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Chapter Nineteen
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We passed a bunch of trees on our way out of the Land of Fire. Oddly enough, this was similar to the generous amount of water we found in the Land of Water.
Other unsurprising facts of our journey involved even more excitement. Such as, Daddy's refusal to let his favorite kids slack off from their training, Isami constantly tripping over me, and Daddy twitching at nearly everything that moved.
But I suppose what was really was interesting was when an unfamiliar ANBU showed up at our camp the first night. He was decently tall with nondescript messy dark hair . . . and judging by how he snubbed me, he didn't appreciate that I'd heard him coming a good ways off. Daddy had shown Kato and me how to rig some pretty clever traps by then, and well, apparently most ninjas aren't prepared for glitter seals.
So it's not my fault that Kato and I called him Sparkle-san for the rest of the trip. We'd simply asked Daddy for the most common ways to dismantle basic traps. We didn't expect Daddy to use our counter-suggestions against a fellow Leaf ninja.
Daddy put our victim on guard and out of sight for most of the trip, and I don't think the new ANBU minded. Sparkle-san (Daddy refused to call him anything else) never left my hearing range. No doubt that was a good security precaution . . . and besides, he didn't make much noise. This was good for me, too.
Kato, as the odd friendly one of our family, took it upon himself to bother Isami about her family's business and all the types of things seals could be used for. Looking back, I think he wanted to see what kind of person my sealmaking buddy was.
I rode on Daddy's back and did my best not to cry the whole way.
I've seen my father go through many things during his life as a parent. Quite a bit of it was my doing, and honestly, I took things too far much more often than anyone deserved, let alone a young, traumatized Kakashi. I've seen betrayal. I've seen many shades of horror. Guilt. Helplessness. Tremendous vulnerability.
When my father first saw me after the clan meeting, he looked like he had died.
Small wonder that what had happened spilled from me with no regard for village politics. Daddy wouldn't want to see children murdered. Grandfather didn't, either.
So when Daddy had decided that I did not need to henge again (save one last, supervised trip to Isami's), I listened. Mostly.
And here we were out of the village, days into piggyback rides and contemplative silence. "Do you want to learn mimicry?" I asked.
"Nah, I copied it a few years ago."
I made a face. "Not fair. It took me hours, and I'm still not very good."
"Do you think I could have done that when I was five?"
"Yes."
He snorted. "You have no idea. I may have graduated, but I wasn't interested in anything noncombat. Mimicry requires a certain affinity, focus, and regulated concentration. When I was your age, I had nowhere near the experience needed."
"And yet you could have beaten me into the ground. Hey, don't laugh at me! I'll pull your hair."
He grinned up at me under his mask. "Winning isn't everything, Kana-chan."
"Says you."
I told him that I'd noticed that the Uchiha clan was unhappy. Instead of changing the subject, he asked me what I'd seen. "People," I said. So we talked about them. We decided that when we got back, letting Suzume visit them wasn't one hundred percent out of the question.
Daddy was careful to keep our discussion focused on making the Uchiha feel content, and not, say, keeping them from revolting. I played along. It reminded me of the day Grandfather had read The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Ninja. A pity I'd been so young back then. Knowing what I knew now, the massacre had been completely stoppable.
Perhaps . . . perhaps. Well, it was out of my hands now. I'd have to trust my friends and pray that Danzō, by some miracle, wouldn't go for Shisui's eye. That the clan would not force Itachi's hand. That none of the aforementioned people would do anything irreparably stupid.
Also, I'd kind of stolen Itachi's necklace, so it was in his best interest to wait. No one likes an identity thief.
Moping wasn't all I did, of course. The Academy had sent us off with a month's worth of homework, and after my practice of churning out seals, the homework didn't take very long at all. I was supposed to ask Daddy for help, but I didn't really care if some of the answers turned out to be wrong. Or half of them. My teacher had an interesting way of viewing the glass as half-full.
Kato and I trained as Isami watched (and giggled, because her fear of ninjas did not extend to small children), Kato went hunting with Daddy every afternoon as I plodded through my target practice, and Sparkles maintained a secure perimeter. We passed a bunch of trees, and we crossed a lot of water.
Eventually, we arrived in Kiri.
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"Where's the sun?" Kato asked as we finally cleared the last of the tall, skinny mountains that bordered our destination.
"Right where it's always been," Daddy replied smartly.
I ignored them, glancing instead at our resident ANBU, who was watching me. He usually did, having long since observed that out of all of the members of our motley crew, I was the one most uncomfortable with staring. For a girl who'd practically made a career out of finding new people to be stared at by, that was pretty funny.
For once, though, I didn't mind Sparkles' gaze. I wasn't humiliating myself with kunai or jotting seals under my blankets. Today, I was far too transfixed by what this new village looked like.
Kind of drab, I guess. With the sun trapped behind a mass of solid gray, wispy clouds were cavorting over what buildings and mountains weren't already absorbed by the prevalent mist. The buildings were cylindrical and most were a stony shade of warm tan. Where Konoha was squared, sprawling, and arranged on a grid, this place's layout could have been taken right from the area surrounding one of my target posts.
Konoha was flat, but flat wasn't an option in the mountains. Buildings here had been forced to claim bits of rock for themselves. Plants took over everything else, most notably the roofs of the majority of the buildings.
"Where's their Mizukage Monument?" Kato asked next, peering at the rock faces he could see. "How come everything's so tall?"
Once Daddy finished practicing all that patience that had (eventually) come with having kids, I added my own two cents. "Are they different because this village is hidden by the mist, and ours is hidden by leaves?" Thanks, Sparkles, now I'm self-conscious again.
"Are all your questions rhetorical, Kana-chan?"
"Did you want an answer, Daddy?"
It took a few hours for us to check in with Kiri's gate guards, deposit Isami at the respectable apartment complex her mother had chosen, and for Daddy to spend what felt like a few days in conference with the Mizukage (I glared at our babysitter ANBU, who was torn between gloating at my failed hearing or eyeing the Mist ninjas piling up in the lobby), but eventually, Daddy remembered to take his kids to an anti-starving-children establishment. Which he interpreted as the apartment next to Isami's.
"Isn't cooking fun, kiddos?"
Day one of my confinement in Kiri. He appears to be taunting me.
"Kana-chan, quit sulking and slice these for me. You're not going out tonight. Perhaps when I'm done with my meetings tomorrow."
So never. Or rather, not for a few days. Meetings were always postponed around Daddy, and since he didn't seem driven to show us around, there wasn't much hope. A better bet would be trying to escape during the day when Daddy was out.
Unfortunately, Sparkle-san was a lot more competent than he liked to pretend. I was stuck.
Until the next morning, when one of the village's jōnin came calling.
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"Someone's coming to the door," I called from the second bedroom, where I was surrounded by a messy cocoon of seal work.
"I'll get it!" Kato said, and he ran to open the front door. Sparkles sighed and untangled himself from the couch.
Recognizing a golden opportunity for what it was, I capped my ink, cleaned the brushes with practiced speed, and sprang at the open window. Something caught my leg. "Hey!" I shouted. "Put me—" Sparkles dropped me on the floor and was suddenly standing by Kato again.
By this point, our visitor was knocking. I leapt for the window—and without a trace of anything, Sparkles was shaking me. He whistled merrily—and then I was on the floor again as the front door opened and Kato greeted our visitor.
"Ah, Wakato-kun. Where is your sister?"
How did he do that? I asked myself as I lay where I'd been dropped. It's one thing when I'm not expecting it, but certainly not when I know what to listen for. And there was no difference in his heart rate. Did he even use chakra?
"Kana-chan, we're leaving!"
Well, no sense in getting thrown around a third time. Yet. "Coming," I said, and this time I packed up the seals and stored them in the box Daddy had given me. It was one thing to make a half-hearted escape. Quite another to leave my seals and equipment completely unsupervised in an unfamiliar village.
"Good morning, Wakana-chan," the man in our doorway greeted me. "I'm here to show you and your brother around the village." Way to take the fun out of escaping.
"Who are you?" I said bluntly. Kidnapping was great and all, but I had things to do today. Although this guy looked middle-aged, so he was probably sane. If sane people came with blue hair and paper earrings. Hang on, did those earrings have writing? Ooh, and on both sides! How much louder could they scream "seal"?
"I am Ao."
. . . Right. It was going to be that kind of day.
I could feel the warm fuzzies abandoning ship off this guy. It was like Kiri had sent a delegate to intimidate Daddy, but they'd missed and targeted his children, instead. Say, I thought. "Are you here because of Daddy?"
The older ninja—whose upswept hair and plain eyepatch really reminded me of Daddy in a bigger, blunter way—stared me down with a particularly disinterested air. "I suppose you could say that."
"He's five blocks to the west," I tattled, guessing a bit about the distance.
"Yes, I know. He has a breakfast meeting."
That kind of day loomed again, ominously.
"Come," the anti-enigmatic man commanded, and we marched down the stairs after him. Sparkles trooped along beside us.
I was suddenly struck by just how little I knew either of these men. In Sparkles' case, it really shouldn't matter, right? He was a Leaf ANBU, and Daddy didn't seem to mind him. My not recognizing his heartbeat was a little odd by now, but perhaps he was new. He barely ever spoke, and Daddy wasn't very familiar with him.
I would have put Tenzō on the list of long-distance partners, or maybe Wildcat. Deer leapt into my mind, too, and it didn't take much to observe that that train of thought had well and truly derailed itself. For different reasons, none of those ANBU had come. Itachi hadn't, either.
It was hard not to wonder about Sparkles when I didn't even know his code name. Some sort of bird, but whoever designed those masks drew like a toddler with a handful of broken crayons. Big scary ANBU, my foot.
Whoever Sparkles was, I could trust him. The longer I knew him, the less I wanted to, though. But trust him with Kato's and my safety? Yes.
Meanwhile, this Ao guy was the resident Kiri killjoy. It wasn't hard to tell when the Kiri citizens gave each other heads-ups. The Mizukage's right-hand man, as they described him, was a person to tread lightly around. Well, I'd known that. It was unlikely that his genin team had taken offense to his attitude and stabbed his eye out with a fork, after all.
Tempting as that might have been.
"The Aviary," the man intoned.
Ugh. If the plan was to make me hate being in this village, it was working very, very effectively. Ao was about as friendly as a rock on steroids, Sparkles kept shooting me warning looks, and I just wanted to disappear. Fortunately, good things come to those who eavesdrop. Every time we made a sightseeing stop, I had the opportunity to find a solid conversation. Some were better than others.
"Why's he got brats with him? Little young for a genin team, aren't they?"
"I recognize those kids. They're the Copy Ninja's twins—came with him from Konoha. Bunch of us went to the Godaime's office yesterday to see if it was true. Man's got serious guts."
"What's the word on the street?"
"Don't mess with these kids. Remember the joke about how every Kage's wife becomes S-ranked?"
"Because he always comes to rescue her? Yeah, that one's pretty funny."
"The stories I've heard aren't."
I glanced up to see Ao glaring down at me neutrally. "What?" I said. "I like birds. Am I not allowed to smile?"
The lines around his mouth didn't relax at all. I changed my tune, abandoning the anonymous conversation. "Are you not allowed to smile? Because you've been less friendly than Daddy is around strangers." And friends, for that matter. My, this argument was full of libel. Eh. "But you know our names," I finished sweetly, "so why don't you smile?"
Whatever else he thought, a sense of bonhomie wasn't exactly shining through. Annoying.
I took my gaze away from the entrancing earring seals and found my brother. Your turn, I communicated.
Kato thought the stoicism was cool, and he reminded me that he'd already tried to strike up a few conversations as I'd let my attention wander. Har, har, traitor. I moved on to Sparkles.
Say, wait.
Our ANBU seemed pretty happy about something. In fact, he'd been in a good mood this whole time. Was he still gloating about earlier?
"Let's go," Ao said.
This was going nowhere! Ao was being a stick in the mud, and I was the only one who was bothered. It was time for an intervention. An elaborate, complicated plan no one would see coming. "I need to go to the bathroom." Come on, Kato!
"Me, too," my twin chimed in.
Our guide nodded evenly, his ninja instincts telling him to be suspicious. There was no need. Kato and I both possessed a penchant for double-tasking, and hitting each other with practice weapons had given us a lot of time to think through kidnapping attempts. We weren't about to blow our cover with code words or something equally pointless. One learns things after being babysat a time or two.
"Hurry up," Ao said once we'd reached a store he'd deemed suitable.
I paused as Kato went ahead. "Ao-san."
A raised eyebrow.
I waited until the door closed behind my brother. "I don't know what's under your eyepatch, but I'm a lady and you'd better treat me like one. And you," I snapped, "Sparkle-san. You give me privacy, too, or I'll give you an eyepatch." I glared at both of them. "I'm hungry." Then I stalked off on my five-year-old legs.
I could hear Kato charging something in the men's restroom (for his sake, I hoped it wasn't another chidori imitation), and I knew I wouldn't have much time to pull off my own escape. Fortunately, both restrooms came with windows. I loosened my window's frame with a dull senbon while Kato sliced through his. He squeezed out and headed in the direction of the apartment building. I left my window on the floor—no point in subtlety just yet—and booked it toward the Ninja Academy.
I doubted we'd remain at large for more than a minute. Still, if lasting longer meant an actual reaction . . . I've always believed in miracles. No point in stopping now.
Meanwhile: "She's touchy."
"Tch."
"She doesn't seem to like you very much."
Sparkles didn't take the bait. Probably too busy gloating.
Right. No time to do something elaborate, so a quick mimicry jutsu and a civilian henge. My, what ugly outfits.
Mimicking Daddy was probably dumb, but he and Itachi were the only ones I was good at yet. Out of the two, only one was officially in Kiri. The other one was at home, waiting for Shisui to go after Danzō, or maybe the other way around. . . .
Okay, Kato had found a busy section of the market.
And our babysitters were active. "Boy," growled Sparkles.
"Girl," Ao agreed, and they sped off. Right along our respective trails, as it happened.
Midair henges it is.
Unfortunately, Sparkles pinned down Kato before my brother could find shelter. "Run, Kana-chan! He's—" Kato and Sparkles began disappearing and reappearing in strategic places.
I gritted my teeth and jumped smack-dab into Ao. What? No, too precise. How did he do that?
Whatever the case, it was simple to release the current henge and dart through his legs. I kicked the back of one of his knees as I left. Should have planted a seal. It was tempting to toss a few fake explosions in my wake, but I was pretty sure I didn't have any in my pockets. Not to mention we were in a civilian district.
I managed to lead him to an alley before he tackled me. By all indications, he was a bit frustrated. I was really small, decently fast, and I knew how to change my size. His little grunt of triumph brought pleasure to my ears.
Sadly, I'd already planted two explosive glitter seals in the vicinity. Yay, rainbows!
My calm, collected assailant growled. I grinned, coughed, and grinned more widely.
Glitter tags came in two varieties. The first, a gag tag meant for children, exploded in an impressive cloud of genjutsu dust. Ten minutes and the glitter would disperse cleanly. Mothers everywhere loved it.
Type two was a battle-tested mass of glitter that quite simply engulfed a good five-foot radius. It wasn't harmful, which was why I didn't mind rolling in it as Ao jumped to his feet like an injured cat.
"Get up," he barked.
I laughed. Hysterically.
His image was gone forever. Beyond that, no quality of henge could keep this stuff from shedding. Small wonder we only sold these tags to grown ninja that could handle having an enemy for life.
"Now!" Ao growled, shaking a healthy pile of glitter out of a sleeve.
Sparkles and Kato appeared at this point. "Nice," Kato said. "That's even more than the one Da—"
"You," said Ao, addressing the coward busy trying to save face by way of gagging. "Take the girl back and clean her up. I'll find you when she's ready. Until then, I'll take her brother."
Oh, really? Sparkles and I both thought, giving the Mist ninja a cynical glance.
"It's been cleared with their father. No harm will come to the boy."
Sparkles shrugged and caught one of my ankles. "Hey!" I complained, but I don't think anyone cared.
The next second, I landed in our apartment's bathtub. I smiled up at the ANBU. "I hope this brings back memories." He spat a sticky stream of mud at me.
Most of the glitter was down the drain by the time Ao returned. I was pleased to see that he was still leaving sparkly footprints. "It'll never wash out," I informed him, skipping along and doodling in the little puddles.
"Keep walking."
"Okay! Did you know the person on the roof over there is laughing at you?"
"Walking is a silent activity."
I disagreed, and now that I'd found a foothold, I wasn't going to back down. I could turn his silence into weakness. And if he thought I was being loud? Well, I wasn't the one who'd written "to hear" on my earrings.
"Out of curiosity, why are we going to the Mizukage's office? Don't you want to avoid everyone's attention?"
"Be quiet," he tried for the hundredth time.
"Why? I don't have anything to—" The door slammed shut behind me as I was shoved through. "Um."
I stared up at the monstrously large wooden desk and barely even saw the person seated behind it. Because, well.
I mean.
Well.
"Hi . . . Mother."
.
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~That happened.
Now that you've had a chance to put your opinion into a review, want to play a scavenger hunt? There were actually a bunch of hints and clues. And if this outcome actually shocked you (let's not joke—being open to possibilities is not the same as predicting), please excuse me while I go selfishly gloat at the plot. If you want to blame someone for a lack of obvious clues, please look at our unreliable narrator who has also been in the dark. So, how close were your guesses?
Again on the subject of hunting, a while ago I read a fic where Minato and Kushina had a conversation something like this:
"What do you mean you're S-ranked? You might be A-ranked, but—"
"Minato dear, what would happen if I were kidnapped?"
"Why, I'd rescue you, of course."
"Exactly."
If anyone remembers which fic this is from, I'd really like to credit it. So if suspiciously scrolling back through this story doesn't interest you, perhaps you could help me with this?
Thanks to darkhairedbabe, who beta'd all but the last few sentences (Giggle. Surprise!).
Also, thanks to the anonymous reviewers Jessica (Wow. If someone recommended it to you, kudos to him or her. Maybe you'll like it most most, but I certainly don't consider it the best fic on this site by a few miles. Thanks for saying so, though. (: ), Guest (Aw, thank you. Enjoy!), and Guest (I'm sure if it's not going to happen, there will be an in-story reason for it. We'll see).
I don't know what this chapter's bonus material is yet, but I'll get started.
Okay, I am kind of anticipating some comments on this one. Hopefully, that wasn't the only question that kept you guys around. I mean, it's not like there are any other secret identities at the moment. ;)