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Naruto fic (KakaSaku Reversebang): By Land or Sea
By Land or Sea, (1/?)
Fandom: Naruto
Characters: Sakura, Ino, Shikamaru, and (eventually) a lot of Kakashi.
Pairings: Kakashi/Sakura, Shikamaru/Temari (FOR LIFE)
Fic based on: By Land or Sea, a fanmix by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oroburos69, which not only had some wonderfully evocative cover art but also a great list of songs. I am very glad to have claimed it. :)
Lengthy note: I have a lot of worries about this pairing -- including the age difference but most importantly the teacher-student set up -- but the KakaSaku comm is full of super nice people who seem to organize more challenges than a church organizes picnics, including monthly art challenges. With the built in interest in female characters (and Kakashi!), I couldn't not sign up for that. I hope I don't step on anyone's toes, either those on my flist who share my issues or those who love the pairing and are watching me impose my own restrictions onto something they love (e.g. Of legal age, god damn it! No longer in a teacher-student relationship! Tens of thousands of words of development!). Anyway, please enjoy. :)
Summary: Something that doesn't have anything to do with Kakashi suddenly turns out to have a lot to do with Kakashi.
Ino dropped onto the stool smelling of leaves and dirt and a touch of something sweet. Sakura’s chest tightened; it was the smell of plant-based poison. Had that been in the mission briefing? It made her uneasy, more proof she was growing unaccustomed to fieldwork.
Ino had wrapped her cornsilk hair around her head in a tight braid and put on a high-necked jerkin that turned her chest into an armored battlement. She looked about about as ready to eat the unwary as Ino usually did, but this woman wouldn’t stop to make sure her victim enjoyed the experience. She eyed Sakura up and down and with her usual solid grasp of undercover work, came out with, “What are you supposed to be?”
Sakura spilled exactly the appropriate amount of tea to express surprise while her left hand made the field sign for idiot. The sign was usually reserved for identifying likely targets, as in this one’s an idiot, show your tits and ask for the keys. Ino didn’t bat an eye.
“I’m sorry?” Sakura said, tugging her painter’s kit a little more snuggly against her side.
Shikamaru appeared at Ino’s shoulder, dressed in dark, well-worn leather armor from knuckle to toe, and Sakura didn’t have to fake the stare. It wasn’t a good look for his sharp features, and the amoral hired killer vibe made his narrow eyes seem empty instead of disinterested.
“You’re the artist?” he said. “We need a poster done. Come with us.”
He walked past her into the back of the tea house, putting a hand mechanically on Ino’s knee in passing like he was checking it off a mental list.
“Mm,” Ino purred much more convincingly. She slammed back Sakura’s tea like cheap liquor and dragged Sakura after Shikarmaru by the elbow. Sakura barely remembered to squeak instead of rolling her eyes.
To think, she’d come on this mission to finally work with some professionals.
**
They found a small private booth behind a sliding paper screen. A window opened a few inches let in the sounds and smells of the street, busy cartwheels and the conversations of those procuring their supper from the steaming pots of the streetside booths.
With the door shut, a whole conversation of faces began – Sakura twitched an eyelid at Ino’s outrageous costume; Ino looked up and down Sakura’s ink-stained yukata with pursed lips, not impressed herself. Sakura wiggled her knee and looked at Ino with watery, smitten eyes – bandits in love? What a cliché! Ino shot back with a jibe on Sakura’s punctuality marked by a jerk of her jaw towards the long leaf shadows cast against the outer screens.
“You’re a painter?” Shikamaru cut in a little desperately.
“Yes,” Sakura said with a touch of nervousness. “Are you – ninja?”
“Does it matter?” he said at the same time Ino said slyly, “Not anymore.”
“Tsk!” Shikamaru pulled two rolls of paper from a pouch at his waist. They were wanted posters, identical except that one had blank space where the picture of the culprits ought to be. “Reproduce this one, but with our faces. They should look the same to someone who hasn’t looked closely. We’ll pick it up tomorrow evening.”
“A day!” Sakura said. “That’s – ”
Shikamaru dropped a small bag on the floor with a promising clink.
“ – I accept.”
Ino rolled her eyes. Her hands moved into field signs. Sakura made herself keep talking – details of the job, the pick up point and time – as Ino’s hands told her: “River”, “North”, “Cobbler”, “Sign of the Ox”. It was harder to do both at once than she remembered.
Sakura bowed deeply and slipped the coins inside her yukata. Signaled by Shikamaru’s sigh, they parted ways.
**
She found them easily with Ino’s clues – in a room hidden by perhaps thicker-than-natural shadows above a closed cobbler’s workshop on an unfashionable tributary of the main canal. Shikamaru left them to check the perimeter – standard practice after a new arrival. Ino had her hair down, running her fingers over her sore scalp after a day of the heavy hair style. Sakura basked in one of those rare moments where she regretted not one bit that she’d stopped trying to match Ino’s hair inch for inch.
Sakura had chosen to lie on her back below the window when it had just been Ino with her. The position was more graceless than Sakura felt comfortable with in company, but she had been too far gone in relaxation to change it when Shikamaru came back from his perimeter search. Even so, she felt her shoulders hunch a little when he saw her, but it was Shikamaru – he didn’t care. After a little while, she forgot to be self-conscious.
“Did they bite?” she said, enjoying the cool night time breeze.
“The tea house waitress was attentive enough,” Shikamaru said. “It will take a few days, but the minister should realize we’re trying to switch out his new contacts before we’re done negotiating price. And if Ino played her cards right, they’ll attribute it to Moudoku Yuujin.”
“She’s missing nin from Mist?”
“Grass,” Shikamaru said.
Ino had finished reassembling her hair into a tumble of loops at the back of her neck, and she scooted forward on her stomach, rolling the empty wanted poster open next to Sakura’s head. She tugged the painter’s kit towards her, stowing a charcoal pencil between her teeth.
Sakura turned her head to watch. “Why weren’t you the painter?” Because of course, Sakura’s hands could chart the exact path of a human neurological network but when she drew the face that went with it, their own mothers didn’t recognize them.
“Can’t let you engage directly with the enemy while undercover,” Ino said only a little smugly. “Don’t worry, Sakura-chan, one day you’ll be an active-duty ninja like me.”
Sakura turned her head away towards the willow tree out the window rather than reply to this. It was true her apprenticeship to Tsunade was taking longer than she’d thought. So long that all of her friends were out of training – real, adult, active-duty ninja with ranks and missions whose outcomes depended on them, not on a babysitting officer tasked with keeping them out of trouble – and income! Last month, Ino had bought a set of hairpin assassin’s knives the likes of which Sakura had never dreamed of in the academy, all because she thought it would be useful “going forward” in her “career”.
And yet, when Sakura tallied up the dates, her apprenticeship wasn’t taking any longer than she’d been told it might take at the beginning. It was more that when Tsunade had said six years, Sakura hadn’t really known what six years meant. Twice in the last six months, Sakura’s parents had checked into her accounts and kindly let her know that they were making a contribution so that Sakura could focus on her studies. They were still very proud, they said, and they had faith that she would do great things on the other side.
Sakura wallowed a little in directionless misery while Ino sketched herself and Shikamaru, shaving more than a few pounds off of her own likeness in the process -- don’t think Sakura didn’t notice. It was hard to miss that Shikamaru’s portrait was looking directly at portrait Ino’s chest.
On the other side of the room, real-life Shikamaru had such a long-suffering expression as he assembled field rations that he had to already know what to expect from Ino’s little artistic touches. Did that knowledge come from genius or from long exposure to Yamanaka Ino? Difficult to tell.
“Which of these can I use, Sakura-chan?” Ino asked, her hand on the little vials of pigment securely strapped into the open flap of the carrying case.
“Any but the last three browns,” Sakura said absently. Her view was fixed on the shifting tree branches outside without really seeing them. Two more years, she was thinking. Two more years.
“Three!” Ino started. “By the first, how much do you need?”
“I like to be prepared,” Sakura said.
“You’re pathological, you mean.”
“Don’t use words you don’t understand,” Sakura said sweetly.
Shikamaru came over with two camp bowls. The floor creaked softly underneath his feet. It had taken Sakura a while to understand that most ninjas believed that a well-chosen safe house and appropriate perimeter checks constituted more than enough precautions to allow shinobi to lower their guard in the safe-house, even in the middle of a mission. And that was perfectly all right. She could not expect everyone to match Hatake Kakashi’s attention to detail.
Sakura sat up, stomach grumbling, and held out her hands. Without even a twitch in his expression, Shikamaru handed one to Ino before sitting cross-legged and digging into the second himself.
“Hey!” Sakura said, opening and closing her fingers several times.
“I’m team leader, not team cook,” Shikamaru said without looking up. “I didn’t see you doing anything that meant you couldn’t make your own.”
Ino chewed with a distinctly smug expression. Sakura gritted her teeth around a scream. She dragged the art kit and poster towards herself. That Shikamaru had been a little bit right about her lying under the window while he worked wasn’t enough to unclench her jaw, and that he’d planned to have it come out just so - ! There wasn’t any part of her that was going to uncoil until she’d hit back just as hard.
Sakura pulled out one of the vials she had forbidden Ino to use. With the water from her canteen, she mixed the dried pigment into a deep red brown wash and sat back to let it breathe. The longer the suspension sat in the lid of her camp mug, the more the red seemed to overtake the brown. Ino paused in her meal as the faintest breath of foreign chakra brushed her senses. If Ino hadn’t come from a long line of sensory-type ninjas, she would have missed it.
“I guess it works,” Ino said grudgingly, but she was watching the ink with interest.
“Yes,” Sakura said. The pigment in the vial was the carefully preserved blood of a shinobi. The same stuff used routinely and reliably in chakra contracts, seals, and scrolls. Valuable, rare, and fiercely protected.
With careful strokes, Sakura painted the characters of a poison tag into the brown shadows of Ino’s poster. In a way, the whole path of this mission had been charted by the a small miscalculation fifteen years ago that had put a shinobi named Moudoku Yuujin in the T&I facilities of Konohagakure for the six short days it took for her ransom to be paid and a trade to be agreed upon. She was one of the few missing nin currently alive for which Konoha had chakra-viable blood samples.
After Shikamaru and Ino’s indiscrete meetings with the province’s minister of trade -- posing as missing nin posing as highwaymen -- this poster was likely to become part of the sealed report to the governor, armed with a chakra tag primed to go off at his touch . If the governor’s physician proved less competent than their research suggested, Sakura would find herself a de facto assassin. With luck, he would live, and the presence of Moudoku Yuujin’s distinctive poison seal in the assassination attempt would convince the daimyo of the Land of Rivers that missing nin were a problem worth official attention. And one that its neighbors, Sand and Fire, would no longer have to take into their own hands at great risk to their operatives.
By the end of the seal, Ino and even Shikamaru were leaning over the bowls propped on their knees to watch as Sakura’s marks slowly faded into the background ink. Ino raised her eyebrows, impressed, and Shikamaru’s eyes had that sharpness that sometimes penetrated his usual laziness.
Finished, Sakura met his eyes and stuck out her jaw. Ino blinked, but Shikamaru was no fool to the intentions of others. He was also, despite his attempts to suppress it, a good and fair team leader. With a sigh he headed back to the field rations.
Yes, he was saying; for this, he would make her dinner as he had Ino’s.
Sakura grinned and hugged her knees. Now that her moment of confrontation had ended, she was shy about the warmth and pride she felt. Ino forgot that their dynamic was about bickering and reached out to ruffle Sakura’s hair affectionately.
For the moment, everybody was smiling. It looked like the mission, intricate as the plan was, had a chance to work out just as it had been laid out.
**
Ino and Sakura waited on the roof together the next day. There was nothing to do but let the pieces settle into place. The mission was considered low risk for encountering enemy nin – even Moudoku Yuujin, who was supposed to be half a country away while all this was happening.
The weather had turned to a dismal, anemic drizzle, but Sakura had a deep, secret love of theater, and there was something beautiful and melancholy about the gray sky cloaking the distance, surrounded by the patter of rain on the trees. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest under one of Konoha’s reliable, standard issue ponchos. Raindrops made little spots of cold along her arms and on the tops of her knees through the fabric.
Ino had her hair up again in her Moudoku-pretending-to-be-a-cheap-mercenary costume and a lacquered paper parasol over one shoulder. She reached into the fortification the tight-laced jerkin had made of her chest, pulling out a small, hand-bound book. It took Sakura a moment to realize what it was because the cover was not in Konoha’s style. It was the bingo book of another hidden village.
Sakura stared at it. “Where did you get that?”
“Oh, it was a gift from my father,” Ino said, as only a girl whose father was the head of Konoha’s intelligence division could. She handed the book to Sakura, eyes gleaming and lips tightly sealed.
Sakura flipped through it suspiciously, running her finger over stone icon of Iwagakure embossed on the cover. The pages felt papery and frail, but they were thin, stiff silk, the same strong stuff that made up festival kites. Durable and waterproof. Hidden villages were protective of their bingo books, but not quite to the point of designing them to disintegrate in bad weather.
She didn’t make it to whatever had excited Ino, because she turned a page and found Hatake Kakashi staring back at her from the sketch’s single, ink-black eye.
A little buzz of adrenaline woke her up out of the reflective daze she’d fallen into. She scooched her knees a little closer, pulled the book a little closer to her face, and the rest of the world dropped out of her head. He had to have one in everybody’s book, she supposed, but she’d never seen it in person before. Like a delicious glimpse behind the scenes of an opera production -- what would it say?
Half of the page had been taken up by an annotated sketch; priority one: recognize your enemy. On the right, a numbered table gave quick ratings in categories like strategy, chakra strength, ninjutsu, genjutsu, etc.
Here, Sakura felt her mouth opening in offended protest – Kakashi’s score wasn’t even in the top half of the other scores in the book! True, she didn’t know many people who had any bingo book entries at all, not in these small, highest priority books that fit in the pocket and only had room for the most lethal statistics, but this was Sharingan no Kakashi. The Copy Ninja!
But there – a chilly note at the bottom of the page took him apart in barely a sentence and a half: Skilled use of transplanted sharingan, but lacks necessary chakra stores for mastery. Not kage-level. That he had scored highly in intelligence and strategy mollified her not at all.
“Those rats,” Sakura said, even before she realized she was speaking out loud. A rain drop darkened the page next to her thumb. “Not kage-level! Kakashi would lead them in circles until they stabbed each other in the back on his behalf.”
“Sakura,” Ino said, exasperated. “You’re not even looking at the right page.”
Sakura barely heard her. She knew that there were people out there to whom no one could really compare, people like Orochimaru, Nagato, Itachi – not to mention the five Kages, and maybe they deserved the place they’d earned, but was this really how the ninja world saw her old sensei? Effective but not remarkable? Maybe that was all anyone could really aim for in life.
Civilians in a hidden village tended to treat the ninja they lived alongside as something of a high-stakes local sports team. Sakura’s family were civilians. When you lived in a secret military installation among men and women taught from childhood to kill with sorcery – the feeling was you might as well get into it or go mad. Everybody kept up on statistics, everybody used splashy public missions for small talk, and everybody had their favorite shinobi. More than a few people had become very invested in the Gai-Kakashi rivalry over the years, though they generally glossed over the undignified bits (which were most of them).
Sakura had tried to look down on that sort of thing after graduating, trying to erase the bright and flashing “Civilian!” sign posted on her forehead.
But despite all her efforts, she hadn’t been able to help how she was raised, and in the evenings and weekends back home, Kakashi’s flag had been a great one to raise with her family. No one could deny he was a winner and not one of her siblings or cousins or neighbors could pretend to have a greater claim to him than her, Haruno Sakura, real life protégé of the Copy Ninja. Kakashi had done her a lot of good over the years navigating the rocky waters of a large, very competitive family in a small town without ever knowing he’d done it.
With all that practice behind her, she couldn’t help taking this little book personally; she felt thirteen years old again, arguing at the snow festival on behalf of mystery and masks with Auntie Etsuyo, who had an unfounded fondness for jounin with beards and smoking habits.
Looking back at the page, she found that one of the book’s previous owners had added a hand written addendum. It had been written in bold, emphatic strokes, as though the message was too important to worry about anything but getting it down. Do not engage without the intent to kill, it said. He will not be beaten twice.
It had a grim ring of terror to it, as though the author had made the mistake and knew he would soon pay for it. She had an out-of-body experience then, watching herself – a Konoha nin sitting in the rain reading Iwa’s book. Had that very mistake brought the book to Konoha? Her spirit settled a little, satisfied.
Ino let out a huff and snatched the book back, turning to the proper page herself. Sakura couldn’t hold back her surprise when she found herself looking at Nara Shikamaru’s very first bingo book entry.
“Wow,” Sakura said honestly. She managed not to say that they’d gotten his beady eyes just right. “When did this happen?”
“Dad just got it, but it’s six months old at least.” Ino smiled. “I knew you’d be excited about it like you should be. Nobody else is – well, nobody over the age of thirty. Come on, people, bingo book! Right?”
“Why aren’t they happy?” Sakura asked.
Ino sighed. “Because he got in before Naruto or Neji. There’s only one good answer to that– ANBU. Nobody likes what that says about our security. Look, I was just showing you so somebody would be happy about it, ok? Stop looking at me like that. Nobody’s given me the clearance for anything, so I can claim I’m probably wrong, and anyway, I’m not speculating to anyone but you – you’re practically Shika-Ino-Cho.”
Ino dropped this last bombshell so casually, Sakura didn’t have time to start gaping again before Ino was plowing on with only a slight tightening of her lips to indicate she knew she’d come dangerously close to pouring her heart out there: “Did you know they reassigned Chouji last minute for this mission? Now it’s Neji playing back up in an undisclosed location not to be within 20 miles of us. That’s the kind of distance you put in to avoid S-Class sensing!”
Sakura’s stomach dropped, feeling suddenly exposed on the rooftop. “Moudoku Yuujin – they think she’ll come back.”
“Moudoku Smoudoku. We’re a cover story,” Ino said impatiently. She waved a hand vaguely encircling all the rooftops they could see. “Somewhere in this crappy town is an ANBU mission, and I hate, I just hate when Shikamaru’s new club uses me like a freebie sidekick.”
“What? No!” Sakura said.
“It’s always the last minute reassignments that clue you in. First Chouji –” Ino narrowed her eyes suddenly. “ – then you.”
For a beat, Sakura didn't understand. Then she almost laughed, but if she laughed, she would have had to come explain. There was a reason she’d had to sign on to the mission when they were all but out the door, and it was about as far from Konoha’s elite secret force as you could get. “Ino! If I were a secret ANBU medic, someone would have told me. Trust me.”
Ino shrugged dismissively. “Well, you are about the worst secret-keeper ever.”
Sakura clenched her teeth. She didn’t know what Ino wanted her to say. ANBU were secretive, but they served the village. It was a shinobi’s duty to support them, explicit instructions or no. Their misstep – if any of this speculation were true – seemed to be in trying to lay a claim in Ino’s territory without her permission. And too, Ino came from a long, proud shinobi heritage. To her, ANBU did not have one ounce more ninja mystique than she herself did.
“Do you think he can handle it?” Sakura said finally.
“Of course, he can handle it,” Ino snapped. “He’s going to be Hokage one day.”
Sakura opened her mouth and just – stopped. She’d overheard a lot of speculation on Hokage successors over the last few years, but Ino was the first to put Nara Shikamaru on the table. Ino caught her expression and flushed red all the way to her scalp under her pale hair.
“Or head of ANBU! Or head cloud-watcher of strawberry hill, I don’t know,” Ino said. “Look, just tell me you’re impressed by the bingo book, okay?”
“It’s great. Really good.” Sakura still had the book in her hands, and she couldn’t help flipping back to compare. Thank god, Shikamaru had scored worse than Kakashi. She wouldn’t have been able to bear it otherwise.
**
Sakura’s painter persona insisted on a public place for the transaction. The sun was out, and Sakura stood shaded by Ino’s parasol in front of the inn, waiting for Ino-as-Moudoku to finish inspecting her own work. Witnesses were the name of the game – as many as possible. Sakura had already circled through the market, talking shop with some of the artisans and buying sweets.
Ino’s frustration from the rooftop seemed to still be fueling her. Standing next to an empty stall, she gave off a low but constant trickle of killing intent, and the ground next to her feet sizzled softly – an impressive trick requiring more than a little prep work for someone who was not a natural poison specialist. People avoided them almost without knowing why, but they watched – and remembered.
Sakura was eating her second stick of dango when she noticed the old man watching them.
He had a broad face, well-lined and sunburnt with a bridge of faded freckles across the nose. Wispy gray hair had been tucked under a cook’s cap. He was ostensibly tending a cart stacked high with steamer baskets, but he ignored any customers who stopped to look. He watched first with one eye open, then the other. It might have looked harmless and eccentric if he hadn’t been twirling a chopstick around his fingers from pinky to thumb and back again too deftly for an old man.
He had to be a shinobi, but Sakura didn’t recognize him from Moudoku Yuujin’s known associates.
All of this, Sakura took in with a slow glance around the marketplace, wearing a bored expression like she was beginning to get tired of Ino’s exacting inspection. She let out a sigh. Shikamaru’s eyes flicked to hers, curious, and Sakura carefully dropped her dango stick.
It rolled past Shikamaru’s feet, picking up dirt with its sticky sweet coating.
Who was the the old man? She wished she could dismiss him based on his abysmal blending skills, but a lot of ninja were bad at undercover. They didn’t like posing as untrained civilians. Pride was supposed to be a flaw reserved for samurai, but in Sakura’s experience, ninja were as snobby as any other highly trained professional.
Sakura on the other hand had been trained by the perfect shinobi – one with no dignity at all. Even as her stomach tightened and her heart skipped, she felt confident the old ninja behind the cart didn’t have any reason to suspect that she was more than a young painter coming into some disreputable cash.
That is, until Shikamaru turned– as she’d meant him to – following the dango as it rolled into the street and saw the old ninja behind the dumpling cart. He froze, eye contact made and held. Hardly noticeable to passerby, it rang through Sakura like a bell.
At his waist, hidden from the other ninja by his torso, Shikamaru made the hand sign for full, orderly retreat.
Ino was already gone, road dust swirling where she had been a moment before. Sakura had no idea if she was meant to break character. The only thing she knew was that she had to pick one or the other. In the end, that wasn’t hard – she hadn’t been outside the city on a paid mission in nearly a year. Success here was leverage. Leverage to make her a real ninja again.
Snatching the discarded poster as it drifted to the ground, she shouted indignantly, “What! Where the hell are you going?”– she and her cover persona were in perfect alignment here – and took off down the alley toward the river as though she were trying to catch her delinquent business partners.
She ran for the arching stone bridge where the alley crossed the river, just catching a glimpse of a strong current running under the bridge, opaque with mud and silt before she felt a presence touch down behind her. Killing intent washed over her, more bored than deadly and raising goose-pimples in it’s wake, as though she were as much an afterthought as a bug under a shoe. She clamped down on her own killing intent in response – cover persona! Cover persona! – and several things happened in quick succession.
She swung the poster at his head, using Shinobi Technique #135: Sheer Audacity. He grunted and ducked. Sakura twisted her wrist and tightened her fingers, grinding at the seal she’d painted in the shadows of the poster. Disrupted, the seal bypassed its intended trigger – the presence of the provincial governor – and activated in a soft pfft of poison dust, rising into the shinobi’s face. Surprise slackened his face, and he had no choice but to body-flicker back to the mouth of the alley to quickly assess its effects. If he were competent and experienced in poisons, this self-assessment would take no more than a handful of seconds.
She used those seconds to cover the remaining steps to the sea wall, screaming and clawing at her face the whole time until her toe found the lip and she tipped over. As soon as she fell out of sight, her hands came together to create a bunshin. The bunshin went in the water with strict instructions to sink and dissipate. At the same time, she focused the barest gloss of chakra on her feet to run straight up the wall and along the underside of the bridge.
By the time she came out the other side, heart buzzing like a hummingbird’s , she had henged into Ino’s Moudoku persona, moving at shinobi-level speeds. There was no reason Moudoku Yuujin wouldn’t be throwing around a few clones to cover her escape, and the bridge had covered the swap.
Who was that? Shikamaru had known him immediately, and more importantly, had deliberately broadcast his recognition. Were they really knee deep in ANBU after all?
All Sakura knew for sure was that if there were ANBU here, mission success wouldn’t matter, Tsunade would kill her the moment her foot touched Konoha soil.
Fandom: Naruto
Characters: Sakura, Ino, Shikamaru, and (eventually) a lot of Kakashi.
Pairings: Kakashi/Sakura, Shikamaru/Temari (FOR LIFE)
Fic based on: By Land or Sea, a fanmix by
oroburos69, which not only had some wonderfully evocative cover art but also a great list of songs. I am very glad to have claimed it. :)Lengthy note: I have a lot of worries about this pairing -- including the age difference but most importantly the teacher-student set up -- but the KakaSaku comm is full of super nice people who seem to organize more challenges than a church organizes picnics, including monthly art challenges. With the built in interest in female characters (and Kakashi!), I couldn't not sign up for that. I hope I don't step on anyone's toes, either those on my flist who share my issues or those who love the pairing and are watching me impose my own restrictions onto something they love (e.g. Of legal age, god damn it! No longer in a teacher-student relationship! Tens of thousands of words of development!). Anyway, please enjoy. :)
Summary: Something that doesn't have anything to do with Kakashi suddenly turns out to have a lot to do with Kakashi.
Ino dropped onto the stool smelling of leaves and dirt and a touch of something sweet. Sakura’s chest tightened; it was the smell of plant-based poison. Had that been in the mission briefing? It made her uneasy, more proof she was growing unaccustomed to fieldwork.
Ino had wrapped her cornsilk hair around her head in a tight braid and put on a high-necked jerkin that turned her chest into an armored battlement. She looked about about as ready to eat the unwary as Ino usually did, but this woman wouldn’t stop to make sure her victim enjoyed the experience. She eyed Sakura up and down and with her usual solid grasp of undercover work, came out with, “What are you supposed to be?”
Sakura spilled exactly the appropriate amount of tea to express surprise while her left hand made the field sign for idiot. The sign was usually reserved for identifying likely targets, as in this one’s an idiot, show your tits and ask for the keys. Ino didn’t bat an eye.
“I’m sorry?” Sakura said, tugging her painter’s kit a little more snuggly against her side.
Shikamaru appeared at Ino’s shoulder, dressed in dark, well-worn leather armor from knuckle to toe, and Sakura didn’t have to fake the stare. It wasn’t a good look for his sharp features, and the amoral hired killer vibe made his narrow eyes seem empty instead of disinterested.
“You’re the artist?” he said. “We need a poster done. Come with us.”
He walked past her into the back of the tea house, putting a hand mechanically on Ino’s knee in passing like he was checking it off a mental list.
“Mm,” Ino purred much more convincingly. She slammed back Sakura’s tea like cheap liquor and dragged Sakura after Shikarmaru by the elbow. Sakura barely remembered to squeak instead of rolling her eyes.
To think, she’d come on this mission to finally work with some professionals.
**
They found a small private booth behind a sliding paper screen. A window opened a few inches let in the sounds and smells of the street, busy cartwheels and the conversations of those procuring their supper from the steaming pots of the streetside booths.
With the door shut, a whole conversation of faces began – Sakura twitched an eyelid at Ino’s outrageous costume; Ino looked up and down Sakura’s ink-stained yukata with pursed lips, not impressed herself. Sakura wiggled her knee and looked at Ino with watery, smitten eyes – bandits in love? What a cliché! Ino shot back with a jibe on Sakura’s punctuality marked by a jerk of her jaw towards the long leaf shadows cast against the outer screens.
“You’re a painter?” Shikamaru cut in a little desperately.
“Yes,” Sakura said with a touch of nervousness. “Are you – ninja?”
“Does it matter?” he said at the same time Ino said slyly, “Not anymore.”
“Tsk!” Shikamaru pulled two rolls of paper from a pouch at his waist. They were wanted posters, identical except that one had blank space where the picture of the culprits ought to be. “Reproduce this one, but with our faces. They should look the same to someone who hasn’t looked closely. We’ll pick it up tomorrow evening.”
“A day!” Sakura said. “That’s – ”
Shikamaru dropped a small bag on the floor with a promising clink.
“ – I accept.”
Ino rolled her eyes. Her hands moved into field signs. Sakura made herself keep talking – details of the job, the pick up point and time – as Ino’s hands told her: “River”, “North”, “Cobbler”, “Sign of the Ox”. It was harder to do both at once than she remembered.
Sakura bowed deeply and slipped the coins inside her yukata. Signaled by Shikamaru’s sigh, they parted ways.
**
She found them easily with Ino’s clues – in a room hidden by perhaps thicker-than-natural shadows above a closed cobbler’s workshop on an unfashionable tributary of the main canal. Shikamaru left them to check the perimeter – standard practice after a new arrival. Ino had her hair down, running her fingers over her sore scalp after a day of the heavy hair style. Sakura basked in one of those rare moments where she regretted not one bit that she’d stopped trying to match Ino’s hair inch for inch.
Sakura had chosen to lie on her back below the window when it had just been Ino with her. The position was more graceless than Sakura felt comfortable with in company, but she had been too far gone in relaxation to change it when Shikamaru came back from his perimeter search. Even so, she felt her shoulders hunch a little when he saw her, but it was Shikamaru – he didn’t care. After a little while, she forgot to be self-conscious.
“Did they bite?” she said, enjoying the cool night time breeze.
“The tea house waitress was attentive enough,” Shikamaru said. “It will take a few days, but the minister should realize we’re trying to switch out his new contacts before we’re done negotiating price. And if Ino played her cards right, they’ll attribute it to Moudoku Yuujin.”
“She’s missing nin from Mist?”
“Grass,” Shikamaru said.
Ino had finished reassembling her hair into a tumble of loops at the back of her neck, and she scooted forward on her stomach, rolling the empty wanted poster open next to Sakura’s head. She tugged the painter’s kit towards her, stowing a charcoal pencil between her teeth.
Sakura turned her head to watch. “Why weren’t you the painter?” Because of course, Sakura’s hands could chart the exact path of a human neurological network but when she drew the face that went with it, their own mothers didn’t recognize them.
“Can’t let you engage directly with the enemy while undercover,” Ino said only a little smugly. “Don’t worry, Sakura-chan, one day you’ll be an active-duty ninja like me.”
Sakura turned her head away towards the willow tree out the window rather than reply to this. It was true her apprenticeship to Tsunade was taking longer than she’d thought. So long that all of her friends were out of training – real, adult, active-duty ninja with ranks and missions whose outcomes depended on them, not on a babysitting officer tasked with keeping them out of trouble – and income! Last month, Ino had bought a set of hairpin assassin’s knives the likes of which Sakura had never dreamed of in the academy, all because she thought it would be useful “going forward” in her “career”.
And yet, when Sakura tallied up the dates, her apprenticeship wasn’t taking any longer than she’d been told it might take at the beginning. It was more that when Tsunade had said six years, Sakura hadn’t really known what six years meant. Twice in the last six months, Sakura’s parents had checked into her accounts and kindly let her know that they were making a contribution so that Sakura could focus on her studies. They were still very proud, they said, and they had faith that she would do great things on the other side.
Sakura wallowed a little in directionless misery while Ino sketched herself and Shikamaru, shaving more than a few pounds off of her own likeness in the process -- don’t think Sakura didn’t notice. It was hard to miss that Shikamaru’s portrait was looking directly at portrait Ino’s chest.
On the other side of the room, real-life Shikamaru had such a long-suffering expression as he assembled field rations that he had to already know what to expect from Ino’s little artistic touches. Did that knowledge come from genius or from long exposure to Yamanaka Ino? Difficult to tell.
“Which of these can I use, Sakura-chan?” Ino asked, her hand on the little vials of pigment securely strapped into the open flap of the carrying case.
“Any but the last three browns,” Sakura said absently. Her view was fixed on the shifting tree branches outside without really seeing them. Two more years, she was thinking. Two more years.
“Three!” Ino started. “By the first, how much do you need?”
“I like to be prepared,” Sakura said.
“You’re pathological, you mean.”
“Don’t use words you don’t understand,” Sakura said sweetly.
Shikamaru came over with two camp bowls. The floor creaked softly underneath his feet. It had taken Sakura a while to understand that most ninjas believed that a well-chosen safe house and appropriate perimeter checks constituted more than enough precautions to allow shinobi to lower their guard in the safe-house, even in the middle of a mission. And that was perfectly all right. She could not expect everyone to match Hatake Kakashi’s attention to detail.
Sakura sat up, stomach grumbling, and held out her hands. Without even a twitch in his expression, Shikamaru handed one to Ino before sitting cross-legged and digging into the second himself.
“Hey!” Sakura said, opening and closing her fingers several times.
“I’m team leader, not team cook,” Shikamaru said without looking up. “I didn’t see you doing anything that meant you couldn’t make your own.”
Ino chewed with a distinctly smug expression. Sakura gritted her teeth around a scream. She dragged the art kit and poster towards herself. That Shikamaru had been a little bit right about her lying under the window while he worked wasn’t enough to unclench her jaw, and that he’d planned to have it come out just so - ! There wasn’t any part of her that was going to uncoil until she’d hit back just as hard.
Sakura pulled out one of the vials she had forbidden Ino to use. With the water from her canteen, she mixed the dried pigment into a deep red brown wash and sat back to let it breathe. The longer the suspension sat in the lid of her camp mug, the more the red seemed to overtake the brown. Ino paused in her meal as the faintest breath of foreign chakra brushed her senses. If Ino hadn’t come from a long line of sensory-type ninjas, she would have missed it.
“I guess it works,” Ino said grudgingly, but she was watching the ink with interest.
“Yes,” Sakura said. The pigment in the vial was the carefully preserved blood of a shinobi. The same stuff used routinely and reliably in chakra contracts, seals, and scrolls. Valuable, rare, and fiercely protected.
With careful strokes, Sakura painted the characters of a poison tag into the brown shadows of Ino’s poster. In a way, the whole path of this mission had been charted by the a small miscalculation fifteen years ago that had put a shinobi named Moudoku Yuujin in the T&I facilities of Konohagakure for the six short days it took for her ransom to be paid and a trade to be agreed upon. She was one of the few missing nin currently alive for which Konoha had chakra-viable blood samples.
After Shikamaru and Ino’s indiscrete meetings with the province’s minister of trade -- posing as missing nin posing as highwaymen -- this poster was likely to become part of the sealed report to the governor, armed with a chakra tag primed to go off at his touch . If the governor’s physician proved less competent than their research suggested, Sakura would find herself a de facto assassin. With luck, he would live, and the presence of Moudoku Yuujin’s distinctive poison seal in the assassination attempt would convince the daimyo of the Land of Rivers that missing nin were a problem worth official attention. And one that its neighbors, Sand and Fire, would no longer have to take into their own hands at great risk to their operatives.
By the end of the seal, Ino and even Shikamaru were leaning over the bowls propped on their knees to watch as Sakura’s marks slowly faded into the background ink. Ino raised her eyebrows, impressed, and Shikamaru’s eyes had that sharpness that sometimes penetrated his usual laziness.
Finished, Sakura met his eyes and stuck out her jaw. Ino blinked, but Shikamaru was no fool to the intentions of others. He was also, despite his attempts to suppress it, a good and fair team leader. With a sigh he headed back to the field rations.
Yes, he was saying; for this, he would make her dinner as he had Ino’s.
Sakura grinned and hugged her knees. Now that her moment of confrontation had ended, she was shy about the warmth and pride she felt. Ino forgot that their dynamic was about bickering and reached out to ruffle Sakura’s hair affectionately.
For the moment, everybody was smiling. It looked like the mission, intricate as the plan was, had a chance to work out just as it had been laid out.
**
Ino and Sakura waited on the roof together the next day. There was nothing to do but let the pieces settle into place. The mission was considered low risk for encountering enemy nin – even Moudoku Yuujin, who was supposed to be half a country away while all this was happening.
The weather had turned to a dismal, anemic drizzle, but Sakura had a deep, secret love of theater, and there was something beautiful and melancholy about the gray sky cloaking the distance, surrounded by the patter of rain on the trees. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest under one of Konoha’s reliable, standard issue ponchos. Raindrops made little spots of cold along her arms and on the tops of her knees through the fabric.
Ino had her hair up again in her Moudoku-pretending-to-be-a-cheap-mercenary costume and a lacquered paper parasol over one shoulder. She reached into the fortification the tight-laced jerkin had made of her chest, pulling out a small, hand-bound book. It took Sakura a moment to realize what it was because the cover was not in Konoha’s style. It was the bingo book of another hidden village.
Sakura stared at it. “Where did you get that?”
“Oh, it was a gift from my father,” Ino said, as only a girl whose father was the head of Konoha’s intelligence division could. She handed the book to Sakura, eyes gleaming and lips tightly sealed.
Sakura flipped through it suspiciously, running her finger over stone icon of Iwagakure embossed on the cover. The pages felt papery and frail, but they were thin, stiff silk, the same strong stuff that made up festival kites. Durable and waterproof. Hidden villages were protective of their bingo books, but not quite to the point of designing them to disintegrate in bad weather.
She didn’t make it to whatever had excited Ino, because she turned a page and found Hatake Kakashi staring back at her from the sketch’s single, ink-black eye.
A little buzz of adrenaline woke her up out of the reflective daze she’d fallen into. She scooched her knees a little closer, pulled the book a little closer to her face, and the rest of the world dropped out of her head. He had to have one in everybody’s book, she supposed, but she’d never seen it in person before. Like a delicious glimpse behind the scenes of an opera production -- what would it say?
Half of the page had been taken up by an annotated sketch; priority one: recognize your enemy. On the right, a numbered table gave quick ratings in categories like strategy, chakra strength, ninjutsu, genjutsu, etc.
Here, Sakura felt her mouth opening in offended protest – Kakashi’s score wasn’t even in the top half of the other scores in the book! True, she didn’t know many people who had any bingo book entries at all, not in these small, highest priority books that fit in the pocket and only had room for the most lethal statistics, but this was Sharingan no Kakashi. The Copy Ninja!
But there – a chilly note at the bottom of the page took him apart in barely a sentence and a half: Skilled use of transplanted sharingan, but lacks necessary chakra stores for mastery. Not kage-level. That he had scored highly in intelligence and strategy mollified her not at all.
“Those rats,” Sakura said, even before she realized she was speaking out loud. A rain drop darkened the page next to her thumb. “Not kage-level! Kakashi would lead them in circles until they stabbed each other in the back on his behalf.”
“Sakura,” Ino said, exasperated. “You’re not even looking at the right page.”
Sakura barely heard her. She knew that there were people out there to whom no one could really compare, people like Orochimaru, Nagato, Itachi – not to mention the five Kages, and maybe they deserved the place they’d earned, but was this really how the ninja world saw her old sensei? Effective but not remarkable? Maybe that was all anyone could really aim for in life.
Civilians in a hidden village tended to treat the ninja they lived alongside as something of a high-stakes local sports team. Sakura’s family were civilians. When you lived in a secret military installation among men and women taught from childhood to kill with sorcery – the feeling was you might as well get into it or go mad. Everybody kept up on statistics, everybody used splashy public missions for small talk, and everybody had their favorite shinobi. More than a few people had become very invested in the Gai-Kakashi rivalry over the years, though they generally glossed over the undignified bits (which were most of them).
Sakura had tried to look down on that sort of thing after graduating, trying to erase the bright and flashing “Civilian!” sign posted on her forehead.
But despite all her efforts, she hadn’t been able to help how she was raised, and in the evenings and weekends back home, Kakashi’s flag had been a great one to raise with her family. No one could deny he was a winner and not one of her siblings or cousins or neighbors could pretend to have a greater claim to him than her, Haruno Sakura, real life protégé of the Copy Ninja. Kakashi had done her a lot of good over the years navigating the rocky waters of a large, very competitive family in a small town without ever knowing he’d done it.
With all that practice behind her, she couldn’t help taking this little book personally; she felt thirteen years old again, arguing at the snow festival on behalf of mystery and masks with Auntie Etsuyo, who had an unfounded fondness for jounin with beards and smoking habits.
Looking back at the page, she found that one of the book’s previous owners had added a hand written addendum. It had been written in bold, emphatic strokes, as though the message was too important to worry about anything but getting it down. Do not engage without the intent to kill, it said. He will not be beaten twice.
It had a grim ring of terror to it, as though the author had made the mistake and knew he would soon pay for it. She had an out-of-body experience then, watching herself – a Konoha nin sitting in the rain reading Iwa’s book. Had that very mistake brought the book to Konoha? Her spirit settled a little, satisfied.
Ino let out a huff and snatched the book back, turning to the proper page herself. Sakura couldn’t hold back her surprise when she found herself looking at Nara Shikamaru’s very first bingo book entry.
“Wow,” Sakura said honestly. She managed not to say that they’d gotten his beady eyes just right. “When did this happen?”
“Dad just got it, but it’s six months old at least.” Ino smiled. “I knew you’d be excited about it like you should be. Nobody else is – well, nobody over the age of thirty. Come on, people, bingo book! Right?”
“Why aren’t they happy?” Sakura asked.
Ino sighed. “Because he got in before Naruto or Neji. There’s only one good answer to that– ANBU. Nobody likes what that says about our security. Look, I was just showing you so somebody would be happy about it, ok? Stop looking at me like that. Nobody’s given me the clearance for anything, so I can claim I’m probably wrong, and anyway, I’m not speculating to anyone but you – you’re practically Shika-Ino-Cho.”
Ino dropped this last bombshell so casually, Sakura didn’t have time to start gaping again before Ino was plowing on with only a slight tightening of her lips to indicate she knew she’d come dangerously close to pouring her heart out there: “Did you know they reassigned Chouji last minute for this mission? Now it’s Neji playing back up in an undisclosed location not to be within 20 miles of us. That’s the kind of distance you put in to avoid S-Class sensing!”
Sakura’s stomach dropped, feeling suddenly exposed on the rooftop. “Moudoku Yuujin – they think she’ll come back.”
“Moudoku Smoudoku. We’re a cover story,” Ino said impatiently. She waved a hand vaguely encircling all the rooftops they could see. “Somewhere in this crappy town is an ANBU mission, and I hate, I just hate when Shikamaru’s new club uses me like a freebie sidekick.”
“What? No!” Sakura said.
“It’s always the last minute reassignments that clue you in. First Chouji –” Ino narrowed her eyes suddenly. “ – then you.”
For a beat, Sakura didn't understand. Then she almost laughed, but if she laughed, she would have had to come explain. There was a reason she’d had to sign on to the mission when they were all but out the door, and it was about as far from Konoha’s elite secret force as you could get. “Ino! If I were a secret ANBU medic, someone would have told me. Trust me.”
Ino shrugged dismissively. “Well, you are about the worst secret-keeper ever.”
Sakura clenched her teeth. She didn’t know what Ino wanted her to say. ANBU were secretive, but they served the village. It was a shinobi’s duty to support them, explicit instructions or no. Their misstep – if any of this speculation were true – seemed to be in trying to lay a claim in Ino’s territory without her permission. And too, Ino came from a long, proud shinobi heritage. To her, ANBU did not have one ounce more ninja mystique than she herself did.
“Do you think he can handle it?” Sakura said finally.
“Of course, he can handle it,” Ino snapped. “He’s going to be Hokage one day.”
Sakura opened her mouth and just – stopped. She’d overheard a lot of speculation on Hokage successors over the last few years, but Ino was the first to put Nara Shikamaru on the table. Ino caught her expression and flushed red all the way to her scalp under her pale hair.
“Or head of ANBU! Or head cloud-watcher of strawberry hill, I don’t know,” Ino said. “Look, just tell me you’re impressed by the bingo book, okay?”
“It’s great. Really good.” Sakura still had the book in her hands, and she couldn’t help flipping back to compare. Thank god, Shikamaru had scored worse than Kakashi. She wouldn’t have been able to bear it otherwise.
**
Sakura’s painter persona insisted on a public place for the transaction. The sun was out, and Sakura stood shaded by Ino’s parasol in front of the inn, waiting for Ino-as-Moudoku to finish inspecting her own work. Witnesses were the name of the game – as many as possible. Sakura had already circled through the market, talking shop with some of the artisans and buying sweets.
Ino’s frustration from the rooftop seemed to still be fueling her. Standing next to an empty stall, she gave off a low but constant trickle of killing intent, and the ground next to her feet sizzled softly – an impressive trick requiring more than a little prep work for someone who was not a natural poison specialist. People avoided them almost without knowing why, but they watched – and remembered.
Sakura was eating her second stick of dango when she noticed the old man watching them.
He had a broad face, well-lined and sunburnt with a bridge of faded freckles across the nose. Wispy gray hair had been tucked under a cook’s cap. He was ostensibly tending a cart stacked high with steamer baskets, but he ignored any customers who stopped to look. He watched first with one eye open, then the other. It might have looked harmless and eccentric if he hadn’t been twirling a chopstick around his fingers from pinky to thumb and back again too deftly for an old man.
He had to be a shinobi, but Sakura didn’t recognize him from Moudoku Yuujin’s known associates.
All of this, Sakura took in with a slow glance around the marketplace, wearing a bored expression like she was beginning to get tired of Ino’s exacting inspection. She let out a sigh. Shikamaru’s eyes flicked to hers, curious, and Sakura carefully dropped her dango stick.
It rolled past Shikamaru’s feet, picking up dirt with its sticky sweet coating.
Who was the the old man? She wished she could dismiss him based on his abysmal blending skills, but a lot of ninja were bad at undercover. They didn’t like posing as untrained civilians. Pride was supposed to be a flaw reserved for samurai, but in Sakura’s experience, ninja were as snobby as any other highly trained professional.
Sakura on the other hand had been trained by the perfect shinobi – one with no dignity at all. Even as her stomach tightened and her heart skipped, she felt confident the old ninja behind the cart didn’t have any reason to suspect that she was more than a young painter coming into some disreputable cash.
That is, until Shikamaru turned– as she’d meant him to – following the dango as it rolled into the street and saw the old ninja behind the dumpling cart. He froze, eye contact made and held. Hardly noticeable to passerby, it rang through Sakura like a bell.
At his waist, hidden from the other ninja by his torso, Shikamaru made the hand sign for full, orderly retreat.
Ino was already gone, road dust swirling where she had been a moment before. Sakura had no idea if she was meant to break character. The only thing she knew was that she had to pick one or the other. In the end, that wasn’t hard – she hadn’t been outside the city on a paid mission in nearly a year. Success here was leverage. Leverage to make her a real ninja again.
Snatching the discarded poster as it drifted to the ground, she shouted indignantly, “What! Where the hell are you going?”– she and her cover persona were in perfect alignment here – and took off down the alley toward the river as though she were trying to catch her delinquent business partners.
She ran for the arching stone bridge where the alley crossed the river, just catching a glimpse of a strong current running under the bridge, opaque with mud and silt before she felt a presence touch down behind her. Killing intent washed over her, more bored than deadly and raising goose-pimples in it’s wake, as though she were as much an afterthought as a bug under a shoe. She clamped down on her own killing intent in response – cover persona! Cover persona! – and several things happened in quick succession.
She swung the poster at his head, using Shinobi Technique #135: Sheer Audacity. He grunted and ducked. Sakura twisted her wrist and tightened her fingers, grinding at the seal she’d painted in the shadows of the poster. Disrupted, the seal bypassed its intended trigger – the presence of the provincial governor – and activated in a soft pfft of poison dust, rising into the shinobi’s face. Surprise slackened his face, and he had no choice but to body-flicker back to the mouth of the alley to quickly assess its effects. If he were competent and experienced in poisons, this self-assessment would take no more than a handful of seconds.
She used those seconds to cover the remaining steps to the sea wall, screaming and clawing at her face the whole time until her toe found the lip and she tipped over. As soon as she fell out of sight, her hands came together to create a bunshin. The bunshin went in the water with strict instructions to sink and dissipate. At the same time, she focused the barest gloss of chakra on her feet to run straight up the wall and along the underside of the bridge.
By the time she came out the other side, heart buzzing like a hummingbird’s , she had henged into Ino’s Moudoku persona, moving at shinobi-level speeds. There was no reason Moudoku Yuujin wouldn’t be throwing around a few clones to cover her escape, and the bridge had covered the swap.
Who was that? Shikamaru had known him immediately, and more importantly, had deliberately broadcast his recognition. Were they really knee deep in ANBU after all?
All Sakura knew for sure was that if there were ANBU here, mission success wouldn’t matter, Tsunade would kill her the moment her foot touched Konoha soil.
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<3 Laurinha
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