Intel
Before I Sleep
She’s choking. She can’t breathe.
Naruto retches, and chokes on the blood congealing in her mouth. A hand pushes her mask aside, and strong arms turn her over onto her stomach. Naruto vomits a stream of black, coagulated blood and bile. Her eyes are streaming, but at least she can breathe now - and breathe she does, inhaling lungfuls of iron-heavy air, gasping like her life depended on it. It hurts so much, every breath feeling like it was breaking her ribs apart anew.
“Ka-ka-shi,” she croaks, and retches again.
“I’m right here, Naruto,” he murmurs back. It’s Kakashi who’s holding her steady. Of course it is.
She brings up her hands to grasp his flak jacket, hauling herself up to her knees. The effort makes black spots dance before her eyes.
“I thought we were going to die,” she rasps, swaying.
Kakashi doesn’t reply, but he wraps his arms around her, tucking her head under his chin.
A moment later, he’s shaking her violently.
“-need to stay awake,” she heard him say, voice laced with panic. “You need to stay awake. We need to move, now.”
Naruto reaches down deep inside herself. It’s harder by magnitudes than it normally is, her chakra reduced from a raging inferno to a kernel to a spark. But there, deep in her belly, is Kurama, coiled anxiously. She can practically feel him pacing back and forth, fur puffed up in rage and fear.
It’ll hurt you.
I know. I need it.
A moment later, his chakra floods her body once again. Without a large reserve of her own, it’s overwhelming - Kurama’s chakra is denser than hers, and it settles and pools inside her uneasily. It burns, without her own wind-and-water nature to soothe it.
Soldier pills don’t work on Naruto. But this is better than a soldier pill ever could be. She could fight for days, weeks, like this - but the consequences will catch up to her, eventually.
Under her cheek, Kakashi stiffens. No-one ever likes it when she and Kurama work together, not least of which because her control over the thick, caustic chakra is always shaky at best.
“I’ve got this, Kakashi,” she tries to reassure him. “I can keep going.”
Kakashi’s sharingan flashes dangerously in her peripheral vision. Her stomach twists and she forces herself not to shy away from it.
He promised, she reminds herself. He promised.
Naruto gets to her feet. They have miles to go.
Caged, Cornered
For the first time in three days, when they make camp, Naruto sleeps. She hopes that she can weather the worst of the physical fallout of abusing Kurama’s chakra through the night, and be fit to move in the morning.
She falls asleep all at once, on the outside of camp, Tenzo to her back. She knows that behind her eyelids, her irises are bleeding red to purple to blue, and she falls backwards through her own self.
The water always feels so real, moving in time to Kurama’s restless pacing. Knees to her chest, she stares at him.
“Girl,” he says, by way of greeting, “You’re fucked.”
“I know.”
“You can’t go back,” he says, tails lashing furiously. “That vermin - that rat - he will never let you go, if you go back. This is your only chance for freedom.”
“I know.”
Kurama leans forward, snout resting on the ground between the bars. She could - she has, before - reach over and touch him.
“You need to wake up and leave. Run as far and fast as you can. For both our sakes.”
She hugs her knees to herself more tightly. She can see it all too clearly, the fate awaiting her in Konoha. The bars, the seals, only ever tasting fresh air as Danzo’s lapdog. Standing by his side, dead-eyed, tongue sealed, so addled she would wish for death. And she imagines a life of freedom, dares to imagine what it would be like to travel without fear, to go to new places without bloodying her hands. To bury her mask and never wear it again.
“I couldn’t. Not ever.”
He’s furious, now, she can see. Lips pulling back over his teeth, pupils narrowed to vanishing, his glowing eyes illuminating the whole cage. She’s never quite sure which side of the bars she’s on.
“They’d never agree. They’re going to go back no matter what I do or say,” Naruto takes a deep breath. “And I could never leave them.”
“Then, girl, you’d better have a plan.”
In the darkness of her mind, Naruto bares her teeth.
Under the Stars
That evening, Naruto dragged her bed-roll outside, on the wraparound porch at the back of the kitchen. It was a chilly autumn night, but Naruto had always run hotter than most. In the darkness, alone, she took off her headscarf, and her red hair tumbled down around her face. She carded her fingers through it, and, not for the first time, wondered what it was about that colour that made such a difference.
Red was the colour of the sharingan, of the spiral insignia on every shinobi’s back and shoulder. It was the colour of her ANBU tattoo and the patterns of their masks. Maybe it was unearthly on a real, living human being, supposed to stay in the confines of paint and dye.
Curled on her side, facing the trees behind the brothel, Naruto waited.
She didn’t have to wait long, just until the last of the lights upstairs had been extinguished and the streets were quiet. If she couldn’t sense Hound’s chakra, she would never have known he was stealing up beside her, never have seen him until he was close enough to hold a blade to her throat.
He’s a shinobi, in every sense of the word.
It was too dark to use ANBU sign - she could just about make out the white of his mask and hair, the pale glow of the white porcelain.
“Found anything?” he asked, barely audible.
“I don’t know, but something’s weird with one of the aunties. Not sure what, yet.”
“Aunties?” She could practically hear him raising his eyebrows.
“I’m just being polite, not that you would know anything about that,” she said, indignant.
“Right. Cat and Crow haven’t found much either - an establishment similar to this, bigger than normal for out here - but no sign of shinobi, or smuggling operations. It’s early days, though, these things take time. It’s good you’ve gotten inside.”
“I’ll try to learn more,” she mumbled.
“One of us will always be close by, okay? I’ll talk to you tomorrow tonight.”
With that, he was gone. Naruto rolled over to face the door and tried to sleep.
Painted Faces
Naruto woke suddenly, jolting upright and instinctively scrambling for her kunai. The door opening behind her had woken her up with a start.
“Ume-chan, it’s me,” Naruto recognized Aiko’s voice in the next second, and then she was scrambling once more, trying to hide her knife from view.
Aiko raised an eyebrow, bemused.
“Smart girl,” she praised, “don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about your - insurance.”
Naruto flushed. Aiko knelt beside her, and brought her hand up to cup her face.
“You heal more quickly than I do,” she said, admiring. “There’s not a trace. Come on, upstairs - the others will expect a cut and a bruise, and a cut and a bruise we’ll give them.”
Naruto stood and followed her, in only her hadajuban and koshimaki - thin, white cotton garments, meant to keep her yukata from soaking up her sweat. Aiko moved completely silently, she noticed, as silently as Naruto herself did.
The whole village was still dead asleep, the dark blue sky suggesting that it was an hour or so before dawn.
As she climbed the stairs, she wondered if Aiko’s plan was just to hit her again. She couldn’t say she would object too much - it would be suspicious, if she turned up with a completely unmarked face after last night.
Inside Aiko’s rooms, she directed Naruto to sit in front of her dresser. The hair comb was gone, presumably stowed safely away after last night’s debacle.
“I’ll put it on for you every morning, for about two weeks. I hit you pretty hard, didn’t I?”
Naruto nodded, and looked down. That was an apology, she thought. Aiko was sorry, even if she didn’t say it. Aiko began to mix pigments into a tiny ceramic dish, blending reds and blues and whites together.
Aiko’s face was completely bare, unlike the night before, and she was wearing a lighter yukata rather than the stiff kimono she’d had on yesterday. In the yellow light of the lamp, flickering on the dresser, Naruto could see - they weren’t identical. But there were similarities. Aiko had the same high, broad cheekbones, the same shape to her eyes, the same round face. She was a small woman, but underneath the yukata, Naruto could see that her shoulders were broad and powerful. She had concealed all this masterfully, with careful styling and makeup, so completely that not even a kunoichi had been able to see through her.
“I dye my hair, Ume-chan. You should too - it’s harder to maintain, but there’s less chance of accidents.”
“It grows too fast, I think,” she said, twisting a strand of hair around her finger self-consciously. “A couple months ago it was by my ears, now look at it!”
Naruto’s hair fell just past her shoulders, now. In a few more months it would be as long as it had been before she joined the ANBU.
Aiko started to apply the dark red to her cheek, across her cheekbone. The brush tickled, and Naruto tried not to squirm.
“Aiko? Why is it - why is it so important, to not let people know I have red hair? I mean, people have always been mean about it, but I thought it was just me.”
Aiko’s eyes were full of pity.
“Did you know your parents, Ume?” she asked, tone careful.
“No. They’re dead, or gave me up. I don’t know which,” Naruto wasn’t lying. No matter how she had begged, her jiji refused to say a word on the subject of her parents. She thought it made the second option more likely, and he just didn’t want to tell her. Didn’t want her to be hurt. But sometimes she thought the not knowing was worse than the truth ever could be.
Aiko squeezed Naruto’s shoulder, comforting. “Even if they gave you up, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had done it to protect you. It was hard for me and my mother, for there to be two of us. It killed her in the end. Hirohito has his father’s hair, thank God.”
And maybe it’s true, maybe her parents loved her, dead or alive.
Naruto turned to the mirror. It was so realistic - like the blood really was pooling under her skin, a crusty red line across the zenith of her cheekbone. Like she was a normal girl, whose skin took days and days to knit itself back together.
“Do you know your parents’ last names? Your mother’s, or your father’s?”
She can’t lie about this. Aiko had to be - Aiko had to be -
“Uzumaki,” she whispered.
“Uzumaki,” Aiko repeated. “A foreign name for a foreign people, cast out from our homeland. We’ve no one but each other.”
The baby began to cry then, breaking the spell between them.
Aiko’s face crumpled. Naruto leapt to her feet, almost in spite of herself. “I’ll get him!” she blurted, trying to stop Aiko from - crying? Shouting? Naruto wasn’t sure.
Hirohito’s hair was brown, and he was struggling to breathe. It would be easier if he were upright, she knew, so she scooped him up out of his crib and cradled him against her shoulder. He coughed, pitifully, and wailed again.
Uzumaki Hirohito, she thought, bouncing him up and down. Her cousin, her blood, her name. He tucked his face into her shoulder, instinctively trusting. He smelled like milk, baby powder and - Naruto wrinkled her nose - something sour. Sickness.
“He’s good for you,” said Aiko, behind her. “He isn’t good for many people, won’t let anyone but me calm him down.”
“Oh,” said Naruto, and her heart swelled with something indescribable. And then, “It’s our chakra, I think.”
“You have the sight?”
Naruto shrugged. “I guess. I was told I was a chakra sensor, but for me it’s always been - like, I can hear. I can see colours. And I can feel things, see things, that other people couldn’t.”
“My mama was the same way,” Aiko said wistfully, sitting on the bed. “I didn’t get the gift, but I think Hirohito did. He knows - he knows when someone’s coming, before they enter the room. He knows when I’m near even if he can’t see me.”
The final, terrible puzzle piece slotted into place. She and her cousin had a gift, a bloodline limit, a kekkei genkai.
“We’re a clan,” she said, blankly. “A shinobi clan.”
“Once, we ruled over our own kingdom. But not anymore,” Aiko’s voice was indescribably bitter.
Once, thought Naruto, we were so powerful, so important, that we were royalty. And now people spit at our feet when they pass us by.
Kekkei Genkai
That evening, Naruto rocked Hirohito to sleep on the back porch while Aiko worked. Unlike the night before, this one was busy - men trickling in and out, the sounds of music and laughter loud in behind her. Naruto was careful to keep out of their way, but she listened, and she watched - keeping score with her sixth sense. She’d be able to follow these men, pick them out of a crowd.
It was just as well - there was a shinobi upstairs, in Aiko’s rooms. He had popped up suddenly, on the periphery of her senses. He hadn’t approached. It was just that one moment he hadn’t been there, and the next he was.
She held the bundle of blankets tighter to her chest and focused, hard. He had the kind of dark, slow-moving chakra she had grown to associate with doton, reserves not quite as big as Hound’s. If she had passed him on the street back in Konoha she wouldn’t’ve spared him a second glance.
The shinobi stayed, for hours, long after all the other patrons had left. Naruto didn’t move an inch, listening to Hirohito’s rasping breaths and waiting.
Finally, finally, after nearly every bedroom in the brothel had extinguished its light, Naruto felt the man begin to move, down the stairs, to the ground floor. Then the door was sliding open behind her, and for a moment Naruto was sure she was about to die. That she’d been found out, someway, somehow.
“This is my little cousin, Ume-chan,” came Aiko’s voice, quiet in the cold night air. “She’s been minding Hirohito this evening.”
The man knelt, silhouetted by the light spilling out from the kitchen, and held out a hand. “It’s good to meet you, Ume-chan,” he said, grinning roguishly. Despite herself, Naruto flushed, and shook his hand.
“Go on, give Hirohito to his tou-san,” said Aiko. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Once again, Naruto followed Aiko to her apartment. On the low table in the centre of the ante-room was a whole spread of items - two half-drunk cups of tea, empty scrolls, ink, calligraphy brushes.
Aiko sat, with Naruto opposite her.
“You’ve had kunoichi training,” it wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Is anyone looking for you?”
Naruto swallowed, hard. “No,” she whispered, “Nobody’s looking for me.” It was even true, after a fashion.
“Good. Better to be here than in a Hidden Village, do you understand? You work hard, you’ll be beautiful when you’re older. Yui-sama will let you stay - better to sell only your body, and not your mind and your heart, as well. Better a whore than a kunoichi.”
They sat in silence as Aiko poured Naruto a cup of tea and slid it across the table. She unrolled one of the scrolls, revealing a complex pattern of brush strokes - a seal, Naruto recognized. Not quite like the standard ANBU storage seals she’d grown familiar with, but similar enough.
“I had to learn by memorization,” said Aiko. “But you - take a look, Ume. Look.”
And Naruto looked. And the world unfurled in front of her, falling into place with startling clarity.
There - that brushstroke that curled in on itself. She knew that shape, the way it moved - so like an egg in a nest, a fetus curled in its heart.Every mark, every curling, moving brushstroke, it mimicked the motion and shape of chakra in an intricate dance that she could only begin to understand.
This was the true gift of the Uzumaki, she realised. Her chakra sight might be useful for tracking, for stealth, but this was what it was meant for.
In a flash, she understood what sealing was. It had always been abstract, opaque, to her and to most shinobi, who only knew the exploding tags and storage seals, identical and mass-produced. This was art, art that created divots and channels for chakra to flow through, to be shaped by the seal and funnelled, corralled, spiralling into a tightly concentrated point.
“This is a storage seal, a modified one, at any rate. I’ll teach you what I know, and you’ll help me in return.”
Naruto really, really should have asked what Aiko meant by that. But she was distracted by the beauty of the seals before her, the promise of being able to make them for herself.
Aiko dipped a brush in ink and drew a spiral on a blank sheet of paper. Naruto watched the chakra run along her brush and thought that she had never seen anything more wonderful.
Under the Dark Sky
It was hours later that Naruto finally made her way downstairs. Her head was still spinning, and her hands were trembling from excitement. She’d at least had the presence of mind to keep track of the man - Shun, Aiko had called him - after he’d brought Hirohito up and deposited him in his crib. She knew where he’d vanished, at the end of the long dirt road winding along the village’s only major street.
Shisui was lurking in the woods outside, pacing back and forth with increasing agitation as Naruto had failed, hour after hour, to appear and speak with him. Standing on the back porch, she glanced regretfully at her bed roll - it would be hours, still, before she could sleep. And then Aiko would be by to repaint the bruise on her cheek.
She darted into the woods, finding Shisui easily. He had a kunai at her throat in an instance, and she blinked.
“Fuck, it’s you,” he hissed. “Don’t sneak up on a ninja like that. And don’t repeat that word.”
“I know what fuck means,” she hissed back. “I’ve got a trail, come on.”
“My god, you’re reckless tonight. Slow down, tell me what you’ve found out.”
Naruto paused, and took a deep breath. “A shinobi visited one of the aunties today, they talked for a long time. I couldn’t tell where he came from, even though I was watching, but I know where he went.”
“Watching?”
Naruto winced. She’d adopted Aiko’s terminology quickly, maybe too quickly. But she didn’t want to talk about Aiko, about Hirohito, to Shisui. It felt too raw, too personal.
And it had left her with a slew of questions she knew better than to ask. The last questions she’d voiced out loud had ended with Hound rotting in a cell.
“Sensing, whatever you want to call it.”
To her relief, Shisui nodded, and followed her.
It was difficult, to trace the man’s steps precisely. Chakra didn’t exactly leave trails. Still, she turned where she remembered him turning, and soon they were at the end of the village’s single street. She circled the area, frustrated.
“He just sort of, vanished, here,” she admitted. “I was watching closely, I promise.”
“Some sort of chakra suppression ability, then?”
“I guess so.”
Naruto scuffed her feet and felt the earth vibrate underneath them. Shisui noticed the second that she did, and knelt, one hand to the earth.
“I think it’s hollow. A tunnel?”
“But where’s the entrance?” the answer came to her a second later. It had to be sealed, the same way ANBU tunnels were back in Konoha. That was okay. Naruto would learn to get around them. She’d learn fast.
“We’ll figure it out,” said Shisui, straightening up. “You did good work, Fox.”
Naruto ducked her head, and hid her guilt in the dark.