NOTES: I hope you like stories about food and characters being petty bastards to each other because that's all this chapter is about!
xXx
Itachi was, thankfully, easy to find because he and Kisame were watching a cooking show. They sat on the couch, side by side, looking disgustingly normal in civilian clothes. Kisame had a pad of paper and a pen balanced on the couch arm. Itachi, perfectly relaxed, held a mug of tea in his lap.
"Wow," Kisame said when Tori stalked up to them, grinning toothily up at her. "You look amazing."
Tori, currently covered in mud and several people's blood and insides, and not having slept in two days, told him to shut the fuck up. Kisame laughed good naturedly, because he was a dick.
Tori turned to Itachi. "Pein wants you to interrogate two people we brought back."
Itachi just peered up at her with his stupid, blank expression and asked, "Are you witnessing?"
"Yes," Tori answered through gritted teeth.
"...why don't you shower first," Itachi suggested.
Itachi was also a dick, but Tori would take a pity gesture when she could. Or, possibly, a command issued for the exact same reason she'd carved a seal into Hidan: she smelled, and no one wanted to work with a smelly person.
xXx
Down in the dungeon, two of the cell doors had been shut and bolted closed. There were two separate bars spanning the width of the door, plus one vertical bar that embedded and locked into the cement floor. Kakuzu's captives must have been excellent shinobi, though, to take on Hidan, and Tori wasn't convinced the elaborate locking system was enough. She scooted to the opposite wall of the corridor to pass the cells, intent on grabbing a clean set of clothes from the cell she'd dumped her stuff in.
Tori was completely out of clean clothes. She sniffed each article in turn and gathered up the least smelly set. She really needed to ask about laundry. Or was that something she could just find on her own? No one seemed to particularly care about her wandering around, but there had to be some places off-limits. She was positive Sasori, for example, would have a conniption if she set a toe in his workshop unsupervised.
If she just put on her mature adult pants and found one of the members who wasn't a raving lunatic, she could just ask. "Where am I allowed to go?" was a completely reasonable question, but part of her was afraid that she'd get an answer she wouldn't like. She'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission.
Not to mention, asking permission for something as basic to human dignity as clean laundry felt deeply humiliating. Tori was done with setting herself up for humiliation.
She passed by the locked cells again to get to the showers. There was no noise from inside. Tori would just have to trust Kakuzu and Hidan knew how to restrain hostile ninja well enough so that they didn't escape and murder her in the shower.
In the process of pulling off her dress in the shower room, something small hit Tori's foot. She paused with the dress half over her head and suddenly remembered Asa's severed finger. Why– why– had drunk Tori thought stealing a finger was a good idea?
The fabric dug into the cut on her arm. Tori tossed her dress aside.
The finger stared up at her from the tile floor. It was all grey and shriveled; she'd done her best to exsanguinate it while breaking into the greenhouse. Asa's bright yellow acrylic nail was, miraculously, still intact. Tori nudged the finger with her own big toe. What the hell was she supposed to do with this?
In the end, she folded her soiled clothes up neatly and placed the finger on top. She could deal with that when she wasn't disgusting beyond all reason.
Standing under the hot water of the shower was both a relief and a reminder of every aspect of her body that hurt. Her legs were sore from walking for hours, and her head hurt right behind her eyes from too much alcohol and not enough sleep. The cuts on her leg and arm stung under the water. Her mouth was so dry she tipped her head back and drank from the shower. She had the vague, full-body ache of exhaustion.
Part of her was very tempted to lie down on the floor and take a nap in the warmth of the hot shower. She was positive if she stopped moving, though, she'd end up passed out somewhere for hours, and she was supposed to record an interrogation. She would have to push through the rest of the day like this. It was fine– she'd done more complicated things in Oto while recovering from some dumb experiment.
Tori went to great length to scrub her various cuts with soap, and then spent time twisting her body to glare at them from various angles while she air-dried. They were pink around the edges, but they didn't look infected.
When Tori went back upstairs, clean and marginally refreshed, Kisame and Itachi were still watching TV. Tori rolled Asa's finger in wax paper and stuck it in the freezer, to be dealt with later.
The freezer needed some serious defrosting, with ears of plastic bags and corners of boxes poking out from a mass of white frost.
Tori's stomach growled. Maybe she could keep going without rest, but food… food would be useful.
She took a step back and glanced down the corridor to the living room. She could make out part of the couch and the back of Kisame's head, and that an old woman on TV was rubbing spices into a giant cut of fish. Well, if Itachi wanted Tori to do something, he knew where to find her.
She freed a freezer bag of seemingly hand-made dumplings from the frost. Someone had written a label on the bag in sharpie, and what hadn't rubbed off indicated that they were meant for everyone.
That was oddly communal. Weirdly friendly of that person. Unless someone was trying to poison their colleagues?
Tori paused in the middle of pulling out a pan, considering that. Making deadly homemade food for others to enjoy didn't really seem like the MO of anyone in Akatsuki. Even Sasori, who favored poisons, seemed more like the type of person to sneak the poison into a specific target's food and then watch them eat it. Honestly, poisoning communal food seemed more like something Tori would do in a fit of spite.
Plus, she was really hungry. If eating killed her, at least she wouldn't have to watch Itachi torture some guys or whatever she'd been signed up for.
There was a cabinet of various cooking oils under the kitchen bench, and someone had obviously spilled one and not bothered to clean it up, because everything inside was sticky and gross. Tori wrinkled her nose and picked the least gross one to fry the dumplings with.
A few minutes into frying the dumplings, Tori discovered that adding frost-covered food to hot oil made the oil bubble and pop and spew burning droplets everywhere.
"Shit," she muttered, and went in search of something to cover her hands with.
Tobi danced in to find Tori standing as far away from her spluttering food as possible as she very carefully turned the dumplings with a pair of rusty tongs, a dish towel wrapped around her hand and forearms.
"Tori-chan!" he greeted, waving his arms. "What are you making?"
He peered rudely into her pan, and Tori watched as oil popped and speckled across his mask.
"Ouch!" Tobi cried, delayed by several seconds, and leaned away. "Tori-chan isn't a very good cook."
"What do you want?" Tori snapped. The food was getting cooked, wasn't it?
"Tobi has a message from Kakuzu-sempai!" Tobi said, and in a very exaggerated kneel, he presented a folded piece of paper to Tori. "Tobi is a good messenger."
Tori read it. It was a bill, for the storage scroll she'd broken, and for the black scroll Hidan had ended up using instead. The black scroll was expensive– over half the price of a cheaper mission rate.
The bill was a low-quality photocopy of a form, which Kakuzu had filled out by hand. At the bottom in bold it read,If damages are not repaid by the end of the pay period, all fees will be deducted from your pay.
"Do I even get paid?" Tori wondered out loud.
"Tobi does not know!" Tobi answered, stretching his arms over his head. "Tobi is a volunteer! However, it seems to Tobi that paying a prisoner would be very odd!"
Tori opened her mouth to ask how one volunteered for a mercenary group, but thought better of it. Instead she asked, "Did Kakuzu tell you anything else?"
"He only said it was a message for 'that idiot girl'!" Tobi chirped.
"Uh huh," Tori said, rolling her eyes and going back to trying to flip her dumplings over. None of them had fallen apart… yet. "Anything about the message itself?"
Tobi made a big show of scratching his head. "No…?" he said. "Tobi just takes the letters where his sempai tells him."
Tori considered the predicament for a few seconds. The delivery of the message relied solely on Tobi, local moron, handing over a piece of paper, so…
She fed the paper into the flame of the gas stove.
"Tori-chan," Tobi gasped. "Your message!"
Tori blinked back at him. "What message?" she asked.
"Tori-chan!"
"Did you need something?" Tori asked innocently, turning off the flame of the stove. Her dumplings were cooked, and all that was left of the paper was some ash.
"Tobi– sempai– Tori-chan burnt her message," Tobi whined, wringing his hands in anxiety. "Kakuzu-sempai is going to be angry."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Tori said, transferring the dumplings to a plate. "Why would I intentionally piss off Kakuzu? I'm terrified of him. You must have lost something."
Tobi let out a low, pathetic wail as Tori bit into her lunch… breakfast… whatever meal this was. Garlic exploded in her mouth, and she pulled the dumpling back to find someone had packed an entire garlic clove into it.
"Kakuzu-sempai will kill Tobi," Tobi practically sobbed, and Tori ignored him while she inspected her food.
Kakuzu would come to collect the debt eventually, but now she had plausible deniability: she'd either delayed it or redirect his rage toward Tobi for a bit. She didn't have that kind of money, and she didn't really see why she should have to pay for Hidan's scroll anyway.
Also, whoever had made the dumplings had obviously elected to share, not out of the goodness of their heart, but because the dumplings were pretty awful. In addition to full garlic cloves, she also found tiny, whole green peppers that were absurdly spicy.
Crispy, fried dough was good, though, and it wasn't like garlic and chilli were bad flavors…
When Tori ignored him in favor of staring contemplatively into space as she ate, Tobi elected to lie face-down on the floor to cry, which is how Kisame found them.
"What's his problem?" Kisame asked. Tori shrugged.
"Tori-chan is mean," Tobi whined.
Kisame seemed to decide to completely tune out Tobi's dramatics, because instead he focused on Tori's plate and asked, "You're actually eating those?"
"They're fine," Tori said vaguely. Kisame did not seem convinced, but made no further comment.
Kisame banged around the kitchen while Tori cleaned up, and eventually Itachi showed up to rinse out his teacup in the sink. He did not say a word to anyone there, and didn't even give Tobi's hysterics a second glance as he stepped over him.
"We should go," Itachi said eventually, and it took Tori– poking around in the fridge for some sort of dessert– a couple seconds to realize he was talking to her.
"Uh, yeah, okay," she said, tearing her eyes from a lone bottle of chocolate syrup.
(Who was keeping chocolate syrup? Inquiring minds wanted to know!)
Itachi, Tori noted as she followed after him, was wearing house slippers and loose pants that were likely his pajamas. Was getting interrogated by a guy in his PJs more or less scary than a guy in regular clothes?
They paused on the ground floor for Tori to run and grab the minutes book, and Itachi watched her wordlessly with a deeply bored look on his face. He managed to look alarmingly not at all like a deadly assassin, but more like a half-asleep college student. Tori half-expected him to pull a cellphone out, and the image sent a jolt of homesickness through her.
She shook it off easily enough, though– Oto had taught her to squish down sappy emotions and fast. If Itachi noticed, he didn't say anything.
In the dungeon, Itachi opened the first cell door and made a subdued gesture for Tori to enter first, like a nice young man holding a door for a nice young lady. Tori shot him a sour look and reluctantly stepped right into kunai-to-the-face range of their prisoner.
Except the Iwa-nin was not going to be throwing kunai any time soon, because he had both hands shackled to the wall, arms spread wide to prevent the formation of hand seals. Every one of his fingers were clearly broken, as were both his legs. He glanced up dimly as she walked in.
For once, Tori was glad she couldn't do any jutsu or fight, because no one had ever felt threatened enough to break her limbs.
A look Tori couldn't quite interpret flashed over the Iwa-nin's face as his eyes flickered over her– a mix of resignation and confusion and maybe a little fear. Then Itachi stepped up behind her, and the Iwa-nin's full attention immediately shifted to him. His body tensed and then suddenly relaxed.
Tori had been prepared to watch a sad, bloody affair filled with screaming. That was not at all how Itachi's interrogation went.
"State your name and rank," Itachi commanded, voice monotone and bored.
"Takeda Yuji. Jounin of Iwagakure," the Iwa-nin answered. His expression was lax, and he gave the answer easily and casually.
Genjutsu? Tori wondered, fumbling with her pen as she hurried to write. She scooted off into the corner of the cell, leaving Itachi– perfectly relaxed in posture– to stand alone in front of their captive.
The Iwa-nin readily answered several questions about Iwagakure's organization and recent events. Definitely genjutsu, Tori thought. She vividly remembered word-vomiting up secrets to both Itachi and Obito under genjutsu nonsense.
When Itachi started to probe into more sensitive questions– things like Iwa's security and high-ranking missions– the Iwa-nin frowned deeply and started to get evasive. Tori caught Itachi's hand twitching at his side, even as his shoulders were relaxed and his face stayed passive.
"No," the Iwa-nin muttered, frowning to himself. "No, I'm not supposed to… you're not… no…"
He trailed off, and then glanced at the shackle on his right hand like he was noticing it for the first time. He pulled at it uselessly.
"Nevermind then," Itachi said, and his hand relaxed. "Tell me about your last mission."
The Iwa-nin continued to frown at his shackled wrist, his eyes slipping in and out of focus. Tori had just been making a bulleted list of the information relayed, but she wondered if the physical responses were worth noting too. She squiggled some notes in the margin while the Iwa-nin debated his answer.
"It's classified," the Iwa-nin said finally.
"It can't be too classified," Itachi said in a tone that was almost conversational under his usual apathy. "It was just a guard mission, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said the Iwa-nin, and followed it up with, "No."
"No?" Itachi asked.
"We were paid to guard a woman in her home," the Iwa-nin said, rotating his face to look Itachi in the eyes. "But Tsuchikage-sama wanted us to... to…"
Itachi's head tilted ever so slightly and his fingers twitched some more. "To do what, Takeda-san?"
Itachi pried the details out of the man bit by bit. Iwa wanted information on Akatsuki because they were a mysterious and frightening threat to the shinobi world at large, and because Iwa specifically wanted Deidara back in their custody or eliminated. They gladly took the mission to guard Mizusawa Asa in exchange for a chance to capture an Akatsuki member. When it became clear that even a large company of high-ranking shinobi weren't going to capture Kakuzu and Hidan, they opted to kill off who they could and flee.
They had some idea of Hidan's ritual from watching his fight in the mansion. The Iwa-nin was positive they'd killed him. It was fortunate for Tori that they hadn't realized that Hidan could live through even decapitation, because she wasn't sure Akatsuki would be so forgiving if she let random ninja run off with Hidan's head.
(Even if Hidan would have absolutely deserved it.)
"But I don't understand," the Iwa-nin finished, "who the girl is."
He glared at Tori, accusing and confused. She stared right back, keeping her face perfectly blank.
"Who do you think she is?" Itachi asked.
"I thought she was…" the Iwa-nin trailed off, and his glare intensified as he scrutinized Tori. "She's got an accent from nowhere, mannerisms from nowhere… but she's not a ninja…"
He rambled and Tori raised her eyebrows at Itachi. She'd traveled a bit internationally, back in her own world, and everyone always seemed to be able to guess her home country just by looking at her. But, she supposed, if you had no concept at all of her country, then she just seemed… unplaceable.
"Yes, she's very confusing," Itachi said, sounding bored with the whole situation. He did not spare Tori a look. "Who did you think she was?"
"She's a friend of the client's," the ninja said, shifting in place and frowning. "But she's here now?"
"Ah," Itachi said, and then switched the conversation to what the ninja had learned about Akatsuki from the incident. It wasn't much– Iwa didn't even have a full member roster. They knew Deidara well, though, and they had some ideas about his louder missions based on analysis of the destruction left behind.
When Itachi pressed for specifics, whatever resistance the man had to the genjutsu kicked in, and he started pulling at his shackles again and giving non-answers.
"What did Mizusawa know about Akatsuki?" Itachi asked.
"Mizusawa complained about Deidara," the Iwa-nin said. "Said he made fun of her nails."
Tori had to close her eyes and count to ten to stop from bursting into laughter as the Iwa-nin described how they'd been hoping Deidara was the Akatsuki member to show up.
Apparently, Asa had decided to destroy her relationship with Akatsuki on the grounds that when Sasori and Deidara went to talk mission parameters with her, they'd been rude.
Mizusawa Asa continues to be inspirationally petty, Tori wrote.
"Were you in contact with Iwa during your mission?" Itachi asked. The man hummed, and Itachi asked the question again.
"We sent updates every other day…" the Iwa-nin said. "By bird."
Itachi asked a few more questions about communication, apparently trying to pinpoint if anyone had gotten any messages back to Iwa about Hidan and Kakuzu. Itachi had no further questions after that and turned and walked out of the cell without so much as a nod at Tori. She rushed after him, wanting to minimize her time in an enclosed space with an enemy ninja as much as possible.
Not that Itachi himself wasn't an enemy ninja, but… well…technically they were working together.
The second Iwa-nin's interrogation went much longer because Itachi's genjutsu had the odd effect of making the missing-nin give lots of useless information. When asked about who he thought Tori was the Iwa-nin said, "A civilian the missing-nin kidnapped because missing-nin are traitorous garbage."
(He wasn't, you know, wrong.)
The Iwa-nin went on a rant about traitors and it took Itachi another ten minutes to calm him down enough to give actual answers. While he rambled, Tori flipped through pages of previous reports to annotate her notes with what they previously knew. The number of Iwa-nin deployed matched the number Kakuzu and Hidan had killed or captured. She noted that the information this Iwa-nin gave matched what the other one had said. The only notable exception was that he asserted Sasori had insulted Asa's nails.
Hilarious, Tori thought. She was so asking both of them about this.
When Itachi declared them done and re-bolted both doors, Tori asked, "Now what?"
"I'll report to Leader-sama or Konan," Itachi said, and then held out his hand for the notebook.
Tori ignored his hand and asked, "And then?"
Itachi's eyes were focused pointedly at the notebook and not on Tori's face. After a moment of tense silence, he answered, "If the information gathered is sufficient, someone will eliminate them."
Well, Tori thought, I guess that's that.
She handed over the book, and then followed Itachi at his heels as he left the dungeon.
"Was that the same genjutsu you used on me?" she asked as they headed upstairs. When Itachi didn't say anything for a whole flight of stairs, she reiterated, "Well, was it?"
"Similar," Itachi replied.
"How does it work?" Tori asked. Clearly, there were some limitations, or Itachi would have the entire city plan of Iwa by now.
"You ask a lot of questions," Itachi said.
"You don't give very many answers," Tori snapped back. It was the type of observation she normally kept internal, but she was tired and cranky and Itachi was a mean bastard.
He didn't say anything in return, but he did pause at a landing to look down at her for a few moments.
They parted ways on the ground floor, Itachi knocking politely on Pein's office door while Tori dragged her feet into her own office. She really wanted to just go to bed, but she also didn't want to sleep across the way from their potentially violent captives.
Not that being awake could stop an escaping ninja from murdering her.
Tori eyed her piles of paper scattered across the floor: mission requests and replies and Orochimaru's dumb seals. The piles had seemed organized when she'd made them, but it felt like weeks had passed since she last worked on them, and it all seemed arranged at random now.
There was a pile of sleeping pads for camping in one of the rooms filled with random stuff she was supposed to organize a few floors up. She'd brought a couple down to the dungeon for herself, but she could just… take a nap in a nice quiet room…
But also she was supposed to be productive or die so if she did that, she should at least make some sort of effort to organize whatever else was in that room. Or should she work on something in the office until the other prisoners were "eliminated"?
Tori chewed at her bottom lip. The other prisoners. The ones that weren't her.
If the information gathered is sufficient, someone will eliminate them, Itachi had said. That applied to her too, didn't it? She had to be more useful than just her knowledge about the future, which was a limited resource she'd run out of eventually.
(And if she changed enough, would her foresight become useless? She already wasn't sure how Sasuke and Orochimaru's roles in the coming war had changed.)
Tori toed a pile of Orochimaru's seals that she was pretty sure were ones she'd decided were at least sort-of finished. No time for naps; she had to make progress on these.
xXx
The problem with Orochimaru was that his thoughts seemed to jump around all over the place, and even when he was trying to record the thought process behind his experiments, it often read as disconnected ideas and observations arranged in a random order.
And that was if he bothered annotating his seal work.
You could also pick out all of Orochimaru's working notes from his assistants' because he never bothered with breaking down his seals into their separate parts. Seals, at their core, were just a set of instructions for pushing around chakra, and the order of instructions mattered, like how you always added acid to water and never water to acid. That meant that when most people went and wrote down their seals, for their own personal benefit or for others to copy, they broke down the seal into their individual components, making a series of diagrams in the correct order of operation. This was especially useful for more complicated seals, where components overlapped and everything got too complicated to easily read or remember.
Orochimaru, on the other handle, just slapped full and absurdly complicated seals down on paper like a monster.
The best thing to do when dealing with Orochimaru's unique and infuriating process, Tori knew from experience, was to break down the seals yourself and sort of reverse-engineer the process. This, of course, was easiest when you 1) knew what the seal was supposed to do, and 2) knew enough about that type of seal to guess what parts did what.
(And if you didn't know either of those things, your labmate would call you a useless dumbass and throw a book or a scroll at you, and you just had to hope the thing thrown at you contained useful information.)
Tori spread the pile of complete seals across the floor in front of her, eyeing them each in turn. She had absolutely no idea what most of them were meant to do, and most of them were heavy on seal components she'd never seen before.
"Shit," she swore. She was going to have to do so much research. Where was she even going to find material that covered what she needed to know?
There was one seal she was sure was some sort of stasis seal, albeit more complicated than anything she'd attempted herself. Every single aspect of it was doubled, with every command written twice, and the second set of commands looking extra odd.
Oh, Tori realized, it's for a jinchuriki.
She didn't know how being a jinchuriki really worked, but if a normal stasis seal only affected the host and not the demon inside… well, you'd need a whole new crazy seal to restrain the demon, wouldn't you?
With that in mind, it actually wasn't hard to separate out the human pieces of the seal from the demon ones. They were similar to the surgical seals Tori was familiar with, and it didn't take a lot of time to break the human-only part of the seal down into two possible orders of operation. Of course the only way to figure out which order was correct was to actuallytry the seal out…
Tori wasn't actually sure how she was supposed to do that here, with Akatsuki. In her world, this seemed like the sort of thing you'd try on mice– nice, cheap creatures where it didn't matter if your outcomes were less than perfect, because you had twenty more to keep trying on. Should she ask someone to catch some mice for her? Who the hell would even agree?
(Tobi. Tobi would agree to such a stupid request, and Tori hated both Obito and herself for the realization.)
Also, assuming she didn't fail and get killed, once she figured out the demon half of the seal… how the hell was she going to test that? Demon mice?
If this seal was part of Akatsuki's bijuu sealing process, how had they figured all this shit out in the original canon, anyway?
One problem at a time, Tori decided, and refocused on the easiest and most immediate problem to solve: how to test two possible versions of the human half of the stasis seal?
What would Orochimaru do? Tori wondered, and the answer was obvious. Morally heinous, but obvious, not to mention pragmatic. If the two people currently sitting in the dungeon were going to be eliminated anyway, it wouldn't make much difference if she had a hand in it.
Tori was still glaring heatedly at the stupid seals and debating how to pitch this to Pein or Konan, when she heard voices in the hallway.
"I don't think the mission worked out because of anything Tori did intentionally," Itachi was saying.
"But I was right," Konan countered, "she's not awful at it."
"We could just recruit an actual kunoichi," Itachi replied.
Tori found herself resisting the urge to bang her head against the door. They were purposefully talking about her in front of her office because they knew she'd overhear, because ninja were mean, manipulative people.
Well, if they wanted to criticize her existence, they could do it to her face. She grabbed the notes she was currently working on and threw open the door with unnecessary force.
"Why don't you just recruit a kunoichi?" Tori asked, interrupting whatever Konan was saying. Both Konan and Itachi turned to her, blinking as if they had not known she was listening, even though obviously they had.
(Seriously, she was going to have a nervous breakdown, and it wasn't even going to be because of violence to her person or because she was about to ask about human experimentation.)
"I have a request," Tori said, and then explained her conundrum with Orochimaru's seals. "Can I try it on our prisoners?"
Konan's lips thinned as she eyed the paper in Tori's hands. "You're sure it's for stasis?" Tori nodded. "And what's the worst case scenario if you're wrong?"
"If it doesn't work, the most probable outcome is nothing happens," Tori said, and then considered what else could go wrong. "But I guess, worst case scenario… his insides become his outsides?"
Konan shot a look at Itachi, who tilted his head slightly at Tori. "You could wait for Sasori to test it for her," he suggested.
"Last time we kept captives long-term, you all forgot to feed them and they starved to death," Konan said, frowning ever so slightly.
Tori's eyebrows shot up. What the fuck. No wonder they were just letting her wander around and eat their food.
"Technically they died of dehydration," Itachi said, and Konan shot him a Look.
"It's easiest to just let Tori test them herself," Konan concluded. "With certain precautions, of course."
They reconvened in the dungeon twenty minutes later, Konan having gone to fetch tools for Tori. Itachi was supervising too, as he had magic chakra-seeing eyes that could stop her from… blowing up the place, or whatever they thought she'd do.
"This is my day off," Itachi informed Tori blandly. He'd gone away and returned with a cup of tea.
"Do you ever stop drinking tea?" Tori asked in wonder.
"It's how I relax," Itachi answered, "on my days off."
He raised his eyebrows at her and in a moment of complete maturity, Tori stuck her tongue out at him.
Konan appeared a minute later, ink and brushes and sticky paper in hand. She laid them across the guard's table.
"I can just do it directly on skin," Tori said, picking up one of the brushes and eyeing it. Konan had brought five brushes of various sizes, and two of them were so thick Tori wasn't sure what sort of seal anyone would make with them.
"Seals on skin are less stable," Itachi said, crossing his arms.
"It's a stasis seal," Tori shot back. "It's designed to be stable."
"It's easier to watch you at the table, anyway," Konan cut in with a note of finality, and picked up the tiny bottle of ink she'd brought. "You can't infuse this with chakra yourself, correct?"
A large part of Tori wanted to use her own blood for her experiment, but. Well. It was a lot easier to let Konan channel chakra into the ink for her. She kept her mouth shut.
Itachi and Konan watched Tori way more intently than she wanted anyone to watch her, ever, and she botched her first attempt as a result of nerves and the brand new brush being stiff and unwieldy. She spent a few minutes "breaking it in" by drawing doodles of flowers and cartoon animals on a piece of scratch paper. By then, she'd had Uchiha Itachi memorize the exact way she drew cute little sheep with his sharingan, and her nerves were gone. She drew up two beautiful seals.
"You know," Tori said tersely as she drew, "studies show people perform worse under intense scrutiny."
"If you can't perform properly under supervision," Konan drawled in return, "then what's the point of keeping you around?"
Tori pursed her lips and kept working.
Konan checked Tori's final products against the seal from Orochimaru she was trying to copy, and then opened the door to cell number one.
Tori didn't know if their prisoners could hear of their conversation or what this Iwa-nin thought was happening. She stood at the doorway to his cell for several very tense seconds, in which in an irrational part of her hoped Konan or Itachi would say something reassuring, like You can do it or I'll step in if he goes to stab you in the face.
They stayed silent, though, and the prisoner just glared at her in hatred.
Here goes nothing, Tori thought to herself, and then crossed the length of the cell in three shakey strides.
The Iwa-nin didn't say anything or struggle, which made focusing easier. Tori kept her eyes on his chest, away from his face, and pretended he wasn't a real person.
The Iwa-nin's flak jacket had been removed, and Tori squatted in front of him and pushed up his shirt to reveal his stomach and the bottom of his rib cage. A tiny part of her felt embarrassed and awkward removing someone's clothing, but– well– a bigger part of her was dedicated to getting her experiments done, and getting them done right.
The Iwa-nin's torso was covered in bruises, and Tori was gentle as she applied the seal. As soon as it was on, he dropped dead.
"Aw man," Tori sighed after she checked his pulse. She peeled the seal back off.
"What went wrong?" Konan asked.
"It stopped his chakra completely," Itachi said, taking a sip of tea. "What an efficient assassination technique."
He said it in a monotone that sounded neither complimentary nor sarcastic, but Tori shot him an annoyed look anyway. Why did he have to choose now to get all chatty?
When they went to the other cell, the other Iwa-nin swore and spat at her, the muscles of his arms straining against his shackles. Tori put on her steeliest face, pushed aside her fears of the Iwa-nin smashing her face in, and practically slapped the seal into place.
The body immediately went limp, and Tori automatically reached for his neck to check for his pulse. When she couldn't find one, she clicked her tongue and disappointment and pulled the seal back off.
The man jolted, his eyes snapping open and his mouth sucking in breath. Tori yelped in shock and panic and reflexively slapped the seal back down. He went still again.
"I think he actually died that time," Itachi said. As he spoke, he crossed the room to stand directly beside Tori, eyes narrowed as he eyed the Iwa-nin's body.
Tori pulled off the seal a second time, and there was no miraculous return to the living. Tori shuffled out of the cell feeling disheartened.
"The first attempt slowed his chakra almost completely," Itachi reported to Konan, following Tori out. "I don't think most sensors would have counted him as living."
"Why did he die the second time, then?" Konan asked.
"Stress to the body from multiple applications," Itachi supplied, and Tori found herself twitching.
"You don't know that," she said, and Itachi glanced back at her like she'd said something stupid. "There are five million possible reasons for the results we saw. You're just guessing."
"It sounds plausible," Konan said, and there was a note of warning in her voice– she didn't want Tori picking a fight with Itachi. Several sheets of paper detached themselves from Konan's body, and Tori took a step back. "I'll transport the bodies upstairs for Zetsu," Konan continued, more paper fluttering free. The sheets plastered themselves to the Iwa-nin's corpse. "You're both dismissed."
Tori wanted nothing more than to march across the corridor to her own cell, to fling herself across her stolen sleeping pads and think about how exactly she'd screwed up her current fuuinjutsu project until she fell asleep. However, Konan obviously wanted her out of her sight, so Tori trudged behind Itachi up the stairs.
At the very least, Tori was going to develop awesome calves from living here.
Upstairs, Kisame was at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. He grinned up at them and asked, "How'd the science project go?"
Tori must have looked remarkably miserable, because his smile dimmed.
"They both died," Itachi said calmly as he poured himself a new cup of tea. He sat next to Kisame, pulling a discarded section of the paper towards himself. Tori stayed in the kitchen, staring blankly at the tea pot and wondering what Itachi would do if she stole his tea right in front of him. Some caffeine right now would be nice.
"Uh, are you okay?" Kisame said, and Tori picked up the teapot experimentally. It was empty.
She put it back down. Kisame was currently going through a very awkward speech about how sometimes ninja had to kill people, while Itachi leafed through the paper and seemed to ignore them.
"It's not going to feel bad forever," Kisame concluded.
"What?" Tori asked, staring at him.
"You killed two people," he said bluntly.
Tori blinked again, and it took a few moments for what Kisame was trying to get at to click in her brain. No shinobi had tried to comfort her since she'd gotten here. It was oddly touching that he'd try.
(Except maybe that border guard who gave her cookies, but that hardly counted.)
Still, she'd already written the Iwa-nin off as dead men walking the moment Kakuzu had captured them. She hardly felt bad about their deaths.
"It's not that," she said, which was true. "I'm upset because I rushed into it and my experimental design wasn't very good. It only kind of worked, and I didn't do it in a way that definitively shows what happened."
She definitely, for example, shouldn't have panicked and reapplied the seal when her second patient had come back to life. Now she didn't know if multiple applications killed the patient, or if the seal working the first time had just been a fluke. One person per treatment was an awful sample size, and she didn't have a control to know if they'd just died from their chakra being messed with in a weakened state or if it was a problem the seal itself, and she didn't actually know how much chakra Konan had infused into the ink, which was a beginner's mistake–
"I think you made a very promising sleeping death seal," Itachi said, looking up from his reading, "providing you don't mind eventually killing your victim."
"Thanks," Tori answered snidely, "I'll keep that in mind if I ever want to recreate ninja Romeo and Juliet."
She turned to the kitchen counter, then, searching for something to wake her up. Did ninja have energy drinks?
("What's Romeo and Juliet?" Kisame asked behind her.)
The time on the microwave read it just past 4:00pm, indicating that Tori was currently experiencing the longest day in the history of the planet. If everyday in Akatsuki was like this, she might just start popping soldier pills constantly. Jesus.
She spied the coffeemaker, which was currently half full of room temperature coffee.
Jackpot, Tori thought and poured herself a glass. Room temperature coffee was basically iced coffee, right?
She took one sip and nearly spat it out. It was horrifically bitter and way too strong.
"Did Deidara make that?" Kisame asked from two feet behind her, and Tori nearly dropped her glass. Kisame leaned over her to open the top of the coffeemaker. He pulled out the reusable filter, and held it out for her to see. It was filled all the way to the brim and overflowing with coffee grounds.
"What…" Tori started to say. She didn't really know where that question was going. Maybe she should restart with a 'why.'
Kisame turned and dumped the grounds into the trash. "He always just packs new grounds on top of the old ones," he complained. "Three tongues and no tastebuds."
Tori thought about saying, "Actually, I think he has four tongues," but she wasn't sure if the sealed mouth in Deidara's chest was something other people were supposed to know about. Instead, she said, "It's fine. I can fix it."
Kisame looked unimpressed as she added milk and sugar and chocolate syrup to the coffee.
"You've just made a coffee-flavored dessert," Kisame said, wrinkling his nose. "It probably doesn't even taste like coffee."
"I'm having a bad day and I deserve dessert," Tori defended, taking a gulp. Even with all the added sweeteners, it was strong. She took another sip to make her point. "Why do you guys even keep chocolate syrup?"
"It's mine," Itachi said from directly behind her, and Tori splashed coffee down her front. "Does it taste good?" he asked, staring very intently at her glass.
Tori had not seen him look that intense since he interrogated her about Sasuke. So he doeslike sweets, she noted.
"Yes," she lied immediately.
Itachi started to pull his own glass from the cabinet above her, and Kisame sighed and said, "Deidara made that coffee two days ago."
Itachi put the glass back.
"You shouldn't drink that," Itachi said, and Tori rolled her eyes and took another sip. God, no wonder Deidara was constantly complaining about how much of a stuck up prick Itachi was. He just never stopped being so… himself.
Itachi twitched ever so slightly, and then turned to put on another pot of tea instead. This one came from a tin label MEDICINAL BLEND.
He really doesn't ever stop drinking it, Tori thought.
Tori took her coffee to the table, and eavesdropped on Kisame and Itachi while she ate. They seemed to be checking the kitchen for what ingredients were available to cook whatever they had watched on TV earlier. Kisame kept gesturing at the legal pad of notes he'd taken.
That was… weirdly adorable. She actually hated how adorable that was. They were her evil judgemental captors; they weren't supposed to be cute.
"The milk is expired," Itachi said, suddenly towering over her.
"What?" Tori answered, blinking up at him.
"The milk is past its expiration date," Itachi insisted. Then as if he were spelling it out for a child he added, "Your coffee contains milk."
"So?" Tori asked, suddenly feeling defensive. "It tastes fine."
"It'll make you sick," Itachi said, and then reached for her glass of half-drunk coffee.
"Why do you care?" Tori snapped, and then grabbed the glass and held it to her chest. He could try and micromanage her experiments in fuuinjutsu, but he wasn't going to micromanage her coffee consumption. "Food doesn't just magically go bad when it reaches its expiration date. It's fine."
Itachi's mouth twitched ever so slightly– his version of a frown, maybe– and then he leaned over and tried to pull the glass out of her hands. "It's a full week past the date."
"Hey!" Tori half-screeched, scooting back defensively, and Itachi put his hand on her forehead to hold her in place while he easily pried the glass from her hands. "What kind of a fucking control freak are you–"
Tori called Itachi several rude words, but there was really nothing she could do to stop him from relieving her of her food.
"Did you really have to–" Kisame started, an extremely pained look on his face as Itachi poured Tori's coffee down the sink.
"You complete psychopath," Tori yelled, on her feet and in Itachi's personal space as he very calmly cleaned out her glass. "There's nothing wrong with the fucking milk–"
"It wouldn't do for you to get sick," Itachi said blandly. Then ignoring the beginnings of a pissed rant from Tori about sell-by dates, he raised his voice slightly to add, "Kisame, add milk to your shopping list, please."
Tori clenched her jaw and fumed as Itachi went back to making his tea. Kisame shot her a sympathetic look.
"There's really no point in arguing with him," he said. "He's right– we're supposed to keep you from doing things like poisoning yourself."
He said this as if it were highly probable for Tori to do so, and she couldn't help but think about the face he'd given her over the dumplings, even though they were perfectly edible if not horribly made.
He didn't even know about her drinking drugged champagne!
"I'm not going to poison myself with milk," Tori answered through gritted teeth. How the fuck were these people sending her to face down hordes of enemy ninja but thought she'd die from expired food? Why couldn't she just have one fucking moment of peace around here? "That's not– the milk hasn't even gone off yet!"
Whatever Kisame said in reply, Tori ignored it as she spied where Itachi had left the milk out on the counter. She stalked over to it, picked it up, and opened it.
"Tori-san," Kisame started, sounding completely and painfully resigned, and Itachi looked up.
Tori looked Itachi dead in the eye and chugged the rest of the milk.
"You're incredibly childish," Itachi said, but made no move to stop her.
When she was done, Tori hurled the now empty milk container into the trash can and hissed, "Don't tell me what to eat."
Kisame pinched the bridge of his nose. Tori continued to stand in the middle of the kitchen, scowling at Itachi as he made his tea, willing the blood vessels in his head to spontaneously burst. Itachi was lucky he was the one with magic eyes and not her, because if she had the sharingan, he'd be on dead and on fire and, did she mention, dead?
"Do you want to come with me?" Kisame asked, and it took a moment for Tori to tear her eyes from glaring daggers at Itachi. "To go shopping," Kisame clarified.
His eyes darted meaningfully to his partner, who was calmly stirring honey into his tea and ignoring both of them, and then back to Tori, who was seething in rage.
She… could go outside? To a grocery store? Why did that sound so freeing?
"Uh– yeah, sure," Tori answered, suddenly very distracted from her fantasies about smothering Itachi in his sleep with a pillow. "Do you mind if I grab some cash first?"
She met Kisame in the lobby. He'd put on his Akatsuki cloak, along with the straw hat to guard from the constant rain. That style of hat was actually quite common in Ame, Tori had noticed.
She pulled her hood on and followed him out and into the center of town. Despite passing two, they didn't stop at a grocery store.
Ame's central market was held in a giant open-aired pavilion. Stalls were arranged in a neat grid, and every few blocks there was a square with a sky shower– a hole purposefully built into the ceiling letting rain down into a fountain. Some of the fountains had fish, and all of them were lined with pretty colored tiles. Narrow gutters brought the water away from the fountains and zig-zagged through the pavilion floor.
The market wasn't particularly crowded, but people still rushed to get out of Kisame's way as he led Tori through. She trailed along behind him, eyeing stalls as they passed. They held everything from food to hand-made jewelry to clothes to live animals, all arranged in a seemingly random order.
Tori paused at a stall selling personal care items. Several feet ahead of her, Kisame stopped as well.
"Do you need something?" he asked.
Tori picked up a bottle of shampoo. "Yeah," she said. "How much does shampoo normally cost?"
The woman running the stall raised her eyebrows but didn't comment. Kisame also gave her an odd look, but told her how much he usually paid.
"Itachi's preferred brand is twice as much, though," Kisame said, watching as Tori opened the bottle and sniffed it.
"Of course it is," Tori muttered and then set the bottle down and wandered away from the stall.
"Itachi's really not that bad," Kisame said, falling into step beside her. "He's just…"
"A control freak?" Tori finished.
"Well, yes, a little," Kisame agreed. "He's not as bad as Sasori, though."
For some reason, that made Tori laugh. Kisame grinned back at her, showing off all his pointed teeth.
Kisame obviously had some preferred vendors he went to for his groceries, but he didn't seem to mind Tori stopping to look at things along the way, and offered to buy her a passionfruit when she stopped at a fruit vendor and gasped: "They do exist!"
Kisame also helped her determine fair prices without much hassle or mocking. (Bananas, it turned out, were very rare and very expensive in Ame.)
"Should I be haggling?" Tori asked. "This seems like a place where you should haggle."
"Deidara was right," Kisame said, eyeing Tori as she examined some pretty hand-bound journals. The person running the booth was involved with a deep conversation with another customer. "You really don't have any idea how money works."
"Don't tell Kakuzu my dark secret," Tori answered with an actual, genuine smile.
By the time Kisame had stocked up on all the nonperishables and produce he wanted, Tori thought she had a much better idea of how much money was worth here. She didn't really have any idea what brands were good though, and Kisame abandoned her to pick out hair products while he went to buy meat and dairy.
Tori very meticulously read labels and sniffed bottles, but there wasn't actually much variety in brands. She aimed for products more in the price range Kisame described Itachi going for because, well, Itachi had nicer hair and skin.
God, she hadn't even thought about lotion in months, and now she had two different types.
Tori figured whatever money she had left over would eventually be confiscated by Kakuzu, so she decided it was best for her sanity to just spend it on things she wanted now. When she'd stocked up on all the toiletries she'd need for a while, Tori wandered the stalls at random. She spent a long time at one that sold pretty clothes she couldn't afford, bought some cheap clothes she could, and invested in a towel and fluffy blanket. On her way to re-find Kisame, she paused at a stall selling small animals.
She squatted to peer into a cage of dwarf hamsters, and reflected that hamsters were better experiment fodder than humans. They were small, cheap, easy to care for, and easily replaceable, and she'd have to worry less about why she didn't really mind doing horrible things to them.
"How much are these?" she asked the old man running the stall, who was currently sipping from a thermos.
The man eyed her up and down and then said, "Wouldn't a nice girl like you be more interested in a pair of rabbits?"
"No," Tori said, standing at her full height of five-foot-nothing. "How much for a hamster?"
"I have some rare lionhead rabbits," the man continued, ignoring her question. "I can sell you a cage and food and everything."
"I don't want a rabbit," Tori said, fist tightening on her plastic bag of hygiene products in irritation. "I want to know how much a hamster is." As an afterthought, she added stiffly, "Please."
The man started to show her a collapsible enclosure to keep rabbits in her garden, and she nearly screamed.
"What is wrong with you?" she snapped, and the man blinked at her, taken aback. "I'm asking you about hamsters." She paused, and glared at the cage he was holding. "That's not even big enough for rabbits!"
"What a rude mouth on you," the man said, shaking his head. "Here, I'll let you hold one of the lionheads, and maybe you can calm down."
The lionhead rabbit the man picked up had a lot of extra whisps of hair on its head that fell over its eyes. It was very cute, and Tori hated herself as she took it from him. The rabbit was very sweet and warm and soft and didn't struggle at all.
"See?" the man said. "A pretty rabbit for a pretty girl."
Tori noted that the man needed a crutch to stand and that no one around them was paying much attention at all. She turned on her heel and walked away, rabbit in her arms and bags dangling from her elbows.
"Hey!" the man called after her, hobbling out from behind his stall. The woman at the next stall over– who was selling crepes– looked up and yelled something at Tori, but she was minding two small children and made to move to intervene. Tori walked as fast as she could without running, weaving through the market, and when she looked behind her, the man was nowhere in sight.
Kisame was very large and blue, and it was easy to find him. He was contemplatively watching some eels squirm in a bucket.
"You bought a rabbit?" he asked, frowning at her when she appeared.
"No," Tori said vaguely.
"Then why do you have one?" Kisame asked.
"I don't know," Tori said, feeling very stressed. This was the same way she'd felt with the soap she'd scammed– she'd seen an opportunity to do a thing, executed the thing, and no one had stopped her. She very briefly explained what happened to Kisame.
"You stole a rabbit?" Kisame asked, looking extremely confused.
"No," Tori said. "Yes. I don't know!"
"We're not really supposed to steal from Ame citizens," Kisame said, eyeing the rabbit doubtfully. "You should take it back."
Too late, Tori thought. She couldn't remember where the stall had been, but even if she could, she wasn't going to give the rabbit back to that jerk.
"I don't understand," Kisame said. "Why was he trying to sell you a rabbit?"
Kisame, Tori thought, feeling extremely frazzled, probably hadn't had a problem with a person ignoring his demands since he got big enough to lift Samehada. Luckily, the eel saleswoman was watching them with interest, and she seemed to understand Tori's predicament much better.
"My daughter keeps rabbits," she said. "One more couldn't hurt. I'll trade you."
Tori didn't particularly like eel, but the woman also sold all sorts of fish. Tori and Kisame walked away with a large cut that Kisame seemed very pleased with.
"I can't believe you think Itachi has control problems," Kisame observed as they left the market pavilion. "You can't be left alone for five minutes without terrorizing someone."
He said it in a lighthearted tone that made it obvious he was joking, but Tori still had to fight back a mean snear.
"Well, I don't have control over anythingelse," she muttered.
"Ah," Kisame said, and the single syllable was surprisingly understanding. Shinobi, Tori supposed, didn't have much control over their own lives, either.
xXx
Since Tori had technically paid for the fish, she was invited to share in Kisame and Itachi's adventures in trying to recreate a recipe they'd seen on TV.
To Itachi's (very meager) credit, his control issues expanded to everyone around him, not just Tori. He hovered around Kisame as he prepared the fish, micromanaging the whole way. Kisame took it in stride, ignoring Itachi's concern about acidity and flavor palettes, and pushing a knife and a handful of potatoes to peel and slice at him.
"Granny Saeko used more ginger," Itachi said, eyeing whatever Kisame was doing even as he chopped the potatoes into neat pieces. Tori could only assume Granny Saeko was the TV chef they were trying to copy.
It was… still sort of cute what they were doing. As cute as murderers-for-hire got, of course.
Instead of responding to his partner, Kisame told Tori's rabbit story in a sort of "Can you believe that?" tone.
Itachi's eyes briefly slid over to Tori, who was leaning against the counter and watching them intently.
"You do give off the strong impression of someone who's easily taken advantage of," Itachi observed in the same bland way one might announce the outdoor temperature.
"Thanks," Tori answered, voice heavy with sarcasm.
"It wasn't an insult," Itachi answered, turning to scrape potato peels into the trash. "You're adept enough at using it to your advantage."
Tori rolled her eyes and turned to her part of dinner prep, which was assembling a salad from a random assortment of vegetables that Kisame had purchased simply because they'd been a good deal. This included a comically large mesh-bag of lemons.
Tori, being a lazy person who only dealt in juices from a bottle, had never juiced a lemon before. It ended with lemon juice all over her hands and a bunch of cuts she hadn't even known were there stinging like mad. Her lemon-and-oil dressing better be delicious.
They made their plates, and in an act of camaraderie that seemed wildly bizarre to Tori, they sat down in the living room together to eat and watch TV.
The salad dressing tasted 100% like undiluted lemon juice, and was awful.
"Lemon and fish should pair together," Itachi said, eyeing his plate like he didn't quite trust it.
"It's probably off because I added way too much ginger," Kisame said, sounding vaguely apologetic, despite the addition of more ginger being the result of Itachi's constant badgering.
Still, the fish was perfectly flakey and the potatoes were flavorful and the vegetables were fresh, and it was easily the best meal Tori had had since… since whenever the dining hall at her university had last served chicken nuggets. It was so good she was willing to forgive Itachi. It was so good she was promoting Kisame to number one kidnapper.
She told him as much and added, "Besides, I like intense flavors."
"I've noticed this about you," Kisame said diplomatically, and then turned and said to his partner, "She ate your death gyoza earlier."
"Hmm," Itachi replied, flipping through channels.
Tori paused, a lettuce leaf doused in lemon juice halfway to her mouth. "Itachi," she said, working very hard to contain laughter, "do you not know about chopping garlic?"
"It was an early cooking attempt," Itachi said blandly, "as I'm sure your salad is."
"We own a garlic press now," Kisame said helpfully.
They settled on a movie, which started with a quick interview from the main actor, who talked about how he'd been drawn to this role because of the amazing twist ending. The movie itself was a drama, set in a world where warriors seemed to be ninja-samurai fusions, and where an evil king had taken over twenty years prior.
Very important to Tori's interests, the main character had a sword made out of scorned ghosts. Were those real? She'd take seven.
Not five minutes into the movie, Tori asked, "So is the twist that the sword guy is the son of the evil king?"
Kisame twitched. "I'm sure we'll find out," he said.
A few scenes later, an evil sorceress (kunoichi?) announced she had a "truth jutsu" that could destroy the main character.
"Yeah, he's definitely the king's lost son," Tori concluded.
"I don't understand how this jutsu is supposed to work," Itachi said. "Where is the information coming from?"
"I'm sure," Kisame said, voice oddly strained, "that the movie will tell us eventually."
Itachi, however, couldn't seem to hold himself back from critiquing the ghost sword (which, to Tori's disappointment, was not a real thing), or everyone's fighting technique, or the bizarrely prevalent use of "summoning jutsu" to summon plot-relevant items to various characters.
Snarky movie commentary was actually a game Tori loved to play, so she jumped in with: "I am 100% sure his love interest is the sorceress in disguise" and "Why can'tI save my grandmother's ghost in a storage scroll for wisdom about conquering evil kingdoms?"
At some point, Itachi got up and came back with a bowl of ice cream, covered in chocolate syrup. Ten minutes later, the love interest revealed herself to be the sorceress and the main character learned he was the son of the evil king, followed by a dramatic freak out session.
"I bet all the ghosts in the sword drag the King to hell," Tori predicted.
Kisame sighed and stood up. "You know what?" he said. "I don't really want to watch this anymore."
Tori watched him leave and then remarked to Itachi, "I thought we were having fun."
"Sometimes people don't appreciate when you criticize things they like," he answered, dragging his spoon across the bottom of his bowl.
"Hold on," Tori said, and sorted through the mess of papers and magazines on the coffee table for a piece of scratch paper. She found Kisame's legal pad, and she held it out to Itachi. "I'm going to need you to write that down and sign it, for reference the next time you start talking."
Itachi eyed the notebook, then eyed Tori, face completely blank. He licked his spoon clean without further comment.
They watched the last bit of the movie in silence, and watching all the scorned souls drag the evil king to the "shinigami's kingdom" was very cathartic if not highly predictable. When it was over, Itachi quietly wished Tori good night and gathered his dishes and left.
Tori watched the credits scroll for a few minutes, listening to Itachi cleaning up in the kitchen. She found that, despite being exhausted all day long, she was now wide awake and ready to do something. Drinking caffeine in the afternoon had been poor planning.
Eventually the credits switched to reruns of the same cooking show from before, and Tori switched off the TV. Standing up and stretching, she crossed to the bookshelf to see if she could find the next Icha Icha.
First, she found a book called The Goat Herder's Son, which was whatever Kakuzu had told her rich people liked. She skimmed the back– it was a "classic" epic about a boy from a rural village going on a quest. Huh.
Tori put it back, making a mental note to read it later, as it was apparently an important piece of culture here. For now, though, she wanted to ready a sleazy, smutty romance disguised as a ninja adventure story, and she laid back on the couch with Icha Icha Onsen.
This Icha Icha focused on the buxom kunoichi character from the first book, who was sent by her village to investigate a murder at a hot springs resort. When she arrived, the kunoichi discovered another female ninja from a rival village was also investigating.
The discovery was made, of course, in the hot spring while they were both naked. This allowed the blonde kunoichi to spend an entire page comparing her body (sunkissed and lushious with curves) to the new kunoichi, who was thin and lithe and had silky smooth black hair down to her knees and moon-pale skin.
Tori sat up slightly on the couch. Hold on, that sounds familiar–
"Tori-chaaan~!" someone called and then Tobi flopped down on her in what was some sort of combination between a hug and an elbow to the stomach. "Tobi apologizes for his tardiness!"
"Oof!" Tori choked back, and felt bile go up her throat from the hit. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) she didn't vomit into Tobi's dumb mask.
"Tori-chan," Tobi gasped, leaning over her with his face way too close to hers. "That book is for after-hours."
Tori had dropped the book onto her chest, and as she moved to sit up, pushing Tobi out of her face, it fell to the floor. ""It is after-hours," she pointed out. "What do you want?"
"Tobi is here to protect you!" Tobi cried, and then stood up and did a pose, flexing his arms at her.
"From what?" Tori asked, and bent to pick Icha Icha up off the floor. She'd lost her place, and she was on the brink of an important realization about Jiraiya's books.
"From Itachi-sempai, of course!" Tobi cried, and then leaned over to whisper conspiratorially into her ear, "He wanted to kill you, remember?"
Tori paused in the middle of flipping through Icha Icha. Yes, Obito had mentioned something about Itachi wanting her killed, only a few days ago. Itachi was supposed to be a pacifist, but he was a ninja first, and Tori knew a lot of secrets that could ruin his whole plan.
Tori had very little interest in stopping Itachi from doing whatever he wanted to do. She hadn't really given the whole ordeal much thought, given the wave of brand new ordeals that had followed immediately after.
"You left me with him all day," she said slowly. It came out accusatory, even though Tori didn't want help from Tobi. She didn't want help from anyone, really, but ninja were so stupidly overpowered it was inevitable she'd need some form of assistance to stay alive.
She just didn't want it to be stupid Obito, of all people. He'd probably laugh at her first and then intentionally screw it up.
"The hero always arrives late!" Tobi cried, and then struck another silly pose.
Tori pressed her lips together, watching him. Absolutely nothing about Tobi's body language gave away that he was anything but a sweet idiot, and she hated it.
"He seemed pretty intent on not letting me accidentally poison myself," Tori finally said, tightly. She was still bitter about the milk.
"Silly Tori-chan!" Tobi said, wagging his finger. "If Itachi-sempai wanted you dead, you wouldn't notice. He'd use a scary genjutsu to make you forget to eat, or he'd make you drown in the shower, or he'd–"
Tobi rambled, and Tori rolled her eyes and went back to skimming Icha Icha for where she'd left off. Vague death threats hardly scared her anymore. Except Tobi mention another food genjutsu and–
"Motherfucker," Tori swore and dropped Icha Icha.
"Language," Tobi gasped, scandalized, but Tori ignored him in favor of sprinting back into the kitchen.
The expired milk carton she'd thrown out was still in the trash, now covered by remnants of chopped vegetables and fish bones. She pulled the cartoon out and shook it– it was still at least half full. She opened it and gave it a good smell; it was fine.
Itachi had genjutsu'd her into thinking she drank it all and tricked her into throwing it away, that asshole–
"What are you doing?" Tobi asked as Tori pulled the new milk and a lemon out of the fridge.
She ignored him, chopping the lemon into wedges and then carefully squeezing the juice into the new milk Kisame had bought earlier. The acidity in the juice would make the milk curdle.
Fuck you, Itachi, Tori thought, and then put both the new milk and the trash-milk back in the fridge.
"Tori-chan," Tobi said, very slowly. "That milk has been in the garbage all day."
"It's fine," Tori snapped, glaring furiously at him. Tobi shrank back.
"Tori-chan is mean," he whined. "Itachi-sempai might seem nice, but doesn't Tori-chan know Itachi-sempai killed his whole family?"
Tobi said this with a sort of reverent fear in voice, like he himself hadn't been there to help. Tori took a deep, calming breath so she didn't throw herself down on the floor and scream.
Itachi had previously threatened her, sure, and he'd been low-key mean to her all day long, but it wasn't worse than Kakuzu yelling at her, or Hidan yelling at her, or anyone else losing their tempers at her. Tobi was just fucking with her because he was a troll who wanted to see what would happen if she initiated a screaming match with Itachi.
(Which– okay– he'd gotten her to sabotage Itachi's milk, but that was besides the point.)
"Itachi is not nice," Tori said through gritted teeth, "and he's not going to kill me. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to bed."
She stomped down the stairs, and Tobi called after her, "Tori-chan, you forgot your porn!"
xXx
NOTES (long today because this chapter slapped me directly in the face):
Kisame: What if you– and hear me out here– what if you stopped being Like That for ten minutes and let us make work friends?
Itachi, sipping tea: Absolutely not.
Tori: WHY is everyone JUDGING my FOOD CHOICES?
Tobi: Because Tori-chan got boiling oil everywhere!
Kisame: Because you keep eating food that tastes terrible.
Itachi: Because you eat expired food.|
Tori:
Tori:
Tori: I still think I'm right. 8C
Itachi, a neurotic bastard: I've noticed several unrealistic details in this film.
Tori, a know-it-all: I love this game! Here are all the predictable story beats.
Kisame, a guy who just wants to watch a movie: thanks guys i hate it
This chapter was meant to be centered around Tori crossing a sort of moral event horizon, but she decided to step over it way more casually than originally anticipated, LOL. Instead we get… the writer projecting her personal fantasies about life post-social distancing. Dinner-and-movie night with friends… going shopping and touching all the things… lab work…!
(Again, I promise Tori is on a slow journey to get respect for her work. I know this is frustrating to many readers LMAO.)
Also notable with this chapter, we've crossed 100k words! (I know FFN reported us crossing that threshold last chapter, but for some reason FFN exaggerates my word count by... several thousand words.) I've never written something this long before, and I wanted to thank each and every one of you for reading along on this self-indulgent story. I read every review (even if I'm terrible about replying), and I thank each of you for taking time out of your days to write them. Also, of course, thanks for the favorites and follows, and thank you to all the lurkers reading too!
The world is a rough place right now, and it makes me happy to know that people are enjoying my weird little SI. Stay safe and stay strong, friends.