack.
After a few minutes of focusing on not hyperventilating, Tori managed to pull herself together. Somewhat. Her hands still shook as she brushed her teeth and washed her face.
Her leggings were still damp in places, but she had nothing else and pulled them on under her tunic, hopping around as she struggled to do it one-handed. The tunic was long enough, and Tori short enough, that it worked okay as a dress, but she risked flashing her underwear if she had to bend over.
She had absolutely no idea what this day would bring, but she was going to pre-emptively squash any chance that any strange missing-nin might see her underwear.
Figuring that had taken about thirty minutes, Tori balanced the box of mission requests on one hip and headed upstairs. It was enough flights of stairs that when she got to the top, she was slightly winded.
The fifth floor was divided into two parts. To her right was a currently empty communal living room with a couch, a few scattered chairs, and a boxy TV right out of the 90s. Tori had completely forgotten the Naruto world had television. Huh.
To the left was a spacious kitchen, and a dining area where Konan and Itachi were sharing a pot of tea. Tobi was dancing around the stove, preparing what looked like scrambled eggs.
Right. Okay. That was… that was what they were doing today. Okay.
She stayed as far away from him as possible and slinked over to the long table Konan and Itachi were seated at.
"You wanted to see me?" she mumbled, glancing over at Tobi, who'd started to sing. What the hell sort of a game was this? Was she supposed to prove herself by ripping off his mask and going, I knew it! You are Uchiha Obito!
That seemed like a very bad idea. She'd play along with whatever this was instead. Mentally shaking herself, she dropped the box onto the table and plopped into a chair one over from Konan. She was still dead tired.
"You wanted to see me?" she asked.
"Tori, good morning," Konan said, pulling the box to herself.
"Good morning," Tori replied automatically. "And um, you too, Itachi."
He nodded and asked, as if the last time they'd seen each other he hadn't recommended torturing and killing her, "How's your back?"
It took a couple seconds to process that the question was not because prison cots where terrible, but because Itachi had watched in exasperation as Kisame had literally dragged her across the country. She did have quite a few cuts and a couple of nasty bruises back there, but…
"Not nearly as bad as it could have been," she said.
"I'm glad," Itachi said, sounding as if he didn't care at all.
Konan skimmed Tori's summary of a request and then the request itself. "A cake delivery service…?"
"Is it a code?" Tori asked, voice as tired as she felt. "Some of them were in code."
"I don't think so," Konan said, and then passed the letter to Itachi. "Anyway, I called you up to tell you your meeting has to wait until this evening."
Tori stared at her, looked over to make sure Tobi was still there, singing a nonsense song about a frog and spider as he added… raisins… to his eggs, and then turned back to stare at Konan.
"Really," she said, deadpan. "Is this the strings-you-along organization?"
"You're awfully impertinent for someone on probation," Konan said, picking up another of Tori's cards.
Tori pouted. The clock on the wall said it was just past 6:00 AM, which meant she really was up at fuck o'clock in the morning. She had no idea when she'd actually gone to bed, but there was absolutely no reason to be up this early, ever.
"I think this person just really dislikes cake," Itachi concluded, putting the letter down. "Can Kisame and I have this one?"
"I'll see what I can do," Konan answered, taking another sip of tea.
A few minutes later, Kisame wandered in and pulled a bag of coffee from a cupboard.
"Is Tori-san eating breakfast with us?" Kisame asked, looking genuinely confused. She guessed Akatsuki Breakfast Club was pretty exclusive.
Konan absentmindedly swirled her teacup as she picked out another request. "None of you wanted to take care of her, so I put Tobi in charge."
Tori put every ounce of effort into communicating Why would you do this to me? through her facial expression. If she just started hyperventilating at the table, they'd understand that, right?
"Tobi will make eggs for all!" Tobi announced, making a triumphant pose with his spatula.
Kisame shrugged and, as he measured water for the coffee, asked, "Do any of you want a cup?"
"Me," Tori said, sounding embarrassingly desperate. She really, really needed a nice cup of caffeine now, and she hadn't had any coffee since she'd been summoned to this world.
Kisame raised his eyebrows at her as he dumped water into the machine, but five minutes later Tori had a mug of hot coffee in her hands.
Normally, Tori took her coffee with a lot of milk and sugar, but it had been so long, and it smelled so nice… She suddenly felt herself completely overcome with emotions. No, Tori! Don't cry at the breakfast table!
"What is with you, yeah?" Deidara asked, and Tori yelped and spilled coffee all over the table. Konan pushed the box away just in time to save the documents inside.
Deidara had entered the kitchen and gotten his own cup of coffee, and Tori was unsure if he had just been ninja-stealthy or she'd been too caught up in her deep emotional bond with her coffee to notice.
"I haven't had coffee in a while," Tori said, grabbing a handful of napkins.
"Is this like the vegetables?" Deidara asked.
"DOES DEIDARA-SEMPAI WANT VEGETABLES?" Tobi called.
"And you!" Deidara snapped, whirling around. "What are you even doing here!"
"I'm making breakfast!"
"I can see that, idiot, but why are you doing it here–"
"Tobi is charged with watching Tori-chan–"
"Then do it in the dungeon where she belongs–"
The conversation ended with Deidara upturning his hot coffee over Tobi's head while Tobi screamed.
This… was the fearsome shadow leader of the Akatsuki? Tori stared into her coffee. Oh god, what had she gotten herself into?
"You said the tower was just for us," Deidara whined to Konan as Tobi very carefully plated his breakfast.
"You refused to watch her," Konan said. "So now she's here."
Deidara mumbled something incredibly rude about being fine watching Tori starve to death in a cell.
"I'd die of dehydration first," Tori corrected automatically, and Deidara stared at her like she'd grown a second head.
"Ta-da~!" Tobi cried, and slammed a tray down in front of Konan. Miso soup sloshed over the toast he'd carefully arranged in triangles around the plate of eggs.
"I'm eating upstairs," Konan announced, and left with her box.
"Konan-sama, your food…!" Tobi wailed balefully after her.
Since he was the secret real leader, Tori wondered, if Obito really wanted, could he command Konan to eat his weird breakfast…?
Deidara had made a fuss about Tobi's presence, but didn't miss a beat stealing the tray for himself. "Why are there raisins in this?" he asked.
The trays Tobi passed out held a plate of eggs and toast, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of soup. The pickles that usually came with Japanese meals ended up being in a neat little pile under the eggs. He also very proudly presented a disgusted Deidara with a plate of grilled celery. "Your vegetables, sempai!"
"These are some very interesting choices, Tobi," Kisame said diplomatically as Deidara picked up the celery and hurled it at Tobi.
Personally, Tori was just glad for food what had been heated up properly, and that had the texture food was supposed to have. Next to her, Itachi just sort of stared at his food and didn't touch it, presumably because Itachi also knew that Tobi was the evil masked man who'd helped him kill his family.
Tori was not sure how Itachi could sit there and not completely lose his mind as Obito broke a teacup in the process of washing it.
"So are they just hanging out here or what?" Deidara was asking.
"She's working support while they verify her claims," Kisame answered, already done with his food. "Didn't you listen to Konan?"
Deidara, as far as Tori could tell, had never listened to a single authority figure in his entire life. He continued to complain to Kisame about being promised privacy away from dumb underlings and the living conditions being the only real perk of this stupid organization.
Tori got the impression, from Deidara grousing about caves, that the communal living conditions were a recent development for the Akatsuki. That was interesting. She wondered what this building was originally for.
She must have been listening too intently, because Deidara cut himself off and snapped at her, "And what do you want?"
"Uh," Tori stuttered out. "Where's Hidan?"
"What, nervous about running into him again?" Deidara jeered. "You should be more wary of Danna; he's pissed at you–"
"Hidan and Kakuzu are on a mission," Itachi cut him off. Deidara glared furiously at him.
"Whatever," Deidara finally muttered, pushing his tray away from him and standing. "Kisame– sparring?"
Kisame gave him a one over. Deidara was covered in bandages and was obviously favoring one arm. "Aren't you grounded from fighting?"
"I'm allowed light taijustu, yeah," Deidara argued back.
Kisame shrugged and stood himself. On his way out of the kitchen, he clapped Tori on the back and said, "Congratulations on still being alive."
Tori clenched her jaw to prevent a hiss of pain. He'd patted her exactly on a giant bruise that he'd caused by dragging her around.
"Thanks," she said as Tobi leaned over her to gather their dirty dishes. His sleeve dragged through her soup.
Kisame and Deidara left, and Tobi fussed over washing things in the sink. Tori turned to Itachi and gave him a pained look which she hoped communicated: Please tell me how to not lose my mind with him acting like that.
Itachi stared blankly back at her.
xXx
END NOTES:
Orochimaru: An Ongoing Problem For Literally Everyone
There are some more loose ends people asked about that I wanted to cover in this chapter, but then it was 8k words and three months later. So hopefully... next chapter!