Infiltration
Respite
Naruto sleeps. And as she sleeps, she dreams.
Tides
In her dream, she lies on a seashore, her legs in the water, her head on someone’s lap. Gentle hands card through her hair, and blinding white sunlight pricks her eyes. She inhales deeply, smelling the salt and seaweed and something else, something familiar. She hears the rhythmic washing of the waves, hears birds cry in the distance, hears her own breath rattling in and out of her chest.
She squirms, struggling to open her eyes.
“Hush, Naruto,” says a woman’s, “don’t open your eyes.”
Naruto obeys. Instead, she brings up her hand and finds it tangled in long, soft hair. A warm hand covers her own.
“You have to let go, Naruto-chan. You can’t stay here.”
Naruto wants to stay, warmed by the sun, held, comforted. But the tide is rising around her, and her fingers are pried loose one by one.
“You have to go back,” the woman repeats. “Kakashi needs you. They all need you.”
Naruto starts to struggle, then, to move her unwieldy body. Kakashi needs her. But the waters are rising and the currents are dragging her away.
She wakes with a start.
Outside the Village Walls
Two weeks later, the Hokage summoned Team Ro to his office.
The mission was fairly simple, Hound had reassured her. There was an outpost along their border with the Land of Rain, which was producing and smuggling various goods through local villages and into the Land of Fire proper. The mission had been passed along to ANBU because of the difficulty in actually locating the outpost, not because of sensitive information or increased levels of danger; the outpost was thought to be manned by chunin and a few jonin. Nothing the rest of Team Ro hadn’t handled before.
Ten miles from the border of Rain Country, they split up. Separating entirely was a bad idea, Hound had said, but they could cover more ground in pairs. Since Naruto was the least experienced of all of them, she had been paired with Hound. Shisui had clapped her on the shoulder, Tenzo had wished her luck, and then they left her with the man she’d barely spoken to since her disastrous meeting with the Hokage.
Naruto wouldn’t sugarcoat it - it was awkward. Hound had cleared his throat, shuffled in place, and then announced that she shouldn’t do anything but shadow him silently, and that they would need to steal civilian clothes from a nearby farm.
Naruto could do both of those things.
By a stroke of luck, the family had decided to do their laundry today - and by another stroke of luck, had a daughter Naruto’s age. She didn’t bother with being stealthy, instead waiting under the cover of trees until all their dull chakra signatures had faded into the distance, working hard to deal with the harvest under the early autumn sun.
Naruto felt briefly guilty as she unpinned a faded yellow yukata and a dark blue obi off their washing line. She hoped that she would be able to come back and return these clothes - the yukata was old, but well cared for. The elbows have been patched, twice, and the seam had been let down more than a few times. A hand-me-down item, she imagined, maybe belonging to the mother or an elder sister before making its way to its current owner, and now to Naruto.
Back under thick tree cover, she self-consciously shirked her ANBU uniform for the stolen yukata and obi, and sealed away most of her gear. Like before, she slipped a single kunai into her obi, unwilling to be completely unarmed, no matter how unusual it was for a poor civilian girl to carry a weapon at all - let alone a ninja weapon.
She met back up with Hound at the edge of the property, near the main road, and did a double take.
Hound was still wearing a mask. Not his ANBU mask, of course, but an undeniably ninja mask. It made the rest of his ensemble - the equally worn yukata and trousers - almost irrelevant.
“You still look like a ninja!” Naruto blurted out.
“And you still look foreign. What a pair we make,” Hound sniped back. “Here.”
He tossed her a bandanna, and gestured to her hair. Naruto scowled but took the hint, wrapping her hair up and tying a knot in the front.
“There,” she said, “now one of us can pass for a normal civilian.”
Hound folded his arms over his chest. “I’m not taking off the mask.”
“Then you’ll have to pretend to be a ronin, or something,” said Naruto. “Civilians don’t - not even samurai wear masks like that. Just shinobi.”
“A travelling ronin with a ten-year-old female companion? That’s believable.”
Naruto tapped her foot impatiently. “Then what do you think we should do, senpai?” She tried her best to make senpai sound like an insult.
Hound glanced down at the ground. “It’s been a while, but normally, with kunoichi, they’d pose as my sister.”
It was Naruto’s turn to look down. Hound’s features - at least what she could see of them - were unusual but not unheard of, especially in the more northern parts of Fire Country. Most kunoichi he would have worked with would share at least passing similarities - dark eyes, or the more narrow faces and double eyelids common throughout Fire Country. Naruto looked absolutely nothing like him.
“We’ll have to split up,” she said, eventually. “I can tail you from a ways off, I guess.”
“Fine,” Hound sighed. “Make a fuss if you run into trouble, I’ll keep an eye out for you. I’ll be Yori. You’ll be Ume.”
Ume
Naruto - Ume - trailed Yori from a distance, all the way into the small village. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure they should have split up. Travelling with an unrelated little girl might be unusual, but that same girl travelling alone was even more so; she’d heard that in some parts of Fire Country, girls weren’t even allowed to travel at all without a male relative or a husband.
To tell the truth, Naruto wasn’t sure what they were supposed to be looking for. People who looked like them, out of place, she supposed - all shinobi must have similar problems trying to pass for civilians. She wondered if they would be obvious to her and vice versa, if she would be able to spot the kunai and shuriken they would have no doubt squirrelled away in the long folds of civilian clothing.
But then, that’s probably why they sent Team Ro, Naruto realised. Naruto could sense a shinobi no matter how convincingly they dress.
The town was small, she thought, as she tailed Yori. Scarcely more than one street, a general store, a small pharmacy, space for a seasonal market. A group of grubby children kicked a ball around.
And - there.
Yori turned to the brothel at the same time as Naruto, no doubt spotting the madam smoking a pipe on the engawa at the same time as she did. An establishment of that size, out here?
While Yori spoke to the madam - Naruto was too far away to hear what they were saying - she turned her attention to the children.
Slowly, scarcely feigning her shyness, she sidled up to the group. One of the older children - a girl, about her age, took the initiative.
“Hey there! I’m Nao. Do you want to play with us?”
Naruto nodded. “I’m Ume. I’d - I’d love to play, too.”
That was all it took, the children happy to fold her into their group. Naruto was mindful not to be too accurate with her aim as they passed the ball back and forth, scoring goals through a barrel laid on its side.
Soon, Ume was laughing with the rest of them every time the ball careened off, and she took up position guarding the barrel. She wasn’t faking her grin, and Ume cheered every time she saved a goal - nothing could get past her.
Soon, they had surrounded her, aiming ball after ball at her, trying to distract her with shouts and cheers. By the time they wound down, her companions were sweaty and uncoordinated. Ume didn’t feel even a pinch of exhaustion.
One by one, the children were called home, some returning to farms in the surrounding area, some sticking in town.
Nao lingered. “Ume? Do you have somewhere to go home to?”
Ume grimaced and shook her head. “Just passin’ through,” she said.
“The, um, ladies at the inn always need a hand,” said Nao. “They could put you up for a bit.”
“Thanks, Nao,” Naruto said quietly.
Hound stared at her from the shadows in the slant of the alley. If not for his shock of white hair, she might not have been able to see him at all.
Report, he signed at her, and she took the queue, melting into the shadows alongside him.
“I couldn’t find anything out of place,” he said softly. Whispers carried, but low voices wouldn’t. “You?”
“Kids seem normal,” she added, shrugging. “Nao said that the ladies at the brothel would take me on as a serving girl. I’ve done it before, it’s good work.”
“Find out what you can. We’ll talk more tonight,” he said, and was gone with a flurry of dead leaves.
Naruto made for the steps of the brothel - the madam had long since gone inside. It was late afternoon, not yet evening, and she could hear the sounds of life inside - a baby cried, two women chattered, and somewhere in the back, she could hear wood being split, no doubt to fuel the kitchen stove.
Lingering in the doorway, Naruto called out, “Hey, is anybody home?”
A middle aged woman, face painted white and red, soon appeared, holding her hands demurely in front of her.
“What do you want, girl?”
“One of the girls from ‘round here said you might have work for me, kaa-san,” she said, bowing in greeting.
The woman snorted indelicately. “I bet she did. We’re not that kind of establishment, if that’s what you meant, but we have work for idle hands. No coin, mind you,” she added, “we don’t get enough business for that. But by the looks of you, you could do with some hot food and a place to sleep without being bothered.”
“Thank you!”
The madam - Madam Yui, she learned - led Ume through the inn, to the back, where an elderly man was lugging wood through the kitchen.
“Nobutoshi!” the woman called. “I’ve got help for you, if you need it.”
Ume bowed low. “I’m Ume, oji-san. I’ll work hard, I promise.”
Nobutoshi’s eyes were surprisingly bright underneath bushy white eyebrows, and Naruto felt peeled apart as he looked her up and down.
“You look like a strong girl,” he said. “Come. Help an old man with a heavy load.”
And Ume did - taking the wood from his arms and to the fireplace. Nobutoshi showed her where it went, and sent her out back for more. Pausing by the pile of wood outside, Naruto reached out with her sixth sense. There was Hound, lingering not too far away, no doubt watching her.
Naruto spun around with a gasp, looking up at the upper floors of the inn. Eyes darting frantically back and forth, she searched the windows for the source of that - that chakra. Not much different from a civilian’s, in size. But intimately familiar.
Naruto caught sight of dark eyes and dark hair silhouetted against a window. But she didn’t need to see to know.
This woman’s chakra burned as golden and bright as her own.
The Kunoichi and the Whore
Naruto tried not to let her shock show through the rest of the evening, as she stoked the fire, chopped vegetables under Nobutoshi’s strict supervision, and ladled soup and rice into bowls.
It wasn’t like Naruto hadn’t felt unique signatures before - her jiji was practically unmatched, and she would know Hound’s blazing white chakra from miles away. But they weren’t like her. No one was like her.
Where other people burned green and blue and white, like gas flames, Naruto was golden. Where their chakra flittered about like birds, like the wind, Naruto’s flowed, syrupy and dense, along her limbs. Where others burned and sparked, Naruto blazed. She found herself reaching out for the golden chakra again and again and again, endlessly curious.
All too soon, Ume had finished carrying out tray after tray of food (much to the delight of the aunties, who had complemented her blue eyes and her manners). Nobutoshi had set aside three final portions.
“Take this one upstairs, Ume-chan, first door on the left of the second floor. Aiko’s son isn’t well, she’ll not be down for dinner tonight,” said Nobutoshi, already tucking in to his own meal.
Ume sighed. No doubt her own bowl would be cold by the time she returned - but she was lowest on the totem pole, here, and had to earn her place.
She padded up the stairs with the tray of food, and knocked on what she hoped was the right door. Inside, she could hear the faint cries of the baby from earlier. Aiko might not be able to hear her.
Ume slid the screen door aside with her foot, both hands occupied. “Oba-san?” she called, “I’ve got dinner for you!”
No answer. Ume poked her head through the door.
Aiko was clearly one of the more sought-after women, she noted, with a dressing room separate from a bedroom, cloth hanging on the walls to dampen sound, and a beautiful wooden dresser.
Ume entered hesitantly, placing the tray on the low table and calling, “Oba-san?” once more. There was no response. On the dresser, something caught Naruto’s eye, glittering as golden as she did, as golden as the woman in the next room.
She spared a glance for the door to the bedroom, and found it shut. Silently, guiltily, she padded over to the dresser.
It was a hair-comb.
Not just any hair-comb. Hollow-toothed, with a garnet set into its apex - the very mirror of Mito’s, down to the pearls and the delicate geometric patterns connecting each gemstone to its fellows. Her heart pounded. There was something, here, that she wasn’t understanding - something she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Something that connected the Princess Mito and the young kunoichi and the whore, tied them all up together in a knot.
Naruto couldn’t help but touch it. It felt exactly like hers, too, humming with that familiar golden chakra.
“ What are you doing?”
Naruto whirled around - and there was Aiko, purple eyes and black hair, practically vibrating with rage and fear.
“I was - I was -”
“Thief!” Aiko howled, surging forward and gripping Naruto by the collar of her yukata. Naruto heard footsteps on the stairs, no doubt coming to Aiko’s aid.
Nobutoshi and Madam Yui were the first around the corner.
“I caught her taking my jewellery,” Aiko spat, turning to the newcomers. “Teach her a lesson for me.”
Naruto’s blood was roaring in her ears. She wasn’t - she wasn’t a thief, she thought guiltily. She only took when she had to. When there wasn’t another choice.
“I didn’t take anything, I didn’t, I didn’t!” she shouted, pushing Aiko away. Aiko stumbled, and Naruto’s stomach twisted. She had underestimated her strength.
She didn’t even see the slap coming.
Naruto landed hard, sprawled across the floor, and a sob rose up in her throat. She brought her hand up to her throbbing cheek and it came away wet with blood.
Everyone was silent, she realised, after a moment. Outside, the aunties had stopped clamouring. Aiko was dead still.
“I was mistaken,” Aiko said, abruptly.
“Go on, girl, out,” said Madam Yui, “We’ll make no trouble for you.”
“No! I was mistaken, Yui-sama,” Aiko bowed to her, then knelt beside Naruto on the floor. “I’m sorry, the stress of Hirohito’s illness - I was wrong. Don’t throw the poor girl out for my foolishness.”
Aiko turned, blocking Madam Yui and Nobutoshi from her view. Carefully, she slid Naruto’s headscarf back down over her hair.