Tori was finally free of her sling, the medic-nin on duty dubbing her shoulder fully healed. Using her new found freedom, she… started on replies to mission requests.
Dear client, Tori wrote. We have received and approved your mission request. For requested services, we charge a fee of–
Tori paused to double-check the figure in one of the tables Kakuzu had drawn up. Prices here contained a lot more digits than she was used to, and she carefully counted them out.
Pein had loaned her the current minutes book on the condition that she not wander too far away with it, so Tori had claimed the neighboring office as her own. It was completely bare of furniture, so she sat on the floor, various drafts of letters spread around her.
Konan pushed open the door, and several pieces of paper went flying.
"Shit," Tori swore, and then made eye contact with Konan, who raised an eyebrow. "Good morning!" Tori greeted in false cheer.
"Here," Konan said, and dropped a stack of paper in front of Tori, sending more of her letter drafts flying. Konan's stack consisted of heavy, textured sheets– the type meant to hold paint and ink. "We need you to figure these out."
Tori flipped through the papers. They were all doodles of seals.
"Are these from Orochimaru?" Tori asked, leafing through them. Barely any of them had any sort of notes or labeling, making it nigh impossible to guess what any of the seals were meant to do, or in what stage of completion they were in. Still, the sheer number of them and the sense of carefully controlled chaos screamed Orochimaru.
Tori eyed an incredibly complicated looking array, which had several transmogrification components and zero recognizable stabilization components. Yikes.
"He left in the middle of developing our bijuu sealing process," Konan said dryly. "Unfortunately, he took most of his work with him. You wouldn't conveniently have a notebook of the completed seals, would you?"
What a weird question, Tori thought. They'd confiscated all her stolen lab journals; surely Konan could just look that up herself? Then again, Orochimaru's notes were both vague and poorly organized.
Or, wait… had that been… a joke? A joke from Konan?
"I don't think so, sorry," Tori said, scratching the inside of her arm nervously. "I'll try harder to plagiarize the entirety of his repertoire next time."
Konan watched her critically as Tori carefully moved the stack of seals aside and started gathering her scattered pages. After a few moments, Konan knelt and picked up one of the drafts, skimming it.
"These don't need to be so formal," she said.
"Well, I wasn't really sure what Akatsuki customer service was like," Tori said.
"We used to let Hidan write replies," Konan said, and Tori let out a choked laugh.
Konan watched Tori for a few more moments, as Tori organized her letters into piles– she had multiple drafts for each of her replies, since she hadno idea what she was doing– and then started to leaf through the pile of Orochimaru's old seals. Konan's wasn't a judgemental look, like most of her coworkers in Oto might have leveled at her, nor was it a dissecting look like Orochimaru himself might give her. Instead, Konan just watched her like she might a rerun of TV show.
Tori did not know what to do with that look, so she asked, "None of these are active seals, are they?"
"I don't think so," Konan replied, which was not a particularly reassuring answer. Konan tilted her head ever so slightly, her indigo hair shifting around her face. "I think we've been thinking about this wrong."
"What?" Tori asked. "Thinking about what wrong?"
"Shinobi look at people like they look at tools," Konan said. "Whether we're exploiting them or protecting them, we don't usually think of civilians as particularly sharp tools."
"Um," Tori said. Was insulting her intelligence just some sort of ninja past time? Should she inform Konan that a sledgehammer was a perfectly respectable blunt tool? No, that was definitely too sassy.
Konan stood gracefully, and the movement barely made the paper on the floor flutter.
"We're having a general body meeting in an hour," Konan said, with no further explanation for her thoughts, and then left. The door swung shut behind her, upsetting Tori's piles again. You'd think a person who used paper-based jutsu would have some respect.
Tori stood shakily, and took a moment to stretch her cramping legs. An hour was enough time to find a bunch of paperweights. She knew there was a whole box of unsharpened kunai upstairs.
xXx
They had the meeting sitting around the collapsed table, with the projections of Kisame, Itachi, and Zetsu flickering at the foot of the table. Kisame reported in first, and his and Itachi's mission to track down and eliminate the last member of a rogue ninja clan was going better than expected.
Apparently, there were still villageless ninja families running around, which sounded cool as shit. Pen in hand, Tori raised her hand to ask a question, and Deidara looked at her as if she had lost her mind. She put her hand back down. A question for later, then.
The next twenty minutes were a discussion about if it were better to have Kisame and Itachi pick up an additional set of missions nearby in Wind Country, or deploy Deidara and Sasori, despite Deidara still technically being in a recovery period from The Hotel Disaster. It was a conversation that should have taken about five minutes, except Deidara ended up standing on his chair and giving a very long rant on his superiority to Itachi in every way.
Itachi's bluish projection looked neither offended nor interested. Tori very carefully transcribed Deidara's list of Itachi's personal failings, among which Itachi being neither offended nor interested in anything was listed four times.
"I know Wind better than anyone here," Sasori finally said when Deidara paused for breath, and that settled the matter.
Zetsu gave a report of some sort of complicated political situation in Water Country, and Tori frowned in concentration as she listened. She barely knew anything about politics in her own country, and in this world everything was run by daimyos and noble families and military dictators, and she definitely didn't recognize anyone's names but the Mizukage's. It made taking minutes difficult, and she wasn't sure her notes were coherent.
Oh, he was talking about Dead Water Fever! She knew what that was! Apparently, Water Country was cutting off travel to certain islands.
When Zetsu was done, Pein turned to Kakuzu and said, "I have a time sensitive mission for you two." It was a statement directed all the way across the room to Kakuzu, despite Hidan being two seats away. Hidan perked up anyway. "But first– Konan, what did you decide about the Mizusawa account?"
Mizusawa Asa was the noble lady client who had skipped out on payment, and who had the rare quality of currently being on Akatsuki's "no kill" list.
"If she actually doesn't have the funds, we'll have to make an example of her," Konan said casually, as if she had not spent much of the previous day insisting they couldn't kill her because she was "last of a noble family" and "important to Rain Country's political stability" or whatever. "If possible, I'd rather avoid that. I want someone to go investigate her covertly."
"Then just wait for Uchiha to get back and he can genjutsu-whammy her," Hidan drawled. "What's our new mission?"
"I already investigated her," Kakuzu growled, and his chair groaned as he leaned forward, arms crossed tight over his chest. "She's arrogant and stupid with money–"
Kakuzu had bullied some accounting information out of various groups related to the Mizusawa household. She was spending money she didn't seem to have, which downright offended Kakuzu. Konan held up a hand to cut off his rant.
"I think we should all keep in mind," Konan said, voice somehow both indifferent and compelling, "several recent lessons on civilian capacity for deception."
Tori consciously kept her face straight and focused on writing, even as she felt everyone's eyes flick in her direction. Kakuzu's chair groaned some more as he clenched several additional muscles in restrained anger.
"I should be able to make time to investigate in a week or so," Zetsu offered.
"No," Pein disagreed. "Stay where you are; this is low priority."
"This is money," Kakuzu gritted out between his teeth.
"She's having a gala this evening," Konan said, and then the slightest hint of mischief entered her voice as she added, "why don't one of you attend?"
There was a very long silence, in which Tori could only hear the quiet slide of her pen on paper. Konan makes an ultimatum: who will crash the party?
"Will there be booze?" Hidan asked.
"You don't drink on a mission," Sasori snapped at the same time Deidara said, "I like parties, yeah."
"With all due respect," Itachi's projection spoke up, his voice clear but filled with static, "aside from Zetsu, I am the most suited to infiltration–"
"Genjutsuing everyone around you isn't infiltration," Deidara interrupted snidely.
"I could send a puppet in," Sasori said, tone bored. "Civilians never notice the difference."
Perhaps they are simply too smart to comment on the strange creature walking around in human skin, Tori thought, idly jotting down notes.
"She was Kakuzu and Hidan's client," Pein said. "They should finish the job." Then after a beat, he added, "Take Tori."
There was a very awkward silence. Tori stared down at the notebook, balanced in her lap since there was no working table.
"Could you repeat that?" Tori asked, and her question was buried under several other protests.
"She's a liability," Itachi said, while Deidara made a mean comment about Tori getting distracted by fancy party food. Hidan yelled something about how even he could play nice at a party with free booze.
"You absolutely cannot," Konan said, eyeing Hidan. Turning back to Pein, she asked, "Are you sure?"
Pein gave a sort of half-hearted shrug and said, "You told me you wanted to send someone unintimidating."
Next to her, Deidara burst into loud, mocking laughter. Tori wrote: Deidara does his best hyena impression, unaware he himself looks like he's in a boy band.
They hashed out the details of what Tori was meant to do, without actually consulting Tori on what she was capable of. She was to figure out the true financial state of the client, and then advise Kakuzu and Hidan on how to secure funds as soon as possible, preferably with "restraint from unnecessary violence." Tori did not think she was charismatic enough to convince some noble lady to tell her her financial secrets, nor did she have any idea how one even behaved at a party fancy enough to be called a "gala." Mostly likely, she was just going to embarrass herself. She'd be lucky if she made it through being escorted there by Hidan and Kakuzu with all her limbs intact.
Tori did not even know how banks here worked. Did rich people of this world have off-shore accounts? What did they do if Mizusawa Asa was hiding their money on one of the quarantined Water Country islands?
Chewing on her lip as Itachi pointed out, yet again, that she was a random imprisoned civilian and untrained in undercover work, Tori wondered if she should be nervous. This mission itself was doomed to fail, after all. Yet, she could bring herself to be worried about that– what was a civilian household going to do, kick her out? Call her names? She was more concerned about Kakuzu losing his temper.
Surely her safety here didn't rely on her being able to perform on ninja missions, because that would be absurd. Then again, Akatsuki was an absurd organization. Maybe she should be worried.
"When you're finished with that, this needs to be done by the end of the week," Konan concluded, and passed one of Tori's mission summary cards to Hidan, who read it very seriously. "It's a simple assinsination, but the client has... unique requests."
Ah, it was the anti-labor union guy who wanted his victims horribly and very specifically mutilated. Hidan carefully traced Tori's stick figure diagrams with a finger. Great.
"If you have any questions about the details," Konan drawled on, "Tori knows. You'll have plenty of time to talk tonight. Dismissed."
Out in the hallway, Deidara grabbed Tori and dragged her into an empty office. There was a single filing cabinet shoved into the corner, which Tori noted would be more useful to have in her office. Deidara shoved her lightly and slammed the door behind them.
"Okay, I don't know what you think just happened in there, yeah," Deidara started, and Tori dragged her attention away from trying to calculate if the cabinet would be light enough for her to move on her own. Right. A pissed-off ninja had just cornered her alone in a room. At some point, this would have terrified her for very good reasons, and she needed to remember those reasons. "But every person in there knows Konan could just waltz over there herself and get this done in like an hour."
"Okay," Tori said, because historically speaking, just agreeing with angry ninja had kept her alive.
"It's obviously some sort of stupid fucking test," Deidara continued, voice unnecessarily loud for the room and face screwed up in a scowl. He jabbed a finger into Tori's clavicle. "I don't know what the fuck for, or who it's evening testing, but if you screw it up, it going to look bad for me and Danna, yeah."
"Okay," Tori repeated.
"Okay?" Deidara barked, and then jabbed her in the collarbone again, hard enough to make her take a step back. "Don't just 'okay' me, yeah!"
Deidara took a step forward, closing the gap between them, his face in hers.
Tori opened her mouth to apologize, but– no. Fuck that. She wasn't doing that anymore. If Deidara was mad he'dkidnapped her and she'd made a fool of him, that was his problem, not hers.
"Okay, I get it," Tori answered, and she'd meant to keep her voice calm and rational, but it had just sort of come out in the range of "quiet with suppressed rage." She learned in even further to Deidara, and he moved back ever so slightly. "You can't stand the idea of someone who played you turning out to be a regular dumb civilian girl." Deidara opened his mouth, looking more pissed than ever, but Tori forged on. "Unfortunately for you, now I know you care, and screaming at me just makes me want to fuck up the mission even more."
Deidara looked completely scandalized. "No–" he started, jabbing his finger into her clavicle again, and then spluttered out some enraged nonsense syllables. "You can't. Leader-sama will kill you."
"Bold of you to assume I'm not petty enough to risk it," Tori snapped back, and then very purposefully turned to the filing cabinet. It had three drawers, and a key that was still sitting in one of the locks. Nice.
"God, no wonder Danna likes you. You're a petty bitch," Deidara sneered, crossing his arms as Tori experimentally opened and closed the cabinet drawers. "Oh, excuse me," he added mockingly. "A petty asshole. Asshole is the gender neutral term, yeah?"
"First of all," Tori said, peering inside the empty drawer. "I cannot believe you think you're not a petty asshole."
Deidara snorted. Tori experimentally pushed the cabinet; it was too heavy to lift.
"Second of all," Tori said, pitching her voice over the scraping of the cabinet as she pushed it across the room, "it's nice to hear you've figured out that we both have to take orders from Leader, because we have both been forced into this clown factory, so either suck it up and give me real help, or leave me alone."
Deidara looked thoughtful as she pushed the cabinet by him and out the door, as if being actively helpful were a new concept to him. It did not seem to fully infiltrate his grey matter, though, as he just vaguely followed behind her as she pushed the cabinet down the hall, instead of helping her move it.
"Yeah, okay," Deidara finally concluded. "Then I'll give you a tip: ask Danna for a haircut, yeah."
Tori paused at the door to her office. "What?"
"I respect whatever disaster burnt your hair," Deidara continued, "but Mizusawa won't."
Tori touched the tips of her hair. A lot of it had gotten kind of weird toward the front after being singed, but she hadn't thought it was that obvious.
"It will be the creepiest haircut of your life," Deidara continued. "But he's good at it, yeah."
With a final Don't fuck up, yeah, Deidara flipped his own hair over his shoulder and swaggered down the hall.
xXx
Getting a haircut from Sasori turned out to not just be the creepiest haircut of Tori's life, but one of the creepiest experiences she'd had, ever.
When she asked– haltingly and awkwardly– Sasori actually stopped in the middle of running tests on Hiruko and dropped his tools. He fixed her with a sort of peel-you-skin-off look that could rival Orochimaru for intensity and creepiness, and then slowly crossed the room to stroke her hair.
"Um," Tori said. Sasori rubbed a strand of her hair between his fingers, completely ignoring her personal bubble.
"It is hideous," Sasori said, very rudely, but with a disturbing sort of reverence continued, "but there's is a lot of artistic potential here."
"Um," Tori said.
Sasori proceeded to have her sit on a stool and be as still as possible.
"I'd like to keep the length," Tori said, once Sasori had scissors and a comb in his hands. He had a whole kit, presumably for his extensive puppet collection.
"Yes, of course," Sasori snapped, irritated his puppet-for-the-hour could talk back. "You don't have the facial structure for short hair."
Rude.
Sasori proceeded to push and turn her head as he pleased, with little regard for Tori's personal space as he snipped away at her hair. There was no mirror, so Tori was not actually sure what he was doing, just that it was happening and it involved a lot of very weird, gentle caresses of her hair.
"What kind of hair care routine do you use?" Sasori asked at some point, disgusted.
"In Oto we had like… body gel?" Tori answered. It had kept her clean, but at what cost?
Sasori made a sort of offended noise in the back of his throat, which was about how Tori felt about the whole situation. She informed him that she now owned a travel bottle of conditioner.
"I think I have a mousse," Sasori muttered, and then preemptively told Tori to shut up and not move a muscle.
When Sasori finally declared her finished, Tori still did not know what she looked like, but Sasori had certainly spent a lot of time very meticulously shaping her loose curls and stroking her hair in an impressively unnerving way.
"We should keep you like this forever," Sasori concluded, eyeing her like a purebred at a dogshow.
"That'snicethanksSasori!" Tori yelped and then left as fast as she possibly could, grabbing the bamboo umbrella he was loaning her to protect "his work" from the rain.
Tori assumed that when actual infiltration agents went to fancy parties like this, they either had wardrobes of nice, appropriate clothes, or some sort of budget with which to acquire nice clothes. Tori was to meet Kakuzu and Hidana in less than an hour, though, so it was too late to ask. In any case, asking for something as basic as clothes seemed humiliating somehow…
...although she was definitely going to have to talk to someone about getting personal hygiene supplies, as she was quickly running out. Hmm. A conversation for later.
Tori pulled on her nicest article of clothing, which was a knee-length black dress that she was pretty sure she sufficiently washed clean of heart-goo stains. She also threw on what little make-up she had, and silently thanked the old gods and the new for having eyelashes and eyebrows again.
The tiny fold-up hand mirror she'd bought was not enough to figure out what her hair looked like as a whole, but Sasori had definitely done some layering around her face to get rid of the uneven chunks, and she'd lost a couple inches in length due to dead ends. The product he's put in made her curls crunchy.
Kakuzu was in the lobby when Tori went down, and she was relieved he did not comment on her make-over. When Hidan came down, scythe over his shoulder, he took one look at her and said:
"You look like a fucking storybook witch."
Tori twitched. It wasn't even the first time she'd been told she looked like a witch, and between the dark curly hair and the black dress, she could see where he was coming from. Still. Rude.
"I'm surprised you recognized me at all," Tori said snidely.
"Listen–" Hidan started, dropping his scythe from his shoulder.
Kakuzu sighed deeply and stepped in between them. He grabbed Hidan by the collar and Tori by the wrist and dragged them out the door. They bickered the entire walk through the village. It was a good distraction, Tori thought, from her sandals filling with rain water.
"How do you even have the same stereotype of witches as my world?" Tori asked Hidan as he flipped off the village gate guards on the way out.
"How the fuck would I know?" Hidan asked.
"Well, where do your witch stereotypes come from?" Tori asked.
"I dunno. Books?"
"But where do the books get the idea from–"
Kakuzu cut the conversation off by grabbing Tori roughly and tossing her over his shoulder. She dropped Sasori's umbrella as Kakuzu lept into the trees, and Hidan followed, cackling at the started yelp Tori let out.
Because he never shut up, Hidan took the time spent flinging themselves between trees like very dangerous monkeys to ask Tori follow-up questions about his next mission.
"Did he want this done alive or dead?" Hidan asked, flashing the notecard. It was getting limp from the excess moisture in the air. It didn't necessarily rain all the time outside of Ame in Rain Country, but it certainly rained more often than not, and every jump form a tree limbed flicked water droplets into the air.
"I don't think it matters," Tori said, and then she bounced uncomfortably on Kakuzu's shoulder and let out a said little wheeze. "He just wants to send a message against unionizing. But I guess if you can make it obvious it was done alive, that's a stronger message. What are your civilian crime scene analyses like?"
Hidan had absolutely no idea, but he'd interpreted Tori's response as "while alive" and nodded seriously. Tori had absolutely not meant this, because she was strictly against unnecessary torture, and she suspected whatever police investigation happened would just be like, "oh no, they're dead!" So, there was no point mutilating someone alive.
"I don't see why it's easier to hire extremely expensive secret assassins than to just use the money to pay your workers more," Tori said, and then Kakuzu very purposefully jostled her so her stomach hit his shoulder and partially knocked the wind out of her again.
"Higher expenses on the front end eliminate the need to deal with costly issues later," Kakuzu said.
"But–" Tori countered, and it sounded like a gag because she'd lost her breath with that move, "happier workers are more productive workers, and a working class that's spending more is better for the overall–"
"–then they should have hired us," Kakuzu cut her off. "At the end of the day, money is money, and everyone has a price."
"'Even Hell runs on money,'" Tori muttered under her breath. Kakuzu grunted in agreement.
"I don't know that the fuck either of you are talking about," Hidan called loudly. He then switched the conversation to clarifying what her little mutilation diagram meant. "What does a pancreas even look like? You drew it like a funky cloud."
"Because it looks likenonsense," Tori answered.
Tori did not think the client had a very good concept of human anatomy, because he wanted things like "pulling the spleen out through the intestines," which was not how one removed a spleen, and would involve cutting a new holes to get the spleen into the intestines in the first place. Tori knew. She'd pulled out a lot of spleens.
"Do you guys have special names for different types of mutilations?" Tori asked. "Like– like– a 'Konoha Smile'."
Hidan was not very unimpressed with this question, until Tori explained what a Glasgow Smile was. A Konoha Smile just sounded like when Konoha ninja randomly offered you mercy, according to Hidan, as the stereotype was known to do.
"Cutting your face open seems more like some shit they'd do in Kiri," Hidan said. "All the good shit comes out of Kiri."
"Do either of you ever stop talking?" Kakuzu asked.
The Mizusawa mansion was up on a hill, overlooking a dilapidated town that they skirted around rather than pass through. Several of the buildings that Tori could see had been burned out, which was interesting considering how decidedly wet the climate was.
"From the war, probably," Kakuzu said when she said. "Now, shut up."
They ended up squatting in a patch of scraggly trees at the bottom of the hill, right at the edge of a more wooded area, and Kakuzu asked Tori what her plan was to get into the party.
"Uh," Tori said, because she had honestly not considered this. "I was going to just… walk… in…?"
Both Kakuzu and Hidan gave her incredulous looks. The faint sound of music drifted down from the hill. The sky was dark blue from the setting sun, and the whole mansion was illuminated.
"Do you have any plan at all?" Kakuzu asked.
Tori shifted, suddenly embarrassed. "No," she admitted. She'd spent most of the day concentrating on what she assumed was step one of an infiltration mission: not looking like a complete disaster.
"And you didn't think to mention this at the meeting?" Kakuzu asked, and Tori could hear the rising temper behind his words.
"I didn't really think any sort of protest was an option," she said diplomatically. Hidan was looking more and more delighted as the conversation went on, so at least someone was excited about her inevitable failure. "I don't really know why anyone assumed I could do this."
Kakuzu took a deep, calming breath, possibly reminded himself of all the money he needed Tori to make, and said: "Okay."
"Okay?" Hidan asked, plastering a shit-eating grin across his face and nudging Kakuzu with his foot. "Just okay?"
"Okay," Kakuzu hissed out, the way someone might insist they totally were calm. He then proceeded to give Tori what may or may not have been intended to be a pep talk. "It will be okay. You're smart, and you have your doujutsu. Just talk about… The Goat Herder's Son or whatever."
Tori nodded automatically, as if everything he just said made sense. Kakuzu's unpredictable temper scared her quite a bit, and she wasn't about to tell him she didn't know what the hell The Goat Herder's Son was. A famous person? A movie? Who knew!
She also wasn't going to remind him that 1) her made-up future-sight was not a doujutsu, or 2) it didn't even work like that.
"Don't tell anyone the world would be better if they paid workers more, either," Kakuzu continued. "Rich people hate that."
"Right," Tori agreed quickly, before Kakuzu mansplained capitalism to her. "I knew that."
"Just remember," Kakuzu concluded his entirely unhelpful speech. "It's technically a seduction mission."
What the FUCK, Tori thought, and then stepped out of the bushes much more boldly than she felt. Behind her, Hidan snorted with laughter.
"Yeah," he called after her, "use your feminine wiles!"
Jesus Christ, Tori thought as she made her way up the hill, cutting over to a gravel path before anyone noticed she'd just wandered out of the woods like an actual forest witch. Absolutely none of us know how to do this.
Tori did her best "I'm a hot girl and I can get into any party" saunter up the path, which was not really a walk she'd practiced much. At the last party she'd attended, the Half-o-ween one that had ruined her life, she'd made her entrance by hiding under the host's porch with a friend and making ghost noises at guests until someone chased them out. She assumed it would never even occur to anyone at this party to crawl under a porch.
In other words, Tori was definitely not someone who belonged at a high-class party, but she was about to do her best to trick herself and everyone around her into thinking she was. She attempted to brush by the extremely bored looking man at the door, chanting in her head about how she was hot shit.
"Excuse me," the man said, and a muscled arm shot out in front of her. Tori paused and turned to eye the man as if it were cute he thought she didn't belong.
The man was wearing an Iwa headband. Ah, fuck, Tori thought, and broadened the smile on her face. Panicking outwardly would not help.
"Invitation?" the man asked.
First lesson of the night: they should have done some recon before she just waltzed in. Pein had used his bureaucratic power to delay Mizusawa Asa's request for a squad from Ame, and it looked like she'd just hired out to Iwa. Was that even allowed?
"Did I need a written one…?" Tori asked, not letting her smile slip from her face. She was good at staying calm while ninja scrutinized her.
"It's invite only," the man said.
"I was invited verbally," Tori said, and the man's face shifted into a tiny frown that told her that was a bad lie.
Second lesson: she definitely should have done some research to come up with a plausible story to get her in. Or, alternatively, snagged an actual invite.
"I'm an old friend of Asa," Tori said, winking at the man. She knew from the report she'd written up that the noble woman was about her age, so it wasn't an unlikely story. "I was passing through the area, and one of her waitstaff thought it would be a nice surprise. She's been so stressed lately, you know."
The Iwa-nin eyed her dubiously, like that was the dumbest bullshit he'd ever heard. Tori frowned, feigning annoyance, and crossed her arms.
"Really?" she said. "Why don't you do your job and go find someone to verify who I am, then?"
The Iwa-nin was definitely not going to do that, because abandoning his post was Tori's best bet for sneaking in, and so Tori felt safe suggesting it.
"What's your name?" the Iwa-nin finally asked.
The first name that came into Tori's head was Princess Leia, so she said the second thing that came to mind: "Fujioka Haruhi."
Fuck.
"And how do you know Asa-san, Fujioka-san?"
"We had classes together," Tori said immediately. She had absolutely no idea what schooling was like for civilians, but honestly, she doubted this random ninja knew either. Assuming Mizusawa had hired a full team, the guy assigned to guard the most obvious entry and check civilian guests out was definitely not the team's top billing member.
The Iwa-nin looked her up and down and then with a note of finality said, "Sorry, no invite, no entry."
"Ugh," Tori groaned and rolled her eyes. She sighed deeply as part of her act and mentally scrolled through all of the stupid complaints she'd heard in the Oto mess hall. How did a wealthy civilian ruin a ninja's day? "Well, I suppose I can just write Asa later about how you wouldn't let me in. I hope your mission contract has a low pay deduction for client complaints, because she is going to be pissed."
And with that, Tori turned on her heel and sauntered back down the path. The Iwa-nin did not immediately call her back, so she supposed now she had to go find out if there were other ninja crawling around to keep her from sneaking in a back door.
Or maybe she should go back and face Kakuzu? Who was more likely to stab her? Fuck.
A rickshaw was ambling up the path in the opposite direction, carrying an older couple dressed in ridiculously fancy traditional clothing.
No wonder the guard didn't believe me, jeez, Tori thought, eyeing the couple, and then had the sudden and impulsive idea to wave at them. It wasn't weird to greet strangers in Tori's hometown, and it was a natural instinct. But, after getting odd looks for greeting people she barely knew in the hallways of Oto, Tori could only conclude that here you only greeted the closest of friends.
"Good evening," Tori called. "How are you doing?"
The woman smiled in a sort of baffled-but-polite way at her and waved back. "Good evening, dear," she said, in the tone of voice of someone trying to cover up that they did not remember who you were at all. "We're doing as well as a pair of old bones can be."
Her husband grumbled something to her, but Tori missed the exact words due to the guard calling her back.
Tori walked into the mansion with the older couple, the wife looking bemused at the random nice girl who'd greeted her, and the husband sternly ignoring the both of them. The guard was sufficiently convinced Tori knew other guests, at least in passing.
It probably helped, Tori thought as she pushed her way as far into the party and as far away from the guard as possible, that she was very obviously a small civilian woman, and not even an intimidating one. Tori had the type of gentle face that made strangers pick the seat next to her on public transport.
It only took about thirty seconds inside for Tori learn her third lesson, which was that she should have learned who was invited and what the dress code was. The majority of the guests were older and dressed traditionally, in expensive silks with complicated embroidery. A handful of the younger guests had more modern clothes– slacks and cocktail dresses– but Tori felt like she stuck out like a sore thumb. Her secondhand dress definitely wasn't as nice as that sequined monstrosity a young woman on the opposite side of the room was wearing. Tori suddenly found it a lot harder to walk with that confident swing in her hips.
Tori picked up a tiny plate of heure d'oeuvres and slinked through the party as inconspicuously as possible. The mansion had an open floor plan, with room after room filled with furniture that looked like it had been lifted from a museum. Almost every room had at least one person-sized exotic vase, and all sorts of paintings hung on the walls. There was even a sword over a massive fireplace in one room. The hole Kakuzu had punched in the wall during "negotiations" was just to the right of the fireplace and had been covered by a black tarp.
The guests stuck in tight-knit groups, most of them too involved in their own gossip to give Tori a second glance. She got a few odd looks– ranging from incredulity to distaste– but no one seemed to care enough to question her presence.
Tori spent several minutes standing awkwardly at the edge of a group of middle aged women and waiting for their conversation to turn in a direction she understood. Right now it was about some family's personal business, and something about a brand of…. Ceramics, maybe...?
Very briefly the conversation did turn to the hostess, with one of the ladies saying, "Of course, Ami-san grew up here, during the war, a good and proper Rain Country girl–"
"–Asa-san could take some lessons from her," another woman whispered, clear distaste in her voice. "Did you see her nails? Is that what they do in Iron Country? Her father liked exotic things, butreally–"
"Oh, shush," someone answered, her eyes darting around the room. "Have some decorum."
Tori fidgeted in place. That was her chance to steer the conversation in the direction she wanted it– she was supposed to suss out what exactly Asa's financials were, after all. She should ask for more information. No one was just going to just announce the information she wanted.
"Excuse me," Tori said, and was firmly ignored. Everyone was very engrossed in gossiping loudly about inflation in earthenware prices due to so-and-so's affair with some merchant's daughter. The fourth lesson of the night, then, was know what questions to ask and to whom to direct them.
Also, as a sort of four-B: learn how to be less awkward in a crowd.
"Here," a very bored man said, and put a dirty plate in Tori's hands, stacking it on top of her own empty plate.
"I'm not–" Tori started, but the man was already gone. "–a waiter."
Tori found an actual member of the waitstaff– who, very notably, was also dressed better than her– and then nearly blew her entire cover.
The woman was a ninja. No headband, and in a formal haori baggy enough to hide her build, but Tori had been living with ninja for months and she knew. She could see it in her face and in the way she moved.
"Thank you," Tori said as she passed over the dirty plates, and then shuffled away as quickly as possible without looking suspicious.
As she picked her way through the crowd, Tori started noticing more and more shinobi mixed in. Now that she knew to look, it was obvious. She counted five just in this one room.
That was more than a full team. How many had Asa hired? Were there more Tori wasn't recognizing? What happened now, if she got caught? Would Hidan and Kakuzu come to save her?
Somehow, she doubted it. The fifth lesson: have an extraction plan for when things go wrong, and a handler you trust.
Tori needed somewhere quiet to think. Her heart pounded as she walked through room after room as calmly as she could, the hum of conversation and the music of a live band making her skin crawl.
Eventually, she found an empty room and shut the door behind her. It was decorated entirely with taxidermied animals.
There were hundreds of them– posed around the room, and then in floor-to-ceiling glass-front display cases. Tori wondered if guests weren't in here because it was actually off-limits or just creepy. It didn't matter to her; she'd done some of her best thinking in off-limits rooms filled with dead things.
She should probably just leave. No one would question an awkward guest leaving early, and even if Akatsuki was mad at her for abandoning a mission, there was no way anyone could expect her to deal with ninja problems. Plus, the ninja were probably specifically here to guard against retaliation from Kakuzu's rage, and Tori should tell him that as soon as possible.
Tori wandered by a pair of monkeys posed in a tree and then peered up at a taxidermy albino bear. Yes, leaving was definitely the only sane option here, but not before she got a look at whatever the hell was going on in this room.
An hour later, Tori was still in the room, examining a platypus, and the woman in the sequin monstrosity burst in.
"I don't care if Yamamoto-san owns an entire fucking army of trading ships," the woman fumed. "He had no right to say that to me! I'm not some stupid country bumpkin–"
"Asa-san, please," the old man with her pleaded, and then abruptly cut himself off as they both spotted Tori, squatting in front of the case with the platypus.
(Where the HELL did this Naruto world have PLATYPI? Tori needed to know, immediately, and this entire stupid mission could go on hold.)
There was a very awkward silence as the three of them stared at each other.
"What," Asa bit out, "the fuck."
"Uh, ma'am," the old man said, and if that was Asa-san, that was probably her second cousin and advisor that Kakuzu ranted about ripping in two long-ways, Oba Takao.
Asa cocked her head at Tori in a sort of Well? gesture, and it suddenly hit Tori how ridiculous she looked. Hair frizzy from the rain and travel, make-up too bold and too dark, ninja sandals under her plain dress– she didn't look flawlessly elegant like the women in the next room. She looked like a teenager that worked at Hot Topic.
Asa shot Oba a meaningful look, a silent communication Tori didn't know how to interpret. She feared they could hear the thudding of her heart from across the room, even though she knew that was impossible.
Tori didn't stand up right away. She didn't know what to do or say. Kakuzu had called this a 'seduction mission,' but she couldn't seduce anyone.
No. There was more than one type of seduction.
She couldn't be sexy. But she could be a lot of other things.
"Asa-san," she said, turning her face up just enough to make eye contact with her. She set her voice low, purring. "You have quite the collection. Do you know what this one is called?"
Tori pointed at the platypus, and then did her best impression of an Orochimaru smile up at Asa.
"This is such a curious creature," she said. "Where on earth did you get it?"
Asa's lip twitched, and Tori made several snap judgements all at once. Asa could dress in fancy old clothes if she wanted to and make all the old ladies coo about what a tragic young lady she was, but instead she was in a glittery dress, with loud make-up and too much jewelry and yellow acrylic nails. Had Tori's time in Oto not been a crash course in teasing loyalty out of young people who were just a little bit different?
"To be honest," Tori said, doing her best impression of Orochimaru on a helpful day: playful and a little mysterious and so ready to tell you how you were special and important. "I snuck in here because I heard your father had exotic tastes. No offense, but this room is so much more interesting than your old fuddy-duddy guests."
"You snuck in–" Oba said, sounding scandalized, but Asa burst into laughter.
"It's a duckmole," Asa said, crossing the room to join Tori. She was wearing a pair of ridiculous suede heels that clicked as she walked.
"Oh, I've read about those," Tori lied, running a finger down its beak. What the hell was a duckmole? Where did it come from? "It's smaller than I thought it'd be. Did you know they laid eggs?"
Asa just raised her eyebrows, apparently not at all interested in learning about monotremes. Tori changed the subject.
"You know," she started, "I was passing through Rain and heard this was the it-spot to be–"
The line of Asa's mouth thinned. "You can't just pass through Rain," she said.
"You can if your family owns Cup Noodles," Tori said, and then winked again. She was winking a lot tonight. She should find a real mirror a figure out what she actually looked like when she did that. "I've heard Yamamoto-san is a huge dick, by the way."
Asa snorted in a very unlady-like way, and then relaxed. "What did you say your name was?"
"Suzumiya Haruhi," Tori supplied. Oh, hell, wrong Haruhi. "Where did you get the duckmole from?"
"I don't know any Suzumiyas…" Oba muttered.
"My father made all of them," Asa said, crossing the room to stand next to Tori. "He fancied himself an ecologist. Bit of a creepy hobby, right?"
She then sent Tori a look so sharp Tori new instinctively there was a right and a wrong answer.
"I don't know," Tori said carefully, "I kind of like stuff like this."
A grin spread over Asa's face. In the next twenty minutes, Tori fulfilled her personal goal of learning where the fuck a platypus might have come from, which was a vague "off-continent" and then "found in an exotic pet market." Was this where they had gotten potatoes from? Peanuts? Tomatoes?
At the end of the twenty minutes, Tori had also learned that Asa was incredibly obsessed with her family's history, an implication that she felt disconnected from it after growing up abroad due to war, and that she wanted to expand and modernize her family's estate. Tori also found out that Yamamoto had slighted Asa by vaguely implying she was too young to understand something, that she was mad at another guest for questioning her maturity, and upset with a whole slew of people for not complimenting her dress.
"This whole stupid country is stuck in the past," Asa complained, raking her fingers through the fur of the albino bear. Oba fidgeted in the background. "I've been trying to improve it and no one is supporting me. I'm so glad I found someone else young and enlightened, like you. Everyone here just wants to talk aboutThe Goat Herder's Son."
What was that? Tori was going to have to look it up once she got back. You know, assuming the ninja running around this party didn't cart her off to some new hidden village.
Tori smiled and said something about not everyone being brave or clever enough to get away from tradition, a meaningless statement meant to pat Asa's ego.
"Let's get something to drink," Asa finally said, slipping her arm into Tori's and guiding her towards the door. "It gets so stuffy in here. Have you traveled much?"
She said that last bit with a little bit of hunger in her voice, and Tori abruptly understood what Kakuzu meant when he said this was a "seduction" mission. It wasn't about sex– it was about offering someone something they couldn't resist.
"Oh, yes," Tori said. "I just came from Sound Country."
The re-entered the loud rooms of the actual party, and while Tori bullshitted her way through a story about meeting with local Cup Noodle distributors, Asa waved down another ninja-waiter with a tray of champagne flutes. Tori pretended not to notice the ninja's eyes lingering on her just a little too long.
"Have you ever had sparkling wine before?" Asa asked.
Tori's one and only experience with champagne was trying to drink it straight from the bottle and the foam going up her nose. She told Asa she'd tried it a handful of times.
"They have an interesting tradition in Iron Country," Tori said, "where they open bottles with swords."
Asa laughed, loud and abrupt. "I grew up in Iron Country," she said. "That is so typical of them, and their silly samurai traditions."
Sabrage was, as far as Tori knew, a French tradition that involved opening champagne bottles with a saber. Her aforementioned champagne experience had involved watching an upperclassman demonstrating the technique with a breadknife.
Asa downed the entire flute of sparkling wine in one go and grabbed another two.
"Hurry up, slowpoke," she demanded, and offered the second glass to Tori.
Tori, realizing she'd made a terrible mistake, drank the flute as quickly as she could, stamping down the memory of the fizz of bubbles up her nose and the distant memory of when she could watch a man wave a knife around and still feel safe.
Asa coaxed two more glasses into Tori and then sent the ninja-waiter away for shochu. Tori was, perhaps, going to die. The most alcohol she'd ever had at once was a coffee mug full of cheap wine her roommate had gotten from somewhere.
(College was… not a classy experience, in hindsight.)
"I heard a nasty rumor about you," Tori whispered conspiratorially to Asa, a shot of shochu later. Asa had made some guests clear off a couch, and now Tori was curled up next to her, listing off random made-up bullshit about her travels as Asa consumed an alarming amount of alcohol. "Yamamoto-san said you've been buying things you can't afford. That you're in debt with some ninja."
"Ugh!" Asa said, throwing her cup at the ninja-waiter, who caught it easily. "Yamamoto-san doesn't know shit. I'm not stupid. My grandmother was from Uzushio."
What the hell did that have to do with anything?
"What do you mean?" Tori asked, but Asa was too distracted and a little drunk.
"Typical of Yamamoto-san to say something like that," she muttered, and then waved down a second ninja, this one disguised as a guest. "Hey, you, let's get this show started. Toss Yamamoto in for good measure, would you?"
Tori did not know what was going on, and it looked neither did any of the guests as they were sheparded into the room. Asa shoved empty champagne flutes off the coffee table in front of her couch and shot Tori a meaningful look. Tori had no idea what Asa wanted and smiled back.
Asa rolled her eyes, grabbed Tori's sleeve to pull her forward, and then used her shoulder to steady her as she stepped onto the table.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Asa announced, surveying her guests like some sort of sparkly, drunk monarch. "I am Mizusawa Asa, the last of the Mizusaawa family, one of only two noble families left in Rain after the War–"
She went on for a while, about how the other living family was a bunch of cowards hiding in Hot Water Country. Then she announced they were here today to recement her family's power.
"And our power," she said, "is Rain Country's power."
She paused, triumphant, and there was some very awkward applause. Tori clapped the way she thought Orochimaru would clap for the latest lunatic in power, which was with restrained enthusiasm.
"In order to progress, of course," Asa continued, swaying on her heels, "obstacles to progress must be destroyed."
This was, if Tori had to pick a turning point, the exact moment where things went from "kind of shaky" to "a complete disaster ordered by Jashin their-holy-self."
Hindsight was 20/20, though, and in the moment Tori just clapped politely and poured herself another drink of shochu.
xXx
NOTES:
Tori: Orochimaru just treats everything like a seduction mission, all the time, and is to be emulated.
The entire Akatsuki: No?
This chapter was supposed to be the ENTIRE mission but then it was 8000 words and we're only like halfway through. :( Uuuh some actual notes:
-"Duckmole" is an old word for platypus.
-Sabrage is cool as shit and we should all go around chopping open champagne bottles. I highly recommend looking it up on YouTube.