NOTES: Everyone who did their homework and looked up sabrage get bonus points!
This chapter, like Tori's entire life, has more gutted bodies than originally planned.
xXx
Lesson number… whatever lesson Tori was on tonight… was actually one that she had already known. Everyone in this world was ready to kill everyone else at the drop of a hat, apparently, because everything was comically terrible.
Asa stood on the table with a smug grin on her face, surveying her twitching audience as some of her non-ninja servants rolled out cages of screaming, writhing rats.
"Some of you," Asa announced, voice a mix of sweet and sharp, "have not been as loyal to this country as you should be. Yamamoto-san, step forward."
Even with her back to the audience, Tori could feel the tension in the room. Everyone was dead silent– there was not even the rustling of clothing from fidgeting, just the scream of the rats echoing through the room.
Asa cleared her throat impatiently, and a ninja pulled an elderly man to the front of the room. Tori held her glass up to pretend to take another swig of shochu and hide her reaction.
This was Yamamoto? He was ancient! Part of her regretted naming him specifically, but…
Most of her was really just glad that wasn'ther up there.
Asa went through a list of names, giving increasingly wild and slurred explanations of their betrayal. She accused people of undermining her, of failure to support her, of giving aid to the wrong people in the previous war. No one said a word against her or made a single sound of protest.
Tori wondered at that. Was this what war did to people? Was this what the presence of ninja did to people? Or did everyone just feel the same as the ugliest parts of her– relief their names weren't being called?
Finally, Asa made to step off the table, wobbled, and Tori shot forward to grab her arm and help her down. The sudden movement made her head spin, and both girls fell ungracefully back into the couch.
"Ugh," Asa said, pushing loose hair back from her face. "I just threw up in my mouth a little." She waved vaguely at the line of eight people now at the front of the room. They ranged in disposition from resolute and still to shaking in fear, but all were silent. "Begin!"
Tori knew what Water Country rat torture was because Keizo had threatened her with it more than once. It had never been one of the threats she took seriously– sure, an irate lab partner might hit you or make you work overtime without meals, but starve rats for days so that they would eat you alive? Who had the time for that?
As it turned out, Mizusawa Asa's waitstaff had the time.
The first person in line was old Yamamoto-san, and two blank-faced ninja picked him up and forced him down into one of the cages. He started to yell and struggle, then, and one of the women in line buried her face in her hands as she openly wept.
"I thought you were s'pose to, um," Tori said, her drunk mind struggling to say anything that wasn't: Lady, what the fuck? "Don't you cut the person open first?"
"What?" Asa asked, rolling a champagne flute in her hands. Tori wondered if she'd noticed it was empty.
In a frenzy, the rats started to bite Yamamoto, who screamed in a sort of unholy fear that Tori had never heard from any of the shinobi she'd helped Orochimaru kill. Tori pitched her voice over the sound, desperate just to be focusing on conversation and not on the screaming.
"You cut the abdomen open," she said, thinking back to Keizo's threats, "and put the rats inside. Then they eat the person from the inside."
Asa let out a thoughtful hum, and then leaned forward in her seat to bark more commands. The next person in line– a woman, this time– was lowered into a second cage while a shinobi leaned over it with a tanto in hand.
I don't know where I expected that to go, Tori thought, fighting back a wince. What the fuck, Drunk Tori?
After the third person was shoved into a cage of rats and then sliced open, Asa leaned into Tori and whispered. "I'm going to do this to the entirety of Akatsuki, just you watch."
Tori snorted into her glass. "Hidan will probably like it," she replied.
"No," Asa disagreed, sitting up straight and glaring at her, "he won't."
Tori backtracked immediately, "You're right. They'll all hate it. How are you going to get them, though? They're ninja."
Asa flopped back into the couch, smiling whimsically at the screaming people in front of her. "How do you think I got so many Iwa elite?" she asked. "I'm going to trade Akatsuki for–"
"Sparkling wine?" one of the waiters interrupted, and suddenly more champagne was under Tori's nose.
"Uh, thanks," Tori said, and took it.
"I think it's a good deal," Asa continued, ignoring the interruption. "I've been selling and trading off– hmm– my grandmother's scrolls, but Akatsuki pissed me off."
The waiter leaned in again and asked, "Mizusawa-sama, would you like me to fetch you anything to eat?"
Tori recognized that it was a bad sign that this ninja kept cutting Asa off, but there was too much alcohol running through her system to get the dots to connect properly. She needed Asa to talk, and Asa was talking, and so Tori ignored the red flag.
"Scrolls?" Tori asked, and one of the ninja pulled Yamamoto's mutilated corpse out of the first cage while another ninja drugged another man– this one in his mid-twenties– forward. "What, like ninja scrolls?"
"My grandmother's dowry," Asa said smugly, taking a sip from her empty champagne flute and then looking down at it like it had personally betrayed her. "The seals on the greenhouse are so good, they survived both wars, and only I can open it."
Asa waggled her pointer finger at Tori.
"What–" Tori started to ask, but Asa had turned around, now demanding a full champagne flute from the waiter that had been hovering over them. The conversation was over, and Asa snuggled back into the couch to watch the show in front of her. Tori copied her.
It was alarmingly easy to stay calm through the entire horrorshow. Tori had seen… well, she wouldn't say worse, necessarily, but she'd seen comparably gross things. The screaming and the crying bothered her more than the mutilation or the stench. She forced herself to relax back into the couch and sipped her drink. Next to her, Asa shifted restlessly and then leaned forward, body tense and brows furrowed in concentration.
Tori tried to put together what Asa had said. Something something dowry, something greenhouse? Scrolls? What?
Also, how in the name of god was she going to hold down anyone in Akatsuki long enough to shove a rat inside? That didn't make any sense.
Eventually, Asa stood up and the ninja waiter helped her climb back onto the table. Tori's vision went sideways and her hearing went all fuzzy so she didn't know what Asa was saying, and then suddenly the old woman Tori had come in with was standing in front of Asa and telling her she would never accept someone so cruel as a leader, and then being dragged off…
Tori blacked out twice more during whatever the fuck was happening, and when she thought she was in control again, the entire room was spinning, there were even more bodies on the pile, and a lot of crying people were kneeling all over the room.
"Well?" Asa asked her, eyebrow raised. Next to her, a ninja chucked a kunai and killed an escaped rat.
"Yes," Tori said. It was always a good idea to agree with the crazy person in charge.
"Kneel first," Asa said, voice sharp. "Kneel and swear fealty, or go to the rats."
Well… why not?
Tori practically fell off the couch and then kneeled awkwardly in the cramped space between the couch and the coffee table.
"Whatever you say," Tori said.
"God, you are so drunk," Asa sniffed. "Typical new money."
Someone else helped Asa off the table, and she stretched and whined about wanting to celebrate.
"I'll open another bottle of champagne," one of the non-ninja waitstaff said.
"Ugh, no, that's boring," Asa complained, crossing her arms and tapping a finger against her skin in annoyance.
Finger… yes… the finger… was needed for…. Something. Something important. In the greenhouse?
Tori needed to get the finger. She stood up, and then instantly had to sit back down, sticking her head between her knees as the room and her body seemed to spin in opposite directions. There was more talking, and Tori missed what happened but Asa was holding a champagne bottle in the fingers Tori needed to get–
Tori stood up and staggered forward. Tori had absolutely no idea what she said, but next thing she knew, Asa was pulling the sword from the mantel place while the kunoichi at her side rolled her eyes.
"'S not hard," Tori said, and gestured for Asa to sit next to her on the floor. She didn't remember how she'd come to be on the floor, but Asa had the sword in one hand and the champagne bottle in the other, so things were going the way Tori wanted. "You run the blade down the side of the bottle and the change in pressure makes it– uh– break."
Tori leaned forward, folding herself around Asa to guide her hands, positioning the fingers around the neck of the bottle and guiding Asa's hand with the sword in slow motion.
"Just like that," Tori assured. "Just go as fast n' strong as you can."
Tori wobbled, moved so she was blocking the kunoichi's view. There were more shinobi present, but they were moving rats and bodies and wailing guests and no one seemed all that concerned with the shenanigans of two drunk civilians. Tori arranged the fingers one more time. "Perfect. To your reign, Princess."
Tori had no idea if that sentence even made sense with the current circumstances, but a manic smile spread across Asa's face.
Asa did just as she was told, running the sword down the side of the bottle as fast as she could. The blade hit the lip of the bottle, and the glass broke off in a perfect ring, taking the cork with it. Foam splattered all over the floor.
Asa screamed. Blood mixed with the champagne on the perfectly polished hardwood floor.
"Asa," Tori cried, voice filled with concern she absolutely does not feel, and she lurched forward to comfort her. Tori was very visibly drunk at this point, though, and she missed as Asa grasped her own left wrist in horror. Tori slipped, ended up on her elbows, and came face to face with Asa's dismembered index finger.
Tori could not believe that worked. She grabbed the finger and did what she always did when she doesn't have pockets: she shoved it down her shirt. (Some hours later, when she was sober again, this will be one of the more horrifying memories of the night.)
Asa let out a piercing scream, and Tori was shoved out of the way as Oba and two ninja swept in to help. Tori blinked dumbly at the scene, sprawled on her butt across the floor. She'd sort of forgotten about the part where removing fingers hurt people.
Strong hands gripped her by the upper arms, and the waitress-kunoichi dragged her across the room and ripped back the tarp to pull her outside through the hole Kakuzu had punched in the wall.
"Okay, you little sneak," the kunoichi said, and shoved her into the wood-paneled wall of the mansion. The back of the mansion was a carefully manicured garden, illuminated by old fashioned gas lamps. "Who are you working for?"
Tori blinked up at the woman, and then into the night sky behind her. It had been overcast coming in, but now it was clear and Tori felt like she could see every star in the universe.
That's so beautiful, what the fuck, Tori thought. She'd have to drive hours out to the middle of nowhere to get a view like this, back in her old world.
There was another shinobi-man talking to the kunoichi– Tori missed how he'd gotten there– and he leaned over and smacked Tori in the face.
"Hey," Tori protested, even though it had barely hurt. Her face was oddly numb. Being drunk was like some sort of superpower.
"She's not normal," the kunoichi said. "I hit her with way too much azylmide for her to still be standing."
Tori felt her world lurch again, and she leaned back against the wall. That was… a drug. She couldn't remember which one. Kabuto had given it to her a few times, though. She was probably more resistant than a normal person.
"Maybe," Tori said, her words sounding to her like they were coming out of someone else's mouth, "you're not as good as you think you are."
Oh no, being drunk wasn't a superpower; it was stupid power. Or… no… she was drugged? Drunk or drugged? Both? What was happening?
"What are the potential alcohol-drug interactions?" Tori slurred, leaning harder into the wall.
"You think this moron is suspicious?" the ninja-man asked, waving vaguely at Tori incredulously. Tori very carefully shifted herself so her back was against the wood panelling. This seemed more stable, even as the stars spun above. "She's so small, you probably just underestimated the dosage."
"She cut off the client's finger!" the kunoichi protested.
Tori stood there and watched dumbly as the two ninja argued. The woman had overheard her comment about Hidan and thought she was suspicious, but the man had seen her walking around with her arm linked with Asa and thought she was an old friend. Tori closed her eyes and focused on not falling over as they mutually agreed they should tie her up and dump her in the basement to be dealt with later.
Tori's incredibly brilliant plan to prevent this from happening was to lean against the wall some more and think: Well, shit. Asa would probably feed her to the fucking rats.
The kunoichi turned to her, grimly, and then suddenly there was blood splashed all over Tori's front and three metal blades coming out of the kunoichi's face and chest. The ninja-man barely had time to reach for his weapon's pouch before Hidan pivoted and kicked him in the chest, his hands still on his scythe in the kunoichi's body.
"What's up, shitstain," Hidan greeted Tori, wrenching his weapon from the kunochi's corpse. Kakuzu snapped the ninja-man's neck. "Did you get sloshed instead of doing your job?"
He said this very brightly, like it was his preferred outcome.
Tori wiped the blood off her face. "Imma multitasker," she said. Blood was going to be so much harder to get out of clothes than heart-goo. "Do we have laundry faci– fusilli–?"
She stumbled over the word 'facilities.' Hidan grinned toothily at her.
"This has been a waste of time," Kakuzu growled. "I'm going in."
He made a move for the tarp, which was flapping gently in the wind as people yelled at each other inside the mansion, and Tori went to block his way, tripped over the ninja-man's corpse, and fell flat on her face.
"No, I know how–ow!" She rolled over to blink spots out of her eyes. Kakuzu glared down at her. "'s been trading her grandma's scrolls for stuff. They're in the greenhouse."
"...what?" Kakuzu asked.
"Her grandma brought old scrolls from Uzush'o for her dowry," Tori said, shakily getting back to her feet. Ooh, now her stomach was rolling. "Asa's been trading them to ninja."
One of the Iwa-nin stuck his head out of the tarp, and Kakuzu grabbed him and literally broke his back over his knee. Tori leaned back against the wall again.
"Aaaand," Tori continued, watching Kakuzu discard the man like a ragdoll, "she was gonna sell Akatsuki out to Iwa instead of paying you."
Kakuzu froze, and Tori learned what 'killing intent' felt like. It felt exactly like dead certainty you were going to be cut open and have hungry rats shoved into your innards.
"Shit," Tori said, and then toppled over again. Was she going to vomit? She was definitely going to vomit.
"Get in there and make sure none of the ninja get away," Kakuzu commanded, pulling back the tarp and pushing Hidan through. Hidan did not resist in the slightest and gave a happy whoop as several shouts of alarm rang through the night.
"Civies," Tori said from the grass. They weren't supposed to hurt them. Konan said so.
"And don't kill the civilians," Kakuzu barked after Hidan. There was some noise and someone's severed arm flew over Tori, its fancy embroidered sleeve flapping in the wind. She hoped it was one of the shinobi in disguise, and not one of the rando old civilians. She didn't want to find out what Konan's killing intent felt like.
"You," Kakuzu said, looming over Tori, "are going to show me these scrolls."
Tori wasn't actually sure how she ended up on her feet and in front of the greenhouse, but it definitely happened. The greenhouse sat in the back of the garden, and the glass panels looked black in the moonlight. Kakuzu jerked at the door, which glowed a dull blue. The ink of a seal bled through the wood, slowly forming a very complex looking pattern.
"She said," Tori said, swaying on her feet, "she opens it with her– um– her finger. Which is why I got this."
If Kakuzu was surprised by Tori pulling a severed finger with a bright yellow acrylic nail out of her shirt, he didn't show it. He took it from her and pressed its pad into the center of the seal. Then he tried around the sides, and then by tracing patterns with it.
Tori watched him, willing the seal into focus as her vision swam. It looked complicated, but the structure was pretty basic. She assumed all the whacky patterns ringing the outside were the… kin-recognition or whatever was going on, but the core of it was mostly recognizable.
Behind them, there was a whole lot of yelling and crashing from the mansion. Nothing happened with the seal.
"Either this needs a living finger," Kakuzu finally concluded, "or you took the wrong one."
He tossed the finger at her, and it hit her square in the solar plexus and fell to the ground.
Kakuzu punched one of the glass panels. It did not break, because the seal had about ten reinforcement components on it to make the place unbreakable. Kakuzu's eyes narrowed at the building, as if it had purposefully pissed him off.
Killing intent was starting to rise around him again. Tori wanted this to stop, because she could feel her stomach flipping over again and she hated vomiting.
"Then why don't you just– hmm–" Tori knelt and scooped the finger up– "dea–deactivate it?"
She wobbled over to the seal and flipped the finger around so she could write with the bloody stump. Deactivating seals was the first lesson you were supposed to learn in fuuinjutsu, and even if she'd… not done those lessons in the right order… Tori had read through and practiced several beginner's guides. Plus, this seal was designed to be deactivated; that's what the whole center bit looked like it was about. Given the seal was supposed to recognize Asa as its owner, deactivating it with her blood as a chakra conduit shouldn't be complicated, even if Tori's spinning head made her write things a little uneven and crooked.
Fingers didn't have a lot of blood in them. She had to squeeze hard to get enough out.
"Ta-daaa," Tori finished, and stepped back as the door swung open. Kakuzu stared at it for approximately two seconds and then stared at Tori for another two seconds. She smiled at him and fumbled with the finger as she put it back down her shirt.
Kakuzu snorted derisively at her and stomped into the greenhouse. Tori wandered in after him.
The insides of the greenhouse were mostly rusted metal shelves with pots of dried dirt and skeletons of plants. A series of trunks were piled up against one wall, and Kakuzu made short work of breaking them open and emptying them of their contents. Ninja scrolls went into his own storage scroll, and a trunk of beautiful but moth-eaten fabrics and another trunk of diaries were shoved aside. Kakuzu paused over a trunk of old books.
"These are rare…" he said, flipping through one with a sort of delicacy Tori had never seen from him.
A ninja interrupted them by hurling a fistful of shuriken through the doorway. They were aimed at Kakuzu, but as Tori was standing partially between him and the door, one ended up in the back of her arm and one grazed the outside of her thigh.
"Fuck," she swore, automatically reaching for the sudden pain in her arm. The mix of drugs and alcohol dulled the sensation, but it still hurt.
Kakuzu snarled and shoved her aside as he stormed for the ninja– now joined by a friend– at the front of the greenhouse.
"Pack those books up!" he commanded over his shoulder.
Tori, now crouched behind one of the metal shelves and clutching a bleeding arm, could not see what happened, but there was certainly a lot of banging and one horrified scream, followed by the sound of shattering glass, the greenhouse walls now no longer protected by the seal.
Tori went with her first instinct and ripped the shuriken out of her arm, and then immediately remembered you weren't supposed to remove things stabbed into you without medical guidance. She didn't have anything to stop the bleeding. Should she put it back in?
No, bad idea, Drunk Tori.
The good news was that the shuriken had not gone too far into her arm and wasn't affecting her ability to move her arm or her fingers at all. This would be… maybe okay….?
The greenhouse was quiet and she crawled towards the storage scroll Kakuzu had left behind. Perhaps he had something in there useful?
Tori had never used a storage scroll before. They were discussed in fuinjutsu literature, of course, although she'd never paid too much attention. The idea was for the user to manipulate chakra into them to make them work, which she couldn't do, but in theory if she just… bled on the right place…
Tori grasped at her bleeding arm again, coating her fingertips.
A while later, she had managed to unseal the Uzushio scrolls Kakuzu had put away, totally undoing the task she was supposed to complete and not finding any medical supplies. Hidan wandered into the greenhouse.
"Yo," he said.
Tori looked up from where she was glaring at the scroll in her lap, now covered in doodles made in blood. Hidan's hair was mussed and pink with blood, and his cloak was cut open. His abdomen was actively bleeding from several puncture wounds, which didn't seem to bother him at all.
"Why aren't you wearing a shirt?" Tori asked, squinting at him.
"You're welcome," Hidan replied, grinning meanly down at her. "Kakuzu went to chase down the runners," He continued, leaning on his scythe and yawning. "He said you had all the scrolls and shit. What're you doing?"
"Um," Tori said. Now that she was slowly sobering up, she didn't have much of an explanation for what her logic here was. "I'm supposed to put these… in the scroll…?"
"Kakuzu and his fucking books," Hidan muttered, and squatted down to start piling things onto the storage scroll. Tori scooted away, delicately touching the wound on her arm. It was tacky with blood, but seemed to have stopped actively bleeding now that she was no longer poking her finger into it.
Platelets, she thought. Gotta love 'em.
And oh, fuck, she'd totally forgotten she'd been knicked in the thigh. It stung when she moved, and now there was a hole in her skirt. She liked this dress, too!
"This isn't working," Hidan said, glaring at his pile. "Did you fucking break a storage scroll?"
"...maybe?" Tori answered.
Hidan made an annoyed noise in the back of his throat and produced his own scroll from inside his cloak. It was black, and Tori vaguely remembered black scrolls meaning something, but she couldn't remember what. Hidan dumped the books and Uzushio scrolls into the storage scroll, re-rolled it, and shoved it into the pack at the small of his back.
"What the hell were you doing?" Hidan asked when he was done. "You broke a scroll, and inside the house there were a bunch of bodies and, like, rats, everywhere– one evenbit me–"
He sounded ever so slightly impressed. Tori could feel a headache coming on.
"Mizusawa Asa is a psychopath, that's what happened," Tori answered, and then gave a brief overview of her 'demonstration.' "Top ten grossest things I've ever seen." She paused, and then because she still wasn't completely sober, added, "Number one, of course, is your face."
Hidan picked up one of the pots of dried out dirt and threw it at her. It was a half-hearted throw, slow and lazy, and Tori just barely managed to duck. It shattered against the wall behind her, raining dirt down on her.
Tori wondered, briefly, if it would be weird to go back into the mansion and use a shower to clean herself off. Getting dirt and that kunoichi's blood in her wounds would be bad.
"That would be really fucking weird, yeah," Hidan said when she asked. "We gotta go find Kakuzu."
Tori grabbed the scroll she had broken and followed him out of the greenhouse. Dawn was starting to break, and birds were starting to chirp as if a bunch of horrible violence hadn't just happened. Tori fought back a yawn.
The mansion itself was eerily silent, the garden strewn with bodies and blood. Tori didn't know where any of the civilians had gone, and when she asked, Hidan just snorted and called them "godless cowards."
"It's probably good that bitch hired Iwa," Hidan said casually, leading Tori down the hill into the surrounding forest, not even giving the bodies a second glance. "We got to send a pretty strong message, without Konan ripping us a new one."
Tori nodded along, rerolling the broken scroll as she followed him. Good. Sure. Right. Let's just ignore that Asa hired Iwa by offering up Akatsuki–
Suddenly, there was a sword through Hidan's abdomen.
"Aw, fuck," he said, swinging around to try and elbow his assailant in the head, completely unbothered by the sword. "How many of you are there?"
This ninja, whoever he was, was not in civilian disguise, instead wearing a standard flak jacket. He ducked Hidan's blow and yanked his sword free in one motion, rolling out of the way as Hidan came down on him with his scythe…
...only for the scythe to be blocked by the sword of another ninja, who seemed to come out of nowhere.
Great, okay, it's the hotel all over again, Tori thought, and then took off at a run into the woods, dropping the broken storage scroll behind her.
The Iwa-nin didn't seem to care about her enough to pursue, which was lucky because Tori's only plan at the moment was to avoid being stabbed by more stray shuriken.
Her stomach rolled again, her vision swam, and Tori stumbled to a stop. She stood and breathed heavily for a while, trying to get her head to clear. For a moment, she considered making a run for escape again, fleeing into the night from Akatsuki.
But, no, that was stupid. They would come find her again, and then she'd lose all the freedom she'd carved out for herself. Better to be strapped into a wild roller coaster than fall off of it.
When the noise from the fight finally stopped, Tori slowly counted to 100 and then started edging her way back to where she'd left Hidan. The scene she found wasn't exactly what she wanted to see.
There were two dead and dismembered Iwa-nin laying around in several parts, which was good. Hidan was also laying around dismembered and in several parts, which was bad.
"Motherfuckers cut their own partner's head off," Hidan's head swore at her from where it had rolled away from his Jashinist seal, ground into the grass in blood and mud.
Tori wrinkled her nose as she surveyed the scene before her. Both Hidan's legs had been cut off at the knees, his torso ripped open and innards spilling out. One arm had been hacked off and then hacked to pieces that were thrown around; the other arm was only attached by a few strings of sinew. A similarly decapitated Iwa-nin was sprawled across the ground some ten feet away, although his partner hadn't desecrated the body after beheading it. A second body was slumped against a tree, his intestines spilling out into his now dead hands.
Gross, Tori thought. Outloud she said, "Where did the rest go?"
"Probably to find Kakuzu, if the fuckers didn't show up to hack off your head too," Hidan grumbled, seething in impotent rage as the muscles in his neck tensed. "Probably figured they could hack you to apart at leisure because they saw how much of a useless cunt you are–"
"We talked about calling me that," Tori interrupted, scowling down at him.
"We talked about calling you bitch, and if you don't like that then I'll call you cunt as much as I want-" Tori cut him off by pressing her foot over his mouth.
"No," she said.
Hidan screamed at her some more and tried to bite through her shoe. Tori removed it from his face and glared down at him.
"You talk a lot of shit for someone with no body."
"You talk a lot of shit for a useless whore."
Tori almost replied At least that means I'm getting some, but NOPE, she was not going there with him, and Hidan took her moment of hesitation to say, very quietly and with pink cheeks:
"You're going to have to put me back together."
Tori stared at him.
"How?" She asked, never mind that she'd much prefer to leave him to rot. Unfortunately, that would probably be considered something along the lines of treason. "Shouldn't we just wait for Kakuzu?"
"No," Hidan stressed, his face contorting and his neck muscles tensing again as he futilely tried to move his head. "That fucker could take days if he gets distracted by a good bounty. If we wait too long the wounds will start to heal over and then reattaching everything will be a fucking mess."
Tori peered over a leg in interest, imagining the frayed and bloody stump closing up with scar tissue. She imagined the bones still growing, the tibia poking out through pink skin, and then all of it growing over widely, distorting Hidan's body, like the bodies back in Oto–
She nudged the back of his severed calf with a toe.
"Even the cut off parts?" she asked. Hidan replied with a weird sort of huff that she interpreted as an affirmative. "But if it's not hooked up to the circulatory system-"
"Look," Hidan barked, "I don't know how it fucking works. I've got a medical kit in my pack."
Tori crouched down next to his torso. Every inch of it was soaked in blood and a foul odor seeped from the gaping wounds of his abdomen. She covered her nose and mouth with one hand while she clumsily peeled back the remains of his cloak to reveal two pouches at his hip.
"It's in the bigger one," Hidan instructed. "A black case."
She opened the pack and pulled out a black leather case easily enough, although now her right hand was sticky with blood. She opened the case- all that was inside were two long sewing needles and a wad of thick thread.
"This isn't a medical kit."
"It fucking is," Hidan snapped back. "Now move me where I can see and I'll tell you what to do."
There was no good way for Hidan to watch properly with his head sitting on the ground, so Tori ended up staking it onto the broken branch of a tree.
"OW- you little fuck-faced heathen-"
"You can see, can't you?"
He snarled at her but didn't argue. "Sew up my torso first so it can heal itself. Sepsis is a giant bitch."
"Uh…" Tori stared at the bloody mess at her feet. Entrails were spilling out all over the place. "Do I just… shove it all back in…?"
"Just make sure it's all there and it'll sort itself out," Hidan said with much too much confidence.
Tori threaded the needle and squatted down. It smelled awful, and she really didn't want to think about the source of those smells. The intestines had all slipped out in a gross mess, but the kidneys were still firmly held in place with adipose tissue. She could see the base of his liver, but it didn't look damaged. Not that she knew what a damaged liver would look like.
"Some of your intestines are ruptured," she said, making a face. Intestines leaked gross things.
"Then sew them together, like I fucking told you."
Tori hesitated, staring down at the eviscerated body, needle pinched tightly between her fingers. She couldn't believe she was doing this. She couldn't believe that she'd made exactly the right fuck-ups at exactly the right places in her life to lead her to this, to squatting in a puddle of blood, still a little drunk and high, preparing to sew someone's intestines back together with another person's severed finger was shoved down her shirt.
"What are you waiting for?" Hidan said impatiently. "Don't tell me you're going to chicken out." He said it with a mean sneer and Tori rolled her eyes.
This ain't my first rodeo, she thought, and then wiped clean an unblemished patch of skin on Hidan's chest with her sleeve and started dragging the tip of the needle across it.
"What the FUCK are you doing?" Hidan yelled.
"You smell bad," Tori said, etching patterns into his skin with the needle. Blood welled up slowly. "I'm going to make you not smell so I don't hurl."
She'd gotten pretty good at this seal in Oto. It was standard for all their surgeries. It was a little risky to use blood and flesh as the chakra source like this, but it wasn't unheard of for surgical seals. She'd just slap some extra stabilization components on it, and it'd be fine. Hidan would be fine if she accidentally exploded his chest, anyway.
Well… he'd probably be fine.
"I am NOT consenting to this, you fuckingpsychopath–" Hidan screamed in the background. She ignored him.
Once she was done, the smell vanished almost immediately, and Tori sighed with relief. She sat back on her heels to examine the job set out for her.
She might as well align everything first. She stabbed the needle into the undamaged part of Hidan's chest to save for later. Figuring she should just follow the line, she started at the part of the large intestine that was still attached to the walls of his body cavity, and carefully tucked and turned the rope of his innards into something resembling what she thought was correct. It was difficult, because she couldn't peel his skin and muscle back like she would a dissected frog, and she was forced to stick her hands into the wound, which she was pretty sure should horrify her but instead she just found mildly annoying.
Having Orochimaru as a boss had been a fucking trip.
Hidan's organs were covered in all sorts of strange things, from bits of dirt to dried leaves to parts of their own contents, and she picked away what she could. Hidan didn't seem too concerned with infections, and if he keeled over because she accidentally sewed a twig into his abdomen, so be it.
She also decided not to worry about minor ruptures since Hidan seemed to think they'd fix themselves. But the small intestine was ripped right through in two places.
"The thread is too thick for the intestinal walls," Tori announced, examining which ends to put where. "I can see your villi," she added brightly, gently peeling back an opening.
"Stop fingering my intestines, you freak," Hidan told her. "Just throw it in there and maybe it'll be fine."
She gave him a very strange look, because 'maybe it'll be fine'? Really? She didn't know how Hidan's impossible immortal biology worked, but 'just throw it in there' seemed like a bad idea. Maybe it would fuse into the intestine where it lay and form an extra loop in his digestive tract. That would be weird. But she could think about that at another time.
She put the ribbon of detached intestine she'd been holding down and got to her feet. Her knees and shins were caked in mud and blood and who knew what else. She approached the body of the shinobi that had been sacrificed and rolled it over, patting it down.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Hidan asked. "Wanna feel up someone else's guts too?"
She ignored him, having found what she was looking for: another medical kit. This one was much more normal, and in it she found a tiny needle and much thinner thread. For smaller wounds, not full-on limb reattachment.
Her stitching job on the intestine was messy, partly because sewing a closed tube was awkward, and partly because wiping her hands on the grass and on her skirt didn't completely rid them of the slipperiness of blood. But she'd put the damn thing back together and kind-of-sort-of gotten it all into place, so she was satisfied.
She grabbed the bigger needle out of Hidan's chest and started on the abdominal walls. It took a lot of force to get the needle through enough skin and muscle and viscera to hold everything together, and her stitches ended up too big and uneven and messy. She was pretty sure no normal person could heal with this sloppy of a job, but Hidan insisted that as long as she closed the wounds, everything would eventually fix itself up.
He also mocked her for struggling to push a needle through muscle, but that was Hidan for you.
"Okay, now put that arm back on," He demanded when she declared his torso finished.
She rethreaded the needle and set to work on the barely attached arm dangling from his shoulder. It was easier than his abdomen, but in order to get the best angle she had to pull his shoulder into her lap.
He commanded her to sew his head on next. "Then I can put my legs back on while you figure out what the fuck is up with my other arm," he explained.
This time she ended up with his head in her lap, scowling down at him as he rattled off obscenities.
"I bet you're fucking enjoying this, you little freak," he yelled up at her. The prick of the needle against his neck did not stop him from speaking. "I bet you've got some weird-ass fetishes. I bet you're getting off on this."
Tori snorted. "You wish," she said, carefully pulling thread through his neck.
"You are," Hidan insisted, "and I bet you'll go back and tell this story to your creepy puppet friend and you'll both get off together-"
He went on, and Tori thought about stabbing the needle through his eye. Instead she said, sickly sweet, "You mean you didn't like me inside you?"
He bellowed at her then, hot air right in her face. She straightened, leaning away from him. Accidentally inhaling someone's used breath was the worst.
"If you want to talk shit about my sexual preferences," she called over the din of his constant prattle, "then don't imply things you can't handle being confirmed."
He stared at her in confusion for a few seconds, then a positively wicked grin spread across his face. "So you do have a kink for-"
"No," she interrupted, stabbing the needle into him with unnecessary force. "I was just fucking with you, the way you were fucking with me." Before he could jump on that particular wording, she added, "I have to get to the back of your neck now."
His grin stayed in place. "So flip me over. I bet you'll love my face in your smelly crotch."
She rolled her eyes, then worked her arm under his shoulder and heaved. He started to flip over limply, and she quickly got her knee under his shoulder blade and pushed. He flopped face-down into the mud and she kneeled on his back.
"What are you-" he started to say, but she pushed his face into the ground.
"If my crotch is smelly," she said, jabbing the needle into the back of his neck, "then it's from having your shit-filled intestines in my lap, you ungrateful fuckwad."
As usual, Hidan continued to try and yell even with his mouth covered, but she ignored him and continued working. When she was three stitches from finished, his arm suddenly spasmed.
"Don't-" she started to say, trying to stitch faster, but Hidan used his one good arm to push himself up, and she rolled off of him onto the ground. He managed to push himself into a sitting position and made a swipe at her, and she scuttled back.
"I wasn't finished!" she yelled.
"You bitch," Hidan yelled back. "You always have to make things more difficult!"
"You're the one making things more difficult," Tori argued. "I could go faster if you'd stop berating me."
"I wouldn't berate you if you hadn't fucking let them chop me up."
"Well what was I supposed to do, asshole? In case you forgot, I. Can't. Fight."
Hidan fumed at her for a moment, then said, "And then you stepped on my face! And carved– whatever the fuckthis is–"
He gestured at the seal in his chest, and Tori threw her hands in the air. "Because you fucking deserved it, asshole. Now do you want me to help you or not?"
He scowled at her. "Thread me a needle and line my legs up," he finally said.
Tori threaded the second needle without complaint, glaring at him as she cut thread with a stray kunai. She tied it off and threw it at him, then went to drag his legs over to his body. In a fit of spiteful anger, she turned both legs over knee-down and lined the left leg up with his right stub and vice versa, so that they were positioned upside down and switched.
"Real fucking mature," Hidan spat, leaning forward to grab his leg. They'd both been cut rather low, right below the knee, so sewing them one-handed would be extra awkward.
"I'll go find your other arm," Tori spat right back at him, and marched into the underbrush where the ninja had thrown pieces of Hidan's right arm. Luckily, in his rush he hadn't scattered them very much, and she eventually found it all in five pieces, including two fingers. She went back to Hidan, who was concentrating on sewing a leg he turned over right-ways back on. She grabbed the other needle and found a non-bloody rock to sit on while she put the arm back together.
Surprisingly, they worked in silence, Hidan concentrating too hard to talk. It was not a comfortable silence- Tori was seething. She didn't even have a particular reason to seeth; Hidan just got under her skin.
She was just starting about to start putting the fingers back on when Hidan suddenly swore. She glanced up, and Hidan had twisted around to glare daggers at her.
"Did I sew a bug into you or something?" she said.
This, apparently, was not the right thing to ask, because Hidan's glare darkened from 'daggers' to 'straight-up horrifying murder-face.'
He stood up, all menacing murderous intent, and Tori stood as well, fear pricking at the back of her head. The severed fingers fell to the ground and she gripped the arm tightly. Then Hidan stumbled and she realized what his problem was.
He'd attached his calves to the wrong legs.
Tori wouldn't help it. She burst into laughter.
"Dude-" she managed to choke out between laughs- "I'm- so sorry, but- Jesus Christ."
He was suddenly in front of her, moving too fast for her to follow, but he stumbled when he stopped and his face leaned into hers clumsily. She backed up and nearly tripped over the rock behind her.
"Bitch," Hidan hissed at her, and Tori suddenly remembered that Hidan was very, very scary.
"I'm going to chop off your feet and put them where your hands go," he threatened, which out of context might sound silly, but when a ridiculously strong, ridiculously sadistic ninja growls threats at you, you take him seriously.
Tori took a deep breath. They were allies, technically. He couldn't murder her. At least, not without repercussion.
"You're standing on your own fingers," she said. She sounded calmer than she was.
For a moment she was positive he was going to rip her face off with his bare hand, but then he deflated.
"Pick them up," he hissed at her, then stomped off to pray over the body of the beheaded missing-nin.
Warily, Tori finished piecing his arm back together, then let it sit in her lap while he prayed over the fallen body, eyes rolled back in his head as he chanted rhythmically.
The last time she'd watched Hidan pray, she mused, she'd been tied up under a food stand while his followers occasionally kicked her. Now she was holding a severed arm while covered in mud and blood and bile. This situation was somehow, and rather regretfully, better.
Not good- objectively it was still pretty bad. And fairly weird. But definitely better.
xXx
Mercifully, Kakuzu reappeared before either Tori or Hidan had to reinitiate conversation about sticking his arm back on.
"The fuck," he said succinctly. He was dragging two Iwa-nin, tied back-to-back, along behind him. Both of them wore the usual Iwa-brown flak jackets.
Kakuzu only listened to their explanation (well, Hidan's angry rant and Tori's equally angry spluttering) long enough to confirm the enemy ninja were long gone, before he kicked his captured Iwa nin to the side and grabbed Hidan's arm out of Tori's hands. He then attempted to beat his partner to death with it.
"My work-!" Tori shrieked at him as the fingers she'd reattached went flying. She wasn't daring enough to intervene physically, but she did dance around the fight anxiously and yell obscenities at them. Hidan would have surely commented on her ridiculous behavior, if he weren't too busy defending himself from and swearing at Kakuzu.
Eventually Kakuzu grew bored and Hidan grew hoarse, and they both calmed down long enough for Kakuzu to stitch his partner back together.
"...are your legs switched?" Kakuzu asked as Hidan flexed and stretched his arm. Hidan shot Tori a murderous look while she became extremely interested in her own feet. "Nevermind. I don't want to know."
According to Hidan, his weird limping was because his insides were too torn up, and not at all because his legs had mysteriously got put back on the wrong way. Kakuzu raised his eyebrows at that but did not comment.
Since Hidan couldn't run, and Kakuzu had to carry his captives (or, at least, drag them along behind him), they headed back to Amegakure at a walk.
"I should scout for more Iwa shinobi," Kakuzu said. "But I doubt any of them have a worthwhile bounty…"
Tori supposed that was his excuse for sticking with them. Hidan, while he swore he was in perfect fighting condition, kept stumbling and staggering off course. Kakuzu didn't comment on it, and Tori followed his lead. That was one nice thing about ninja- they didn't mock injuries. They didn't exactly let you use them as an excuse not to work, but diminished function due to injury was an accepted fact. She hoped that if her wounds got infected from Hidan's insides, that mercy would extend to her too.
Night fell, and with a pang of sorrow Tori realized they weren't going to make camp. Instead, they walked through the night and stumbled into Akatsuki headquarters well after sunrise. Well, Hidan stumbled. Kakuzu stomped through the entryway seeming only slightly more irritable than normal, while Tori dragged her feet and glared red-eyed and bleary at the stairs.
"I'm going down," she said.
"We have to report to Leader-sama," Kakuzu said.
Tori wondered if Pein would accept Tori punching herself in the face as a mission report. Probably not.
When they arrived in his office to make initial reports, Pein barely reacted to their appearance, or to Kakuzu dragging two men behind him like a child drags along a stuffed bear. His eyes lingered on Tori a bit longer than necessary– she was still covered in mud and Hidan's insides– but apparently Hidan's own dishevelled appearance wasn't worth a second glance.
Kakuzu dove right into reporting without so much as a greeting. He asserted Tori successfully talked her way into the gala and struck up a conversation with the target, extracting the required information. While she was inside, he and Hidan had noticed there was a foreign shinobi guard, and they eventually decided to "retrieve Tori."
Kakuzu pitched it as a rescue. Tori thought it was more likely they'd gotten bored and decided to crash the party.
"We successfully extracted the scrolls as payment," Kakuzu finished. "I didn't have time to go through them for content, but any relic of Uzushio is worth at least its weight in gold."
"And who are they?" Pein asked, gesturing at Kakuzu's captives.
Before Kakuzu could answer, Hidan shrieked, "This motherfucker!"
He then stomped very enthusiastically one on the men's abdomens. The half-conscious man wheezed in pain.
"Hidan," Pein sighed. Hidan pouted.
"He cut my head off," Hidan whined. "I just recognized him."
Tori once again considered punching herself in the face.
"You were incapacitated?" Pein asked, eyebrows raised.
"I tried to sacrifice his partner and the asshole cut his partner's head off while we were linked," Hidan mumbled. "Hey, bitchface, how do you make a– what did you call it– a Konoha smile?"
"That would take a pretty in-depth understanding of your jutsu," Pein said, and then turned to Tori with eyebrows raised. Briefly, Tori thought he was also interested in a Glasgow smile, but then she realized he was looking for an explanation.
Was he… accusing her?
("Don't make it harder for him to talk, moron," Kakuzu said, swatting the kunai out of Hidan's hand.)
"They probably watched you take down all those dudes at the mansion," Tori said, thinking over… Hidan's entire personality. "Did you deliver any monologues about how your God works, Hidan?"
Hidan turned bright red. "It is the way of Jashin to inform sacrificial bodies–"
Pein held up a hand, cutting Hidan off. "I don't care how you work, as long as the work is done." He paused. "Are your legs on backward?"
Tori was lucky she had Kakuzu between her and Hidan, because Hidan immediately let out a roar and grabbed at her. There was a lot of yelling between the zombie combo, during which Kakuzu's poor captives were stepped on several times and Tori edged around Pein's desk and grabbed the minutes notebook.
"Should I write down our report?" she asked.
"Yes," Pein agreed, watching Hidan and Kakuzu scuffle in front of him in disinterest. After a few beats he asked, "What was your impression of Mizusawa Asa?"
Tori frowned as she flipped through the book. "She's very… determined. And self-centered in her determination."
Tori told the murder-party story. Pein didn't react beyond humming in the back of his throat.
"Well, those are her vassals," he said finally. "She has a right to do as she pleases."
Tori's gut response to that was: But are you SURE? Instead of saying anything, she just nodded.
Eventually, Hidan calmed down, and Pein instructed them to chuck their captives in the dungeon to be interrogated.
"You're capable for your next mission?" he asked Hidan, who just snorted.
"What, massacring some civilians? Of course!"
"I can rip his legs off and put them on right before we go," Kakuzu offered. Pein nodded even as Hidan swore and flipped Tori off.
When they left, Tori settled into the one other chair in Pein's office and settled into writing at his desk. As she got into an explanation of Asa's personality, she asked, "Who's even in charge of Rain Country?"
"Currently? Me," Pein answered. He'd been watching her write with an entirely blank look on his face. "Since the last war, Amegakure has held the seat of power, although once our plan is complete, we'd like to return Rain to the rule of its rightful nobility."
That… was so wildly out of line with what Tori had grown up being taught was a just system, that she wasn't going to comment. Military dictatorship to oligarchy was probably a step up for the average citizen, anyway. Maybe.
...perhaps not if the new leader was Asa, specifically. Hmm.
Tori turned back to her report and Pein asked, "Did Mizusawa Asa give any indication of what Iwa wanted from us?"
"Umm," Tori said, tapping pen on page. Should she admit she literally blacked out for chunks of that night? No, not if she didn't have to. "Don't all the villages want to get rid of you in general?"
Pein's perfectly blank face looked, somehow, deeply unimpressed.
Tori tapped the page some more. "Well, you took missions from Iwa, right? Maybe they don't want that getting out."
Pein's head tilted ever so slightly. "We haven't taken any missions from Iwa."
Oh no, Tori thought, and then ducked her head to focus more on her report. "My mistake, then," she mumbled. Hadn't what's-his-face been accused of using Akatsuki? Was she misremembering that, or had it just not happened yet?
Pein let the subject go, though, and waited until Tori declared her report done to drop another, unrelated bombshell on her.
"You're lucky Hidan doesn't need proper legs for his next mission, or much chakra." He leaned back, fixing her with his grey-purple eyes, and Tori suddenly felt pinned in place. "What sort of jutsu was on him?"
"What?" Tori asked. No one had put anything on him, as far as she could tell, except– oh. Oh. "It's a surgical seal," she said, her mouth going dry. She'd never had to think about how slapping seals onto people could drain their chakra; she'd always just assumed her test subjects were going to die anyway. "It's not hurting him. It'll fade when he heals."
"Well, it's good to know you're not all talk, at least," Pein said vaguely. "Go find Itachi and tell him he has a prisoner to interrogate. You'll take minutes, of course."
"Of course," Tori agreed through gritted teeth. She wanted to take a nap. Was this a punishment for being mean to Hidan?
"Dismissed," Pein answered.
xXx
END NOTES:
Tori: Did I complete the mission? Yes. Did tens of people and several man-eating rodents die in the process? Also yes. Was any of that my fault? Debatable.
Kakuzu: Yeah, I can fix him.
Hidan: Bastard, why didn't you do that BEFORE-
Kakuzu, looking him dead in the eyes: Because I didn't want to.
Hmmm a few notes:
-According to the databooks, Kakuzu's hobby is collecting old books. For the purpose of this fic, I'm only using the manga as 'canon,' but Kakuzu collecting books is too cute for me to ignore. u.u This will (hopefully) come back up.
-"Azylmide" is a completely made-up drug name. :P
-Over the course of this fic, several people have shown frustration/concern that no one is making any moves to help/prepare Tori for various things. That's intentional! It's a mix of people actively wanting her to fail and it literally not occurring to some people that she shouldn't be held to the same standards as her ninja co-workers. Maybe... she can make a friend to help her...? Nah...
-The scene where Tori stitches Hidan up is one of my favoritess and was actually written years ago! I didn't edit the dialogue much, so it feels a little OOC now in the context of the whole fic, but I'm not changing it for ~nostalgia~ reasons.
NEXT CHAPTER: Itachi and Kisame! I feel like I have been ignoring them... don't worry, my friends, they'll be here!