They debated a little over the differences between 'shinobi testing a seal' and 'testing a seal on shinobi' and went over the documents that we'd provided to prove that the seal really was harmless.
"I see," he said afterwards. "I believe I have a full understanding of the situation now. Is there anything else you would like to add?"
I tucked my hands flat beneath my thighs and waited. This was it.
"Despite the seriousness of the initial accusation," he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. "I believe this was not an incidence caused by malice or wilful disregard of our laws. However, negligence is still dangerous, especially when we consider the ways in which this situation could have gone. In that light, I am reducing this reprimand to a warning, though it will still be noted on your permanent record. In the next six months, I expect to see evidence that you acknowledge and understand the rules and regulations involving seal use and research testing in Konoha, and the reasons behind them. I charge the Nara clan with seeing this is carried out."
I nodded solemnly, though it didn't seem so bad. Actually, that sounded like I was getting off really lightly. I'd have to, what, fill out a questionnaire? Write an essay, maybe. I'd already looked up the damn rules.
"I'm also going to levy a fine, to be paid to the village in the next quarter," he finished, stamping the scroll and signing it. He handed it to mum, and the three of us stood and bowed.
Kofuku-oba sighed as we left the tower. "I thought we'd get away without the fine," she said regretfully. "But it wasn't too bad, overall."
I peeked at the scroll mum was holding. It was… well. It wasn't a small amount. It would probably have taken a Genin a good few months to try and pay that off, especially if they'd had other things to drain mission pay away. But… it was less than I'd been paid from my last big mission.
My last 'big mission' had been an S-rank; if it came out of my pay, I wasn't really going to suffer much.
Mum rested her hand on my shoulder, and tucked the scroll away. "You let me worry about that," she said. "Why don't we get something to eat?"
She nodded goodbye to Kofuku-oba, and we found a nice little café to sit and drink tea at. She even ordered me a plate of sweets without admonishing that they'd ruin my teeth, weren't healthy, or that it was nearly lunch time.
That definitely indicated she was worried, but since the hearing was over, I wasn't sure about what.
I drank my tea quietly.
"Hey, hey! It's Shikako's mum!" Naruto's voice broke the silence, yelling cheerfully across the street. "Hi!"
He dragged Sasuke along behind him, weaving through the people on the road like they were an obstacle course and he was being timed.
"Hey, have you seen- No, way! Shikako, you look different."
I propped my elbow on the table and rested my chin in my palm. "Really?" I asked dryly.
Naruto squinched his eyes at me; I couldn't tell if he was trying to glare or smile. Maybe both.
"We were totally looking for you," he said accusingly. "It's team training, how could you miss it?"
I considered. Then affected a very familiar drawl. "Mah, well, I had a very important meeting, and when that was over, I had to recover my spirit through the quick application of wagashi-"
"No!" Naruto hollered, sounding absolutely horrified. "You can't become sensei!"
He was so melodramatic. I let my lips curl into a smirk.
Sasuke rolled his eyes. "We didn't have training planned, idiot," he said, and elbowed Naruto in the side. "She didn't know."
"But you know now!" Naruto said, apparently recovering quickly from his shock. "So let's go!"
I smiled at mum. "It sounds like I have no choice," I said, slipping from my seat. "Can I go?"
She smiled back, lifting her cup. "Have fun."
.
.
"So what's with the…" Sasuke said, after we'd finished fighting, waving a vague hand in my direction.
I pulled a kunai out of a tree trunk, and examined it to try and decide which one of the boys it belonged to. I'd had to liberate a few from them at the start of the fight, on account of not having my own with me, but there were enough items in the training field that could be impromptu weapons in a pinch.
Being creative had been… fun.
I shrugged. "I had a meeting," I said, touching the pigtails a little self-consciously. I threw the kunai into the dirt near Naruto and started to re-braid them properly.
"Yeah?" Sasuke prompted, frowning at his new Fuuma Shuriken. His last one had been destroyed with Genno's traps, but this one's opening mechanism seemed to stick. It was possible there was some grit in it, or that the plates weren't quite formed properly. He'd have to sort it out before he took it into the field, or that could cause problems at the worst moment.
I thought about putting them off – calling it 'clan stuff' or just out right deflecting – but that wasn't fair. They'd asked. They were my team.
I gave them a short summary of what had happened.
"What?!" Naruto exclaimed, outraged. He bounced to his feet. "That's not fair! I'll tell 'em that you didn't mean to hurt anyone!"
I waved him off. "It's fine," I said. "Everything is sorted now. It doesn't matter."
"You didn't say anything before," Sasuke said, still frowning at his weapon.
"To be honest," I said. "I didn't want to talk about it. There was nothing that either of us could do to fix it. And… it just made me upset to think about it."
It still did, a little. I didn't like admitting that I'd made mistakes. I'd rather the whole thing was dropped in a deep hole and forgotten about, actually.
"Don't be upset!" Naruto said, switching from indignant to concerned. He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder and threw a slightly desperate look at Sasuke.
I sighed and threw an arm around his shoulder to pull him into a hug. "Thank you, but you don't have to worry. Just forget about it, okay?"
Sasuke was watching out of the corner of his eye, even if he pretended his attention was focused on the shuriken. He snapped it shut. "In that case; round two?"
I grinned. "Prepare to go down."
.
.
"I'm assigning you a B-rank mission," Tsunade said, after summoning Naruto and I to her office. "You'll be apprehending this man – Gosunkugi, also known as The Nail. He recently stole an artefact of some value from the Land of Tea's court; they're eager to get it back."
"No problem," Naruto said confidently. "It'll be just like the time with that weird teddy bear statue."
Tsunade looked like she was trying to cover a smile. "Quite," she agreed. "It's unlikely that the item is still in his possession at this point. Mostly likely it's been sold on the black market. If that is the case, we'll have to question him until we can begin to track it down again." She picked up the mission scroll on her desk and threw it to Naruto. "He's been keeping his head low, but we got word that he's been spotted in the Land of Stone. I want you to head there and track him down."
I hesitated. "Just the two of us, Tsunade-sama?"
"No, your third teammate will be here soon," she said.
I wondered who it would be. Apart from the team that returned with Naruto, Hinata was the only other rookie still in Konoha. She would have been a good choice for a mission like this too; it was more to her skill than ours. But either Shino or Ino would have been a handy addition, in different ways.
Turned out, even I could be completely blindsided.
"Hello," said the boy who stepped into the office. "It's nice to meet you." He smiled.
I turned to look at Tsunade.
"Eh?" Naruto asked, puzzled. "Who are you?"
"He's an experienced Chunin who's been assigned to your team for this mission," Tsunade introduced. "This is Sai."
She had to know.
She had to. There was no way she didn't know who he was – who he worked for. Not if she was assigning him to Naruto's team. Sure, it was Sasuke that had so far been targeted, but thinking that Tsunade wouldn't be equally careful with Naruto was missing the point.
Which begged the question of why? Why put him here? What was she hoping to accomplish?
And what was Danzo hoping to accomplish? Sai, in the story, had always been a double agent. He'd… what, been supposed to go after Sasuke? Or deal with Orochimaru? But that wasn't the case here and now. It couldn't be. So what was his goal?
Dammit.
There was not a single expression that gave away anything on the Hokage's face. I might as well have been staring at the carved mountainside, for all the good it was doing.
"Shikako Nara. Pleased to meet you," I echoed, bowing to Sai, and pasting on an equally bland smile. "I hope we can work well together."
"Yeah, yeah," Naruto said, and jabbed his thumb towards himself. "I'm Naruto Uzumaki, Konoha's Number One Most Unpredictable Ninja." He grinned. "I hope you're good. You're gunna need to be, to keep up with us."
"I am," Sai said, completely without any bravado.
Naruto faltered at that, just a little. He was used to people self-promoting, or being intimidating, but actual confidence was something different. But his smile came back full force in under a second. "Great. Let's go then."
"Tsunade-sama," I said lowly. "Since Sai has yet to be briefed… I assume that Naruto is the Team Leader for this mission?"
She'd introduced Sai as 'more experienced' after all, which tended to indicate that he would be the one. I just… well. I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him, as the saying went.
I didn't want him in charge. I didn't want him arguing that he should be in charge. And I really didn't want Naruto to fall into the habit of listening to him like he was in charge.
"That's right," Tsunade agreed. "Naruto could use a little more experience as a Team Leader. Though I'm sure Sai will be willing to offer advice and guidance should the need arise."
I bowed to her, thankful that that was one hurdle down. Now I just had to find the rest of the hurdles, before I could clear them.
Why are you here, Sai?
He wasn't supposed to show up for years. That meant that something was different, somewhere along the lines. I didn't expect that nothing would have changed after all this time, but… well.
He could still have been after Sasuke, in an oblique fashion, trying to get at him through us. But that felt like it was reaching a little. There were easier ways.
"How long have you been a Chunin, Sai?" I asked politely as we headed towards the gates. "You didn't take part in the last Chunin Exams." It was both an attempt to break the ice with small talk, and to fish for information. I wasn't sure if anything that Sai would tell me was true but… well. There had to be something.
"Two years," Sai responded and didn't elaborate further.
To be fair, it answered the question directly – it just didn't respond to the social cue to talk.
I couldn't tell if that was deliberate or not. My knowledge of Sai had him being generally offensive and insulting, with an added smile. It could have been pure social incompetence, but there had to be a factor of deliberateness to how often he had hit the mark.
"Oh yeah?" Naruto said, falling into step on Sai's other side. "Where did you take the exam then? It wouldn't have been Konoha, right? Since that only happens every three years." Naruto looked pleased with himself for remembering that – which he probably only knew because Idate had made a big deal out of it. But whatever worked.
"It was not," Sai said placidly.
This was going to be so fun. I could tell.
"So where was it?" Naruto persisted.
We spent much of the trip that way, pressing Sai for information and occasionally throwing out small, unimportant tidbits about ourselves so that it didn't seem like a total interrogation – or at least I did. I was pretty sure Naruto considered the whole thing a successful conversation.
It wasn't that I didn't like Sai, or that I didn't want to help him, or didn't think he deserved helping. That wasn't the case. If I could, I would have gladly welcomed him into Team Seven and had him at our backs.
But I knew that he worked for Danzo. And that made him dangerous to us. Until I could work out what he wanted and why he was here… I couldn't trust him.
"Do we want to set up camp here?" I asked, as the sun was starting to sink towards the horizon. "I don't think there are any inns along this way."
Land of Stone was an offshoot of the Land of Earth, wedged in the bordering countries between it and Land of Wind. It had been part of Earth Country up until the last war, when Konoha's offensive –read, the Yellow Flash – had devastated the border line so fully that the troops had had to pull back and abandon miles of ground including all the war bases and outposts. The outposts had been reclaimed by locals made homeless by the war, and they'd managed to cobble together a series of functioning villages and governance before Hidden Rock had thought to do anything about the place after the war ended.
Whether it was its own country, or a vassal state of Land of Earth, depended entirely on who you talked to – the Daimyo of Earth Country claimed it as theirs, but everyone else tended to accept it as a tiny, unimportant country of its own.
The fastest way to get there, by rights, would have been to head north-west from Konoha and cut through Land of Rivers and Land of Wind. Of course, that ignored terrain issues – the fact that River Country was basically one giant mountain range, and the fact that the desert of the Land of Wind was dangerous at the best of times. So instead, we were going to head to the north-west corner of the Land of Fire, cut through River Country there, and then head west.
It was a trip that would take us three and a half, maybe four days depending on how hard we pushed.
"Yeah," Naruto agreed. "Let's find a place to camp out. Man, I feel like I haven't seen a real bed in weeks."
He probably hadn't, depending on how they'd slept on the last mission.
We found a flat clearing with cover that we agreed upon, even if it took a bit of poking to get Sai to deem it 'acceptable'. It wasn't so much that he didn't like the place, it was just that didn't seem to recognise he needed to contribute an opinion after the Team Leader had made a decision.
"What, you don't like it, or something?" Naruto asked, piling wood together to make a fire. "We got cover, exits, and there's a little river down that way a bit."
Sai blinked. "I don't feel anything about it, one way or the other. Emotions are a hindrance to a ninja."
Naruto scoffed and crossed his arms. "That's a load of crap. How can you act if you don't feel anything at all?"
"I follow orders." Sai smiled.
I looked carefully at him. This was… okay, this was a lot deeper than I thought we were going to get so fast. Maybe not into why he was here, but the issues of Sai himself?
I sat down next to him, carefully casual. "You don't feel anything at all, Sai?"
"No," he said. "Why would I?"
I hummed and tipped my head back to look at the sky through the trees. Now how did I handle this? "Sometimes," I started. "It's easier to be like that. Emotions can be a hindrance to a ninja, but they can also be really beneficial. They might stop you from completing a mission, but they might also give you an extra reason why you should complete a mission even if it seemed like it was beyond your capabilities."
"What she said," Naruto agreed. "There've been a lot of times when I've been scared, but so what? My friends needed me, so it didn't matter that I was scared. The bonds I have with them, the need to defend my precious people, that was what made me really strong."
"Are you implying that I'm scared? I'm not," Sai objected quietly, calmly. "I just don't feel anything at all."
Not the right track to take, then. I reconsidered. There was something almost fragile about him, which I hadn't expected to see. Not when I thought of him as being so dangerous to me. But to bring this up so quickly, to reach out so fast to people he didn't know or trust himself…
Either Sai was playing us so well, or this was something that was so often at the top of his thoughts.
"Have you ever been hit with a flashbang?" I asked, keeping my tone a little detached so it didn't sound like a threat. "You know, afterwards? After all the light and sound has faded, you still can't see or hear, because you were so overwhelmed with it. It can take a little while for it to come back. Emotions can be like that too."
Sai tilted his head. "That would assume I once suffered enough emotion to render me 'blind'," he said.
"Did you?" I asked, still calm, still detached. It was an offer, not a push.
His eyes drifted towards his bag, but he said nothing more.
Naruto was watching us, arms still crossed, still scowling. But his eyes were trained on my face, and when I flicked my eyes towards the direction of the river, he nodded. "I'm going to go catch some fish to eat, okay? You guys get the campsite ready." He disappeared into the trees, before pausing to holler, "and make the fire!"
Maybe I should have left Sai to him, he was better at getting through to people, even if it normally involved shouting and punching. But I didn't really want to leave the two of them alone together.
Sai stood briskly and started getting things ready. I knelt down to fix the fire that Naruto had half way readied, and used a lighter to catch the kindling alight.
"It's okay, you know," I said quietly. "Whatever you feel or don't feel. It's even okay if you don't know."
"How could one not know?" Sai asked blandly. "That doesn't make any sense."
I gave him a small smile. "Feelings aren't always simple," I said. "Especially the big ones. See… for the two of us, right now… I could show you a stick just fine," I held one up, for demonstration. "Or even a tree. But how could I show you the forest? Or the Land of Fire? We're inside them. Maybe if we got distance, we would be able to, but right now, it's impossible."
Sai gave a bright, fake smile. "You really like to use metaphors, don't you?"
I laughed, and dropped the stick into the fire. "I guess I do," I said.