"Are you sure that we should not end this genjutsu?" Sai gave what she imagined was a suspicious glare at a fat kitten happily lapping up milk outside the genjutsu house she'd led them to. It was probably indifference, but it made her snicker to think of him being angry with kittens. "It would simplify finding the entrance."
"I'm sure. We don't necessarily want this found by anyone else."
Besides, it was fucking hilarious that Orochimaru or one of his people had gone to such ridiculous lengths to disguise their hideout. It just seemed… well, not very evil to go to the work of programming in happily gamboling kittens into their hidden lair's defenses.
'Maybe I was closer than I realized when I did my exercise trying to get into the mind of a madman. Orochimaru couldn't have been all that bad if he liked fluffy animals.'
Aiko nibbled on her lower lip, scrunching her face up in thought. Something about that just wasn't quite right.
'That's probably a dangerous thought. The fact that he had some human qualities doesn't mitigate what a gigantic jackass he really was. That's like making an apologia for Danzo. Sure, he probably didn't start out nuts. In fact, it may well be true that he had permission to form Root and his real failure came when he refused to disband it after the war.' She sniffed, tugging at her wig. 'That says something sad about the slippery slope of ninja morality, I think. Yesterday you were performing a needed function, and then before you know it you're attempting to take over the world and getting eyeballs put into your arm. It could happen to anybody, really.'
"What are you doing?"
"I'm thinking. Deep thoughts for deep people," she replied absentmindedly, sniffing at the air and following the faint seeping of stale air. The trail led her to drop onto her knees, feeling around in the grass with her hands, digging her fingers into dirt and—She tapped again, feeling a lack of give beneath her.
"Hellooo," she purred, scratching without care for the filth accumulating beneath her nails, bending back to fold her legs so that she rested with little weight on her elbows and could poke around and work with her hands without adjusting too much.
"You look ridiculous."
"Don't care."
"Like a dog."
"Woof," Aiko shot back distractedly.
She wasn't so dignified that she really cared about letting her ass hang in the air when there was snooping to be done. This was kind of fun, actually. Aiko forced down a sneeze, closing her eyes against the dust she was disturbing, but kept working. "I think this is a back entrance," she informed unnecessarily. Sai wouldn't have known the difference, but if this was really the entrance, it wouldn't have been literally buried.
'I'm so good that I found the super-hidden secret entrance,' her mind crowed, doing the mental equivalent of a fist pump.
Her arm and shoulder muscles shook with the effort of prying up the trap door once she finally got her fingers around the edge. Thankfully, she'd managed to find the hinge side first at least, as demonstrated by the way that it wiggled a little. Sai bent by her side and forced his fingers under the door as well. It came up much more easily with two people working on it, hinging upwards with a horrible scraping sound.
Nose twitching, Aiko whipped her mask up and covered her face with her elbow to catch the three petite sneezes that welled up involuntarily at the rust particles that tickled her nose.
"That hasn't been opened in a long time," she wheezed a little, backing away slightly and shaking her head. Ugh. This was the worst part of training as a scent tracker. You were much more sensitive to problems like that. She got the sense that Sai was growing impatient, so she hurriedly enjoyed the sensation of wind on her face for a moment before she dutifully pulled her mask back down and took one final sniff over the entrance. "Looks like a straight drop. There's only one thing to do, then." Her companion straightened in alarm, but she was already jumping agilely into the opening, arms curled in front of her chest and legs bent to soften her landing.
The preparation was unnecessary. The entrance was low enough overhead that she could leap up unassisted. That made sense, if this was really an emergency exit of some sort. She saw a blur, and then Sai was straightening at her side.
Alarmed, she looked up in time to see that the trap door had slammed shut, leaving them in complete darkness. Aiko fidgeted. Probably should have seen that coming. "Well, we'll find another way out," she sighed. "Keep an eye out. There's bound to be some sort of lighting system down here. The electricity might still be running, since any generator in the water won't have been disabled as far as we know. Even if it's not, there's going to be something we can light."
Her words might have been prophetic, because feeling her way along the wall revealed a light switch. 'Much better.'
It was a bit dim, but the light led her to another switch, and another, and the combined light sources gave a clinical brightness to the facility they found themselves in.
Their entrance had been in a storage area. Gingerly, Aiko pulled up sheets and tugged open boxes, but all that she found was uninteresting to her.
The lab equipment was probably forbiddingly expensive, but she didn't even have the knowledge to imagine what half of it was for. Aiko heaved a put-open sigh. "There's bound to be something more interesting around here." Sai wordlessly set down the machine he'd been examining and followed her out into the hallway they'd already lit. With a shrug, she turned to the left. Without knowing the layout, all she could do was guess and check every doorway.
"Jackpot?" she asked sarcastically when the second door they opened turned out to be a laboratory of some sort.
"Poisons research," Sai confirmed blandly, carefully not touching any of the dusty beakers. "I imagine all this was abandoned when Orochimaru died and his replacement apparently decided to commit his efforts to war instead."
"Probably for the best." Dust swirled around her ankles as she searched the area. "Records would be nearby so they could use them, right?"
He wasn't a medic nin of any sort either, so Sai's guess wasn't any better than hers. The first two doors were supply closets, but the third revealed a small office of some sort with a bookshelf full of notes, organized by experiment number.
Aiko pulled open the first of her prepared scrolls while Sai handed her reports, sealing the largest piles that she could into each individual seal in the scroll. It would be too ridiculous to set it so that an entire library flew out into Danzo's face when he tried to open it, but she was hardly about to spend the time sealing each notebook individually.
'It would be funny to have this literally explode in Danzo's face, but I'll have to settle for it doing that figuratively.'
If she saw something that she wanted, she would take it. If she saw something that was too dangerous to allow in Danzo's hands, she would destroy it. But he didn't have the facilities to carry on these types of experiments, and they were a bad thing to be caught holding. Having them in his possession would prove to Tsunade that he had been involved with Orochimaru.
Danzo actually had been involved with the criminal, of course. Orochimaru had been the one to give him his Sharingan implants. No one else from Konoha could have done such a thing, aside from Tsunade, who would have remembered giving Danzo unethical augmentation surgery. But it would be salt in the wound for Tsunade. At this point, Danzo deserved what he would get.
When that library was cleared out, they closed the door behind them and carried on. The next few areas were useless to them, either small training facilities or barracks. Clearly, living conditions had been less than fabulous under Orochimaru. The nearby kitchen was a mess. Someone had abandoned it without doing the dishes.
Sai caught her twitch towards the sink. His amusement was enough to remind her to steel herself. Since she couldn't clean the filth, Aiko instead hurried out of the room, eager to turn her back on the unpleasant mess.
An oversized set of doors led down a hallway with only one suite of rooms attached. It was of far higher quality than the other rooms seen so far, clearly designed for comfort. Aiko ran the pads of her fingers along the blue sheets to confirm that they were indeed silk.
"Orochimaru appears to have had a taste for the finer things in life," she remarked blandly, wiping the dust off onto her pants.
"Over here." She flickered to Sai's side with a reflexive Hiraishin. Luckily he hadn't been looking at her when she accidently displayed that she had tagged him. The small office attached to the bedroom was enough to occupy his attention.
It was nice, but functional. Aiko had to wince at the seven bookshelves and chose to poke through the desk first. "Nice pens." She tossed the writing implements onto the floor and tugged out the false bottom in the flat drawer, surreptitiously tagging it with a seal as she let it drop. 'Might need a quick escape later. If push comes to shove, I can find the trap door from here and blast it open.' The drawer hit the ground with a clatter that Sai no doubt disapproved of, but it wasn't as if they had to hide the signs of their presence. If anyone was around they would kill them. If no one was around, then the only ones who would see would be the Root operatives that would no doubt follow up on their mission to secure the area as a safehouse.
"Boring." She set the financial reports she'd found back down to free up her hands to open another sealing scroll, stuffing them inside. May as well bury Danzo in paperwork.
Aiko glanced at titles as she hastily stored the rest of the available materials, scanning for anything of interest. Her mind was nearly numb when she first encountered the first thing that piqued her interest. Without missing a beat, she unrolled a fourth scroll and sealed the jutsu scroll inside as if she'd merely run out of room in her last one or was making another sorting categorization.
Sai wasn't paying attention to her anyway, busy as he was indiscriminately dumping the contents of his own bookcase into a scroll. The lack of finesse brought a smile to her face.
'I hope Danzo likes having an entire library leap up and smack him in the face.'
The word Uchiha caught her eye. Proof about Danzo's involvement in the massacre, perhaps? Aiko scanned the document… and felt sick to her stomach.
'Wow, I'm glad Orochimaru died when he did.' She swallowed hard, face pale. 'He must have had excellent spies in the hospital. I don't think that anyone was told about her.'
There was the option of putting it into the scroll she meant to steal. But there was always the chance that Sai would confront her and she would be forced to hand that scroll over. This absolutely could not fall into Danzo's hands.
Without swiveling to see if Sai was looking, she crumpled the paper in her hands and lit it on fire with the spark jutsu meant to start campfires.
"Washboard?"
She glanced at her curious companion and continued working without a word. Let him make of that what he would. She couldn't risk bringing proof to Danzo that there was more than one Uchiha in Konoha. Sasuke would never forgive her, even if she could stomach the thought of letting Danzo get his claws on another child.
Sai might tell Danzo… but what would he say? That she burnt a paper he didn't see? He would be conflicted. It could have been unimportant, and he wouldn't want her killed over potentially nothing, when the information was gone already.
After that, her comrade kept a closer eye on her. She didn't avoid using the scroll that she meant to take. It would be more suspicious than likely to help her. Reports on Danzo himself, other people that Orochimaru had determined to be of interest, and a couple other jutsu scrolls that Orochimaru must have picked up after leaving Konoha went into her scroll. Every time that Sai turned around she switched out more scrolls, moving their positions and adding new ones to ensure that he couldn't know she was putting books of interest in one scroll or even how many she was using. When her scroll hit capacity, she slipped it into her hip pouch and kept going. Anything of interest she found after that would have to go to Danzo.
He ended up getting a few jutsu scrolls, but that was fine. Orochimaru was famous for attempting to learn all possible jutsu, so it made sense that he would have had reading material of that sort in every hideout he had a room. Danzo might have actually been suspicious if none of that had come in what he received. Luckily, she didn't see anything that looked particularly close to what she wanted to keep out of Danzo's greedy paws.
For the moment, she didn't care if Danzo managed to make his Root stronger by setting up footholds in Orochimaru's old bases. He could gather up all the useless data he wanted, waste his time trying to piece through Orochimaru's paperwork and further implicate himself with sensitive information for all she cared. Given opportunity, he would probably overextend himself and damage his own ability to counter her or Tsunade by distracting himself.
What she didn't want was for him to improve his position. Orochimaru was the kind of man who would have plenty of useful contacts, many of whom would have been obtained through leverage like blackmail. He had certainly kept such information on Danzo, though she couldn't hope to confiscate that. The Root commander would be looking for it.
She'd done what she could to prevent him from gaining more leverage, though. It would have to be enough. The filled documents went into her hip pouch and the little knapsack that Sai carried, leaving them little room for anything else.
"We've found more than I anticipated." Aiko frowned worriedly at the empty room. "That was probably the most important cache, but if there's more, we'll have to come back for it. I only have one more scroll, and it's half-full."
"We shall have to return. Danzo-sama will be pleased."
Her lips thinned. "Yes, he will," she agreed blandly. "Let's find our way out."
Since the path they'd initially taken had come to a dead end with Orochimaru's quarters, they backtracked all the way to the first hallway and continued on. Barracks, washroom, office, lounge… Aiko stopped, sniffing the air like a hound.
"Is something wrong?"
"I smell fresh air," she confided lowly, a hand twitching towards the hilt of her blade.
Sai seemed puzzled. "Is that not a good thing?"
She shook her head, turning her stride into a silent prowl that hugged the edges of the hall. "It would be far fainter if the entrance was sealed. Someone else has been here." Her quiet tones seemed to put him on guard as well. The warning her senses had provided were invaluable, because the other shinobi stalking the halls were silent as well, chakra signatures obscured by one of their party members. There was a moment of silence when the first man turned the corner of the corridor ahead of them, his eyes widening as if in slow motion.
'Rock shinobi,' her mind catalogued at the sight of his unscratched headband. It was kill or be killed. Even if their countries had been allies, there was a good chance that they would try to kill her to protect this potential resource.
His mouth was opening and a smaller foot had just appeared around the corridor when she was already tossing the sole Hiraishin kunai she had packed at his gut. He dodged to the side, but she'd already snatched her weapon out of the air and stabbed deeply into his kidney, fiercely tearing a four inch gouge towards his spine and pulling it out even as she moved to hit the woman who had followed him around the turn.
The kunoichi reflexively blocked, but it only took a touch for Aiko to plant a trapped seal on her forearm and rubber band past her to the—oh lord, there were three more of them. The first man was heavily wounded, but she and Sai would have to take the rest of them down fast and hard. Sai was suddenly at her side parrying an oversized blade coming in from above as a tall shinobi swung it off his back, so Aiko ducked down under and broke free of the cluster to flip around with a leap that left her hanging in the air for a moment.
The two men at the back were turning to face her. One of them didn't have a rock headband at all. A Sound traitor who'd led them here, perhaps? A good sign that Rock couldn't find this on their own. When this team never returned, management would assume that they'd been betrayed by the outsider.
The woman she'd tagged earlier had dropped to her knees to lay green glowing hands on her wounded teammate. The medic, then.
The analysis only took a moment.
'This seems like an excellent time to try that old idea.' Aiko gave an involuntary grin as she holstered her kunai, stretching her lips wide to bare her teeth even as she reached out and violently snapped the array tentatively holding her recently planted Hiraishin seal together.
Her victim's arm exploded like she'd dipped it in C4, ripping apart the medic's other arm, her face, and the back of the man she was trying to heal. Blood and organ spatter coated the walls and the backs of the four men in the hallway.
'It works!' She let out a loud laugh, tapping down on the floor and shooting forward to duck back into the mob. 'Whoa. That was more impressive than expected. That means I only have to touch someone once in order to end them.'
"You bitch!" the tallest man shrieked, white-eyed and furious. He abandoned his fight with Sai to turn towards her, ready to pull his sword free and bring it in a clothesline twist to cut her in half. It was a mistake. The other Root agent slipped his short sword from under the man's oversized weapon and cut out his throat in a flash, pulling it out and zipping in to slice through his torso three times before the corpse fell like the lump of flesh it was.
Aiko had already been distracted exchanging blows with the two survivors before the third casualty hit the floor, pushed back. Frantically, she swerved and stepped around two different sets of blows. If she'd had the time, she would have been thanking every kami for her speed. The first man was wielding what looked like Sarutobi Asuma's short chakra enhanced blades. He must have been a wind user as well, because backing away from the first blow that came too close wasn't enough to avoid the hit.
"Ah!" She bent over involuntarily, one arm curling around her torso to protect it from further damage, using her left to deflect the next blow and quick-stepping backwards to gain some distance. Most of the technique had scraped ineffectually across her armor, but the edge had sliced into her side and bit into her back when she'd twisted to back away.
This was bad. She was blooded, and she couldn't tell what exactly had been damaged until she had a moment to examine it. The more that she moved, the faster that she would bleed. It was also likely to exacerbate the damage.
'I have to end this, now, or I'll be dead.' Aiko gritted her teeth against the pain and caught the next arm that entered her personal space, ignoring the ugly slice the wind blade gouged into her arm, nearly sending a huge flap of skin flopping off and exposing muscle tissue. Her fingers lightly squeezed his wrist in reflexive reaction to the pain, but she'd already set the explosive seal on the top of his arm where her fingers almost met her thumb. Big wrists. She leapt away, letting the force rip her hand off his arm since she couldn't quite communicate with her muscles to adjust her grip, and detonated her new explosive toy with less force than last time to save her own limbs.
The unmarked shinobi was left blinking at the stub where his arm had been, mouth gaping. His last companion was already closing the distance. She pulled her short blade off her back to block his blow—but let her arm fall so that the blade nearly touched the floor.
There was no point. Sai had already severed his head and swung around to stab his blade into the one-armed man's back and drag it slowly down to his hip. Stupidly, he blinked down at the tip protruding from his stomach before his knees gave out.
In the sudden quiet, Aiko noticed for the first time that she appeared to be leaking red liquid at an alarming rate. Mildly concerning.
"Are you alright?"
"I'd be better if he hadn't lost control of his bowels," Aiko reflexively joked back, before tentatively trying to straighten. She cringed, losing hold of her own blade and nearly wobbling to her knees. White pressed against her vision. "I've been better," she allowed after a moment, painstakingly sheathing her blade on her back again. Now that she'd stopped fighting for her life… "I think I need medical attention. I don't suppose you have a field medicine kit?" she asked dryly, trying and failing to twist to see the wound. She ended up running her fingers over her wound to examine it as best as she could without a mirror. "I don't carry one."
Cold fingers gently pulled apart her ripped shirt to peer at the exposed skin around her armor's fasteners. "No. I am not certified."
"I take it I'm not about to die?" Aiko asked dryly when it seemed that he wasn't going to offer comment on his own.
"It's not deep. Perhaps an inch or so at the entry point. Can you make it to a more secure location?" Sai hovered at her side uncertainly.
'I have to.'
Aiko nodded and awkwardly held her flesh together, steeling herself to continue walking. If she'd managed to fight, she could keep moving. The group they had encountered had apparently just entered the facility, making it easy to trace their way out to the source of the fresh air and faint light. They'd been in the darkness for longer than she had realized. It was evening.
"We're a fifteen minute run from the small village," Sai informed unnecessarily, hand twitching to her shoulders.
The girl shook her head, considering their situation as best as she could. "We can't go there. If those guys have back-up, they'll be there."
"You cannot run two hours to the other town, and I cannot carry you that far," Sai protested, actually managing to sound somewhat upset. "Use your Hiraishin to return to Konoha for medical attention."
'He must be upset to think that's a viable solution.'
"I can't explain this," Aiko said dryly, gesturing to her Root uniform and injuries with her free hand. "This uniform would raise questions, but so would showing up naked, our other option. Are there medics in Root?" As if it would help, she pushed her mask up onto the top of her head. After a moment, Sai copied her.
"There are, but getting to one in such a condition will be a problem as well."
"Well, we don't have much choice." Aiko sighed, rubbing a hand over her face and inadvertently smearing blood where she touched. "C'mere. I'll take us to my apartment. Just… give me a moment to catch my breath."
Tsunade might have been right about the initiative to put a medic of some level on every team, but it wasn't a good time to complain about lost opportunity. She sure as hell wasn't going to end up stuck as a medic. Generally speaking, it was a career ending move, or would at least reduce her to a support position. Fuck that shit.
A flicker of unpleasantly familiar chakra buzzed at her consciousness like an irritating insect when her comrade moved in close to steady her, and she moved to brush the feeling away. Slowly as she was moving, Sai was able to move back before her fingers lightly connected with his jaw and gave her an odd look.
'That was weird.' Aiko blinked quickly, trying to clear her head. 'Blood loss, or did I actually feel something? I thought it was…' Comprehension dawned. 'I think I was sensing Danzo's chakra signature in his Root seal. Kami only knows I should be familiar with it by now.'
Not something she really had the faculties to ponder right then. "Alright, hold on." It took more effort than usual to reach out and pull on the seal in her bedroom, but she got them there. Sai looked a bit ill at the long trip, but dutifully lurked until she managed to semi-steadily walk to her couch.
"How do we get a hold of a medic?" she asked, still holding onto Sai with slightly more force than was entirely dignified.
"We don't. I will."
Rudely, she blew a raspberry at her comrade, but didn't complain while he left. The scroll that was for her personal use was almost immediately hidden between her couch cushions and the others juggled so as to obscure the fact that the pouch should have one more. Hopefully, even if someone snuck around, they would discount such a stupid hiding place. She should have stayed awake to wait for the medic, but it just wasn't happening. Exhausted by a combination of blood loss, strain, and lack of sleep, Aiko tugged her mask completely off and easily drifted off into a state of bare consciousness, only waking when the door opened to show that Sai had returned with a rather large person.
"Oh, for the love of-" Aiko scowled, putting her hands on her hips. "You."
Sai blinked and looked between her and Shou. "Is there a problem?"
'Color me surprised. He didn't strike me as a medic at all. What doesn't this guy do?' Turquoise eyes narrowed at a rather uncomfortable-looking Boar. There wasn't any point in ticking off her medic, however. "Not at all."
Sai perched on the back of the couch and watched the medic work, working around the clothes that he could and removing those he couldn't, namely the chest plate. He was actually pretty good as a healer, all things considered, even if he did do a poor job of hiding his surprise when she pulled up her hair and inadvertently revealed her somewhat indecent tattoo of Tsunade.
"You're a brave woman," he commented idly, running a cool hand over her open wound with a tickle of chakra that she could tell was repairing internal damage, lacing together cells.
'Captain has a matching one,' she thought about saying. But it would be pretty unsporting to sell him out, even if nothing ever came of it.
Boar left as quickly as possible. It was impossible to see her back, but the ugly mess of her arm had been reduced to a silvery, near-invisible scar at the entry point. That boded well.
"Help me get out of this? I'd like to not wallow in bloody clothes." She'd probably rubbed a quarter cup of blood into her couch as it was. The stink was going to linger. Sai moved to pull her ruined top the rest of the way off, clinically pulling off the untouched glove to join the ruined one Shou had removed to heal her arm on the table. "Yeah, thanks. I can get the rest on my own," she demurred when he gave a rather hopeless look to her ANBU pants.
It would have been a massive pain to struggle with getting a shirt over her head from her seated position, but she could take care of pants. Cute as he was, she didn't particularly want to sit around in just her underwear, even if he was clinical about seeing her in her bra. The pants weren't cut or nearly as saturated with fluids. Changing may have been stupid when she would have to redress in a minute to go report, but showing up to report to Danzo covered in her own blood with half her back and waist exposed under a wrecked shirt reeked of vulnerability. A uniform wasn't much of armor against him, but it was better than nothing.
"Washboard? Why did you destroy evidence back at that base?"
Tiredly, she glanced up at him through her eyelashes. "I suppose it would be too much to hope that you'd forgotten." Aiko licked her lips, dehydrated but uninterested in going in search of a drink while she searched for words. She settled for honesty. "I was protecting someone precious to me."
Sai's eyes narrowed. "Someone… precious?" he asked slowly, uncertainly, sounding lost.
"Danzo-sama…" That wasn't a good start, so she cleared her throat to try again. "I don't like the way he trains and treats his operatives," she admitted. "Konoha needs an organization like Root to compete with other villages, but there's no reason to treat his people so poorly. He's wrong about a lot of things."
Dumbsmacked, Sai let his lips open slightly. He blinked twice. "I… see."
"Do you?" she countered, seriously curious. She'd laid her cards out. If she had misjudged him, this would end badly for her.
"I…" He licked his lips. "I." Obvious distress appeared on his normally opaque features. With the air of a tortured confession, the teen opened his mouth and let it hang for a moment. "I have had… concerns." Utterly miserable, Sai curled a hand into a fist. "Differences of opinion," he clarified, in a way that really didn't clarify much of anything.
Her heart melted a little bit. "Do you want to talk about it?"
He seemed to be weighing her up. "I had a brother once." As if that explained everything that needed to be said, he stalked off into the kitchen.
Aiko blinked at the back of his head. 'Well, that was cryptic.'
His voice seemed returned to normal when he spoke again over the faint sound of water running. "Do you need assistance getting re-dressed? We must report." He appeared again and handed her a glass of water, as if ordering her to ameliorate her blood loss by rehydrating.
Out loud, she said, "Would you go grab a replacement shirt from my room? I want to wash up as best as I can." Aiko drained the water with speed that would have given a medic apoplexy and walked to the bathroom with more effort than was usually required, eager to scrub up the worst of the crust on her arms and torso. Sai had appeared in the doorway with a new shirt as she was tossing two ruined green washcloths into the trash can. "Thanks." With a grimace, she pulled the shirt on quickly, as if ripping a bandaid. Boar was definitely no Tsunade, or even Sasuke, and she was definitely going to be even more sore in the morning.
Impatient, Sai tucked her chestplate against her torso and circled her back to secure it himself while she fixed her wig and mask.
'That water was a good idea. I feel a bit steadier.'
Still queasy, though, but that might have been because she was about to go report to a man who had already done her harm with a comrade who was clearly wavering on which one of them he wanted to do right by. If Sai told Danzo that she had destroyed something important, he might kill her on the spot. She was fast, but he was canny.
If she died in Root, there would be no justice for her. Tsunade couldn't acknowledge that association. She would simply disappear, or Danzo would create the impression that she'd died on duty or ran off.
Aiko took a deep breath, ignoring the quaver, and set out the door with her head held high.
They ran through the village as if they owned the place since hiding would be more suspicious in the light, blending in with a patrol at one point and having to exchange credentials. Obviously, she gave them her root verifications and not her regular or ANBU verifications. The information was all valid, but for an imaginary solder Danzo had put into the system with paperwork magic. Memorizing three sets of credentials was annoying, though.
After a while, she realized that they weren't headed anywhere she recognized from her Root forays. In fact, they appeared to be heading to one of the upper scale residential districts.
'Are we going directly to Danzo's home?' She scoffed at her own foolishness. Of course he didn't lurk in tunnels at all hours. It would be idiotic to just start checking meeting rooms. This meeting was unplanned, so of course he hadn't made an appointment and summons.
That lapse was enough to drive home that she was far from at her best state and prepared to match wits with the man who held her life in his wrinkled claws.
'This meeting could go badly enough even if I wasn't affected by blood loss,' Aiko thought bitterly. 'Either I have poor luck, or the gods are with Danzo.'
There was no mistaking the presence lingering and seeping from the inside of a conventional-looking home. Aiko belatedly resisted moving a hand towards her head, by now associating his chakra with pain. Sai's white mask swiveled to survey her for an instant as if he'd caught the twitch and wondered what it meant, but he led the way in through a back entrance. "Tell Danzo-sama that we are here for a debriefing," he quietly instructed the woman who came to greet them. From her graceful movements, she was a shinobi as well, and probably accustomed to those requests.
Aiko did her best not to look around at the surroundings with curiosity—or at least, not to let on that was what she was doing. If she had no other options, she might find herself creeping down these halls one day, and knowing the floor plan could only be beneficial.
Such a home invasion wouldn't be her first choice, especially since the area she was led to was clearly unconnected to his personal quarters. They knelt with bowed heads to give their report in a small office, but she would bet any amount of money that there was nothing of real import in this room.
Excepting, of course, the documents she and Sai held in their possession.
"Am I to assume that you are successful?"
"We located-"
"Not you," Danzo snapped at Sai's soft murmurs, cutting him off briskly. "I assigned the other agent leadership."
'What the fuck? That's strict chain of command for such an arbitrary assignment. Is he testing my leadership capabilities?'
Bleakly, Aiko began. As she spoke, the woman from earlier carried in a tea tray with a single cup and set it beside Danzo before backing out silently. "We located the former facilities at coordinates marked on the map given us for the mission. Inside we found and retrieved information in a laboratory and what appeared to have been an office maintained for Orochimaru's personal use, enough to exhaust our storage capabilities. Inside the base, we encountered and eliminated five hostiles, four of whom bore Rock identifications. I have left a seal so that we may return at a future date, and can provide a partial sketch of the layout."
"Rock…" Danzo mused, sounding not pleased at all. "I see. They grow bold indeed." After a sigh, he switched topics. "What type of information did you retrieve?"
"Medical reports on several hundred experiments and subjects, financial data from Sound's administration, several-"
"That's enough. Give them to me." Aiko rose just enough to unzip her hip pouch and lay out six scrolls onto his desk. At her side, Sai extracted a pile of his own and set them beside hers. Danzo picked one up and briefly examined it, rubbing a dry thumb over the soft material as if inspecting for defects. "I see. Agent codenamed Sai, have you come to a decision on your junior agent's performance?"
Her heart stopped. 'Well,' she thought with a tinge of irony, 'this explains why I was put in charge. Danzo was giving me rope to strangle myself with.' Unavoidably, her muscles tensed. If Sai was going to sell her out… She could flee to Kakashi and beg him to escort her to Tsunade immediately, tell her that the mission was a bust and they needed to make a move on Danzo now, that her extraction was unavoidable or cover was blown and-
"She performed admirably," Sai murmured, not raising his head. "in both a position of command and in locating the premises without assistance. Her combat is also passable. I recommend full instatement."
"Humph," Danzo grunted noncommittally, leaning forward slightly to examine her with a rheumy eye. "Very well, then. You may leave." Aiko lingered awkwardly—he was definitely just indicating Sai, but he hadn't talked to her alone since the first meeting. "Have a seat."
It felt like a trick, but she did as she was told, pressing her knees together to keep them from shaking. The swell of his chakra was bothering her so much that it seemed insane that she had never noticed it this way before. It felt sick, bloated, tainted. He was very ill, though whether she was registering a physical or mental illness impossible for her to discern. She would never forget it. It might be that she was developing better senses or just that she was overly familiar with his in particular, but it left a bad taste in her mouth.
"Calm yourself, child. I do not bite."
'Oh, we're back to the grandfather routine?'
Danzo seemed to use classic abuser tactics, though whether or not he realized that was up for debate. He engendered intense feelings like loyalty or affection, would give praise, and then likely remove his approval later like he seemed to be doing to Sai, making him desperate to work for stingily rewarded praise. It was a vicious cycle, but a very persuasive one.
'I hate him. I hate this man. He's awful.'
Outwardly, she relaxed her muscles obediently and kept a faint smile plastered on her face under her mask, as if he could see it. He might, for all that she knew.
"You are young," he began, as if imparting great wisdom. "Let me tell you about true strength. It is the way of a shinobi to break emotional attachment, for emotions lead to weakness in character and judgment."
'Thanks for the lecture, grandfather time. This is like the inverse of Kakashi's philosophy,' she noted with wary amusement, not letting herself dwell too deeply on his words. They couldn't convince her if she didn't listen. 'I'm getting the Danzo version of 'welcome to the team, let's get to know each other', I think'.
"Shinobi serve the village, working for the betterment of the most people and not selfishly clinging to the welfare of a few. Passion only begets pain," the old man stressed firmly, fingers turning white as he clutched a small wooden token she couldn't quite make out.
'My name is Danzo', she mocked internally, pulse jumping. 'My hobby is lurking and coming up with new ways to put the 'fun' in 'orphan'. My dislikes are free will and the creeping realization that I am inferior to my old friend Sarutobi in every way. Also strawberry mochi.'
"And that pain will lead you down the path of revenge. It is no wise thing to form attachment, Aiko. When you live as long as I have, you see many comrades die. But those deaths are only a tragedy when they are wasted because of unwise attachments that cloud judgment."
Making fun of him was getting a bit harder, because something he was saying was resonating.
"Do you understand, child?"
"Hai, Danzo-sama."
His head seemed to shake slightly, but his eye was perfectly bright and clear when he pinned her with a piercing stare. "Take heed of my words, and learn from the examples of others." He took the single cup of tea and tipped it up to his mouth for a leisurely sip, closing his eye. "Your codename will be Sakura."
Her heart stopped. Everything stopped. But Danzo kept talking as if he hadn't just done the conversational equivalent of shoving an ice pick in her head.
"I hear you have been involved in diplomatic missions with both the Kazekage and the Mizukage. I would like a full report on their personalities and habits delivered to me when next I summon you. Excluding tomorrow, of course."
"Hai, Danzo-sama," came the wooden reply from her mouth. It seemed as if someone else was operating her body. It was trembling beyond her control.
"Very good then, Sakura, my girl." Slowly, the old man stood and shuffled to the door. He stood there for a moment. "One more thing. I made a small timing error in assigning you a five day mission. The monthly meeting with the large council is the day after tomorrow. I hope that you will make it."
The casualness in that statement rang false, but she couldn't bring herself to care that he'd been planning to keep her from any possible political influence until he'd determined her worth.
His kimono rustled lightly on the ground as he trailed out like a snake in the grass, but her limbs were frozen with lactic acid. It took a tremendous effort to will herself to stand and make her way out of the building.
'That code name wasn't an accident,' Aiko realized numbly. 'He's making a point. Sakura…' She gave a choked laugh, mindless of where she was. 'Is he saying I got her killed because I was too attached to Naruto? How could he possibly know I had any recourse to affect that outcome?'
Cold, hard logic sank in, but provided no comfort this time. No. He had been making another argument. He had been careful to wait to give her a code name until he had been at a certain position in the conversation, after having detailed how misplaced emotions were often a cause of weakness and death. Danzo had meant that to be a bitter blow, no doubt about it, a warning to harden her heart, but he had been making the claim using what he would think was an example she would be familiar with of a stupid, pointless death.
Danzo had been claiming that Sakura had gotten herself killed because she had tried to save Sasuke, and that she was the epitome of a weak shinobi Aiko should strive to be separate from.
That was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Sakura had been… soft, yes. She had been everything that a man like Danzo would hate. But she hadn't been weak. She must have been so scared that day, and rightly so. A hundred highly trained shinobi would have frozen in her place. It hadn't been weakness that had drawn her into a fight she couldn't win, against ludicrous odds. She'd been trying to protect someone she cared deeply for. That wasn't weakness.
And if it was weakness to try to keep your loved ones safe even when you can't see a chance for success, this wasn't a world Aiko wanted to live in. So it couldn't be true.
"Where are you going?"
Aiko blinked, registering that she was outside. That was Sai. Sai had waited outside for her… and she could feel Danzo's chakra clinging to him like a parasite, leeching off of his health and sanity and free will.
A shudder wracked her body, but the feeling of revulsion fled when Sai tentatively brushed his fingers against her shoulder. His chakra. She just had to concentrate on his chakra and keep herself grounded. "Pardon my lapse," she managed jerkily. "I was in thought."
He stared. She couldn't see it, but she could feel it.
"I would like to talk to you," he settled cautiously.
'Right,' she remembered, gratefully latching onto the distraction and trying to focus on that. 'He just saved my skin. He will probably want to be sure he made the right choice.' She managed a weak smile before remembering it couldn't be seen anyways. "My apartment, then?"
"That would be acceptable."
Aiko barely noted the trip home, pushing her door open and crawling mindlessly onto her bed with her full gear on, boots included. She positioned herself with her back to the wall, knees defensively pulled up and a pillow to her chest.
"Washboard?"
Oh. She blinked up at him, pushing her mask up and noticing vaguely that her palm brushed a strange wetness on her cheek as she did so. "Hai, Sai-kun?" Her mild tone seemed to unnerve him further, but she couldn't imagine why.
Visible hesitation was written in his muscles, but Sai slowly removed his own mask and gently took hers off her head, laying them both on her bedside table. "May I ask why you are upset?"
It wasn't like her at all to share what was really going on in her head without carefully planning and packaging the words for her audience, but she was too tired for that now. "He gave me my code name," Aiko confided blandly. "Sakura."
He looked mildly concussed. It was probably his version of confusion.
"That's the name of a genin I got killed," she explained conversationally. "Naruto and Sasuke's teammate. Sweet girl."
If it were possible to him to scream the words, 'I feel trapped and uncomfortable and do not know how to rectify this unpleasant sensation without violence, but I sense that killing you is not the appropriate answer' without words, that would be the best way to sum up the conflict written in the way that he carefully did not breathe or twitch. It was like he expected her to pounce, or start sobbing.
"I hate him. He fucks with my head. Did I tell you he used a genjutsu on me, the first time I met with him? I found out a few days ago. It'd been affecting my behavior." The words just wouldn't stop coming, bland and factually impersonable. Was this what it was like to be Naruto? What it was like to be honest and open? It was awful. "It hadn't been meant to come off. Either he thinks I'm disposable and doesn't mind damaging me, or he didn't know what he was doing. I'd already begun experiencing migraines, inability to sleep, and personality changes. Was that the point?"
"Washboard, stop."
She stopped.
Tentatively, Sai sat down on the bed, keeping a careful distance and a nonthreatening posture.
'I want a hug,' she realized with open misery. 'A hug and someone to tell me it's going to be better.' Sai was far too broken for that. He was making huge changes as a person, growing and evolving and doubtlessly going to become a far better human being than she could hope to be, but he was not capable of offering her comfort of his own initiative.
So she took it, leaning in and pulling her arms around his torso, and just tried to stop thinking for once in her life. After a long moment, thin fingers laced through her hair and trailed down to rest on her upper back uncertainly.
"I'm sorry. I just made this all about me, didn't I," she choked out a laugh, pulling backwards. "What did you want to talk about?"
"Nothing," he said softly, looking down at his hands. "Nothing at all."