CHAPTER SUMMARY: For once in her life, Tori manages to not make a situation worse. Kind of.
NOTES: I try to get a chapter out at least once a month, but my muse died on me in October and then I did NaNoWriMo. So... this is about two months late... Oops.
xXx
Tori craved raw broccoli.
Tori had never in her life enjoyed raw broccoli, but Oto had done such a whammy on her relationship with food, she didn't know what she enjoyed anymore. Flavor, probably. A satisfying crunch. Actual nutrients.
Broccoli.
She moved the stool she'd used to prop open the dungeon door and slunk out into the stairwell. Last night, Kakuzu had still been watching TV when she'd gone to find Icha Icha, so she'd just sort of grabbed the book and fled. Kakuzu was scary, but not so scary to deter her from reading erotica, apparently. She was paranoid the dungeon door would lock automatically and she'd be trapped, so she'd jammed it with the stool. She'd slept only slightly poorly on the metal bed.
Tori dithered in the hallway for a few moments, debating what to do. She'd seen two heads of broccoli in the vegetable crisper when she'd gone through the entire kitchen. It was right there, but Oto had also done a whammy on her relationship with wandering around a building filled with ninja unsupervised. Just existing outside of the dungeon felt rebellious.
The Akatsuki had a vegetable crisper. That was so weird it hurt to think about. She was just going to charge ahead and if she wasn't supposed to be out of the dungeon, they should have locked it.
Someone had made a pot of coffee, now cold on the counter. Several unwashed dishes were in the sink. Tori stood around awkwardly for long enough to confirm she was alone, then went straight for the broccoli.
Chopping a head of broccoli one-handed proved cumbersome, and Tori gave up almost immediately and just took a bite straight out of the broccoli.
This was fine. Perfectly normal behavior. She was fine.
The entire floor continued to be silent, save the hum of the refrigerator, and Tori wandered out to the next floor down. This level turned out to contain what looked like unoccupied dorm rooms, filled with dusty metal bedframes. Large cardboard boxes decorated the rooms, and Tori pulled one open to reveal yellow-stained pillows. Huh.
The next box had a bunch of weapons pouches, and the next an assortment of mostly broken transmitter radios, followed by a box of blank scrolls. This building was obviously meant to house shinobi en masse, but judging by the dust build-up, had been unused for a while before the Akatsuki had moved in.
It was ridiculously fascinating. Tori opened every single box in the room.
"You're late," a voice snapped, and Tori nearly dropped her half-eaten broccoli head into the box of flak jackets she'd been poking through.
Sasori's face was also fascinating, in that his expression hadn't changed much from his resting face, but he still managed to look irritated beyond all reason.
"Excuse me?" Tori asked, and felt her heart rate increase slightly. Was she about to get in trouble for poking through Akatsuki's stuff? Would Sasori even care? "Late for what?"
"I told you I had a task for you," Sasori said. "Come."
He walked away. Tori stared after him, clutching her broccoli in front of her like a bouquet.
"I said come," Sasori emphasized, and it took every ounce of Tori's self-control not to answer, That's what she said.
Hey, she'd just read all of Icha Icha Paradise in one night.
Tori hurried after him. Sasori did not care at all that she'd just been going through their creepy abandoned dorm rooms, except that it had taken him slightly longer to find her. He griped at her about it as he led her to his workshop.
Sasori's workshop was exactly like Orochimaru's lab in that it was incredibly alarming. Tools of various sizes and horrifying applications hung from the wall, along with things that were obviously preserved human remains. A large freezer chest sat in one corner. The workshop was unlike Orochimaru's lab in that everything was arranged precisely: the tools hung from the wall in neat lines, as did the array of human limbs. A wide bookshelf held carefully stacked scrolls. The two workbenches set up at the center of the room were spotless. One of the benches had a chemistry set, and the reagents were in bottles that had the caps screwed on properly, lined up neatly along one side.
In direct contrast to the careful organization, loud music drifted through the wall from what Sasori had indicated with a tone of disgust was Deidara's workspace.
"Have you ever worked with poisons before?" Sasori asked.
"Not really," Tori answered. She'd been poisoned, sure, but she'd never used one.
"But you worked in a lab," Sasori prompted.
"Well, yes," Tori said. "I mostly did sample analysis and–"
"It should be fine," Sasori cut her off, and selected a scroll from his shelf. He rolled it across the workbench with the chemistry set, and it unsealed a pile of fuzzy looking leaves. "This is mountain nettle. Here."
Sasori picked up a leaf and held it out to Tori, and she took it on reflex. Touching it felt like being stung by a bee.
"Ow," Tori yelped, and dropped the leaf.
"They produce chemicals useful in poison making," Sasori continued, unphased by Tori glaring comically at him. "You're going to isolate them."
Red welts were blossoming over Tori's fingers, worse than any reaction she'd had from nettles in her world. Great.
The first step, Sasori explained, was to grind the leaves with mortar and pestle. He then completely ignored her as he flipped open another storage scroll on his other workbench, and Hiruko appeared. Its arm was mangled and the jaw unhinged, presumably from her little stunt in the hotel. Good, Tori thought . Sasori fucking deserved it.
Sasori set about tinkering with his puppet, and Tori found a set of tweezers and started moving leaves into the stone mortar. Grinding them with one working hand was just as awkward as trying to cut up the head of broccoli, which was now sitting in Sasori's waste basket. After the third time she stung her self, she asked, "Do you have any gloves?"
"No," Sasori said bluntly.
"Well," Tori said, working hard to keep irritation out of her voice, "now the toxins are in my skin instead of in your poison."
Sasori looked up at that. "Deidara should have some," he said. As an afterthought he added, "Ask for a face mask too."
A face mask? Even Orochimaru hadn't asked her to do anything that required one of those.
(Well, okay, they shouldn't have been performing wild ninja surgery without them, but it hadn't been strictly necessary. )
The music coming from Deidara's workspace was even louder in the hallway, and Tori deemed it pointless to bother knocking. She pushed the door open cautiously, lest he decide to throw something sharp or explosive at her, but inside Deidara was too preoccupied with sculpting to acknowledge her.
He was busily working on something lizard-like and huge– as tall as a large dog, but twice as long with the tail. Deidara sat on a stool, carefully smoothing the clay with a tool that resembled a toothless comb. His clothes and forearms were covered in grayish clay, and his tongue poked out the side of his mouth as he worked.
Tori took a few steps into the room and then just stood and watched for a few minutes. The music sounded like a little like '90s grunge from her world, and Deidara had turned his clay-splattered speakers up so high she could feel the bassline through the tiled floor.
Finally, Deidara leaned over and turned his music down.
"What?" he snapped at her.
Honestly, this wasn't even a rude greeting for a ninja.
"Sasori sent me to get gloves," Tori said. "And a facemask."
"What does he need those for?" Deidara said, wiping his hands on a rag that was so caked in clay he might have made himself dirtier. "He's made of wood, yeah."
"They're for me," Tori said. "And I thought he was made of Sasori? Isn't that the point?"
Sasori definitely had human skin. It was a little leathery, but it was definitely someone's skin. She'd assumed it was his own.
Deidara shot Tori a look and tossed the rag aside.
"Yeah," he said. "Good point."
Tori must have said something right, because Deidara pulled out a pair of beat-up gloves and a disposable facemask without further hassle. It took a few moments– Deidara's workshop was a mess of partially-finished sculptures, pails of dried and forgotten clay, dirty tools sitting in piles, and crates of random things. Huge windows revealed the skyline of Amegakure, along with its gloomy skies.
"I don't know if those will fit, yeah," he said, passing her the gloves and mask. "You have the most useless, tiny hands."
Tori banished any thoughts about when Deidara had last cleaned the gloves and pulled one on. "Yeah, the baby hands have been a real hinderance in all the fist-fights I get into," Tori answered sarcastically.
Deidara rolled his eyes as Tori flexed her hands in the gloves. They were cloth, and not as dexterous as the nitrile gloves she been used to in the lab, and the fact that they were about two sizes too big didn't help. Still, she could definitely do a simple task like mash up a bunch of plants with this.
"What is Danna making you do that you need gloves, anyway?" Deidara asked, sounding curious under his front at nonchalance.
Tori explained, showing off the welts on her hand. Deidara snickered.
"He's already working you to the bone, is he?" he teased.
"Well," Tori said diplomatically, thinking back to her old job. "At least the chances of explosions are lower with Sasori."
The mean smile fell right off Deidara's face. It didn't fully hit Tori exactly who she'd said that too until she's already waltzed out the door. Oh well.
The toxin isolation was boring, tedious work, and Tori began to understand very quickly why Sasori did not want to do it himself. Hours later, Tori was only halfway through grinding leaves and getting cramps in her hand. Sasori glanced over and remarked: "You're going too slow."
"I have one hand," Tori replied through gritted teeth, frustration and pain overriding the part of her brain that was afraid of evil ninja. That part of her brain was shrinking every day, it seemed, and she continued, "An injury that is your fault."
Sasori dropped the tool he was holding. "You're the one who tried an idiot's gamble at escape."
"Well maybe if you'd been better at countering an idiot's gamble," Tori answered tersely, smashing away with the pestle like a cavewoman, "you wouldn't be fixing your puppet right now–"
Sasori was suddenly two feet away from her on the other side of the bench, and the jab died in Tori's mouth as she remembered exactly why she should be afraid of evil ninja coworkers.
Sasori eyed her for a few moments, and Tori couldn't tell if he was the type to revel in others' fear or not. She kept her body still and calm and stared him down, resisting her gut instinct to smile sweetly and disarmingly at him. This was a different game than Oto.
"You have enough to continue to the next step," Sasori finally said, and verbally walked her through what she was to do with the crushed leaf-goo she'd amassed. Basically, she was going to push the leaf-goo through a strainer to get out any solids, and then boil the leaf juice at a low temperature to remove all the water without denaturing anything important.
"It should take several hours," Sasori finished, and then went back to rewiring Hirko's jaw.
"Is this the part I need the facemask for?" Tori asked, turning the strainer around to try and figure out how to work it with one hand.
"Only if you're sloppy," Sasori answered. "Don't let it boil over."
Straining the leaf-goo was a nightmare that ended with green goo in her hair, so Tori was revealed when she finally lit the bunsen burner. She hung a round-bottom flask over it and fed a thermometer into it, reminding her oddly of first year chemistry lab. In class, she'd had to look up the safety data sheets of everything she worked with and always wear a lab coat and goggles. Now she had some unknown poison ingredients in her hair, and that didn't even make the top ten list of things she was worried about. She picked the goo out of her hair and flicked it into the trash.
It… made her unexpectedly sad to think about her college chemistry lab. She had hated that class. The TA was mean and made misogynistic comments. The lab reports took forever, and the lab lecture was at 8 o'clock in the morning. Still, it had been normal and predictable and home.
Tori shook herself. It wouldn't do to dwell on that and risk something embarrassing like crying in front of Sasori. Instead, she thought about how Orochimaru had regularly done surgery barehanded. At least Sasori supported personal protective equipment.
Two hours later, the plant juice was a much darker shade of green and had a syrupy consistency, and Tori was still thinking about what a shitshow Orochimaru's lab had been.
"Do you know what," Tori said, breaking the silence between her and Sasori. "Orochimaru was kind of a shitty scientist."
Sasori ignored her, which wasn't a command to shut up, so she kept going. "He'd get something to work one time and get bored and move on. That's not an experiment; that's a case study. Not to mention his approach to isolating variables just just sort of like, 'according to my hunch–'"
Orochimaru had absolutely never uttered to phrase, "according to my hunch."
"And don't get me started on Kabuto– " Tori continued, scowling at her flask of plant juice.
Sasori, apparently, did want to get her started on Kabuto, because he said, "He always seemed like a weak personality to me. Always pandering to the stronger power."
"Yeah, he was a total kiss-ass," Tori agreed, as if she wouldn't heavily invest energy into ass-kissing if she thought it would get her somewhere. "He was even worse at science."
Sasori had actually glanced up to look at her, so Tori launched into an explanation of one of Kabuto's torture sessions disguised as a science experiment on "drug response." She broke down step-by-step what Kabuto had done wrong in his experimental design: no control, wild fluctuation of variables between trials, a poorly defined hypothesis and a sample size of one. Sasori went back to his own work, but the occasional eye-flicker in her direction indicated he was paying attention.
When she was done, he helpfully identified the drug Kabuto had used. "You're lucky you don't have permanent nerve damage," he concluded.
"Well, for all his faults, Kabuto was a great medic," Tori said, double-checking the thermometer showed her leaf juice was at the right temperature and then adjusting the flame. Using fuuinjutsu for a constant temperature had been one of the few advantages of Orochimaru's lab. If she could get someone to give her the right materials, she could definitely improve Sasori's current set-up. "Orochimaru had to have some reason to keep him as his right-hand, seeing as how he'd ruined his body."
"Orochimaru had foolish ideas about immortality," Sasori scoffed.
"Yeah?" Tori prompted.
Sasori shot her an assessing look– Tori was, afterall, someone who'd staked her survival on gathering information. She cocked her head to the side, smiling vaguely and making herself look as disarming as possible. Sasori must have decided this was safe to share, because he kept going.
"What's the point of living forever if you're a slave to someone else's body?" Sasori said. "He had all the intelligence and means to perfect his own body, and he chose not to."
"He thought having a sharingan would make him perfect, didn't he?" Tori asked. Sasori had to have known Orochimaru had tried to take over Itachi's body right before abandoning the Akatsuki. Orochimaru wanting the sharingan had to be common knowledge she was allowed to share.
Sasori wrinkled his nose ever so slightly. "If he wanted to modify his body, he should have just taken the younger Uchia's eyes and been done with it."
A few months ago, Tori might have found that statement horrifying. With her personal definition of horror sufficiently readjusted, she just nodded along. "But you take other people's bodies all the time," she said. "You know, for art."
Sasori's eyes slid over to her, then back down to Hiruko with an almost loving expression. "Other people don't have the right vision," Sasori said. "I have to show them. They're not worthy of anything else."
Ah, okay, that made it onto her list of 'horrifying statements.' Tori sort of wanted to ask what Sasori thought of Orochimaru brainwashing teenagers with interesting bloodline limits into offering their bodies up to him, but Philosophy Hour with Sasori was getting unnerving very quickly. She decided to change the subject.
"Once Kabuto mentioned he thought haiku was the finest form of art."
A very strange noise came from Sasori's throat.
xXx
Tori left Sasori's workshop very late at night, weak with hunger. It hadn't even occurred to her to ask for a meal break until she was running her boiled plant sludge through chemical separation and had a sudden dizzy spell. She'd left her final product out on a paper towel to let the alcohol dry off. Once dry, the isolated purpleish powder could cause serious respiratory problems, so she might as well just leave it to Sasori.
She found a box of cup noodles under the sink and heated one up. Hidan had replaced his stolen hot sauce, and written DO NOT TOUCH across it, and Tori dumped some in before taking her dinner into the living room. Deidara was lounging across the couch, watching a very low budget horror film. Tori settled into an armchair.
"You look happy, yeah," Deidara observed.
"I do?" Tori asked, blowing on her noodles. She certainly didn't feel downtrodden and miserable. Maybe that was the same as being happy?
On screen, a ghost dragged a man kicking and screaming across the floor. Tori liked ghosts. She wondered what the movie was.
"Given you just hung out with Danna for ten hours, you look positively overjoyed," Deidara said.
Tori shrugged. "He's interesting to talk to," she said.
"That's not a common opinion," Deidara said, propping himself up on one arm to peer at her. "Must be something wrong with you, yeah."
"Well," Tori said, shoving noodles into her mouth. "Sasori and I hate the same people."
Deidara burst into laughter. On screen, the ghost howled in fury as the man's wife threw handfuls of salt at it.
The movie ended with everyone dying half an hour later, and Deidara turned back to Tori with a lazy grin on his face and asked, "Are you seriously eating cup noodles?"
Tori blinked at him a couple times and then realized why that was funny. "Can't I be proud of the family business?"
"Nope," Deidara said, still grinning, and stood up and stretched. He purposefully knocked into her armchair as he passed. Tori was unsure if it was a hostile or friendly gesture.
Tori drank the rest of the broth, set the empty noodle container down on the coffee table, and fell asleep in her armchair.
xXx
In the morning, Konan woke her and informed her she was to take minutes on Hidan and Kakuzu's mission report. Tori scuttled down to the meeting room after Konan half asleep. No one wore their cloaks inside, and Konan was sporting a full face of makeup, a dark shirt that showed off an elaborate bellybutton piercing, and a pair of thigh-high boots that Tori was, honestly, a little jealous of.
Who was already dressed up that much at six o'clock in the morning? What was wrong with these people?
The table in the actual meeting room was still broken, so the mission debrief was held in Pein's office. Hidan and Kakuzu were already there, and Hidan looked the way Tori felt: bleary-eyed, with his hair slightly mussed, slumped over in a chair. The room was very cramped with five people, and Tori stood behind Pein's desk with her minutes notebook cradled awkwardly in her slinged arm. She wondered what on earth Pein did that required an office at all. How much paperwork could Akatsuki have?
Kakuzu and Hidan's mission had allowed them to come home for the night because it was in Rain Country. A civilian noblewoman had contracted a series of politically-motivated assassinations in neighboring River Country over a month ago. She had yet to pay, and the zombie combo had gone to collect. It had been unsuccessful.
Four separate times during the meeting, Kakuzu slammed his fist down on Pein's desk with enough force to solicit alarming cracking noises. Tori caught Konan's eye twitching only once.
"You cannot kill a Rain Country citizen," Pein repeated for the third time. His voice was perfectly monotone, even as Kakuzu became more hostile.
"She has refused negotiations," Kakuzu seethed. There was a splintering dent in the desk in front of him from his fist. Hidan blinked groggily off into space.
One rule of Akatsuki– which Tori would have never guessed, but made perfect sense now that she'd heard Konan's reminder to Kakuzu, delivered in clipped tones between his rants– was that members were not allowed to kill the people of Rain Country. It was not that Akatsuki never killed people from Rain; if there was a justified reason, Konan went and did it herself. Using her outsider knowledge, Tori was able to fill in the blanks: at the end of the day, Nagato and Konan were doing all this world domination bullshit for the benefit of their country. If their countrymen had to die, it would be by their own hands, not by the hands of more foreign shinobi.
This, of course, made Kakuzu's preferred negotiation strategy of "extreme violence" less effective.
Every time Kakuzu ranted about the client, the amount she owed and the amount of time that had gone by since her payment due date increased. At some point, Pein turned his face ever so slightly in Tori's direction and asked, "How much does she actually owe us?"
Tori clumsily flipped back through the previous pages of the notebook, trying to find whatever had actually happened. The client had in fact paid for the first assassination, as well as donated weapons, and that had won enough favor to get more Akatsuki missions with a laxer payment agreement. The amount she actually owed was less than Kakuzu was claiming, and Kakuzu ripped off a chunk off of Pein's desk and threw it at Tori.
Pein made no attempt to intervene, but the act of physically ripping wood apart took long enough that Tori managed to get the notebook up to block before the chunk hit her hit her right in the face. Why! Did they! ALWAYS! Aim for the face!
"It's in your handwriting," Tori pointed out, waving the notebook in Kakuzu's direction. The chunk of wood had bounced off the notebook and slid back under the desk from whence it had come. Hidan's eyes had snapped back into focus at the sudden Tori-focused violence.
Tori actually had no idea what Kakuzu's handwriting looked like, but every once in a while the minutes book had a cramped little tables of budgets and projected costs and suggested mission rates, and who else would have written those?
"Why does he get to throw things at her?" Hidan demanded.
Pein tapped his now holey desk with a single finger in annoyance. "That's coming out of your paycheck," he said.
Kakuzu just sort of crunched down in his seat and seethed, crossing his massive arms over his chest.
"We should charge interest," he muttered. "We should just go in there, kill the whole household, and–"
"We're not killing the last member of one of the four noble families of Rain," Konan said, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Explain to me why exactly negotiations broke down."
Negotiations had broken down, essentially, because the client wanted to delay payment and Kakuzu had lost his shit and put a hole through the house. Tori was genuinely surprised this woman was still alive, all things considered. Hidan himself had broken several ribs in the process of Kakuzu having a temper tantrum. Tori could see how, under circumstances in which Kakuzu was allowed to maim and kill people, having one's bodyguard's beaten to death in front of them could be a very convincing argument. As it were, Kakuzu had instead chosen to control himself by marching off into the woods and punching some trees down, instead of breaking this noble lady's face.
Ninja did, after all, very reliably go for face-breaking.
"It's not 'negotiations' if she just doesn't want to pay," Hidan said defensively. "That's just her being a bitch–"
"Hidan," Konan cut him off. Hidan glared at her, but shut his mouth immediately. "We'll figure it out. You two are dismissed."
Kakuzu stomped out the door, still visibly shaking with anger, and Hidan followed him with several complaints about getting up early for nothing. Tori secretly agreed with him.
"We may have to assign someone else," Pein observed when they were gone. "She petitioned Ame for a jounin cell for protection. She's terrified."
Tori continued penning their conversation. Did that mean most people weren't aware Akatsuki was based in Amegakure?
"She might be more open to a less volatile negotiator," Konan mused. Tori scribbled their thoughts down as Konan and Pein debated if they should let Kakuzu– who was in charge of payment collection– try again, or let someone else on-hand try.
"Tori," Pein suddenly said. "You're a civilian. Who would you respond best to?"
Tori nearly dropped her pen at the question. She didn't see how her opinion could possibly matter, but they were both looking at her.
You're all scary as fuck, Tori thought. Outloud she said, "I would just pay the man who was punching down my trees. You know, if I were a rich person who had money to pay."
"You think she doesn't have the funds, then?" Konan said, arching an eyebrow. Turning back to Pein, she added, "She has been publically spending a lot."
That had not been what Tori was trying to say at all, but now that it was said out loud, both Konan and Pein seemed to think that was definitely what was going on.
"Kakuzu is not going to like this," Konan sighed.
Pein nodded once, then leaned back slightly to look up at Tori, who was squished in awkwardly behind his chair.
"You should order a new conference table," he said.
"Uh," Tori said. "Okay. How do I do that?"
Tori had not been allowed to see how Oto got their supplies, but she had assumed it would be as bizarre and foreign as everything else going on in Oto. She had also, for reasons that didn't even really make sense, assumed that ninja shopping would be just a little bit cooler than normal shopping.
It wasn't. Konan gave her an office supply catalogue.
"Have you used a telephone before?" she asked, and Tori was briefly terrified of the implication that there could be some version of her life where she didn't know how to use a phone.
"Are there people who don't?" Tori asked cautiously.
"Not everyone has lives in a city," Konan said vaguely, as if Tori was the weird one for being confused. Which, in this universe, was fair.
Still, the Naruto world had phones. That made sense with the television and the movies and the radios, but then why didn't they ever see anyone using them? Could you call in an order for baby genin to come clean your gutters? Tori had so many questions, and Konan looked very much like she didn't want to answer them.
There was a landline phone at the front desk in the lobby, and Tori found herself seated behind the marble-top counter, flipping through the furniture section of the catalogue. Someone had swept up the remains of the shattered chandelier and then just left the pieces shoved into a pile in the corner.
Tori read through all the table descriptions very carefully before she realized that whatever she was going to get was just going to end up broken. She called and ordered the cheapest one using the account number Konan had written down for her on a sticky note.
"Address for delivery?" asked the person on the other side– an incredibly bored sounding female voice.
"Um," Tori said. Did the Akatsuki just, like, have an address? That one could send mail to? Did they get spam? Laundry detergent samples?
"Do you not know your address?" the woman on the other side of the line said. She didn't sound judgemental, just resigned to speaking with incompetent underlings.
"Er," Tori said, tugging distractedly on the phone's cord. "I'm new…"
"That's okay, honey," the woman on the line said, and her bored monotone nullified whatever sympathy her memorized script was meant to convey. "I'll see what address we have on file."
She read an address off. All Tori got out of it was that it was located in Amegakure.
"That sounds right," Tori lied, scribbling the address down on the back of Konan's note with the account number. The numbers and words were basically meaningless to her, but the woman read them off like they definitely were a real address.
The woman confirmed the order and hung up, and Tori continued to stare at the address she'd written down. This seemed like it should be powerful information. She had the Akatsuki's mailing address! Surely she could do something with that!
Tori flipped the catalogue over and examined the advertisements on the back. A lot of them had instructions for mail-in orders, but a handful also had phone numbers. On a whim, Tori called a company that made cleaning products.
"Hello, yes," Tori said, doing her best impression of a customer service voice. "My office made an order of– for two cases of vanilla almond soft hand soap," she said, squinting down at the photo of random products and reading off a label. "And instead we got–" she squinted harder– "Spring cherry blossoms."
"Okay, ma'am, it sounds like you're calling about receiving the wrong product," the man on the other side said. "Do you have the order number?"
"No?" Tori said.
"That's okay," the man said, sounding much more into his work than the previous woman. "Do you have the PO number? Or the account number?"
"Ah…" Tori said, and then flipped through the catalogue so the man would hear the rustle of paper. "Sorry, I'm new here. I don't really know the ropes yet."
"That's perfectly alright," the man assured her. "Can you give me any other details?"
Tori made up an order date and delivery date, and then said her coworker threw out the shipping label when the man asked if she could get the order number off of it.
"I am so sorry," she said. "Normally it would be fine, but one of my colleagues is allergic to something in the cherry soap."
"Not to worry," the customer service man assured her, although his voice sounded tighter than before. "Can you give me the company name and address?"
Tori said the first company that came to mind. "I work for Toshiba Electronics. The address is–"
Two minutes later, the man was promising her the soap was on its way. Tori thanked him and hung up the phone. She stared down at the company's ad for a few moments.
Why on Earth had she done that? Just to see if it would work? Tori had definitely just gained quite a bit of power. Perhaps, even, too much power, and it was going to her head…
When she went upstairs, Deidara was eating breakfast while Sasori complained at him, and Tori remembered she actually had barely any power at all.
"If you'd let me turn you into a puppet," Sasori said, scowling as Deidara peeled an orange, "I could just fix you when you get hurt, and then we wouldn't have to wait around for missions."
"Screw you, yeah," Deidara retorted. "You know you like the down time to mess around with your creepy dolls."
Hidan was passed out at the table, his head in his arms next to a mug. Tori very purposefully did not give him or the artists a second glance as she marched into the room in search of her own breakfast.
Sasori rolled his eyes at Deidara's insults about his art, and then turned to Tori as she poured herself the last of what was in coffee carafe. "Where were you? You didn't finish yesterday."
"I had stuff to do," Tori said bluntly.
"She's been following Konan around like a little bitch," Hidan called, head still in his arms.
Tori, feeling safe with Deidara and Sasori between her and Hidan, and power-high from scamming a soap company, replied, "Stop calling me bitch, asshole."
Hidan raised his head to glare half-heartedly at her, his hair more mussed than ever. "I call it like I see it," he answered, and took a very long sip out of his mug. "Bitch."
Tori twitched. Deidara's eyes darted between them and he asked with a mischievous grin, "Who's the real bitch, the one with the broken arm or the one with the broken ribs?"
""It's a dislocated shoulder," Tori corrected primly and the same time Hidan yelled, "Shut up!"
Sasori chose to intervene in the riveting discussion by grabbing Tori's said shoulders, turning her and pushing her towards the door. "You're wasting my morning," he snapped.
Tori was not strong enough to physically resist Sasori, so she had to settle for yelling over her shoulder as he shepherded her out, coffee in hand. "Gendered insults make you sound like uneducated dicks."
"'Dicks'?" Deidara yelled back, "Now who's making gendered–"
Sasori slammed the door behind them.
"'Dick' isn't an equivocally powerful insult to bitch," Tori told Sasori, blowing on her coffee. "Because men hold power over women as a social class."
"I cannot describe to you how much I don't care," Sasori answered.
Tori crushed more nettle plants with her coffee sitting on the corner of the bench. It went against everything she believed in in regards to lab safety, but she hadn't had access to coffee in so long, she was fully prepared to accidentally poison herself over it. Plus, if she died, it would seriously ruin Sasori's day, and she was more than alright with ruining Sasori's day.
At some point in the afternoon, while Tori was watching the plant sludge boil, Deidara shoved a bunch of mission requests under her nose.
"Konan says these are your problem now," Deidara said.
"Do people just mail these to you?" Tori asked, examining the the top letter. It was in what was obviously a greeting card's enveloping, with a little rainbow printed in the corner. If anyone could just get the Akatsuki's mailing address, why wasn't everyone spamming them with soap?
"Obviously not," Deidara said, as if Tori had just asked a particularly stupid question. "I swung by one of the drop points this morning."
So then the Akatsuki were probably not publically associated with this address. Did that make them squatters? Did the people of Amegakure know who the weird ninja living in an abandoned building on the edge of town were.
The card contained within the rainbow print envelope was simply an address, written in blood. There was no more context. Tori wrinkled her nose.
"Is this supposed to mean anything to me?" she asked, flipping the card around to show Deidara. Were they requesting a murder? A robbery? Babysitting? Was she supposed to make a connection between the bloody address and the cloud print on the other side of the card?
"That's why no one else wants your job, yeah," Deidara answered, grinning at her. "Good luck."
Deidara left, and Sasori snapped at her to pay more attention to his precious plant goo.
xXx
The next day, someone delivered some boxes of hand soap, and Tori walked into the living room to find Kakuzu yelling at Deidara.
"Why would I turn away a delivery?" Deidara yelled back. "We use soap, yeah!"
"Not this soap," Kakuzu hissed dangerously, brandishing one of the vanilla almond bottles at Deidara. "This isn't in the budget–"
Tori busied herself emptying an entire pack of shredded vegetables into a pan. She didn't have to say anything. Kakuzu and Deidara could settle this themselves, and she could finish up organizing the mission request summaries for Konan.
As she tossed the vegetable bag, Tori noticed Itachi had marked it as his own in tiny, neat lettering. Ah, well. He and Kisame were on a mission, anyway.
The shouting continued, Tori threw a scoop of chili paste onto her meal, and then several alarming banging noises came from the living room. Tori winced and turned off the heat of the stove.
"Hey, guys," she called, and was of course ignored.
Tori scraped her weird meal of spicy veggies onto a plate and walked hesitantly into the living room. The pool table was knocked over, and Deidara was squatting on the wall, yelling threats at Kakuzu with a wad of clay in his hands.
"The soap was free," Tori said.
Both ninja shot her equally frightening glares. Tori had fortunately been threatened by various terrifying violent ninja before and did not immediately wet her pants.
"What did you say?" Kakuzu asked in a voice that was filled with barely-contained rage.
"The soap," Tori repeated, slowly because she was afraid if she spoke normally her voice would tremble, "was free."
There was a long silence.
"Okay," Kakuzu said, and relaxed from his fighting stance. He showed no interest in how the free soap had been obtained.
"Yeah, Kakuzu, you crazy stingy bastard," Deidara fumed, his fist tightening around the clay. It shrunk in size– was his hand eating it? "The soap was free, so I don't know what your fucking problem was–"
"A ninja shouldn't accept mysterious packages anyway," Kakuzu growled back.
Tori walked back out of the living room. It really wasn't any of her business now.
xXx
From the Deidara-Kakuzu altercation, Tori learned that the Naruto world did not have smoke alarms.
"That seems really unsafe," Tori said.
"Tori," Konan replied, her face buried in her hands. "Shut up."
Deidara had set off a minor explosion, which had summoned both Konan and Hidan. Hidan to cackle widely at the scene, and Konan order everyone to stop being dumbasses. Kakuzu had put out the fires with a water jutsu, and he and Deidara had been tasked with cleaning the mess up. They were still arguing in the living room over it.
(Hidan had been tasked with "going and mediating on the benefits of silent prayer.")
Now, Konan was seated in the kitchen with Tori, leafing halfheartedly through the mission requests while looking completely done with how her day had been going. She seemed resigned and tired, and Tori felt bad for her.
"Has switching to cohabitation been tough?" Tori asked in a tone that was meant to be sympathetic to Konan's plight.
Konan's brow crinkled ever so slightly. "You're so nosy," she said, turning over one of the summary cards Tori had written. "No wonder you go through these so quickly."
Tori actually thought she'd been combing through them rather slowly, but she wasn't going to contradict Konan. Instead she said, "If I'm allowed to be nosy: how do you pick missions?"
"I don't know what about anything I just said made you think I was giving you permission to be nosy," Konan said, arching an eyebrow at her. "But in this case the answer isn't a secret. We take all of them."
Tori blinked. Twice. "One of those is about a ghost," she said.
"And we'll gladly take it," Konan said, leaning back in her chair, "if our client accepts the price gouge we give to particularly stupid missions."
"Ah, I see," Tori answered.
They passed a while longer in comfortable silence, and Tori concentrated hard on drawing a diagram of a what one client wanted done to some labor union's leader. He had sent a very in-depth description of exactly how he wanted the body mutilated, and Tori did her best to translate it onto a stick figure.
Deidara marched out of the living room, bleach spilled down the front of his black shirt.
"I hope you're happy," he said snidely, and it was unclear which woman he was addressing. "It's clean now, yeah. I hope your fancy soap was worth it."
Kakuzu appeared behind him, the remnants of a smashed and burned chair in his arms. "I'm going to take this to a second-hand store," he said.
Tori very carefully added a full head of hair to the mutilated stick figure of the union leader's wife. The client had a different, equally horrifying list of things he wanted done to her.
When Deidara and Kakuzu were gone, Konan eyed Tori thoughtfully. "You wouldn't happen to know where the soap came from, would you?"
Tori paused in her drawing. Her gut instinct was to lie; in hindsight, scamming companies for soap was a deeply silly thing to do. However, it wasn't a lie she felt she could get away with.
"I may have run a little experiment," Tori said finally.
The look Konan gave her was one of complete incredulity.
"It was free," Tori defended.
Konan just let out a single, short sigh. "You should know," she said, voice deep and purposeful, "that if you keep testing boundaries, you're going to find one you wish you hadn't."
Tori stared down at her morbid little doodle. Right. Violent, professional murder machines.
"Write out replies to these," Konan said, dropping the card in her hand and immediately shifting to all-business. "You can estimate quotes for them based on previous missions. I'll screen them before they're sent out. When you're done, find somewhere to store this."
She gestured at the boxes of liquid handsoap Deidara had left on the kitchen table.
"And since you're so nosy," Konan continued, standing up and stretching, "You can also catalogue and organize all the things we have in storage on the unused floors."
She must have meant all the boxes of random stuff Tori had found. How much of the building was unused? How much work had she just been assigned?
"Sasori isn't having you do anything labor intensive, right?" Konan pushed on. "You can start decoding Orochimaru's work, too."
Tori had finished with Sasori's current supply of mountain nettles, but he had made an ominous promise about having more things to process. She didn't know how much work that would be, or what "decoding" anything from Orochimaru might entail.
Konan sailed out of the room, her boots silent on the tile floor. Tori's gaze shifted back down to her stick figure diagram. She was supposed to reply to this lunatic, with a price estimate for this? How did one even start a letter like that?
Fuck, Tori thought. I wanted to read the next Icha Icha.
xXx
NOTES:
Konan: Why did you order two cases of hand soap?
Tori: To test my capacity.
This is kind of a filler chapter to set up what Tori's day-to-day is going to be like, BUT NEXT CHAPTER has actual action and one of my favorite scenes. :3c