"I began using my art for my missions and training at a young age."
"Oh?" Aiko raised an eyebrow. 'I don't really see why you're bringing this up now, though it is nice to see you confiding in me of your own volition.'
Unaware of her thoughts, Sai mildly continued, "It is best that your superiors know of your unique strengths, so that they can most wisely allocate resources. Do you not agree?"
She bit her tongue instead of replying.
That would have been an odd thing to say under normal circumstances, wavering on the line between a banality and a sign that he needed more practice initiating conversation. When he was escorting her to meet with Danzo, it took on an entirely more sinister tone. 'Is he… warning me that I can't hide things from Danzo?'
That was all Sai said on the matter, and she didn't push. He'd made his point. He probably shouldn't have done even that, if she was reading him right.
'Though, what could he be talking about? He mentioned unique strengths, so he could be hinting that Danzo knows about my chakra chains or Hiraishin.' Aiko kept her face blank, dully staring forward as their footsteps echoed in the tunnel. 'It shouldn't shock me that Danzo could know about Hiraishin, which he's much more likely to be interested in than the chakra chains. If Mei figured out that there was truth to the rumors and eliminated Yamato as a possibility, then Danzo certainly could.'
"Danzo-sama," they muttered in unison, Aiko hastily taking the bent-kneed position that Sai modeled.
"You two leave on a mission tomorrow evening." Danzo's knees creaked when he moved to sit down, air escaping from his chair with a rush of sound. "Information has turned up a possible location for one of Orochimaru's many abandoned bases in northwest Grass. I would expect that a tracker of your supposed ability should be able to find the truth of this matter. You will lead your senior agent in securing the premises, if there is anything to be found, and retrieving any sensitive information for my perusal, especially anything regarding experimentation. The time for this mission is short, in order to ensure that your absences are not noted, so you may waste no time. You have a day at most to search the area. The other pertinent details will be released to you tomorrow. I trust that there are no questions?"
They remained silent, though Aiko's mind was racing.
'That's a two day trip. He has to have known that Tsunade put me on leave. The timeline he's given us makes it incredibly risky. If anything at all goes wrong, then I would be late getting back in the village and someone would report me missing.'
Root could only operate in one of two ways. Either the agent took on extra orders in missions legitimately assigned outside of the village where no one was observing, or the agent's actions were hidden from the Hokage's scrutiny. By far, the easiest way to do that was for Danzo to train his own agents and keep them off Tsunade's radar entirely, like Sai had been in the past. If she didn't know the soldiers existed, she wouldn't wonder where they were if she called them in for a mission and they weren't around.
The other option was to work around the sometimes flexible assigned breaks that shinobi were allotted. Obviously that was risky.
'Definitely Hiraishin,' Aiko noted grimly. 'He's testing me without making it obvious. Danzo wants to see if I'm loyal enough to tell him about a resource that could make this mission easier of my own volition. That's why Sai warned me.'
"Danzo-sama," she started quietly. When he gestured her to continue, she swallowed. "A thought occurs. I believe I am capable of transporting the two of us back into the village safely to allow extra time to complete the mission."
"And how would you do that, child?"
'Keep it simple. Don't talk more than you have to. There's no way of knowing what else he knows. Don't offer any more information.'
"Hiraishin."
She couldn't see his expression through her lashes, with her head bent as it was, but Danzo seemed to have a pleased air. "Excellent initiative, agent. In that case, spend as much time in the area as possible before returning to a secure location."
He would have reacted differently had he actually been surprised. Thank the kami for Sai giving out hints. Danzo had been testing her loyalty. But that didn't explain everything.
'Why would he give me a mission with just Sai? Much less one where I'm at least nominally leading.' That night, Aiko took a walk around the village, trying to clear her head. 'It seems serendipitous for me, especially since Sai is emotionally compromised. Really, emotionally conditioning agents the way that Danzo did was stu-'
"Ow," she hissed, holding a hand to her throbbing head.
Strange. That headache had turned up again suddenly. Her eyes burnt a bit, but a few moments of massaging her temples mitigated the pain. "I've been having a lot of headaches lately," she muttered, lacing her fingers and giving a stretch upwards to unwind some of the tension in her shoulders that was probably contributing to her recent spout of migraines. There was something odd about it, but she couldn't quite put her fingers on it. 'It's probably nothing. Stress, maybe.'
Disturbed, but not quite cognizant of why, Aiko ducked into the first bookstore she wandered by and picked through the shelves for something to work on in her spare time. She hadn't been feeling creative enough to do any writing for a few weeks, but she felt the need to do something.
'I used to read all the time,' she mused, running her finger over a section label and poking inside book covers. 'Back when I was in the Academy. I think I burnt through just about everything of interest in the public library.'
To be fair, 'of interest' meant something very different than the types of things she wrote nowadays. Despite writing things that she found frivolous but enjoyable, her reading tastes leant toward more serious subject matter. It was hard to want to write up academic theory in a world where it was not only coming from an incomprehensibly different state of mind, but also an unwanted opposition to ideological tradition. Entertainment was much easier.
"Oh, the new one is out," Aiko realized, blinking at the bright cardboard display. "Jiraiya is a busy man… What does that make, like twenty books?" She picked up a copy and flipped through it to be sure she wanted to read this one, ignoring the salespeople and customers who gave her dirty looks.
With that book tucked under her arm, she eventually picked out one more text and made her way to the front counter. It didn't exactly look thrilling, but the treatise with short histories on the interactions between shinobi villages other than Konoha would probably be good background information to have if she was going to have to work with others. It wouldn't take her long to read, in any case.
That was one thing that had always baffled her about Kakashi, actually. He was a brilliant man, but he took a ridiculously long time to make it through his Icha Icha books. She might have thought that he just happened to be a slow reader, but he could pick through a mission brief in less than a minute if he was inspired to.
'To be fair, he might be savoring the experience of books he actually enjoys,' she hypothesized, tossing her academic book on her bedside table and beginning to read her frivolous book while she prepared dinner one-handed.
Aiko was definitely not that type of reader. She read everything at top speed, and retained a large proportion of it. It would be a lie to say that she had perfect recall, but it was good enough for government work.
That speed was the reason that she had torn through her new Icha Icha book and placed a bookmark in page seventeen of her more serious selection before she finally turned in for the night. Restlessly, she did her best not to think about her mission or what she'd just read in an attempt to get a decent amount of sleep for once. After what must have been half an hour, Aiko eventually resorted to staring up at the ceiling and trying to think sleepy thoughts.
It must have worked, because she managed to clock a full six hours of rest before her mind was too awake to let her rest any longer, even if her body felt like 125 pounds of dead weight. The sunlight streaming in tricked her into opening her bedroom window. She immediately winced and slammed it back shut, flicking the lock.
"Nope. It's way too fucking cold for that."
Thus forewarned, she dug out a warmer pair of form-fitting pants and an oversized blue standard issue sweater like Kakashi's or Yamato's to layer over a tank top and gloves for the day.
"And now I only have… four hours to waste until practice. Great."
It was tempting to skip practice altogether. Team seven wasn't her team, after all. It was strange and uncomfortable to act as though it was. But she had agreed to come when it fit in her schedule. Aiko rolled her eyes at herself in the mirror while she washed her face for being such a damn chump, but obligingly planned her day around a workout with team seven.
When left to her own devices, she preferred to do her conditioning the very first thing in the morning, with fruit and water as fuel. If she needed to do more intensive training for a certain skill set or something, she would usually do so in the afternoon so that her body had recuperated enough for her to push her limits again. Team seven under Kakashi's direction didn't follow her (entirely sensible, she thought) patterns at all.
They did pretty much whatever occurred whenever it occurred, depending on who showed up, in what order they showed up, and how much Kakashi felt like actually teaching.
"He's kind of a hot mess as a teacher, actually," she realized with the air of a long-overdue comprehension.
He was a nearly-unmatched captain, a stellar commanding officer, and an incredible shinobi, but a seriously iffy teacher at times. As she locked her door, Aiko cast a guilty glance at Yamato's door, as if to make sure that her less than entirely approving thoughts wouldn't be overheard by her largest contender for Kakashi's fanclub. As far as she could tell, his apartment was empty.
'Maybe he's out of town, or not coming to team seven's training today. If he were, he probably wouldn't have left the apartment yet.'
It was unnecessary and a bit silly, but she found herself going to the grocery store and stocking up on ingredients for far more bento than she could eat. The kitchen at the house was larger, so she walked there and let herself in without blinking twice. It was still her house too, in a way. She'd paid for the damn place. Miso with tofu was bubbling on the stove before she pushed open Naruto's door and woke him by tossing a couch pillow at his head.
"Wha-"
She was already turning out of the room. "Breakfast is ready."
That mild pronouncement was enough to get Naruto scrambling out of bed. His thudding woke Karin and Hinata… who came out of the same bedroom. Aiko gave them a speculative look, but didn't comment. It could mean nothing, and it wasn't her job to tease in either case.
"Are you going to sit and eat?"
Aiko shook her head at Hinata. "No, I'm not hungry at all." The rice was done soaking, so she drained it and refilled the water before transferring it to heat and checking on what would be her filling for riceballs. A look in the cupboard was enough to have her frown, however. "What happened to all the bento containers?"
Three guilty faces stared back at her from the kitchen table, soup dripping off of Karin's spoon as she sat frozen.
'Why am I surprised? I probably don't want to know.'
Her pained expression and obvious bafflement eventually spurred one of them into action. "I'll replace them," Naruto offered, reaching for another serving. "I can run to the store in just a minute before you're done with that."
"Works for me. Do you know who all is going to be at practice today? I thought it might be nicer to sit and eat outside than go out for lunch."
"Just you, me, Bastard, n'Kakashi-sensei," Naruto counted off through a mouthful of bread, ignoring her curious expression.
"Really? I didn't know that."
Her younger brother shrugged. "Bastard begged Kakashi-sensei to show him some genjutsu, and now we're all stuck having to learn some. 'parently Yamato and the asshole don't have to learn genjutsu."
Aiko blinked. 'Oh. That actually sounds like a really good thing to me.' Naruto didn't sound chuffed, however, so she let it be. He knew more genjutsu than she did. Jiraiya must have actually worked with him a fair bit on the subject. 'I'm sure that my theory is up to scratch, but not casting. I only know the one genjutsu.'
That thought was a bit depressing, so she ignored it in favor of carefully sculpting a piece of honeydew melon into a kitty face for Sasuke's bento (she wasn't going to make a fucking slug). Naruto got a toad, and Kakashi got a dog. She had just started Hinata's lunch when Naruto deposited a ridiculous excess of bento boxes on the kitchen counter and pranced off to go watch cartoons. Finishing Karin's decoration left her with a long moment where she had to think on her own. She shouldn't make another dog. It would be lame to make two identical lunches, but what other animal was like her…
She shrugged and turned hers into a crude butterfly.
'This is the best part of making lunch.' With a sneaky glance to be sure no one was watching, she scooped all the little shavings of melon that were left into her mouth. Yum.
Dessert thus handled, she piled a few cherry tomatoes in along with slices of sweet potato (stealing a few of those as well) before turning to make rice balls.
Naruto was her good natured pack-mule and tossed all the boxes into his knapsack before sprinting out the door. She cringed and tried her best not to think on the way the boxes were clattering together and the tentative connection her mind was trying to make to the fate of the other bento. Sometimes it was just best not to dwell on how unintentionally destructive Naruto could be.
The wait for Kakashi was as boring as ever, from her perspective. Naruto and Sasuke really only did have eyes for each other, even if they expressed that through name calling and wrestling. It was a bond she could live without in her life and wished them all the best luck with it. She'd braided, undone, and put her hair in twintails just for something to do with her hands before Kakashi finally showed up.
'It's hard to go back to waiting on him when I've had much more timely team experiences,' she mused, giving him a mournful stare in an attempt to make him feel guilty for his rudeness. It might have worked—he broke eye contact—but there was really no way to know with that man.
"Who wants to try learning the Hell Viewing Genjutsu first, and who would prefer its opposite?"
Sasuke gave Kakashi an indignant scoff. "The opposite? If that's a perverted joke, I'm going to hit you through that tree." His knuckles cracked.
In unison, Kakashi and Aiko cringed slightly away from him. Brave, foolhardy Naruto, whose skull was apparently much more resistant to Tsunade-esque beatings, just leered at him. "Maybe you wouldn't be such a tight-ass if you got laid, eh bastard?"
"As if you would know, Naruto," Sasuke shot back, cheeks pink.
Kakashi rolled his eye. "Hell Viewing it is. Sasuke, try to take your eyes off your beloved and pay attention, would you? You'll have plenty of time to stare longingly at Naruto while you cast this on him." He paused, as if considering what he'd just said. "On second thought, you'll be working with me. I don't trust Naruto not to thoroughly traumatize you with something learned from Jiraiya, and I don't feel like visiting him in the hospital."
Naruto made a face at him for that one.
The handsigns for that first genjutsu were minimal, and Aiko had no trouble with them at all. The only difficulty came in visualizing what she wanted her victim to experience. Her best chance was to use her considerable knowledge of her target to poke at a secret fear he legitimately possessed, but she was having an oddly hard time coming up with ideas. It was possible to perform this jutsu and let the victim's mind fill in the blanks, but that left a lot up to chance at her low level of experience imposing her will on others. Without a good idea, she eventually she had to settle for the brute-force solution.
But Naruto's turn was first. She hit her knees in the dirt, feeling wretchedly sick the instant that his chakra crawled into contact with hers, but easily identified that what she was seeing was false.
That didn't make her feel much better about breathing in the rotten stench of Naruto's corpse, body mangled and torn open like a peeled grape for someone to get at the biju inside. Half a ghastly grin peered out at her through the place where his cheek had used to be.
"Kai!"
Her brother eyed her curiously, mercifully whole and sweet looking. "Does that mean I did it right?"
She had to stare at him for a moment, before she realized that he didn't know what she'd seen. He wouldn't have created that vision for her. That had come from her subconscious mind. Her real fears. "Yeah." Aiko cleared her throat, trying to force down the nausea in her gut and focus. "My turn, then." A deep breath, a moment with her eyes closed to concentrate, and she flicked through just two hand signs before pushing out an undulating wave of chakra, much more subtle and insidious than Naruto's shockwave.
It still seemed to work. He looked vaguely ill, but grit his teeth in determination and brought his hands up into a cross. "Kai!" he bellowed, snapping out fifteen times the chakra he'd need to break her illusion.
Aiko had a moment to shake her head in faint amusement at his wasteful excess before the chakra pulse hit her and washed slowly through her body with an odd clinging sensat- She heaved, putting a hand to her head in a failed attempt to block out the ringing in her ears. Her vision had gone entirely white and she couldn't feel her limbs, so it was a bit of a surprise to find that she was on her hands and knees, staring down at the grass while her brother knelt by her side.
"Aiko? Are you okay?"
His concern brought her back to the real world enough to swallow down bile and nod. "Y-yeah."
No. She most certainly was not okay. She was not okay at all. No matter how over-powered, that genjutsu release shouldn't have done a damn thing to her unless she was under a genjutsu. Her release earlier hadn't caught whatever the hell that was, so she'd been under something seriously heavy utility. It had been meant as a long-term measure… and a successful one at that. Nausea and light-headedness were textbook symptoms of genjutsu backlash from overexposure to foreign chakra in the brain. Typically, the longer the casting, the worse the symptoms.
'Danzo. That fucking asshole Danzo. He probably put me under the first time that I met with him,' Aiko realized with dawning horror and rapidly escalating panic, her heartbeat thudding like a rabbit's. 'Oh my god, he's been in my head. How much damage did he do to me?'
With sudden and unpleasant clarity, she catalogued clues that had not been allowed to register before now. Even after she'd coded her tongue seal in to her security, the seal meant to keep out foreign chakra constructs had pained her since she set them up. She had been approving of Danzo's agenda—more so than she had been before. Now that her head was clear, it was hard to think about the man without remembering that she had decided she hated him for cavalierly abusing those in his care and profiting off their pain. And that she thought he was a bit of a moron, constantly shooting himself in his own foot because he couldn't commit to a logical course of action without over-steering into crazy town.
'I… I think that it was really me thinking that Konoha needed deniable black operations, though,' she assured herself, licking her lips nervously. 'I'm pretty sure.'
She looked up just in time to see that her fit had apparently brought over Kakashi as well. His eye met hers.
His serious expression sent her heart dropping to her stomach. 'He's thinking the same thing I am, minus the focus on what a gigantic douchebag Danzo is. He would recognize those symptoms just as well as I would. Better, even. He's bound to have seen them in person before.'
It wasn't a situation she could explain. She didn't want him to worry.
So Aiko pulled a sheepish smile onto her face and accepted Naruto's hand up. "Wow, that was thorough, otouto. Try to use a little less force next time, ne? I'm a little sensitive to chakra."
It was true, in a way, and Kakashi had expressed that he didn't have the knack for sensing arrays that she did. With any luck, he might think that she'd just had an unusual reaction to a dispelling.
Naruto pinked a little and pulled away his hand to rub at the back of his neck. "Yeah. Sorry."
The tall man watching them cleared his throat. "Naruto, why don't you work with Sasuke for a while? I don't think that a large release will bother him as much." Kakashi was still eying her uncertainly, unconvinced but wavering.
"Sounds good."
As the teen trotted off with a glance over his shoulder at them, the two Jounin eyed each other. Aiko intentionally didn't fidget, meeting his gaze seriously and letting him make of that what he would. There were two acceptable outcomes of this stare-off. Either he would be convinced he had been mistaken and drop the subject, or he would realize that his guess had been dead-on but that she could not or would not tell him for some reason, having to trust that she knew what she was doing.
"Aiko." Kakashi averted his gaze to above her shoulder, stuffing his hands in his pockets in poorly hidden discomfort. "You know you can talk to me if anything is wrong, right?"
Since he'd looked away, he missed when she pressed her lips together to keep from frowning. Somehow, she'd hoped he would know that she had her problems under control. (Okay, so missing that she'd been under a genjutsu in the first place didn't look good, she'd admit it. But now that she knew, she could do something about it.
"Of course," her voice answered brightly, sounding so far from her thoughts that it didn't really register as her own.
"Right." He sighed, apparently having convinced himself that he'd imagined the whole thing and that she was merely sensitive to chakra, but having tentatively covered his bases just in case. "Well then. Are you ready to move on to the second technique? I already showed Sasuke."
He must have directed his Heaven viewing technique, because her mind probably wouldn't have come up with a rapturous vision of herself reclining on a beach surrounded by fluffy puppies and cabana boys who looked suspiciously like someone she knew. "Kai," she intoned dryly, giving him a scathing look. "Any reason you think Sasuke should focus in my fantasies?"
Kakashi shrugged, scratching at his chin. "I hear he's dreamy," he confided seriously. The sarcasm was palpable.
She fought not to choke. 'Okay, he's definitely trying to cheer me up. In his own awkward-as-all-hell way.'
It was a battle she lost, eventually cracking out into a smile. "You're terrible, Kakashi. My turn now." Just to be a jerk, she quickly pulled up a rather raunchy fantasy that should both make his day and ruin it entirely.
If she was right, he wouldn't have finished the new book yet, but he should be able to recognize the two protagonists if he'd even bought it. Aiko copied a few moments of actual dialogue from the beginning of the last chapter, since he would recognize it from the back of the book—and then went in a completely different direction with it. He was familiar enough with Icha Icha that he wouldn't find her abrupt scene change odd, even if it did have a distinct 'exit, pursued by a bear' feeling for her. After the bandits would come the nudity, of course. 'I wonder how far he'll let it play out?' It could be hard to tell. Genjutsu could play out at speeds that didn't correlate to real time.
Perhaps it was inappropriate, but she didn't think it would bother him too much. If he was the type to get miffed about things like that, he probably wouldn't be able to read porn in front of small children. It wasn't like this was any dirtier than the actual books.
Foolishly, he seemed to let the vision run its course when he recognized it, clearly letting curiosity override his good sense. Aiko knew it had gotten to the good part when he stiffened, and then almost immediately let out a sad, keening sound. He broke the genjutsu without a word or motion, and gave her a mournful look. "Did you really just ruin the end of the book for me? Aiko, how could you?"
Aiko wavered. It was hard to say no to that pitifully sad eye and the plaintive sniff that accompanied it, so she sighed. "I was going to let you think so, but no. That's not what happens."
Kakashi nodded slowly. She forcibly stilled her expression to avoid amusement, but he was probably wondering if she was telling the truth or if she was just teasing again and she really had ruined the book. He didn't seem to know if he wanted to be happy or sad. After a moment, Kakashi shifted uncomfortably. "Right. I've, ah. Got to go." Before she could blink, the debris caught in his shunshin was fluttering to the ground. Her Hiraishin tag informed her that he was speeding back to his apartment. She snickered. 'Well, that's one way for me to escape scrutiny. I'll remember that solution.' Very deliberately, she avoided wondering if he was going to go finish the book or work on another problem. That way lead madness.
'Of course, that exchange also illustrated another possible aspect of whatever genjutsu Danzo had me under,' she thought seriously, turning to walk home. 'It didn't just subtly alter my perceptions of him to be more positive. Naruto's amateur attempt caught me much more easily than Kakashi's much more refined genjutsu, and I had no problem coming up with a more creative solution even though I couldn't think of one to save my life earlier. He was actually making my own genjutsu skills worse, even if it was just as a side-effect. I was more susceptible, and less creative.'
The theory seemed solid, but there wasn't a way to verify it without asking someone who might know more about Sharingan-influenced genjutsu, who also wouldn't find it the slightest bit odd that she was asking about such a thing.
The two obvious candidates, Kakashi and Sasuke, were out of the question. If she asked either one of them, Kakashi would have no trouble making a connection between her earlier symptoms and the odd question. He was reluctant to believe that she would lie to him, not an idiot. So she swallowed her curiosity.
"Aiko? Are you taking your lunch?" Naruto was frowning when she turned around, dirt smeared on his nose for some reason. "And Kakashi left already? I guess I'll just have to eat his too."
"Bento?" Sasuke made an unsubtle head movement in the direction of Naruto's bag, the only obvious hiding place. She snorted, enjoying the silly tension. It was ridiculous to see two nearly grown men ready to get in a fist fight over some simple rice balls, but also a little calming. At least she could count on those two to be constant when everything else was changing.
"You can have mine, Sasuke." She waved over her shoulder. "I'm not that hungry."
'At least I know now. That genjutsu took so much chakra to dispel that it must have taxed him terribly to cast. Danzo won't check to see if I'm still under it as long as I don't alter my behavior. Another genjutsu won't hold now that I know what to look for, but he might do something worse next time. I can't let on that anything is different. That's not much of a solution. It does make it seem like I should hurry as much as I can.'
That could be a problem. Deep-cover infiltration was meant to last a long time by definition. Tsunade would probably be shocked to know that she had even made it into Root so early, much less that she had any useful information to report. She could probably get Danzo arrested right away by tattling on his implants, but there was no way to do that without having first plausibly encountered them. It was a last resort at best. In addition to that, she didn't have nearly enough information on Root to have made this exercise worth Tsunade's while. (And much more importantly, worth her time. It was too late to back out, so she was going to profit from this idiocy.)
As of right now, she could lead Tsunade to two different meeting rooms and the grand interconnecting tunnel system below Konoha through three different entrances, and report on two members' identities. It was hardly information worth reporting five months early on her six month deadline, by anyone's standards.
'I'll just have to find something worth writing home about, then.'
As a member of Konoha's security forces, she really should report the passageway that Sai led her through that dodged the gates completely and let them out past city limits. She scowled at the pitch-black forest, but didn't say a word. There were security forces around nearby, probably within a mile. It would be idiotic to linger when illegally outside bounds. Sai obediently fell behind her when she began to run. Aiko was the one with the map, after all.
'And that's another thing. I find it hard to believe that Danzo is so confident in his genjutsu that he would actually put me in charge of this mission, even if I am the tracker.'
Her lips twitched into a smile as she touched down on another tree and bounced forward, Sai a breath behind. 'To be fair, it's probably a combination of trust in his genjutsu, his seal, and Sai. He's entirely wrong. But it does seem much more legitimate to trust three sources of assurance. If he had done a better job with human psychology, he would have Sai in his corner for certain.'
The only thing that could really assure loyalty was that it was freely and wholly given. A seal was a nice protective touch for an agent who really did want to keep their information safe, but an unwilling pawn could always find a way. People are far too intelligent to count on a whole group of them being unable to find a method of recourse.
Sai didn't know it, of course, but his minor rebellions like trying to keep her from angering Danzo earlier that day could be the straw that broke the camel's back. He might even want them to be. He transparently longed for human interaction and affection, emulating and learning from anyone who would give him the time of day. The boy was very intelligent, and had been traumatized by Danzo's ham-handed methods of building children into soldiers. Now that he was essentially a full-grown man, he was questioning those teachings.
'The first instant it seems viable, I'll feel him out to see what he's actually thinking. Sai would be a hell of an ally. Really, we're not at such a different place in life.'
He was a good comrade. Sai might actually be miffed on her behalf to find out that Danzo had put her under a harmful genjutsu, now that she thought about it. If he didn't mind the idea of Danzo punishing her, he would have let her walk into that meeting blind. She was clever, but she wouldn't have thought to volunteer her Hiraishin without that hint.
They traveled throughout the night, doing their best to put distance between them and Konoha. Mission adrenaline kept her from feeling the effects of her long day for quite a while, but eventually she had a call a halt, blinking the sun out of her eyes and moving to cover a yawn before the cool touch of porcelain reminded her that she was still in her ANBU uniform.
Well. Mostly in her ANBU uniform. Sai had brought a completely unpainted mask for her, along with a rather striking chin-length black wig. She'd taken the hint. ANBU butterfly wasn't on this mission, a Root operative was.
Still, the gear was close enough to her own to feel familiar.
"Two hour rest, and then we proceed."
The sword on her back dug into her shoulder blade when she leaned against a tree, so she crossed her legs and folded forward to rest her forehead on her knees. Frankly, it was a terrible position, and she was bound to be painfully stiff if she stayed that way. But they couldn't fall into a deep sleep on a short break when the point was to get the minimum amount of rest in order to allow them to go on until nightfall. Sai seemed to hesitate, his sandaled feet just barely in her vision for a moment before he gracefully sat next to her, just close enough to share body heat. She unfolded enough to twist and blink up at him before remembering –'Oh yeah, the mask. I wish I could take it off.'
In lieu of offering him a reassuring smile as she might otherwise, Aiko sat up and leaned her shoulder against his arm, tucking her head into the crook of his neck. She napped lightly in that position, ready to switch back into alertness if he so much as tensed. Sai didn't move a muscle. Her eyes opened again of their own volition, and she had to tilt her face to check the position of the sun with the stupid mask blocking her peripheral vision.
"It's been an hour and twenty minutes?"
Her voice was a bit raspy with sleep, but her comrade didn't seem bothered. "Hai."
Aiko let her head connect with the flora behind her. That meant there were forty minutes left. "You should take a nap, too. Need a pillow?"
A pale mask turned to view her, looking slightly down. "I'm afraid your shoulder is a bit low, Washboard."
Her playful scowl was wasted on him. "Mean. Then lay down. I'll wake you at the first sign of movement." Perhaps it was because she was supposedly his commanding officer at the moment, but Sai took her at her word and twisted to drop his head between her knees when she straightened her legs.
She shivered involuntarily at the way his silky hair tickled her skin but held herself stiff and refused to look at him. She needed to focus on keeping watch.
'Ow,' Aiko grimaced, feeling tingles and prods of pain in the nerves of her legs. Said legs were completely numb by the time she gently curled her fingers around his shoulder to wake him up. It took a few pained seconds of stretching to wake her sleeping limbs enough to get to her feet, but after that she led them on another long push, this time crossing the border out of Fire Country into Grass. There was something creepy about being in a dead country.
Oh, there were people living there, to be sure. The Daimyo of Grass ruled over plenty of farmers, merchants, and samurai. But she couldn't look around without remembering that it was now a dead zone for shinobi and shivering a little.
She must have been a civilian once, but that life had been so long ago that the idea of an entire country being wiped clean of shinobi structure was unnerving. A lot of the things that shinobi did were idiotic, but they were familiar idiocies.
They traveled in silence, and bedded under genjutsu cover when they finally made it to blissful nightfall, having crossed most of the country over the course of the day. It wasn't a particularly comfortable camp with no fire, no fresh food to intersperse the bland protein rations, and only two people to share watch shifts. But Aiko savored every moment of the four hours that she clocked and thanked every kami that there was for having given her an opportunity to work with seals. It was hard to believe that other people really had to make the choice between carrying their heavy bedroll all day instead of other equipment and sleeping on the ground at night. Not for her, thanks.
'Is it safe to get Mitsuo's help looking for the entrance?' Aiko pursed her lips in thought, inadvertently kissing her mask. 'He would have no reason to know that this is covert work and therefore unusual, and I'm sure he doesn't talk to Kakashi. He might talk to Pakkun, though, who definitely does talk to Kakashi. It's unlikely, but if he heard about this Kakashi would know I wasn't on a regular mission. He'd probably assume I was doing something sneaky for Tsunade, but it's just best not to leave loose ends like that.
Regretfully, she dropped the fingers that had been curling into the first seal to summon her furry friend. She would just have to complete this mission the old-fashioned way.
'But screw the old-fashioned way for everything else. I'm hiding a seal somewhere before I go. It'll add to my map and mean I won't have to make that awful run again on Danzo's stupid sneaky schedule. It could be useful at some point to jump out of Konoha's borders.'
The location that Danzo had specified was too large to search by foot, even in three days, so she unrolled the map and tried to think like a madman scientist. There were two settlements relatively close to the area she was meant to search. One was agricultural, and the other was much more likely to have medical supplies.
She ignored the areas close to the much larger town. That would be too obvious for a paranoid man like Orochimaru. Anyone looking for him would have searched out places that could supply the expensive materials for his habits. Even if he did find appeal in having a short trip to town for syringes, even a zealot would find much more frequent need for food than medical supplies. Food was much harder to import and much heavier. The rural area would also make it less likely that anyone would stumble on his business (and more likely that he could make them disappear without anyone knowing if they were so unlucky).
There was only one source of fresh water running through the area, though there were multiple lakes. A man like Orochimaru would be well-aware that running water was safer and more hygienic, so she paid most attention to those banks. He probably used the river for electricity—he would need a lot of power to maintain tanks and experiments like those she'd seen when Suigetsu lead them to a base.
The first day of searching was wasted entirely. The second day panned out, though they didn't realize it at first. The base was disguised as a town. Well. Town was a bit of a stretch, really. A genjutsu still active after god knows how long depicted four dull-faced men and women working in a small field, nearby a smattering of small houses. It seemed utterly boring and nondescript, were it not for two things. Firstly, the hamlet was not on the map (not that it would have to be, recent and small as the development seemed). Much more important to her decision to investigate was the overwhelming tang of human chakra that hung in the air, and the fact that the place didn't smell of humans at all even though they could be seen walking about and talking. No living being had been there in a long time.
"Creepy," she deadpanned, waving a hand in front of a genjutsu woman who clearly didn't register her presence.