Mito sat up, not looking around at her surroundings so much as the big fox in her head. Kurama's big red eyes were staring down at her with interest - and then he pulled a face.

"Aw. I had hoped you were dead."

"You liar."

Kurama admitted nothing. "That was interesting."

"Yeah," Mito agreed uncomfortably. "I've been letting myself go."

Kurama shrugged, guessing that he had been doing the same thing.

"I thought I was some kind of human lie detector. –That was foolish."

"I can sense negative intent." Mito gave Kurama a dry, disbelieving look, thoroughly offending him "I can!"

"Apparently it's not like I know if you're lying," she reminded him with a pout. "And Akatsuki Guy's 'ill will' definitely came through loud and clear in his last moments."

Kurama thought that was obvious, considering the bloodlust the former fleshling had suddenly spewed out of nowhere. "Perhaps he was addled."

"Like mentally unstable?" she tried to clarify. "I guess," she sighed as she looked over what was left of the guy. The guy's seal looked like it had melted his body but she'd been able to stop the jutsu before it destroyed any part of the shrine - aside from the hole she had been hiding in. The vortex genjutsu was still up. It seemed as strong as ever. Part of the guy's head was available and hopefully, it would be enough to do testing on because Mito had no idea of who he was.

A glint of silver caught her attention and Mito hesitantly walked over to it, gawking at what she found: a very thin sword. Shakily picking it up, she was surprised by how heavy it was. This is one of Kiri's Seven Swords if I'm not mistaken. "Mei, you have got to better secure your stuff!"

"You should seal it." Or steal it.

"Yeah. –That and everything else. Maybe giving Kiri this back will make up for me giving them that bad information."

Kurama doubted it, but maybe.

"Oh, crap. We've been out here all night! Or... How long have we been out here?!"

Once she was stable enough to flash back to Konoha, Mito had been escorted to the Hokage for a debrief. She'd almost been excited (although quite nervous) about their meeting until she saw how tense and angry her father looked.

Fuck. Mito had been so busy feeling guilty about the utter and pervy nonsense she'd told her father about herself - to hide having done the literal nasty with Chiriku - that she'd half-forgotten how much it hurt that Minato didn't trust her. "Hokage-sama," she said, kneeling to the ground and staring at the ground, fist over her heart. "Forgive my delay. I ran into an enemy."

"Did you?" Minato asked quietly.

"Troublesome."

Minato grazed Shikaku with a dry look. "Who was it?"

"I'm… not actually sure." Mito caught her father's eye and could only smile grimly - with bitterness lacing it. "You want proof."

Kurama sighed, having had enough of this Hokage-turd. His father was never so troublesome. "He does."

"I KNOW THAT!"

"Um…" Mito began pulling through her scrolls, deciding to keep the Kiri sword to give directly to Mei, and then pulled out what was left of the guy's Akatsuki robe - which was a few ragged strips of only black. "Ah-heh! Oh! My phone… Hang on." Digging through her cell like the newb she was, Mito finally found the file and tried to grin gratefully up at Shikaku who had come to take a closer look.

"Akatsuki," Shikaku breathed as he watched a man getting his ass handed to him by trees. Minato flashed to the other side of Mito as he finished the word.

"What happened?" Minato asked sharply as he looked at his daughter more closely. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine." A little poisoned; no biggie. Mito figured that if she told him, she'd probably get sent to have all kinds of testing done on her and Tsunade didn't need that kind of stress. Mito could do it herself if she needed to. "This is right outside the shrine. It uhh… goes on for a while."

Minato heard Mito's snickers and snorts on the video and sighed, giving her a playfully annoyed look that she didn't see. Mito appeared to be carefully evaluating the video.

"This guy looks like a moron," Shikaku wisely surmised.

"Can I see your phone?" Minato asked.

Mito handed it to him and scooched a bit closer to him, careful not to touch him, as he went through the images, frame by frame.

Minato enlarged one when he had a decent shot of the nin's face. "Oh, my God."

Shikaku's eyes were wide. "Holy shit: I thought he was dead!"

"Who is it?" Mito asked. She went stiff when her father draped over her, clutching onto her, and wondered exactly what this was about. She awkwardly patted his back, not really returning his desperate hug.

"What do you know about the Iwa Explosive Corp?" Shikaku asked as he sank onto the nearest couch. He put his feet up, momentarily reliving one of the nastier battles of the Third Shinobi War.

"Just the well-known stuff, I suppose," Mito admitted. "They use forbidden seals of various sorts to cause destruction using what were originally earth or lightning techniques, right?"

"Not this guy," Minato said. He sighed noisily at Shikaku, wincing as he considered it. "He was supposedly one of the last of his clan. The real clan, the Osoreta, before their followers started using forbidden jutsus to mimic their techniques. –Not that we know which one this is." If either one of them lived this long, though, there could be more of them. That was a horrible realization.

Mito waited for the two leaders to pull their heads out and tell her what was going on - and what that meant.

Minato saw that Mito was patient but getting irritated. "Identical twins: before the war, they took on the name Jugo for whatever reason but before that, this was Osoreta Sunshine."

Mito blinked at him, remembering the guy hollering about sunshine. "Sunshine."

"Sunshine and Ace," Shikaku said. "One of them gave me these scars," he said, gingerly tracing the jagged lines of his cheek as if they still hurt. Oh, he remembered the pain well. His shadows had caught the worst of one of the twins' jutsus but the other one had nearly taken out his teammates and Shikaku didn't wake up for a month. It took him another two weeks to remember who he was - something that was terrifying for Nara. Or probably anyone, I'm sure. "If Minato hadn't shown up, my team and countless others would've been dead."

Minato was thankful his friends were alive and well but right now that didn't make him feel a whole lot better. "I thought I killed them. –I'm so sorry, Mito."

"There's um, nothing to be sorry for, 'ttebane. …I can't help but think this twin is Ace, then, from the way he's wailing. Here, hang on." She fast-forwarded until around that part of the video and then tried to find it.

"Sunshine! Oh, Sunshine!"

Shikaku got back up, looking excited for once. "I see what you mean. Hopefully, all this bellyachin' means that Sunshine's dead, too. –You did kill this one, right?"

Wow. "Harsh," Mito commented.

"Shi-kaku," Minato scolded. Shikaku rolled his eyes.

"Hello, shithead. Welcome to hell!"

Hearing her idiot self on the video, Mito juggled her phone, trying to get it back from her Jonin Commander who had yanked it away (grinning like a lunatic,) tossed it to her father, and stuck her in a shadow. "Let me go! That's embarrassing!" She felt her face and neck getting hot as the two shinobis eagerly watched her shitty interrogation. Thank God if anything could be seen at this point in the video, it was either the ground or the sky since the phone had tumbled to the ground. Unfortunately, there was a full moon out that night and the nearby shrine had lights. "Oh, um. I was going to kill him but he killed himself. Sorry."

"You've been poisoned," Minato said, freaking out when he saw a telltale neon-purple gas rise on the video. It was so bright, he could see it at night. Those damn Rockheads!

Shikaku was more practical. Mito was up and looked well. "She's capable of evaluating herself, Minato." He patted Mito on the head after letting his shadows go, smirking at how irritated she looked because of it. He'd become quite fond of her - and perhaps a little protective considering what a baka Minato was always making out of himself when it came to his daughter. "This guy - if it's Ace - also had a run-in with your mother. Kushina thought she killed him, too."

Mito stopped resisting affection. "What happened?" The two men looked sheepish, she thought. "If he's still alive… No, I've got his head. –But I should've checked the area!" Nodding to herself, Mito decided to finish what she'd started. "I'll go do that." She gave Shikaku a dry look when he grabbed her with his shadow again. He was fast, she'd give him that - plus she was a little poisoned (and feeling a little lazy.) Her eyes roamed to her worried, distracted father. "Have you ever tried to teleport out of a shadow?"

Minato's expression turned to one reflecting horror. "I would not recommend it."

Shikaku began chuckling like an evil villain.

"Get an autopsy on the head, stat: first priority, and I'll assemble a team. If it's not him, we'll find him - but I'm ordering you to be evaluated," Minato said, trying to ignore how pouty his daughter looked. "You're very cute!"

"Tou-san!" Mito was so embarrassed. "Don't be creepy," she mumbled as she jumped out the window.

Turns out, the guy was either Ace or Sunshine. -Or he was an Osoreta, anyway.

Mito drank from her bowl of delicious ramen, wanting to go home and go to sleep. Anko was slurping along beside her, eagerly talking about the whole thing right in front of Teuchi and Ayame.

"Inoichi said his head was full of crappy seals," Anko said, imagining being able to do such a magnificent thing.

Mito hummed. "That's fucked up." Teuchi bonked her on the head with a ladle. "Sorry. Now you need to wash that, you know."

"I know that! –And you need to watch your language, young lady."

"Yessir," Mito agreed: anything to keep the delicious noodles coming. Teuchi bonked Anko, too, when she cursed about civilians. "Did he find out anything?"

"Not much. He said what was left of his brain was mushy." Ayame gagged, making Teuchi chuckle at her. (He was quite used to ninjas.) "He DID see that the guy allowed himself to be sealed." Anko thought more about it. "He hated Konoha! How did you know that he was an Osoreta, Mito? –I thought they were extinct."

"I'd never even heard of them," Mito admitted. A sour look worked its way up Anko's face which probably meant that Orochimaru had been coveting their abilities. "You probably know that Kekkei-Genkai holders have certain anomalies in their genetic structure," she explained, quite used to (sometimes) avoiding the whole Orochimaru thing with her best friend.

Anko nodded.

"That, along with the scarring I saw, the fact that my father and Shikaku-sama recognized him at all, and the old-timey Senju records on so many clans lent enough evidence to basically prove he is who we thought he was. –Or to at least confirm that he was an Osoreta."

Anko grimaced. "I wonder if he spawned."

"Let's hope not."

.

Kakuzu was going to kill this guy. The problem was that Pein was powerful but not well-known, meaning that his bounty would be negligible but the risks would be great. Mark his words, though, Kakuzu was definitely going to research Pein and Konan even more - and then they'd both be going down.

"So you killed another one?" Pein/Nagato asked, his lips twitching.

Kakuzu glared at him even harder. "You set me up."

"Kakuzu," Pein sighed, "we could only trust you to take him out. By taking out his brother, too, we've sent a message."

"You should've told me!" Kakuzu roared.

Konan agreed with Kakuzu but wouldn't say that in front of him when Nagato was here, watching. She had figured out a way to resolve the problem regardless. Kakuzu was all about the money. "He was cooking the books."

Kakuzu gasped. "What?!" In the Akatsuki, he only allowed himself to commit fraud when it came to money!

Pein nodded, following Konan's logic. Really, dealing with everyone in the Akatsuki - even, to some extent, the Uchihas - was like trying to manage insanely powerful small children who had gotten a taste for killing. "Not only was he keeping money for himself," he lied, "but Zetsu found intelligence that showed that the twins allowed Iwa to perform exploratory procedures to take vengeance on their enemies and us." The thing about Iwa was the absolute truth.

That pissed Kakuzu off. "Onoki's been one of our biggest backers." From behind the scenes, of course. He frowned at Zetsu who had finally revealed his face in the wall. "What did you find?"

White Zetsu thought he smiled charmingly. "Oh, you know; a little of this, a little of that. Ace and Sunshine signed up for everything Iwa had to offer. –Drugs, surgeries, sealing psyches…"

"That was stupid," Kakuzu said, unsurprised. Iwa sucked at everything related to sealing, especially.

Zetsu nodded. "They even gave up clan secrets and their genetic material for Iwa's greater good!"

"And you're sure Onoki knew?"

Zetsu grinned and nodded, always wanting to start up trouble. Onoki was powerful; he needed to go. Plus it really was true - he guessed, anyway. Onoki, the Tsuchikage had been acting against them for a while: the idiot! "Definitely!"

Kakuzu glared at the weirdo - and then at the other weirdos. "That doesn't explain why you didn't tell me."

Pein sighed. "And you still haven't told me who took him out if you don't have a bounty."

"I'll have your bounty by morning," he said and stalked off. It wasn't professional that he had arrived before picking up their target's bounty but he'd been so pissed off at Pein, he came anyway. And now he was going to have to track that damn Ace and figure out where the hell he'd disappeared to.

.

After Kakuzu and Zetsu left (IF Zetsu really left,) Konan turned to her best friend and sighed. "Nagato. Why did you prank him?"

Nagato, through his avatar, had the hint of a sheepish grin. He may not seem like that kind of guy on the surface, but sometimes he just had to do it. "All work and no fun makes Pein a very dull boy."

Konan grimaced. That was gross! "Please never say that again."

.

Once they were sealed in his home office, Shikaku sighed and laced his fingers together. Mito took her normal seat in front of his desk, having brought in more of his wife's delicious cookies. "Daimyo-sama has refused to exhume the mass graves at the capital."

It wasn't surprising. "What a drag," Mito moaned.

"That's what I said."

"Have you gotten through the spreadsheets?"

"I did," Shikaku replied, revealing little else for now. "How do you think Mei-sama will react when you go back to Kiri?"

"Go back to Kiri?" Mito parroted in her mind. "I guess she or her entourage are pissed enough not to come to Konoha as was scheduled?" Shikaku shrugged rather helplessly and bobbed his head. Mito pulled out a scroll and then tapped it against the palm of her hand, wondering if she should show him. "I guess it depends on what your data says. –And… Well, it's a good thing I'll go back there bearing gifts."

Shikaku was already eying the scroll but now he was really curious. "What is it?"

"Akatsuki Ace had one of the Seven Swords, Nuibari, on him." Mito pushed chakra into the storage scroll and out popped the longsword.

"No way," he breathed. "How the hell did he…" Shikaku stopped himself. This was really troublesome. "Why didn't you turn this in when you got to the village, Mito?"

"I'm Kiri Ambassador." I thought it might help!

"This isn't gonna…" Nope, Shikaku was not going to say it.

"Make my father trust me any more or better?" Mito chuckled. "He's not going to, Shikaku. I know he's having me followed and while most might think it's because he's overprotective…" Mito sighed heavily. "Never mind. It doesn't matter. WHY he made me an ambassador when he doesn't fully trust me, though, is really worrisome."

Really, when she thought about it in her darker moments, Mito wondered if her father was setting her up - which was awful! "I love my father. I love my family. …I love my village," she added after a few seconds both because she felt she should and because she did. "But I don't love being treated like a child when I've repeatedly layed my life on the line for this village." For my father to survive; for him and Naruto to thrive.

To give up ever having a family of my own... "Ah," Mito let out in surprise, harshly wiping her suddenly teary eyes. "Sorry."

.

"Having daughters is hard," Shikaku eventually said, beginning to softly tell her exactly what Minato had said to him.

"Why? –Or if having daughters or children was so hard, then why did he bother?" I'd say that he should've used a fucking condom but no way: I thank God for Naruto.

Shikaku winced.

"But back to topic," Mito tried to beam - although she knew her smile was watery, "what's the real data on the spreadsheets anyway?"

"A clue," Shikaku drawled. Mito groaned. "Troublesome. Alright, more than a clue since we've got proper invoices, warehouses, and shipping routes now. And regarding the missing folks: those that more recently went missing were probably smuggled to North America."

Mito was horrified but... "I'm not surprised, I guess." North America was a long way away, though. Not by summons, it's not, Mito. "Well, lay it on me, boss. What's the plan?"