Chapter 46: Forty-Six
Chapter Text
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX:
Jiraiya refused to let them leave the room at the inn they'd been given until the start of the Chūnin Exams, scheduled for three days after their arrival in Kiri.
"Once the exam starts," he'd said, grim-faced, "they'll expect you to die anyway. Until then, there's no point in pushing your luck."
Sansa had conceded that he would know better than her and considering she wanted to return to Naruto alive she had followed his advice. That didn't stop her from feeling antsy, however, so she'd returned to old habits, pretending to meditate while warging into Kiri's wildlife to explore the village.
The situation in Kiri was just as grim as she'd expected from her short inspection earlier. There were no stray cats or dogs for her to warg into, only rats and the multitude of seabirds around the shores where the fishermen came in with their catch of the day, hauling in nets of squirming, silver-scaled fish as grim-faced shinobi guards lining the harbour, watching for thieves and ready to take the village's percentage of the day's work.
The people of Kiri, Sansa thought, scampering along as a rat that was barely more than skin stretched over bone, weren't just suffering the aftermath of a cull to their population. They were suffering the results of a war that had been waged on their own population.
And the fighting wasn't over yet.
Kiri may be trying to hide it from the world, but they weren't hiding it from the rats, from the gulls, from the tiny sparrows that flitted from rooftop to rooftop. Sansa watched and she listened, as the shinobi got drunk, got careless, spoke too freely when visiting filthy, rundown bars and brothels.
The Killing Squads were still being sent out. Shinobi from bloodline clans were still being hunted down to be killed. "Warmongers!" one member of a killing squad had spat, face red and bloated with drink and rage both, "they're nothing but warmongers!"
That did seem to be the reason behind the persecution that had led to the genocide; the efficiency of the bloodline users during times of war had led to them having a reputation as too powerful, much like Uzushio once had, and too hungry for a fight. There was a spiteful part of Sansa that felt no pity for them, only a burning, spiteful sense of justice served– they had reaped what they had sown, and just as they had once massacred her people for their strength and power, now they were being massacred in turn. But it wasn't just the active shinobi who were being killed, it was the innocent civilians and untrained children too.
War makes monsters of us all, she thought, almost grimly entertained.
There was nothing she could truly do, but she still let out a low, chittering keen when she heard the drunken shinobi talk about being sent out again once the visiting villages left before scampering off.
The wider, outskirts of the village were even worse than the inner village. Stone buildings were replaced by shacks that were little more than tar paper wrapped around rotting wood and people walked around dirtied, sagging and sunken, with gaunt faces and swollen bellies– a cruel symptom, Sansa knew, not of a good meal, but of a prolonged starvation.
There were no shinobi here, just the hopeless, the helpless and the forgotten. They were always the first to die, when a war was being waged; Sansa knew keenly the starvation that came with war, people busy burying corpses not crops, and watering the soil with blood.
Now warged into a sparrow, Sansa couldn't stop herself from flying down in front of a skeletal-looking urchin girl, collapsed on the ground and barely stirring, letting the girl grasp onto her bird-form with greedy, shaky fingers and snap the delicate bones in her neck. Back at the inn, Sansa gasped, jolting from her lax meditative pose and rubbing at her own neck, horribly disturbed by the remembered sensation, but glad the child would have at least one meal that day.
It was difficult, the conflict she felt warring inside herself. The people of Kiri were clearly suffering and there was a part of her selfishly glad of it, the part of her that mourned her own broken, massacred people and hated them for their part in Uzushio's destruction.
But there was the part of her that looked to the children, the young and the innocent, and Sansa knew better than anyone how it was when children were found guilty and punished for the crimes of their family.
She didn't want to help any of these people, these murderers of her clan, her kin. She didn't want to, she didn't, and yet...
And yet.
"I don't know what to do," she admitted to Mito, who sat across from her in the snow of Sansa's mindscape, the layers of her kimonos spread delicately out about her.
"I have told you," Mito said softly, sadly, "of how Uzushio was never a militarised village. War was never our way; we had a shinobi force, but they were not mercenaries, sent out to rob and spy and murder for a price. They were, at their heart, protectors– and you, Sansa, at your heart, are a shinobi of Uzushio. You are a protector."
Sansa felt tears well within her eyes at Mito's deep, unwavering faith in her.
"Tell me," she begged, "tell me how I can help these people."
Mito smiled at her, warm and soft.
"Sansa," she said, "oh Sansa, you have never needed me to tell you how to help someone."
And Sansa... she breathed in, breathed out, felt the mantle of responsibility settle over her, a familiar burden on her shoulders. "No," she murmured, "no I have not," she looked over to meet Mito's eyes, calm and certain once more. "But I do need your expertise in sealing."
Mito's smile widened. "Of course, Princess," she said, and there was a change in her inflection when she spoke the title she had given Sansa, a title she had never used before; a certain weight and a deference in her voice.
Sansa knew there was a choice Mito was laying out before her and when she nodded, she accepted both; the title, the deference, and the choice both brought with them; the weight of a legacy.
~
The second night of their stay in Kiri, Sansa slipped from her room in the inn. Leaving the inn itself was difficult, but Sansa had spent her youngest years slipping past her ANBU guard with a toddler at her side, then spent years training as an infiltrator; she evaded Jiraiya and the Kiri ANBU alike, making her way through the streets she had memorised earlier and not a single guard saw her.
Kiri didn't have an official Yūkaku, not in the manner that Konoha had, but it had its rougher areas, crawling with criminals, prostitutes and street children and it was these children that Sansa sought to find.
Just as she had once singled out Suzuki Tama, Sansa hunted down a leader amongst the small gangs that wandered the streets. She didn't have the time to truly establish hierarchies but to one who knew what they were looking for it was easy enough to find a child who seemed to hold enough sway over their compatriots that Sansa felt confident in approaching him.
The boy was scrawny with pupils so large they swallowed the whites of his eyes and two long, hooked fang-like teeth with needle-sharp tips and knifelike edges in place of his lower canines. He was about two years older than her and had a blade in his hand the moment he noticed her approach. Sansa moved slowly, careful not to startle him with any sudden moves. "I go by Uzu," she said.
The boy didn't reply. Sansa wasn't expecting him to. Instead, she knelt down, ignoring the filth of the street in her search for a stone the right size– she found a rock the size of a coin and picked it up, clenching it in her fist. Red light glowed between her fingers and when she opened her hands, a seal glimmered on the rock's surface.
The boy hadn't left yet, but his strange eyes were wary; his grip on his blade had tightened.
"Like this," Sansa explained, pricking one of her fingers with a sharp tooth and leaning forwards to press her finger against the seal which sparked red. A second later, a small flame flared to life. It was small, but it burned steadily until Sansa blew puff of air and it went out. She held it out the stone and, after staring at her for a long moment, the boy stepped close enough to her to snatch up the stone, his knife raised up defensively between them.
Sansa stayed still until he'd backed away again, disappearing into the shadows of the street.
Smiling to herself, Sansa slipped away too, returning to the inn.
She spent the next day with her team; Kabuto was completely absorbed in his medical scrolls and Chiyoko nervously sharpened all her kunai then packed and unpacked and packed her pack, over and over. Sansa 'meditated' again; in truth, she spent much of her time with Mito, going over the seals that would help the children survive on the streets– the most important, they'd decided, was a fire starter, drinkable water, and a source of heat.
When night fell, Sansa returned to the same street she had the previous night; this time, just as she'd hoped, she found herself surrounded by thin, hungry faces, all of them holding stones in their hands. It was only too easy to create the seals, to watch the children turn the rocks over with fascinated hands, tracing the lines of the seal with dirty fingers.
The boy from the previous night watched her the entire time with his sharp, strange eyes. Bloodline clan eyes, she had no doubt in her mind. He continued to watch her, until all the other children had left and then he nodded at her before disappearing once more into the shadows.
~
The morning of the Chūnin Exams, Sansa woke grim and ready. She dressed in her gear, strapped on her weapons, including Shion which she tucked up her sleeve, and tied the noose that was the Konoha hitai-ate around her neck.
She braided her hair back in the multiple braids style that resembled fish scales, careful that it was all tucked away in a tight, twisted knot, winding in the caltrops Jiraiya had bought her amidst the braids so that anyone who tried to grab the knot would get a nasty surprise.
Finally, she painted her face, Uzushio's spiral in its place of pride and her cheeks lined with bold purple. Never before had it felt so much like war paint as it did now.
"Are you ready?" Jiraiya asked her as she stepped out of her room.
"I am," Sansa said and she meant it.
She met Chiyoko and Kabuto outside their rooms of the inn. Chiyoko looked pale and nervous while Kabuto looked more blank then anything.
Momochi was waiting for them at the front of the inn.
"Took you long enough," he grumbled. "Come on," he gestured impatiently, and they followed after him as he led the way through the now, to Sansa, almost familiar streets of Kiri, back to the Mizukage Tower.
Jiraiya had been right when he said only the major Hidden Villages would send a team– and only a token team, at that. Apart from Konoha, only Iwa, Kumo and Suna had sent a genin team, and all of them had only sent a single team. Kiri, in comparison, had seven teams competing in the exams.
Sansa was easily the youngest present and she could feel the stares; all the villages were aware of the symbolism of the Uzushio spiral, but Iwa would understand more than most and Sansa made sure to meet the eyes of the three genin hopefuls from Iwagakure and their sensei, slow and blank-faced in a way she knew was particularly unnerving.
"Vicious little bitch, aren't you?" Momochi muttered, clearly having noticed. He sounded approving.
Sansa looked up at him, blinking innocently. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Momochi-san," she said sweetly, and he laughed, causing more than a few eyes to turn in their direction.
Any reply he could have made was lost, however, when a proctor stepped forwards to start the exam. "Line up in your teams," the man ordered. "You'll be called in one team at a time."
"Good luck," Jiraiya said, voice strained. Sansa nodded to him and swept forwards, chin high, not looking back to Kabuto and Chiyoko, confident that they would follow. They did.
They were the fourth team to join the line and were given the label 'Team Four' when it was finally their turn to enter the Tower. A guide led them to a door that led to a staircase and Sansa felt unease stir inside her as the stairs wound their way further and further down, until she knew they must be at least three levels underground.
Finally, they stopped and exited the winding staircase out onto an underground floor; a series of doors faced them, but before they could ask what they were meant to do their guide turned and left, returning back to the stairs and disappearing. Sansa and her teammates only had time to look at each other in confusion before three of the doors facing them opened and a Kiri shinobi stepped out each.
"If each of you would please follow one of us," instructed the shinobi furthest to the left and Sansa hesitated, her sense of unease rising. Jiraiya and Eri had been certain the first stage of the Chūnin Exams would involve teamwork, not an individual task. Nevertheless, she stepped forwards, following the leftmost shinobi, following her through the doorway into an enclosed room.
Sansa immediately felt her skin start to crawl. She knew what sort of room this was; underground, white walls, metal rings on the floor and ceiling– the desk they'd placed in the middle of the room didn't hide its original purpose, not from someone who'd spent days chained in a room just like it.
This was a cell used for torturing people.
Her anxiety at an all-time high, Sansa could barely focus as the Kiri shinobi instructed her to sit down at the desk. There were several sheets of paper on it and a pen. It was some sort of test, Sansa gathered, but she was too distracted to even think of trying to complete it, trying to fight back the panic clawing at her throat. The white was pressing down on her. She needed to get out of the cell.
The feeling of foreign chakra suddenly attempting to meld against her own was the final spark that set off the wildfire.
Just as Sansa bolted to her feet, ready to sprint past the surprised looking shinobi, to get the fuck out of the cell, she heard a scream.
Chiyoko!
Sansa didn't hesitate. She lunged for the door, and when the shinobi reached for her, to try and stop her, Sansa slammed her palm against the woman's wrist, seal blazing to life, leaving her to drop to her knees then to all fours, choking and spluttering as the pressure in the blood vessels of her lungs increased so rapidly it pushed the fluid into the lung tissue and air sacs until she was drowning in her own lungs.
Sansa could hear Chiyoko screaming even louder now and she didn't hesitate after dashing into the hallway, kicking open the closest door. It wasn't Chiyoko in there, but Kabuto; he was slumped at a desk, his eyes unfocused as a Kiri shinobi stood over him– and Sansa felt rage.
The shinobi spun around, but he made the same mistake as the woman, reaching out to grab her, and Sansa latched onto his wrist, a seal blazing under her grip. The man screamed as his blood boiled in his veins, dead before he even hit the ground.
"Kabuto!" Sansa demanded, frantic, reaching over to shake her teammate. Her panic was thick and choking, she could barely breathe. "Kabuto!"
She couldn't hear Chiyoko screaming anymore.
(She didn't think of what that could mean)
"I'm okay," Kabuto's hand was squeezing hers and Sansa realised her breath was coming so fast the world was spinning. "Breathe, Fuyuko-chan," he instructed, "I'm fine. It was a genjutsu." Sansa took a deep breath, then another, and she'd almost reached a state of equilibrium when Kiri shinobi started to pour into the room– and among them, the presence she'd felt the first day, the corrosive, salt-water-in-fresh-wounds chakra.
The man with the corrosive chakra was the one who spoke.
"What happened here?" he asked, his light purple eyes not leaving Sansa's own.
"My teammate had a bad reaction to your tactics," Kabuto answered calmly for her. "She broke the genjutsu cast over her and heard our teammate screaming. She responded as she should, upon hearing a teammate in distress while in what is potential-enemy territory."
"She killed two of the proctors!" Another shinobi exclaimed, sounding outraged from where he was kneeling over the corpse in the room.
Sansa still hadn't looked away from the man who seemed to be in charge. His chakra...
It was bijuu chakra, she finally realised. That was why it was so familiar.
He was a Jinchūriki.
"Well," the Jinchūriki said, "the test was supposed to see if the genin would give up their teammates under torture. Or at least, under a genjutsu that made them believe they were being tortured. Nobody here can truly argue that she failed, can they?"
"No, Mizukage-sama," the outraged man said, bowing his head, and Sansa's eyes widened slightly. So this was Karatachi Yagura. He seemed... younger then she'd expected.
And he was a Jinchūriki.
"Well," Yagura said again, an almost pleasant smile on his face, "we should be sending them on their way, to prepare for the next part of the exam then, no?"
"Yes, Mizukage-sama," the man said through gritted teeth, and Sansa could feel the seething hatred in his chakra, though whether it was directed towards her or his Kage, she couldn't tell.
Yagura turned his smile away from the man, towards Sansa. "Well done on passing the first stage, Onryō-hime," he said and Sansa felt herself go still at the moniker he'd given her. Onryō were vengeful, wrathful souls of the dead, believed to be capable of causing harm in the world of the living, of injuring or killing their enemies, of even causing natural disasters to exact their vengeance for the wrongs committed against them while alive.
Onryō-hime. It was a weighted name, and there was a certain amount of mocking attached to it.
She would make him regret ever giving it to her.
"Thank you," she said.
She didn't bow.
She didn't bow to those beneath her.
Yagura's eyes gleamed and he motioned for his shinobi to part, to let her and Kabuto through. Chiyoko was waiting for them by the winding stairs that led back up, her face pale and tight. The three of them didn't speak until they'd reached the open-air outside the Mizukage Tower, Eri and Jiraiya converging on them immediately.
"What happened?" Jiraiya demanded. "An alarm was set off but they wouldn't let us in, what did you do?"
Sansa felt it was quite unfair that he was directing that question at her.
"She killed two proctors and insulted the Mizukage to his face," Kabuto answered Jiraiya for her, his tone not changing from light and pleasant. Sansa looked at him, outraged.
"See if I ever save you from torture again!" she said, indignant.
"What!?" Jiraiya hissed.
Sansa grimaced, realising her folly. "I'll explain back at the inn," she said quietly, glancing over at the other teams still lining up.
"Yes you will," Jiraiya said darkly.
Explaining her reaction to the cell to Jiraiya, Eri and her teammates was... awkward. "I have spent an extended amount of time in a similar cell," was the most delicate way she could put it as she was forced to explain her panic in response to the room they'd been taken to, and she could see the dawning understanding on their faces, as well as the fury on Jiraiya's.
"My head was... not in the best place. I didn't realise she was trying to put a genjutsu on me, those don't work well on me, but I heard Hirai-san start screaming and... I reacted mostly on instinct. I tried to get to my teammates, to get them to safety. The proctors got in the way of that. Yakushi-san helped break me out of the panic before the Mizukage arrived. When he did, Yakushi-san explained to him what had happened. The Mizukage said that the test was to see if we would give up our teammates under torture– or at least, if we believed we were being tortured, which was the purpose of the genjutsu."
Eri hissed under her breath. "Of course Kiri would think of something that fucked up," she muttered angrily.
"The Mizukage most graciously decided that my... reaction was a suitable response to the situation," Sansa said delicately. "He said I passed and that we should return to prepare for the next stage of the Exam."
"Of course he did," Jiraiya echoed Eri's words, running his hands through his thick mane of white hair. "Fucking Kiri."
"Then he called her Onryō-hime," Kabuto said, because apparently he was a secret sadist, and Jiraiya's eyes snapped back over to her.
Sansa gave a slight shrug, despite how her chakra seethed, currents twisting and tides churning under her skin. "I've decided to take it as a compliment," she said with a lightness she didn't feel. "It doesn't quite have the same ring to it as 'Legendary Sannin' but I'm going to make them fear it."
Surprising her, Jiraiya nodded. "Own it," he said. "That's what Tsunade, Orochimaru and I did. We fucking hated Hanzo's guts, but we took the title he gave us and we made it our own, made it legendary in truth. You can do the same."
She could. And she would. The Mizukage had named her a wrathful ghost of Uzushio and she would show him just how wrathful she could be.
"How long until the second part of the exam?" Chiyoko asked softly. The older girl's hands were trembling slightly and Sansa was reminded that Chiyoko, unlike her, had been trapped by the genjutsu that made her believe she was being tortured. A wave of sympathy washed over her; she knew what it was like to be tortured and it only stoked her fury towards Kiri higher, that they'd dared to hurt her teammate like that.
"It starts tomorrow," Eri said quietly and Chiyoko nodded, looking down, her dark hair hiding her face.
Sansa reached out, laying a gentle hand on Chiyoko's shoulder and pretending she didn't notice when the other girl's breathing hitched, her body shaking with restrained sobs.
If this was just the first stage of the exams, she couldn't help but think grimly, what were the second and third stages going to be like?
~
The strange-eyed boy was back again as Sansa passed out seals that night. The children had brought her rocks again which she cradled in her palms, emblazoning with a simple seal that would convert the saltwater of the ocean to drinkable water. The children accepted the rocks with badly-hidden delight, even the roughest, oldest, worst-scarred of them.
There was a certain regard in their eyes now as they looked at Sansa, as their fingers brushed against hers when she handed over the seals. It was almost reverent; it made her uncomfortable, even as she smiled at them all, not bothering to hide her sharp teeth behind soft lips.
The boy's strange, dark eyes never left her and before she left to return to the inn, Sansa made sure to meet and hold his stare.
~
The sky was greying with pre-dawn light when they were woken for the second stage of the Chūnin Exams. A Kiri shinobi– not Momochi this time– arrived at their inn to lead them to an outermost corner of the village, to the foot of one of the mountains.
The Mizukage stood there, waiting.
It seemed only the Kumo team had failed the first part of the Exams; the seven Kiri teams, the Iwa team and the Suna team had all gathered, some shivering slightly in the chill.
"Welcome," Yagura said, "to the second stage of the Chūnin Exams." He smiled. It was about as friendly as Sansa's own smiles. There was no warmth in his pale purple eyes. "For this task, imagine you are running a mission in enemy territory. Every team you come into contact with is an enemy that you cannot allow to alert their village of your presence. You will all have a token. If you see and defeat a team, you can take their token. If a team sees and defeats you, they can take your token."
Here, his smile widened. "You may defeat the enemy teams in any manner you see fit. This is a survival exercise. If you survive three days in these mountains, you may return to these gates and you will be allowed through. If you try entering before those three days, you will be turned away. You must have a token at the end of three days to pass this stage."
A Kiri shinobi came around, handing out tokens. Chiyoko accepted theirs with a hand that shook slightly and, as they were waved forwards impatiently, the three of them stepped through the gateway and immediately started running, aiming to put distance between them and the other teams.
After a solid half hour running they had to slow down, to make a plan for how they would approach this stage of the exam. The temperature had plunged the higher up the mountain they ran and the mist was so thick around them that Sansa could barely see her teammates in front of her.
"Do we keep moving for the three days, or should we find a defensive position to set up a camp?" Chiyoko asked, her face damp with sweat as she heaved for breath.
"I don't think it makes sense to keep moving," Kabuto said, after a moment of contemplation. "The Kiri teams likely know these mountains and we don't. It would be too easy for us to walk into an ambush. We need to choose somewhere we can set up a strong defence and wait the three days out."
"I agree with Yakushi-san," Sansa said and Kabuto smiled slightly, amused.
"I think," he said, "seeing as we could all die horribly in the next three days, you can use our first names." Chiyoko huffed a laugh and nodded so Sansa smiled slightly.
"Then call me Fuyuko," she told them, before turning back to planning. "We have enough supplies to get us through the next three days, so food and water isn't our priority," she said. "Higher ground is, though. I know seals that can help us set up a defensive perimeter once we've chosen a site, but we'll need to set up traps too– I don't know many, do you two?"
"Eri-sensei taught us some," Chiyoko assured her. "She likes using them– I think it's a poison specialist thing." Sansa, remembering their first team training session, winced in agreement.
"Alright," she said, glancing around. "We should keep going for a few more hours, to put some more distance between us and the gate– but after that, we'll set up camp."
"I think," Kabuto said carefully, "we should also discuss what happens if we are attacked."
Sansa didn't even hesitate.
"We kill everyone," she said flatly. "They'll take no prisoners and we can't afford to either," she added bluntly when Chiyoko looked sick. "They're going to be hunting us down. If we leave them alive, they're just going to come after us again. We can't afford to let them."
"She's right," Kabuto told Chiyoko.
"They're going to be coming for us," Sansa repeated, "so let's be ready for them when they do."
~
A/N: Hope you enjoyed the chapter! Also, if you've ever seen a picture of a payara fish, that's how I'm trying to describe the as of yet unnamed boy's teeth. Those fish eat piranhas, so you know they're badass.
Thank you everyone for your amazing comments! I read and adore them all xx