A/N: This was gotten back to me in record time by the lovely Shana, light of my online life. In real life it is literally all dogs. All dogs together. Anyway.
'Well,' her father said when he entered her room, 'the good news is that the Device isn't Traumatic Backstory.'
He smiled when Raiku just sighed in relief. Traumatic Backstory had sat on Hokage Mountain for years before Raiku had been born, and lingered a few years after. It had brooded invisibly and implacably over the village, churning out parental deaths and lost lovers and abandonment issues until it had eventually moved on, leaving no Character within reach with a Drama Ranking of Two or below. The Gairano still twitched if they got too near where it had carved a groove in the village history.
God, Traumatic Backstory was the worst.
'How's the leg?' he asked, stepping more fully into her room.
Raiku folded her arms across her chest and scowled at him, aforementioned strapped leg stretched out in front of her on her bed.
He huffed. 'Don't give me that, it was barely broken.'
'That isn't what "transverse fracture" means. You've been around Characters too much,' Raiku muttered sullenly.
He ignored that pretty devastating jab and continued. 'They've just said you should take it easy for a few days, you don't even have to stay off it completely. Count yourself lucky.'
Raiku flicked her fingers irritably. 'What's the point of our whole village doing this healing overhaul and going all chakra-healing-crazy if, once they've helped you, you're still not completely fixed?!'
He sat down on the bed by her leg and patted her arm. 'It is completely fixed, they just don't want you to reinjure it while the bone at the fracture site is newly healed. It's hardly going to slow you down.'
Raiku continued to glare.
He ignored it, undoubtedly because he knew he'd be intimidated if he looked too closely at her withering gaze. 'Anyway. I came to let you know that the Device is there for Naruto, that much is clear,' he resumed, as if he'd never left the topic to begin with. 'It's got a main Narrative Arc travelling through there at some time in the near future, so you were right on that front.'
Raiku reluctantly let some of the scowl fade from her face in favour of relief. The nebulous dread that had struck her, that strange idea that it was there for her, shrunk just enough. 'Any idea what it is?'
He father shot her a side-on look. 'No. I can rule some of the more obvious ones out but I can't positively identify it for sure until it interacts with Plot in some way. Maybe not even then, since I won't know when it moves on.'
They remained there, looking at each other for a long moment, Raiku feeling tenser and tenser under his assessing gaze, more and more irritated for her lack of mask.
'I can't tell what it is either!' she snapped when it finally got to be too much. 'I just knew it was there!'
He raised his hands innocently. 'Didn't think you could! Or if you could, I know you'd tell me.'
'Then what's with the face?!'
'I'm not making a face!'
Raiku leaned forward and jabbed one gloved finger into his cheek. 'That face, the one you give me whenever you're trying to decide if I'm in trouble or not!'
He batted her hand away. 'So first of all, you're always in trouble, it is quite literally part of your composition. And second,' he continued while she squawked in outrage, 'I'm trying to think about this situation.' He poked her back soundly in the cheek through her mask, following her as she leaned away. 'Raiku.'
Raiku snapped her teeth threateningly and leered when he hastily withdrew his hand. 'So. Should I try and find others? Would that make it easier to tell which one is which?' she asked, settling smugly back into place. 'Is that useful?'
He tilted his head back and sighed, more heavily than she felt the situation warranted. 'As this stage,' he said, 'I'm not sure it's a matter of "trying."'
Raiku frowned. 'Rude.'
He shook his head. 'No, that's not what I mean. Devices aren't supposed to move, per se. They just appear when needed.'
She nodded warily. 'Yeah…'
He shifted to face her more directly and gestured. 'But you've been adjacent to a fair few Plot developments in your life that are central to themes of Destruction, even when you've tried your hardest not to be. So we can logically assume that the Genematrix is compensating for your movements. We've talked about that before.' After a glance at her to make sure she was following, he kept going. 'But things are getting more serious, faster than I anticipated. I thought it would be as simple as you just ignoring the more obvious Genematrix interventions, but with larger events to orchestrate, I think it's finding that your scurrying around is harder to manage. But basic narrative structure suggests that it does have to try to manage you. Device-you, that is, not… Raiku-you.'
Raiku jerked back. 'What?!'
He patted her knee quickly, a perfunctory gesture of comfort. 'There's just the one of Device-you, we knew this. The thing I've been working on, that's more—'
'It's news to me that I'm—what, a management priority!' she said shrilly. 'To the Genematrix—oh god. I'm gonna throw up'
'You're not going to throw up,' he said patiently over her gagging noises. 'This is fine, everything is okay.'
'It is so not fine,' Raiku croaked, leaning over the edge of the bed and dragging her wastebasket towards her. Another wave of nausea made her retch loudly.
'Raiku, I know this is hard,' he said soothingly, patting her back since she was apparently committed to being horrified. 'But we've got to most past the obvious if we're going to plan around this. You can do this!' He paused. 'I mean, if you think about it,' he said with a snicker, 'we're destroying our preconceptions.'
Raiku paused mid-retch, then slowly lifted her head to glare at him over her shoulder.
He beamed at her, but only for a second.
'Let's try this again,' her father said, patting down his singed vest. The edges of his hair still smoked faintly from where he was now safely sitting on the other side of the room, with her desk, bin and chest of drawers hurriedly dragged between them. 'Now that we've gotten that out of our systems. Wait, honey; that didn't hurt your leg, did it?' He craned his neck to see over the makeshift defensive wall.
Raiku squirmed and growled at him from where he'd forcibly swaddled her in two layers of blankets, her arms bound to her sides.
He settled back. 'Moving on. We know that Devices sometimes group together at points of high Plot density, just for efficiency. Many Plots, but nowhere near as many Devices… it just ends up that way for resourcing reasons. And some match together thematically and stick to each other for periods of time. Like…' He snapped his fingers. 'Romantic Intrigue and Amnesia!'
They both winced.
'That was a bad few months for us.'
'Really bad.'
'Do you remember the…?'
'We all remember "the,"' she said, voice bleak.
He grimaced. 'Less than ideal. Oh, a more relevant example would be Traumatic Backstory and Familial Tension. That's what would have nabbed your teammate, what's-his-name.'
Raiku rolled her eyes for the thousandth time on this very exchange. 'His name is Ryuu, Dad. You're past plausible deniability at this point.'
'Right, his name's not important,' he agreed easily. 'But that combination is very common here. Traumatic Backstory-And-Basically-Anything is very common for shinobi, really.'
Raiku raised a hand. 'Wait, does that apply to us? With… my mother, and all.'
Chitose rubbed his forehead. 'Not really, we've talked about it before. People die every day. It's the impact moving forward that determines Plot significance. We took the loss, grieved, and moved on, like people do. It's not a defining element of our lives or identities and our futures don't revolve around it. Just like how each occurrence of Destruction doesn't require your influence. It comes down to…' He waved a hand vaguely. 'Weight.'
Raiku managed to drag her arms out of the blankets and braced herself on the desk to lean closer to him in her eagerness. 'Yes! That's how I was thinking of it, like weight, or, or gravity!' she exclaimed. 'Nailed it!'
He shot her a wry look. 'I'm flying blind here and I might be wrong, so dial back on the confirmation bias.'
She shifted her weight to one hand, freeing the other to make a hurrying motion. 'But cut to the point. Should I be going near them or not?'
He shrugged helplessly.
Raiku slumped down onto the desk. 'Dad!'
'Well!' he said defensively. 'This is new to me as well, I have no idea! I don't think you're doing it as consciously as you seem to think you are. That's my only conclusion so far.'
'What does that mean?!' she groaned, pressing her face into the desk's surface.
He reached awkwardly around the dresser to pat her head. 'Things get complicated when Devices get too close to each other, and the more there are in one spot, the more that appear. Like the Chuunin Exams, that whole mess.' He made a gesture as close to frustrated as she'd ever heard him. 'I don't know yet. I can't be sure if that's just because they need to be there to deal with major Plot and it's convenient to have them in the same spot, or if they get pulled towards each other more and more the higher the Plot density is. I can't tell which way around things are. So for now, it means that you should be careful. Stay away if you can, in case it's attracting you.'
'That's so incredibly unhelpful! And vague! And everything that Tsunade thinks you are in general, Dad!'
He made a low wounded noise. 'Raiku, how could you?'
'Well! You have to admit, it's not the best advice! You even said before that I shouldn't run away from Characters so much but not not at all, now I have a whole other set of vague instructions?'
'One instruction.' Another pat to the head. 'You can do it. You've been doing well so far, anyway. Trapped into lunch with multiple Characters and not a Plot on you afterwards! I was so proud.'
She pouted, turning her head to the side and scratching a nail along the wood grain of the desk. 'I was hoping you'd have figured it out by now,' she muttered. 'You always know everything about this stuff.'
'I'll get there,' he said mildly; as if it were something simple, just a facet of Gairano life that generations before him had failed to fully grasp, now set out before him with nothing to navigate with but her defective instincts and their combined Gairano abilities. 'But it's a process and we're going to have to be patient and not rush into anything.'
Raiku sighed. 'I'm really bad at that,' she said, like she was admitting something. 'Yamada says "quick" and "gratuitously violent" are my strengths.'
'Well,' he began, voice dropping into something sly. 'We'll see about … the destruction of that vice.'
That was a lot to process. That was a lot for her to get through, to struggle through as a sentence. When she finally lifted her head to glare at him, he was already beating a hasty retreat.
'I'll see you later, sweetheart, sleep well!'
'It is five o'clock!' she yelled at his retreating back; when he hastily flicked the light switch off, the room was still well-lit by the light from the open window outside. Despite that, she still settled back on her bed with a grumble, folding her arms. She eyeballed her furniture and sighed, then looked down at her strapped leg. 'How the hell am I going to move all this back by myself?'
The main issue with falling asleep at five in the afternoon, other than the fact she hadn't meant to obey her fleeing father, was that she woke at four the next morning and couldn't go back to sleep.
Raiku stared at the dark ceiling, breathed in the cool, still air for a moment and then rolled out of bed with an undignified thud. Springing up to her feet, she made for her closet to change, because she'd be damned if she got dragged into another night-time Expository event. Or worse, tried to go back to sleep—Tsuji's black, hurt gaze wasn't going to visit her while she had anything to say about it, not on her watch! With her graceless fall out of bed and the subsequent awkward onomatopoeia she'd capped it off with, she had a good feeling about holding that off.
She dressed and slipped outside into the courtyard, rolling her neck and cracking the knuckles of her fingers and ignoring the shattering of a nearby potted plant when this went horribly electrically awry. Because this was going to go fine! She was going to have a low-key day, maybe see some cousins, ignore her currently uncontrollable electrical outbursts, and eventually go back to training. In three to five days, pending re-injury, and as long as she used alternating heat and ice at the site for two hours every night if there was any lingering discomfort and reported any abnormal swelling or pain, thank you Mayuko yes she understood no she didn't need to repeat it.
Raiku shook her head and set off out of the compound.
The streets sat silent except for the few people up at the same time she was; someone she recognised as the owner of the nearby bakery, slightly bleary-eyed and bundled up against the pre-dawn chill, was making his way away with his back to her. She'd been a morning person on and off her whole life, but this was early even for her. Nothing was open, her friends wouldn't appreciate being woken up so soon, and Yamada was probably either training on his own or doing… whatever it was he did at home.
She wanted to guess "sleeping," but that didn't feel like him.
She tapped the toes of one foot against the path, sort of detracting from the peaceful ambience.
And it was then, at that very moment, that Raiku realised something that all other teenagers had come to know instinctively long before her.
"Alone" actually meant "unsupervised."
Her sudden twitch struck a nearby light pole with an ominous crackling sound, but she ignored it in favour of the sudden thrill of this new information.
Her dad was asleep. Yamada was elsewhere. Iwao was—wait, Iwao was not her boss! Damnit, Raiku! But even then, he was leaving her alone while she was meant to take it easy. Kakashi was swept up in the Main Plot, so god knew if she'd ever even see him again, or if he'd even remember her with the new Drama taking over his mind and Characterisation.
For a moment, she was startled to find herself feeling a pang of sadness. She quickly shook it off. Anyway. The point was that the people who usually policed her behaviour, weren't, or couldn't. She could do whatever she wanted!
Raiku stretched her arms above her head languidly. No one jabbed her in the side or pushed her over. She enjoyed it thoroughly for a whole five seconds, then did a two-step jump off the nearby wall and took to the rooftops.
She spent the better part of the morning perched on various ledges, taking to her new people-watching hobby with enthusiasm. The civilians of Konoha were largely used to their kind of birds-eye surveillance and tolerated her effortlessly, opening stores and sending kids to school in little stumbling armies along the street. She strolled down a phone line just to send the pigeons scrambling, swung past Ryuu's window to pull faces at him while he pointedly ignored her and got ready for training. Without talking to anyone in hours, Raiku found herself laughing more than she had in what felt like months.
After a while, she'd built up enough good cheer that just naturally, she should have known it would have to balance itself.
She was jumping from a store's overhang to a suburban roof when she caught sight of a familiar figure and lifted an arm to wave, halfway through calling out Iwao's name before she registered the two strangers behind him and cut herself off with a squawk to duck behind a nearby chimney stack and hide.
She pressed her back to it. His team! How had she forgotten that they were in Konoha as well?! God, she'd almost put herself in a position to interact with strangers. On her day off, no less. She could only hope, against all odds, that they hadn't seen her before she ducked away.
After a moment to collect herself, she peered out at the group again to take a better look.
Hijino had been distinct from other Jounin and was immediately recognisable to her even years later, crouched behind the chimney stack just like she had been then.
Also injured like she had been then, she realised irritably.
His hair was still long and pale, a more age-appropriate platinum blond rather than bone-white like hers. It was tied back into a high ponytail that still fell past his shoulders and it looked improbably silky for someone from such an arid, harsh climate.
Raiku had never trusted Hijino's hair and it looked like her instincts had been dead-on. No one harmless had hair that soft.
Brooding, she let her eyes trace down. For a second she thought that he was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved shirt like her own, sans mask, but after a few seconds of squinting and pointedly ignoring how bright his smile was, she realised she was wrong. The skin of his collarbone and what she could see of his arms was tattooed with thickly lined geometric patterns, such a solid, inky black that her own skin itched in sympathy. She was too far to make out the details but it seemed symmetrical from his vertical axis, spreading up the sides of his neck evenly, mirrored on his exposed forearms.
Raiku cocked her head to the side. He hadn't had those before, had he? Also, how was he did he have such a mild tan? She could understand that from a purely Character-driven point of view, it made sense. It made his hair and skin contrast better with the tattoos. But how was that contextually justifiable? Did he have to use sunscreen every thirty minutes back home?
She sighed and shook her head. There was no point wondering about things like that, but every now and again it was irresistible. Moving on. She skimmed over the now-familiar sight of Iwao, the tense line of his shoulders, to the third figure.
Well… It had to be Akihito. It just had to be, but nothing about him but his proximity to Hijino and Iwao told her that. Visually, at least. He'd certainly never looked cheerful, but there were heavy bags under his eyes and he was whipcord lean, verging into dangerously thin. His hair was only slightly longer than Iwao's and dark, while pale, mottled scarring edged from where his shoulder was covered by shirt, stretching up to border his ear. He wore thin leather gloves that were plain and well worn, but nothing out of the ordinary otherwise. Plain, serviceable clothes, a weapons pouch on his hip. It didn't make sense for a moment, how surprised she was by his appearance, but she supposed it was likely because he wasn't as handsome as she'd thought he was going to be. At one stage he'd reminded her faintly of Ryuu and sure, some people might be into the whole "brooding serial killer with consumption" thing he had going on, but she wasn't used to the Genematrix changing its approach mid-development.
They'd clearly spotted her so Raiku didn't bother to hide her blatant appraisal of Iwao's teammates, mostly because she had learnt her lesson about trying to spy on Jounin. In a non-professional setting, anyway. When Hijino looked up, shading his eyes with his hand and waved, she just waved back.
No point in delaying the inevitable, she reflected.
Hijino's smile was terrifyingly bright. Raiku took a second to feel indignant, truly indignant at how much time the Genematrix required people to spend on taking in the stupidly complex details of shinobi's appearances. Really? Half of the adjectives it forced on her, she would never have to use in any other context. This was hardly the sort of thing she would need to focus on if she was dealing with normal people. Like Yamada—his appearance was straightforward and purely reflective of his function. And also a slap to the face of biology, given his size, but still. It certainly didn't do anything stupid like draw attention to how special he was.
Hijino made a beckoning gesture when she continued feeling sullen rather than jumping down towards them. She could make out thin black lines along the edges of long fingers.
She shook her head and shrank back.
It looked too much like Plot.
It looked too much like Plot trapped or slinking over his skin, brought back trapped yellow eyes and that hot, claustrophobic feeling of helplessness.
Iwao half-turned towards her and frowned. He gestured towards his leg and then at her. She changed the wave to a quick flapping motion, brushing him off. He lifted his hand again, then stopped, turning quickly to face Akihito.
Raiku started to shift backwards, but stopped when she bumped up against something. She spun around, skidding a few steps back on the tiles.
Akihito looked down at her blankly, head tilted at a curious angle. She bit the inside of her cheek hard, refusing to give him the satisfaction of jumping. Trying to scare her? He was deluded if he thought she hadn't been thoroughly trained out of making a scene by that anymore. Mostly. Very nearly entirely, and certainly not on her day off.
'Seriously?' she asked, instead of slapping his stupidly impassive, creepy face. 'Seriously, man?' This was some Genin bullshit right here, she thought, and with a huff she turned to shoot Iwao a frankly lethal glare.
He was already looking away. Jaw set, staring down Akihito where he still stood next to him.
The presence behind Raiku—she cast her mind to it instinctively, felt for it with her pathetic chakra instincts as well for good measure.
Nothing.
But really nothing. No metal, no chakra, not even the dull, muffled press of water in a body. Just the teeth-grinding pressure of dense carbon.
She heard a faint, dull click from behind her.
Raiku looked up at the sky and considered her options. She should turn around and investigate, she knew. God only knew what was going on. But… also…
Also, it was her day off. Mysterious clicks, creepy teammates, and attractive people were problems she had to deal with at work. Raiku was too worldly and mature to let the whine behind her teeth escape, but her breath did come out as a hiss. She cast a quick, reluctant look over her shoulder.
Akihito—or whatever it was—regarded her with his blank, dark eyes.
'Nope,' she enunciated clearly, slowly. 'Nope.' She turned and started carefully making her way over the roof tiles, mindful of her injured leg. 'Nope!' She kept up her determined chant all the way through her descent to street level, giving escape a token attempt only to find the road blocked by not-quite-Akihito.
That, she thought, was a little too clear.
So.
'Hey guys!' she said, turning on her heel and walking towards the Sand team like it had been her plan all along. 'How are we all doing today?'
Iwao risked enough of a facial expression to shoot her a mildly apologetic look, and she made a note to hurt him for it later. No "faint" anything was going to make up for this little ambush, and it was frankly insulting that he was even trying.
Hijino just smiled at her. His teeth were very white, she noted glumly. 'Gairano!' He greeted, hands almost ostentatiously relaxed down at his sides. Look at me, his bare palms said; look how harmless we are. 'It's been a while. Though I don't think we ever formally met?' he added, shooting her a look that she had no choice but to professionally admire. It was warm, and conspiratory, and seemed so sincerely affectionate that with a chilling rush, she suddenly knew exactly what kind of shinobi Hijino was. She shifted just an inch away. His smile got incrementally wider.
Iwao took the hint. 'Hijino Itsuki, Gairano Raiku.'
Raiku bowed her head quickly as Hijino did the same. 'Itsuki like… One Happiness?' she asked, sketching the name characters in the air with her finger. Hopefully. Because that was a common name with that boring spelling of it. Something harmless and able to take him down a Rank or two.
He shook his head, doing the same more decisively but with different letters. The tattoos were vaguely dizzying up close, layers and layers of perfectly drawn lines and inky swathes. 'Like "Go My Way" or "My Way Only,"' he corrected.
Of course it was.
'But more importantly, look at you!' he said cheerfully. 'You've grown up a lot. Hasn't she, Akihito?'
Raiku looked at the other boy reluctantly, meeting the gaze she had felt boring into her since the awful doppelganger showed up.
But all Akihito said was, 'She grew… taller.' It didn't feel like a compliment.
Hijino laughed, which Raiku was starting to suspect he did often. 'Yeah, must be convenient for identifying insecure boys. Nothing gives them away like their fear of women being taller than them.'
Raiku shifted her weight from foot to foot. 'I mean… it hasn't really come up? As an issue, I mean.'
Hijino looked away from a suddenly sullen Akihito to her—up at her, she noticed, she was almost an inch taller than him—and gestured at his arms, at the dizzying, spiralling patterns there. 'You're lucky. I had to resort to these to intimidate people. Being as tall as you would have saved me a lot of time under chisel and ink.' His eyes creased at the corners when he smiled. He was probably three seconds away from winking.
To her dismay, Raiku realised she was only about two seconds more away from being reluctantly charmed anyway.
Fortunately for her dignity, but less so for her peace of mind, there was another low clicking noise. Raiku tensed.
She felt Iwao shift closer to her side. 'Akihito. Stop,' her said, tone sharp.
'Is that…?' Raiku asked faintly, unable to finish the sentence. It stuck in her throat like the words had shrivelled there, leaving her mouth dry. She reluctantly turned, looking past the reassuring shield of Iwao's shoulder. The second Akihito tilted his head to the side as it stood there facing her. She heard that faint click again, like ceramic tiles coming gently together.
'You remember Akihiro,' Akihito said.
Raiku didn't want to turn her head, like the movement would set him off. But her eyes drifted to the side to look helplessly at Iwao.
Iwao wasn't someone who glared. But there was something like anger in the way he was looking at Akihito, something hard and flinty. 'This is his puppet,' he said, voice flat of affect and totally unhelpful in informing Raiku's response. 'He named it after his brother.'
'It used to be my brother,' Akihito corrected.
Raiku could feel that her face was frozen into a grim rictus of horror, but couldn't seem to shift it. 'Ohhhh,' she echoed, noise distorted by the weird shape her mouth was pulled into. No mask was going to cover up this expression. Her whole body was broadcasting disgust.
A slow smile spread across Akihito's face, thin-lipped and satisfied.
Raiku could feel the shudder building again, but she couldn't. She couldn't let him see how bad it was. If he got even an inkling of how intense her horror was, he'd see it as a weakness and exploit it every chance he got. If she could just pass this off as an initial bad reaction, she could fake it the rest of the time. She could act! Her whole job revolved around lies and violence.
But she couldn't make herself look at the puppet again, so she was relieved when someone else broke the silence.
Iwao took her elbow lightly. Mercifully. 'Raiku,' he said. 'Your leg.'
Raiku blinked at them, then looked down at her own leg. 'Oh. Oh! It's still hurting a bit,' she offered, her mouth apparently taking the out a moment before her brain kicked in. 'I'm meant to be resting, I should go. And sit!' she said, looking at him then unable to stop herself from glancing at the puppet. 'Sit down. Because my leg is hurt,' she added unnecessarily, to the puppet, before physically turning her whole body away so she would stop fixating on its blank eyes.
'I am going to meet Hatori,' he told her. 'Come?'
Raiku nodded quickly. 'Yes! Definitely! Of course.'
Hijino laughed again, but he waved them off. 'Of course. I'll see you around, yeah?'
'Yeah,' Raiku said, incredibly unconvincingly. There was no Plot on him, but Hijino screamed Narrative potential. She'd have to tell Mayuko there was a troublingly attractive man floating around, roughly her age. In an ostensibly caring profession, rogue shinobi with beautiful hair were one of the great banes of Mayuko's existence. Raiku knew this for a fact. Mayuko had shown her the list. Waiting for doctor's instructions was up there, as well as a scribbled-out blur that looked suspiciously like it ended with "-se." 'I'll see you,' she added lamely.
Hijino reached out and pinched Akihito's ear hard, still smiling.
'Bye,' Akihito said flatly, still dead-eyed but leering.
Iwao steered her lightly up the road. She had the patience to wait until they rounded the corner and got out of sight before she smacked Iwao quickly and repeatedly in the shoulder. 'You couldn't have helped me out, you bastard?!'
Iwao, smart young man that he was, took the hits without protest. 'It was hard to explain.'
'No shit!' she said shrilly. '"He turned his dead twin into a puppet! Oh, and is terrifyingly creepy!" There, I did it in,' a quick dialogue scan, 'less than twenty words!'
He nodded, taking this feedback in. Or so she hoped.
'And even with that, you still think he didn't kill him?!' she demanded.
'I do,' Iwao confirmed easily.
Raiku gestured soundlessly, vocal chords temporarily paralysed with sheer indignance. 'He's… the whole victim is his trophy!' she got out in the end. 'You can't tell me that doesn't raise some doubts!'
Iwao shook his head. 'Nothing was found. Akihito isn't that subtle.'
Raiku scowled. That, she had to admit, felt true. 'But Hijino just lets him carry that around! That's so traumatising!' she persisted.
Iwao came to a stop at Daisukenojo's front gate, the muffled sounds of the screaming Hatori siblings setting it apart from the other houses on the lane. 'Things got better, after,' he said, hand resting on the fence. 'I said before.'
Raiku had to stop and think hard for a second, the lines of writing in her mind already faint without the binding effect of the timeskip. 'They were always fighting,' she remembered. 'Putting you all in danger on missions. But… still. Aren't you upset by the whole thing?'
A louder voice came to the forefront in the house, almost making the plants flourishing in the yard lean away. It seemed Hatori Alpha, AKA: Daisuke's mother, was awake.
'No,' Iwao said simply. 'Things got better.'
'The puppet, though. The puppet, Iwao.'
A faint, wry smile. 'The puppet,' he agreed. 'Sorry.'
She hit him again in the shoulder, hard enough to make him stagger. Or at least that he felt he should pretend to stagger, because Iwao was gracious like that. 'I'm so mad at you,' she grumbled. 'And your creepy teammate.'
'Fair,' he said. 'Will you come?' He gestured towards the house. 'We are going to the poison lab, before the training forest.' The yelling had subsided slightly, but Raiku was never able to tell what was enthusiasm and what was anger, not with so many people and so much energy in one place. She shook her head.
'No way, you're on your own. Let me know how many Daisukenojos you find in there!'
Iwao tilted his head. 'How many?'
She sniggered. 'You'll see,' she repeated back to him, though her surprise wasn't going to be nearly as awful as his had been. It was still something to hold over him. She turned and walked away, knowing he was staring after her bemusedly. It was all about the little victories.
Raiku had decided that rooftops, as she'd long suspected, were too inherently Dramatic to be trusted. So many bad things happened to her on roofs. So she made her way around the village on foot, like a civilian, and it had honestly gone better than she'd expected. She managed to catch up with some of her cousins living amongst the Aburame, who seemed equal parts excited and wary of her electricity near their bug-intensive children, but it felt nice. It felt grounding, to be around her people and her family. Some of them had missed her, as evidenced by the fact that her uncle the florist let her sit at the counter without ushering her outside with a broom for a whole twenty minutes. She'd barbecued a zinnia before long, but in her defence, it'd been placed very close to her and her random electrical accidents were pretty well-known amongst the Gairano.
She'd long suspected that they published a newsletter to keep Raiku-related-damage-control at a comfortably high level.
Dusting the charred remains of the zinnia from her pants, she patted her rumbling stomach. Aburame Satomi, née Gairano, had happily given her something to eat mid-morning, but that had been over an hour ago. She was a growing girl. Or girl-like, whatever that meant. It was clearly time for her to eat again. She stuck her hands in her pockets and let herself slouch a little, after reflexively glancing around to make sure Yamada couldn't see her poor posture. It felt fantastic.
Actually it felt a little weird for her lower spine, so she quickly corrected it. But she kept her hands in her pockets, damnit, while she thought about what to do. She could actually go for a walk down the main street without Ryuu and Daisuke immediately dragging her into a barbecue joint, or the same place they always went. She could get takoyaki without Daisukenojo making faces at her. Or taiyaki without Ryuu immediately stealing it, that sweet-toothed bastard.
It was enough to bring a tear to her eye. She sniffled, overcome for a second with the sheer beauty of it all. Before she remembered Team Hijino.
She sagged slightly. Right. Hijino and Akihito were tourists. Sticking to residential areas like she had been, she wasn't going to run into them. But in the main shopping and dining area of the village? The risk of seeing them again was unacceptably high. Of seeing the puppet again.
But that wasn't so bad! She ignored the familiar feeling of a broom lightly butting up against the backs of her shoes, the pointed invitation to take her electricity away from her uncle's bouquet display and move elsewhere. She'd leave when she was good and ready, and the broom had stopped scaring her when she was five. Six. Okay, eleven, but she was certainly past that point now.
Raiku let herself travel on autopilot towards the more agriculturally-oriented part of the village, further from the centre of town but famous for its excellent dango. Plots shifted past her on the road but gave her a wide berth, occasionally dipping close enough to butt up against the fail-field and deflate a little. Depressingly near, in her opinion; her father could clear a room, but she had noticed her field only cleared a radius of about thirty centimetres.
She ducked around a woman holding a stack of books higher than her head, darting around her with totally unnecessary flair and smiling to herself. It was easy to forget that years of acrobatics, running, and strength conditioning meant she could twist and prance around whenever she wanted, not just when her life was in peril.
She vaulted over one of the street dividers just because she could.
She was feeling so positive, in the face of dango and the ruthless repression she'd employed on the puppet-memories from that morning, that when a familiar head of red hair was visible between buildings in the distance, she automatically changed her path to meet him.
'Hey man,' she called, when she grew close enough to Daisukenojo that she was confident he could hear her. 'I am so glad to see you. Have you met Iwao's team? Have you seen the puppet?!' She shuddered. 'That puppet…' She stopped to take a breath halfway up the steps, leg twinging. Roof-climbing and stairs had not been part of her recuperation plan. 'I mean,' she muttered, 'taking it hard, that I get. But what he's doing is something else; is it narcissistic or necro-something? Is it just me that finds it weirdly psychosexual?'
Daisukenojo turned towards her and raised his eyebrows, hands shoved in his pockets. Apparently he'd chosen to take a rare Ryuu-break and spend it on the bridge leading to the verdant fields beyond, which… People liked water, Raiku could understand that objectively. It seemed sick and weird to her, but he probably found the sound of running water… reassuring? Soothing. Invigorating…?
She'd ask him at some stage, she decided. Right after she got this puppet-talk out of her system. 'And the eyes! You don't even… the eyes, Daisuke!' She gestured to her own emphatically. 'They're almost as creepy as his! At least those are blank for a reason, but his too?! And Hijino!' she added with a frustrated flick of her fingers. 'Am I the only one who feels personally victimised by attractive people just showing up all the time?! Isn't it rude?! You of all people get that, right?'
Silence. Daisukenojo seemed to have stuck with his general approach to her or Ryuu ranting, which seemed to be: are they going to hurt me? If no, ignore but make understanding noises so they don't think I'm ignoring them.
He hummed a little when she'd been silent for too long. The wily bastard. She grinned and made her way closer, relieved for something normal even though she had to sidestep Plot, a heavy rope of it twisting up alongside her on the steps, curving around her and then again when it—
She stopped in her tracks on the second-highest step.
Mother fucker.
The Device didn't have arms to wave, but its presence in her mind seemed to ooze smugness. Where it sat on the bridge.
On that same fucking bridge.
Raiku seethed, one foot still braced on the top step. How had she already failed? She had one job, she had one job! She hadn't even thought about it, she'd just… been carried there by the events of the day. It had never occurred to her that she'd end up near the Device again if she wasn't actively seeking it out. She'd been to this bridge maybe five times in her whole life in Konoha, and yet.
Here she was.
Again.
On the fucking bridge.
Out of sheer pettiness, she stayed on the second-last step to avoid being on the bridge proper. She was still taller than Daisukenojo despite being a step lower, so it was the sort of thing she could get away with unless he felt patronised by it. She craned her neck around to see what Daisukenojo was looking at, hoping to start a conversation before he could question why she'd stopped.
Raiku repressed a sigh, because of course. The blind eyes of the Hokages stared out from the mountain, carved there to remain in perpetuity. She curled her lip. 'Creepy.'
Daisukenojo glanced at her.
She waved a hand vaguely. 'Ignore me.' But it was and she would stand by it. Logistics aside—they were going to run out of mountain at some point—the black lines tracing across their features made her eyes water just looking at them. They were so significantly weighted, in history and the Themes that Naruto liked best, that they were a constant source of and focal point for countless Plots and Character Arcs. She'd been taken there as a child, like all Gairano children were at some stage. What seemed like spiderwebs at a distance were vast swathes of Plot up close, so thick and rife with Drama that even her father's fail-field hadn't repelled any of it on approach. Her cousin Pan had vomited when she'd gone, but she was a little older than the other kids and had known enough to understand what it meant.
Raiku had almost fallen off the Sandaime's face. It hadn't been a great day.
She warily scanned Daisukenojo for signed of Plot potential latching on; no one ever stared at the Hokages without something trying to latch on.
To her profound relief, the ground around his feet was devoid of Plot. He was standing a little too close to the impenetrably thick Plot headed over the bridge, headed for Naruto, but it was neatly avoiding him, a perfect curve of empty ground around his feet. She resisted the urge to coo at him; Daisuke had never really been Character material, and she couldn't help but love him for it.
Anyway.
'Did you get Iwao to the research lab okay?' she asked. 'He's mentioned that sort of stuff before, but I didn't know he was good enough for them to let a foreign shinobi in there. Though, I guess Sand is known to be way better at it than us.' She quickly ducked her head. 'Don't tell Ryuu's mother I said that. She'd be so upset with me.'
God. Jun, doting mother of Ryuu and professional poison engineer. That had been a weird set of truths to reconcile.
'Of course,' Daisukenojo said, shooting her a look.
She raised her hands. 'I'm not insinuating anything! You have to admit, though, that escort missions are not your strong suit!'
He huffed.
She grinned at him and poked his shoulder, but he just huffed at her again to drive the point home. 'I'm glad you guys are being friendly,' she said fondly. 'He's a good guy. Quiet, but he's the best one in his team for sure. I met them this morning, hence all the puppet ranting. He was on the way to your house and he caught me on the roof again.'
Something about that stuck in her mind, sending up a warning signal. On her day off. Rude. But she reluctantly turned her attention to what she'd said, scanning it for issues. The unlikely friendship of Daisukenojo and Iwao, Iwao's general disposition, meeting his team.
his team.
After which he had gone to meet… Daisukenojo, so he could show him to the poisons lab before he met to train with Ryuu. In the forest, rather than the field that day.
Raiku dragged her hands down her face roughly, just about ready to give up on a vacation day and slink on home.
Son of a bitch, it was one of the Duplinojos. A clever name she was refusing to say out loud in case it sounded stupid instead of as hilarious as it was in her head.
Raiku smirked to herself a little before masterfully straightening her face. 'So I guess we should head off, huh?' she asked, casually brushing dust off Daisuke's shoulder. At the last second she let her fingers linger over his exposed shoulder, sending a playful jolt through as she exclaimed, 'gotcha!'
A puff of smoke, the brief feeling of victory. Then a split second in which time seemed frozen, the smoke just cleared enough for pale skin and lines like slashes of black ink, wide eyes, a blur of red and black clothing in her peripheral vision. An elegant, angular face she had never fully seen but knew immediately.
'U-chi-ha,' she heard herself say impossibly slowly, her mind racing too rapidly for the world to seem anything but caught in slow-motion until it caught up in a flash, suddenly too fast and bright and overwhelming. Raiku was twisting away before she consciously recognised the attack for what it was, pulling herself to the side. A line of fire burst across her chest, an arc of blue-white lightning splashing out between them, torn out by the knife in his hand. It hung there for a moment in her shock before red spattered across him and the railing at his back, blood sizzling and crackling where it landed.
The Plot hadn't told her. It hadn't clung to him the way it should have. It hadn't even touched him.
For a moment, Raiku felt something like betrayal.
She couldn't meet his eyes. His eyes were death. She couldn't meet his eyes but Raiku wasn't good at listening to her better thoughts and she slipped. Just for a split second, she looked towards him when he came towards her again, so close already and they locked gazes. His eyes were death, and Raiku met them and the realisation wasn't a bolt of lightning, or a crashing weight. She met his eyes, and
they recognised each other.
That feeling again. Of gravity, of having been falling and landing, and she saw him. In that older, quieter part of her mind, she knew him; it spoke more in feelings than in thoughts, spoke then in a quiet sigh.
Oh. It's you.
Something like recognition in eyes flashing too black to be anything just physical and the world shuddered and warped violently, oil slicks of Plot hurtling around them to curve in towards her, towards the invisible force between them, arcing over his skin but never touching before it went on its way. Weaving around her, the Device between them, around him, all exactly the same.
Her father hadn't answered, she realised; he'd never told her who it was, the one so unlike her and so essentially the same.
And then she was alone. The interrupted spray of her blood had burnt spots into the bridge, two broken lines. Uchiha Itachi, as well as the Device that had sat between them, was gone.
Raiku stood on the bridge and heard, felt, the water rushing beneath her. The wind rustled through the trees, cooling her skin even through all her layers, and she just stood there, paralysed by shock and the feeling of falling, so briefly gone before she lost herself to gravity again.
She felt it.
She hadn't understood what Tsuji had said, hadn't grasped what he meant at the time, but she was left on the bridge and god, she felt it then.
She was so alone.
A/N: just all dogs, guys. Also man, this is why she gets no days off. Clearly can't be trusted with them, am I right?
