Chapter 28: Twenty-Eight
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
A/N: warnings at the end
TWENTY-EIGHT:
Sansa dry-heaved, feeling her stomach muscles contract violently even though there was nothing left to expel.
"I– hate– this!" she panted as Shin rubbed her back soothingly.
Inoculating herself against poisons was a miserable affair– not that this was true 'inoculation', so much as it was an exercise of proving her relative immunity to Root's sadistic medic-nin. As a jinchūriki, she had a natural resistance to poison which meant that instead of administering her with the normal, beginner dosages that all Root agents were given before slowly being built up to higher doses, Sansa had been started on the much higher levels of poisons– enough to kill several fully-grown men. It was agony, but the medic-nin had insisted that she be able to prove she could still engage in a fight after being poisoned, this being the latest in a long list of poisons, before dismissing her to ride out the effects in privacy.
At least she had Shin with her, and sometimes Koi. Inari-sama knew that Kaeru wasn't any help.
In the wake of Serena's death, Sansa had been assigned a new Root agent to be her mentor– Kaeru; frog-mask. Kaeru was physically older then Sansa, in her early twenties, and a perfect Root agent with not an ounce of true emotion left in her, though she was able to feign it perfectly when it was necessary for a mission, able to slip into different personas with the same ease that most people slipped into clothing. Sansa had wanted to dislike her, she truly had, but more than anything she simply pitied the young woman.
Training under Kaeru was a very different experience from training under Washi and Buta. Kaeru specialised in infiltration, spying, sabotage and silent assassination, and for the first time since she'd been forcibly recruited to Root Sansa had reluctantly found herself genuinely interested in her lessons on the more subtle, traditionally feminine shinobi arts. Learning how to disguise herself as a noble in the daimyo's court, or as an oiran or kamuro, or a geisha or maiko* was of far more interest to her then learning how to fight in battles.
Under Kaeru's tutelage the past two years, alongside keeping up with her skills in taijutsu and kenjutsu, Sansa had been trained in various skills associated with infiltration, spying and sabotage. Some she already knew quite well from her many lessons from Petyr, her time as a hostage and from ruling as Queen. Others she learned from Kaeru's dedicated tutelage. To her disgust, she was also taught how to kill– silently and efficiently, though to her relief the majority of the time she was made to practice on mud bunshin only. It was rare that she was forced to test her new skills on a prisoner.
Easily her favourite aspect of her new training, not that there was any competition, was the cultivation of her knowledge on the traditional arts of calligraphy, tea ceremony and ikebana, the classics of poetry and entertainment, playing the koto, shakuhachi, tsukumi, and shamisen**, and learning to play a decent game of shogi and go. These were all deemed necessary skills for learned, glamorous noble women, entertainers, and courtesans all, and considering the very specific skillset she was being trained in, common sense dictated that Sansa would need to pose flawlessly as them all.
These lessons in the traditional feminine arts reminded Sansa of her lessons with her Septa when she was a young girl learning how to be a proper noble lady and potential queen, and she wasn't at all surprised when she excelled; these were the sort of skills she had spent a lifetime learning to perfect, after all, quite unlike fighting and killing.
Her proficiency, however, had a notable drawback.
"How long do you think it will be before they send you out on another mission?" Shin asked quietly when it seemed she had finished retching and Sansa couldn't help how she flinched.
Missions were excruciatingly awful. Six months into her training with Kaeru, Sansa had been assigned her first mission. It had been at a tea house, in an almost ironic twist of fate. It had been a beautiful tea house; neat, clean and beautifully arranged, with a steady stream of customers all day. Kaeru had killed one of the employees to take her place using a henge and stage make-up both to disguise herself as the young woman, while Sansa played the part of the employee's younger apprentice.
Her role for the mission was to gain experience outside of the confines of the Root base; she simply had to smile and be sweet and earnest as Kaeru poisoned every single man, woman and child who visited the tea house that day with a delayed-acting, deadly toxin to disguise the one single person that whoever had hired them (Sansa, of course, was not given the details) did want dead. A single assassination hidden within a massacre. Sansa could barely keep the smile on her face as she watched a pair of young girls giggle as they tried to copy the elegant way their mother sipped her tea and smiled indulgently down at her children, knowing that by the same time the following day, all three would be dead.
Difficult as it was to believe, the missions had only gotten worse from there.
"Kaeru's been talking about my misstep during our last mission," Sansa said, just as quietly as Shin.
By 'misstep', Sansa was referring to when she had refused to kill her target when she realised the reason they'd been hired to kill the young woman who was practically still a child was because some idiot noble had gotten her pregnant and had panicked when the girl refused to get an abortion; Kaeru had stepped in to kill the girl when Sansa refused and Sansa had made the mistake of trying to stop her, pleading that they could just drug the girl to induce a miscarriage instead. Kaeru had responded to Sansa's pleas by knocking her out, completing the mission as ordered and then dragging Sansa back to the Root base where she was disciplined.
After the RTI training, discipline rarely involved physical pain as Sansa had become very good at disassociating herself from it. Instead, it involved genjutsu 'training'. It was called training because technically she was allowed to try breaking out of the genjutsu, but even with Kurama's help Sansa was appalling at doing so and the nightmarish visions of her loved ones, of Naruto, Torrhen, Robb, Raya, Asha, Argella, Galladon, Jainne, Arya, Lady, Tormund, Brienne, and even Shin, Kanna, Tsukiko, and Koi, all being tortured and murdered before her playing out over and over and over again were a strong deterrent against acting out of mission parameters, even when she knew the haunting visions to be false.
"And?" Shin asked, pulling her from her dark thoughts, and Sansa could see the concern on his face for her.
"And she thinks I've learned from my 'lapse in judgement' and I'm ready to start taking missions again," Sansa said quietly. "Even with the 'mistakes' I made in two out of our five most recent practices."
Shin frowned. "You didn't make them too obvious, did you?" he asked. "The mistakes have to look authentic."
"No, I did exactly as you said," she told him.
Shin excelled at subtle sabotage. Sansa hadn't told Shin what had happened with Serena, she couldn't, the seal didn't let her, but the haunted look she'd given him and Serena's glaring absence had spoken what she could not, and Shin had been subtly sabotaging both his and Koi's training since in an effort to put off the inevitable fight to the death between them. Sansa and Shin were both aware that time was running out for the pair and Sansa hadn't missed how Shin had started losing weight, looking thinner and more haggard. She was terrified for him, because she knew, she knew, that he would never kill Koi. He'd die first.
Which was why she had to act first. But try as she might, she still could not simultaneously shape all the necessary seals under her skin to disable the bindings. There were eight binding seals on her skin– over-kill, Mito had called it. Sansa could counter six at once now and Mito assured her it was extraordinary, that most seal masters couldn't manage more than four or five such complex seals at a time, but extraordinary wasn't good enough. Extraordinary wouldn't free her. Extraordinary wouldn't save Sansa and Koi, it wouldn't avenge Sakumo, and it wouldn't reunite her with Naruto.
"You're thinking too hard," Shin murmured and Sansa leaned into him, closing her eyes and rubbing her cheek against his as she inhaled his scent, the comforting scent of Pack… while it lasted.
~
Naruto liked the people Tama-neechan had introduced him to, back when he'd first gone to her for help after his Ko-ane had been taken away. Some were his age and some were a bit older but they weren't anything at all like the mean kids at the Academy. They taught him lots of cool tricks, like how to trip into people and slip his hands into their pockets and take their money, and how to play tricks by distracting mean store owners so his new friends could take their stuff, and even how to carry little packages in his pockets for these scary older men with colourful pictures on their skin who actually weren't so scary at all when they smiled at him and ruffled his hair afterwards.
But nice as they were, he liked Tama-neechan the best. Around him, Tama-neechan would drop what Ko-ane called 'street slang', talking all smooth and proper like Ko-ane did, her dark eyes serious and piercing as they bored into his. "It's not safe," she would tell him, "to be too clever or too strong. The streets and the shadows are not safe. Not for the likes of us. You need to be loud, Naru-chan. You need people to notice you without looking at you."
"I don't understand," Naruto admitted to her, confused, because that didn't make any sense to him. Tama-neechan smiled grimly.
"That's okay, Naru-chan," she said. "I'll help you."
And she did. Tama-neechan had made him tell her the names of all his classmates and then told him which ones he needed to talk to, even if he didn't really care at all about stupid Kiba or lazy Shikamaru or stuck up Sasuke. But Tama-neechan insisted they were Important, so he made sure to prank them both and, when she told him to, he made sure to prank his sensei too– he liked that much more.
He didn't like being loud in class because he got told off for being disruptive, but Tama-neechan insisted he be and when he told her he sometimes thought about being Hokage, Tama-neechan told him he should tell everyone about it, that he should shout about it everyday.
Sometimes, when the other kids in his class got mean about telling him to shut up and be quiet and called him useless, Naruto couldn't help but want to shrink back into himself and hide. When he did, Tama-neechan would hug him tight.
"People can only steal your voice if you let them," she would tell him, something achingly sad and wistful in her voice, "never let them stop hearing you. Never let them take that from you. Never silence yourself for them."
Tama-neechan bought him these amazing bright orange jumpsuits to wear which he carefully sewed the Uzushio spiral on the back of and Ko-ane's favourite wolf-teeth stitch onto the collar and hems in the same red as his sister's hair– Ko-ane had taught him sewing because she said it would be good for his dex-ter-i-ty, whatever that was. The jumpsuits were awesome and he loved the orange so much, even when his sensei groaned at the sight of them and the other kids pointed and laughed. But they all noticed… and Naruto thought that might be the point. Because they didn't notice what the other kids wore, but they always noticed his jumpsuits.
Time passed. Gradually, the other kids stopped being so mean. When he shouted about being Hokage, his classmates just rolled their eyes. When he pulled pranks, they just groaned and his sensei would sigh, "Naruto!" in a very exasperated voice. And Naruto finally sort of understood then what Tama-neechan meant. They didn't see him, none of them did, not really, but they all noticed him and they would notice if he disappeared like Ko-ane had.
Ko-ane...
The grief that filled Naruto up when he thought about his sister made him choke up like he couldn't breathe properly, made him feel all sick and yuck like he might throw up. Sometimes it felt like he couldn't get out of bed, it hurt so much, and all he could do was curl up under his blanket and cry into his pillow. Other times he would just run to their shrine and hide there, unable to bear to be around anyone else until Tora eventually came out of the shadows to carry him back to the empty apartment.
(The shadows are not safe. Not for the likes of us.)
Sometimes, Naruto wouldn't talk to Ojiisan, couldn't bear to, even though Tama-neechan said he must, that Ojiisan was the most dangerous man in the village. But Hokage-ojiisan was a liar and he was keeping Ko-ane away from Naruto and Naruto hated him, he hated him, and sometimes it was just too hard to pretend.
Ojiisan usually sent his shadows to fetch Naruto if Naruto wouldn't come visit him, or if Naruto had skipped too many days of the Academy, but Naruto had gotten super good at avoiding the shadows. They felt different from the rest of the people in the Yūkaku, so they weren't exactly hard to avoid. Especially if he took off his orange jumpsuit, trading it for ratty t-shirts and baggy shorts, rubbing dirt on his cheeks and wrapping a scarf over his bright hair the way Ko-ane had taught him, what seemed like forever ago.
Nobody seemed to notice him then. It was like he was invisible. It made Tama-neechan frown in worry, sometimes, but she knew he needed to be invisible sometimes. Because being Naruto was exhausting.
The scary men in the Yūkaku liked that he was good at avoiding the shadows, especially when he was delivering their packages. They also liked it when he used the burning red haze to snarl at people– it seemed to really, really scare people when he did that. It had made one man even pee himself! The scary man that Tama-neechan called Waka-gashira*** had been really impressed. He'd ruffled Naruto's hair and said Naruto was wasted as a shinobi, that he'd have made a great enforcer. Naruto wasn't sure what an enforcer was, but he'd preened at the compliment and Waka-gashira had chuckled, something almost fond about his face.
"You just charm everyone, don't you Komorebi-chan?" Tama-neechan had said fondly afterwards. Komorebi was the name she used for him when he wasn't pretending to be too-loud-too-bright-Naruto. It meant warm sunshine that streams through the leaves, because Tama-neechan said he was the only true ray of sunlight in Konoha. Naruto loved it. He loved being Komorebi. It was a freedom, a weightlessness, that being Naruto just wasn't.
Sometimes Naruto thought about disappearing into the Yūkaku, which really was a world of its own compared to Konoha proper, for good. He even thought it probably wouldn't be that hard to get out of Konoha altogether. Waka-gashira smuggled people in and out of the village all the time. Hokage-ojiisan said that the Will of Fire meant that Konoha was his family, but the only real family Naruto had left in Konoha laughed in the face of the "Will of Fire" when he'd told her about it– Tama-neechan called it useless 'propaganda', whatever propaganda meant– and Naruto didn't even know if Ko-ane was still alive.
The only reason he stayed was out of what little hope he had left that maybe, just maybe, Ko-ane still lived. He would never forget her and he could only pray to Inari-sama that he would see her again. But that hope was dwindling more and more as the months turned to years, and more and more often Naruto found his mind wandering away from Konoha, and instead towards the island Ko-ane used to whisper to him about, the island their kaa-san had been a princess of before it had been destroyed, the island Ko-ane called Uzushio.
But he couldn't leave without Tama-neechan. And he couldn't just disappear on her. He knew how much that would hurt her– not after she'd told him her secret, curled up together in her kaa-san's room at Madam Ai's while her kaa-san worked downstairs.
"I had a sister, once," Tama-neechan had told him softly. "She wasn't my sister by blood, but her kaa-san is one of the neesans here, so she was my sister in all the ways that matter. Her name was Anka– it meant colour of dawn because she had the prettiest blue eyes. But she stood out. It was too obvious that she had Yamanaka blood– her hair, her eyes, her mind... she was too clever, too bright, too good for this place. And then one day she was just gone.
"The Konoha Military Police Force did nothing, of course. They barely put any effort into searching for a bastard, a fatherless child of a whore. The Yakuza at least tried, but all they could do was confirm that at least she hadn't been taken by the skin trade. Which was... something, at least. It was more than Konoha ever gave us," Tama-neechan said bitterly and Naruto sniffed, wiping at his damp eyes as he shuffled over to wrap his arms around Tama-neechan, pushing his face into her tummy.
"That's why I joined the Yakuza," Tama-neechan told him, bringing one of her hands to rest in his hair. "They do what Konoha doesn't. Sure, they get a bad rap, but they've got proper codes, and they protect the businesses and the people of the Yūkaku if you pay them a protection fee, including the neesans of Madam Ai's and their kids, and it's not like they harass businesses into paying them, and they protect all the kids who work for them. They're not the good guys, I know, but the KMPF and the shinobi aren't either."
"Old Man Hokage is forcing me to be a shinobi," Naruto told her, using Tama-neechan's name for the Hokage, rather than calling him 'grandfather' as the Hokage had instructed him to, "but I don't want to be. Do you think I could join the Yakuza like you and be a shinobi?" He liked the idea of being part of an organisation that protected the neesans and their kids and the other boys of the Yūkaku. It sounded much better than the Will of Fire that the Hokage talked about, which seemed all great and stuff but was actually all lies. Nobody in Konoha proper had ever seen him or Ko-ane as family. And he knew they never would.
Tama-neechan laughed and wrapped her arms tighter around him. "Silly Komorebi-chan," she said teasingly, "you already are– what do you think all those deliveries are for? And Waka-gashira doesn't just meet up with any old runner; you can dodge ANBU– and that's really fucking impressive!"
Naruto beamed up at her, even as he leaned up to quickly rub his cheek against hers, his chest warming when she didn't complain or grimace. He liked that she smelled like him, like Pack. It made him feel less like he was just drifting aimlessly along, more settled in his skin. Tama-neechan scratched his head affectionately. "You're one of us, Komorebi-chan," she said. "Don't you ever forget that."
"Pinky-promise." Naruto said solemnly, holding up his pinky, and Tama-neechan smiled and hooked it.
"Pinky-promise." She agreed.
~