part 3
"Well... I'm not going to turn you down. I definitely shouldn't be here when Tsunade comes back," Shikako says, standing up and stretching. "But should you really help me get all the way out of the village? I could get away on my own. Probably. You could say I overpowered you or whatever."
There's no one in the observation room, and the muted signatures of the people in the building around her are turning in their mysterious clockwise fashion without any more urgency than usual. She's pretty sure that Sai is here as part of the regular rounds walked around the building to check on various prisoners. If Sai doesn't raise the alarm, Shikako could likely exit the building easily; she's been tracing the path of people through the building and has a good idea of where she is and which way to the exit.
Granted, it might be a stretch to say she overpowered him physically — Sai is older, taller, more muscled, and has probably had better grappling instruction than her — but Shikako's got some tricks up her sleeve that would make it plausible.
Sai blinks at her. "I'm not concerned with how this will effect my status in the village."
She can't tell if he means that he won't be in trouble or that he doesn't care about the trouble he'll be in, but Shikako only shrugs in response. It's Sai's choice to make and Shikako doesn't want to look this gift horse in the mouth, especially when any delay might get them caught before they can even get started.
"It will be... hard to leave if you don't know the ANBU stealth techniques." The corners of his mouth are pulled down in what Shikako thinks is worry. "We might have to fight."
Shikako can hide her chakra signature well enough that non-sensory jōnin, at least, have a hard time finding it. And she'd managed to use Kakashi-sensei's escape, evasion, and stealth training to sneak up on those foreign ANBU on that mission with Kiba. But sneaking out of T&I and out of the village altogether... probably not. And Sai looks like he wants to fight his way out even less than her, probably because this is actually his village.
"If you think you can sneak out alone, I have a technique that should work," Shikako says. No one will know about shadow state here; it's doubtful that Sai's version of Shikako got any training in Nara techniques at all.
A little tension leaves Sai's shoulders, and he moves towards the door with her at his heels without further discussion. She kind of expected him to have questions about the technique but... apparently not. That's a lot of trust. Maybe his version of her had usually called the shots and often not explained things before trying them? Because Shikako thinks that that sounds like something she'd do, even shoulder-deep in ROOT and sinking.
Sai reaches out a hand to open the door. Standing this close and able to focus on just the door handle, Shikako can feel that it holds the barest sliver of his ink-brush water-nature chakra. A spark of chakra fires, the seal tests Sai, and the door handle turns. Chakra floods into the room, into Shikako's throat and lungs, but she suppresses the need to cough. Coughing is not stealthy.
Outside the room there's a short dead-end hallway that looks like all of the other T&I hallways Shikako has ever been in. This one has four doors, including the one she and Sai have just exited through. They're spaced far apart to allow for observation rooms and sound proofing and seal work and whatever other things had gone into the construction of T&I.
Right outside the door there's a skinny table with Sai's sword and kunai pouches on it. He affixes them all where they belong quickly and then looks to her. Shikako is barefoot, wearing thin clothing provided by T&I including her still-ripped shirt. She considers getting out her spare shoes and jacket, at least, but there probably isn't time and she doesn't intend to actually walk any farther to get out of here now that all the chakra has rushed back into her grasp.
"You should be able to just walk out," Shikako says. "Maybe try to avoid any Nara you see?"
Sai nods. Still no questions. Well, okay. Maybe she's made it sound like a clan secret which... it probably would be, if anyone but her could do it.
Shikako pulls out the chakra that she's been storing in the Gelel stone and melts into a thick pool of shadow. She doesn't exactly have eyes to see with, but she can still perceive Sai's surprise, the curious tilt to his head as he looks at her.
"I can still feel your chakra," he observes. Hearing is just as weird as sight in shadow state, but it works.
Shikako pulls her chakra in as tight as she can, as tight as she would after a nightmare about the Kyūbi. Shoves it down and down, past where the seals in the interrogation room had put it.
Sai nods, then seems unsure if she could have seen that and says, "Good."
Shikako slips forward silently into Sai's shadow, hiding there as best she can, matching the natural shape of his shadow and not seeking to control or freeze his movements.
He stays still for a moment... and then he turns towards the open end of the hallway. His pace is steady, unconcerned, perfectly casual.
There are several long stretches of hallway and a set of stairs that Sai hops up in one leap because ninja have just as little respect for flights of stairs as they do for things like front doors and foot paths. Then Sai has to cross a bullpen that's not unlike the one Shikako is used to from Cryptology.
"Hey, Hikaku, rounds go good?" asks one of the chūnin. Shikako doesn't recognize him, but he's practically lounging at his desk, a delicate mixture of balance and chakra keeping his tipped-back chair from toppling.
Sai stops to talk to him. Agonizing, but necessary. He says, "Yes, everything was normal. Everyone was where they were supposed to be."
"Cool, cool," says the chūnin.
He uses a chakra string to yank a clipboard into his hands and then a pen. He can't do both at once, it seems, but then Shikako has no place to talk, as her control of chakra strings is nearly as useless. The chūnin makes a couple marks on the clipboard and then hands both over to Sai, who signs his signature unbelievably quickly. Or, well, that's probably what he does; Shikako can't exactly tell from her angle on the floor.
Sai hands the clipboard back and says, "Thank you for your flexibility."
"No problem. You get anything new? Was she laying on the table again?"
"No. And no. I was building rapport. I think she will be more cooperative next time we speak."
The chūnin laughs. "Oh, sure, if Ibiki ever lets you interrogate anyone ever again."
"Even if he does, it's doubtful the Hokage is going to back down from her escalation," says someone else. "Not even with Yamanaka-sama so pissed at her."
There's a beat of uncomfortable silence, probably because having the head of the Yamanaka as mad as Inoichi must be about what happened to Fū — what Shikako unintentionally did to him — and at odds with the Hokage is... bad. Ibiki can't be too pleased, either, assuming this version of Ibiki has the same opinion of torture that Ibiki-taichō has.
"Whatever that girl did was fucked up, too bad we can't use the MRA or any of the other equipment," says the first chūnin, which is probably about as close as you can get to openly criticizing the Hokage, and then he calls out to someone in the back of the room: "Hey Santa, that cousin of yours okay? They figure out if it was one of her seals or whatever?"
In the back of the room, a Yamanaka who must be 'Santa' looks up from his paperwork. He has the same sharp, spun chakra that Ino and Inoichi and Fū have, his yet another variation on the same theme.
"We're not sure that it was a technique at all," Santa says. "There should be an announcement later this shift about it, once the elders are finished with their preliminary investigation, but we'll probably be barred from even using Holding-Door Mind Transmission on her."
"Shit, really?" says the talkative chūnin.
Another adds, "There's practically no risk with that jutsu, though. Aoba's used it on like. Everything that even seems like it might have a brain."
Sai starts moving again as the whole room starts reacting to this new gossip.
"That explains a lot about Aoba," says one of the special jōnin.
Sai crosses the bullpen quickly and exits a door that probably constitutes a drop in security level; sound from the bullpen shuts off suddenly. It's a conversation that Shikako is desperately, disgustingly glad to leave behind. She's not ready for that.
Three steps away from the door, it opens again. "Hikaku!" the woman stepping out calls.
Sai turns. He tenses, and so does Shikako, ready to back him up, ready to stretch out, connect to this woman's shadow, and freeze her.
"Sorry, I know you're trying to go home," she says. "The Jōnin Commander wants to see you before you leave the tower. I was supposed to tell you when you came in but..." She shrugs, and there's a faintly embarrassed air to her. In the bathroom or distracted by an attractive coworker, probably, when Sai came in.
"I'll go," Sai says. He can hardly refuse after all.
The woman seems relieved. Sai... Sai does not seem relieved, but starts off in the other direction, towards the stairs up to Nara Shikaku's office.
The office is the same as Shikako expected. The same as her father's office, and this man is essentially her father. He feels just the same, and looks the same as well, desk covered in neat stacks of paperwork and several nondescript scrolls. Out the window, Shikako can see the sun low in the sky but not yet setting. She'd lost all sense of time while in the interrogation room. Sai's shadow stretches out the door and into the hall and Shikako spreads with it, watches the hall as well as the office. People walk by, but none of them are Nara and Shikako is careful not to grab at them, careful to keep her chakra tight and hidden.
"Hikaku," Shikaku says in greeting, from a file cabinet at the side of the room. He closes it, the drawer rolling smoothly and shutting without a sound but with a flash of chakra from security seals. Shikako's not sure she'd have noticed that before being locked in a chakra-dry room for several days.
"Ogawa-san said you wanted to see me," Sai says.
"Yes. The Godaime wants you kept away from T&I," Shikaku says.
He turns from the file cabinet.
"A milk run to one of the outlying Nara farms seemed better than actually having you barred from the department," Shikaku says.
He starts across the room — headed for his desk, for one of the scrolls there.
"I hope you don't mind a little busy-work," Shikaku says.
He's backlit by the sun coming through the windows, his shadow long enough to span the office and even crawl up the wall a little.
"I don't mind," Sai says.
Shikaku's shadow brushes over the lower half of Sai's body, his shadow and Sai's overlapping. Shikaku... freezes. Just a little. A pause in his step and a more careful look at Sai.
Shikako can feel the rasp of his shadow over Sai's. There's no jutsu there, no conscious use of chakra for Shikaku, but Shikako knows that she's observed, nevertheless, because no matter how well she masks her chakra, Shikaku's shadow has basically touched it directly. His shadow feels just like her father's, and she struggles not to reach back, to tangle comfortably with that warm night sky.
He's not her father and he's just made Sai. They might need to fight — a fight Shikako's not sure they can win. Nara Shikaku is a dangerous opponent and he'll have back up here very, very quickly.
But Shikaku just picks up his pace, finishes crossing the room, and unrolls one of the scrolls. He speaks hurriedly now when he says, "You're later getting here than I thought you'd be, so you won't have time to go home to get anything or find a partner, but I hear you're always well-supplied."
Sai pauses, a noticeable pause, but seems to realize that Shikaku expects him to respond and offers, "Regulation in ROOT was to always have two weeks of rations on you at all times and be ready for deployment at any time. I am mission-ready."
"Good," Shikaku says. He finishes whatever he was writing with a signature, then rolls the scroll up and tosses it to Sai. "Here's your mission scroll. It has directions to the Nara farm from Kinchaku-gai. I've added a note authorizing your immediate departure from the village without waiting for the paperwork to clear because these notes need to get to that farm as soon as possible."
Shikaku throws a second, smaller scroll at Sai, which Sai also catches. Shikako knows that Shikaku knows she's here, knows that he must have guessed before Sai even made his way to T&I that he'd be breaking her out, and she's surprised that his plan seemed to be to give Sai an excuse to leave the village. Maybe it's just giving him rope to hang himself with, but if so why speed up Sai's ability to exit the village after noticing something amiss with Sai's shadow? No — Nara Shikaku is letting this happen. Supporting it. Not just helping Tsunade get Sai away from T&I, but helping Shikako get away from Tsunade.
Shikako's dad is the best in every universe.
"I apologize if my delay has caused you any trouble," Sai says, tucking the scroll he's to deliver into a secure pocket.
"You're not late yet, but you'd better get going," Shikaku says. "Straight to the gates and on to Kinchaku-gai."
"Yes, Shikaku-sama," Sai says. He's too good of a ninja for his pulse to race, and all the tension has left him, but Sai still clearly feels the same urgency Shikako does — he exits Shikaku's office and moves directly for the window at the end of the hall. He has to slide it open, because it's not usually used for coming in and out, but then he's flinging himself at the ground, his shadow sliding quicking down the side of the tower and then over the ground.
It's a strange feeling, really, because with Sai mid-air so dramatically Shikako has a good chance to feel not just the 2D visible shadow but the whole 3D shaft of blocked light that links Sai's body to Sai's shadow. It feels like being stretched to fill the space, but there's no strain to it — a shadow is the absence of a thing, so Shikako expands to fill the space.
Sai lands. Shikako is compressed. Another chakra enhanced leap brings Sai to the nearest rooftop and then he's bounding towards the village gates.
Halfway there someone Shikako doesn't see must flag Sai down because Sai angles his next jump to return to street level. Shikako is ready to scream in frustration and then she realizes that the chakra signature they're headed towards is Sasuke. It's not exact, it's a little wrong, different enough that Shikako would peg the signature as either an infiltrator or a sign of the cursed seal being up to something if she were back home, but she guesses 'Sasuke' and then she sees that it is Sasuke.
So maybe he's closer to the version she knows back home than Ibiki was to Ibiki-taichō, at least. And not wrong like Tsunade.
"Hikaku," Sasuke says. "You're in a hurry. Towards the gates."
"Yes, I have a mission," Sai says. "I must go."
Sasuke frowns. His that-doesn't-sound-right frown. "You're on your in-village rotation. And you don't have a mission pack with you. Or teammates."
"It... is a very urgent mission," Sai offers. "And a favor. For the Jōnin Commander. It is important to build a rapport with my superiors."
Sasuke's frown deepens.
"You can read my mission scroll," Sai says, and hands that over. Sai hasn't even read it yet. "Quickly. I must leave immediately or my delivery will be late."
Sasuke unrolls the mission scroll and reads it. Not just a normal reading, but like a lawyer checking for dastardly loopholes. He even flicks his Sharingan on and studies the note at the bottom.
"Well, I've been wanting to leave the village and stretch my legs," Sasuke says. He flips the tight-rolled mission scroll back at Sai.
Sai snatches it out of the air. "I do not require a partner."
"Mission scroll says you should have one if you can find one. You found me."
"I cannot delay for you to get your mission pack," Sai tries.
"Who needs a mission pack to go to Kinchaku-gai?" Sasuke waves a hand like he's sweeping away Sai's concerns. "Anyway, you've got enough rations for a small army, right?"
"I have two weeks' worth of rations," Sai corrects.
"Well if it takes us more than a week to get to Kinchaku-gai and back, we probably don't deserve to return to the village." Sasuke's tone is dry, joking. He has no idea that Sai probably won't be able to come back. He flips through hand seals to summon a small hawk, who he asks to tell his mother that he's going on an overnight mission 'with Hikaku' and he'll be back soon.
The hawk takes wing and then Sasuke looks expectantly at Sai. "Now I have to go unless you want me to have lied to my mom. And anyway, if it's that important you probably shouldn't keep standing here arguing with me about it, right?"
"..Right," Sai says reluctantly.
They both take off towards the gates
At the gates, it's Idate, again, and another chūnin Shikako doesn't know by name. Idate raises his eyes at the mission scroll and its urgently scrawled note signed by the Jōnin Commander.
"You always have the most interesting missions," he complains, handing the scroll back — which Sai only now takes the time to read — and noting down Sai and Sasuke's check-out time. "What the hell are you delivering that requires two jōnin?"
Sasuke shrugs.
Sai finishes reading the mission scroll and says, "We are leaving now."
Sasuke sends him a look — a look that says you're being weirder than usual and it's bad — and then shrugs at Idate again, this time a little more apologetically. "Good luck!" Idate calls after them as they spring away south towards Kinchaku-gai.
When the sun has gone down, Sai finally comes to a stop — there are no more Hashirama trees with broad branches to stop on, so he makes do with a clearing. Shikako supposes that they're going to deal with Sasuke now. It's just as well, because staying in Sai's shadow has gotten harder and harder and eventually she'll fall out. Not ideal.
The clearing has the added benefit of bright moonlight, but Shikako's not sure that Sai actually considered that.
"Are we making camp?" Sasuke asks.
The furrow of his brow should be hard to see in the dark of the night, but it's not. Shadow state senses are weird.
"...No," Sai says. "I wanted space in case we have to fight."
Sasuke tenses. Not the tenseness of someone expecting possible betrayal, but someone readying to enter into combat with his teammate at his side. "Where?" he asks, eyes flicking on, already scanning the forest around them."
Sai doesn't sigh or anything but he sounds tired when he says, "Sasuke, you shouldn't have come on this mission with me."
"That's exactly the kind of thing you'd say about a mission where you really need me," Sasuke shoots back immediately, but panic had very definitely flashed across his face. "And I'm not going to fight you. What's going on?"
Someone else would evade the truth, would use euphemisms or beat around the bush... would probably lie, and then take Sasuke by surprise to get him out of the way. But Sai... blunt, straightforward Sai... he says: "You interrupted me while I was committing treason and invited yourself along."
There is a long beat of silence.
"Okay," Sasuke says, slowly, taking in Sai's tense form and clearly going back over everything that's happened since he'd seen Sai leaping across the roofs on Tea Street. "Okay, still not fighting you."
"You know I would win," Sai points out.
Sasuke... rolls his eyes. "Yeah, but also I don't want to. How treasonous is this treason we're talking about? Because assassinating your commanding officer, a respected village elder, in broad daylight was definitely technically treason but Tsunade just promoted you for that, so..."
"Tsunade-sama will not be pleased," Sai says. And then, looking down, he says, "You should come out now, Shikako."
So Shikako does, although she's not sure it's the best choice. It's a relief to pour out of Sai's shadow and into physical form again, her bare feet pressing into the scruffy long grass of the clearing. She should have paused to put her extra set of shoes on in T&I.
She gets her regular hearing back just in time to hear Sasuke ask — demand — "Nara Shikako?" and wonder if she really heard his voice crack a little.
"Yes," Sai says, confusion tinting his voice. Shikako relates; she didn't think this universe's Sasuke would have ever given Nara Shikako a passing thought.
Shikako looks up at Sasuke and discovers that spending so much time staying still and pressed down and incorporeal has a negative effect on her reflexes when Sasuke darts forward and drags her into a hug. Sai doesn't twitch to stop it or tense in warning, so he recognizes that it's not an attack, but Shikako is caught by surprise, practically yanked off her feet.
"'Kako," Sasuke says. And he sounds... younger. He sounds younger the way Shikako knows she and Ino and Sakura sound when they slip into childhood patterns.
His chakra is so nice. Not perfect, but familiar. She can't let herself relax into it because she'll lose all momentum to keep moving and this is far from a safe place to stop.
Sasuke pulls back, looks at her, his Sharingan flickering on to look her over. Then he looks at Sai. "Hikaku, this is your best treason yet."
Sai sounds so pleased, if surprised, when he agrees.
"But," Sasuke adds, looking between them, "why was it treason? Leaving the village without permission is just... bending the rules, as long as you come back. And where have you been? And why is your shirt ripped, who did that to you?" The last two are directed at Shikako.
"Ah... this is awkward," Shikako says.
She means the explanation she's going to have to give, but Sasuke clearly takes it to mean the way he's clinging to her and he lets go abruptly. Which. Well. Probably good.
Shikako glances at Sai for help.
"Shikako had a sealing accident," Sai says, helpfully.
Sasuke looks. Uncertain. About that explanation. Or maybe about her. He says, "With... explosive tags?"
Of course, the only Nara Shikako that this Sasuke might have known would have been in the beginning stages of figuring out how to modify explosive tags. Which had involved a lot of practical tests which, when written down, became science. A perfectly respectable, hobby for a young Nara, if louder than was typical.
"A little more complicated than that," Shikako says. "I'm from... a version of Konoha where things are different."
"'Different' how?"
This had been so hard to explain to Ibiki, and they really don't have the time. And Shikako really doesn't want to go over it all again.
She reaches into her hammerspace and drags out two things in quick succession. First, shoes, which she lets drop to the ground. Sai and Sasuke both start at their sudden appearance. Second, a small cardboard box, still in her hammerspace from her move.
"This explains why you didn't have any supplies on your person when you were arrested," Sai observes, looking down at the shoes.
Shikako digs around in the box and ignores Sasuke's incredulous, "Arrested?"
"Here," Shikako says, handing over a picture of the team from before Naruto had left on his training trip, all of them sitting on the veranda, Dad and Shika out of focus at the shogi board in the foreground.
She knows Sasuke will give it back. She knows before she hands it over, but she knows much more certainly afterwards, when he holds it like a priceless document.
"This never happened," Sasuke says, but she sees him looking at it with his Sharingan for a split second. "That's not me."
"It happened to me," Shikako says, quiet. "I was trying to... get away from something, but I escaped a little too far. I'm not... the Shikako you knew."
Sasuke has a moment to look at her, stricken, grappling with how quickly everything he thought he'd gained in the last few minutes has been stripped away.
Then Sai adds, "The Shikako you knew died fighting Danzō with me." He's giving one of his unfortunately misplaced expressions, the smile that means he's emotional but trying to be helpful.
Sasuke's eyes snap to Sai.
"What?" Sasuke croaks. "Your partner?"
"She taught me about teamwork." Sai pauses, and adds, "I didn't know that she was Shikako. I... would have said something. If she'd told me."
"We'll probably have to talk to the Nara about moving her to..." Sasuke trails off, glancing at Shikako. He holds the picture out so she can take it back. "Um. Nevermind. If Hikaku's helping you, I'm helping you. What are we doing?"
Yeah, Shikako doesn't want to hear any more details about where her remains ended up, even though it's kind of fascinating that the Uchiha apparently ended up in charge of them. Did police duties involve seeing to the interment — or cremation — of people with no one else to do it? Or... had Sai seen to it, and managed to get her buried on Uchiha clan grounds as well?
Shikako swallows. And puts the picture and the box away so she can put her shoes on. "Uh, escaping. Somehow. We should go to Kinchaku-gai and then to the Nara farm like Da — like Shikaku wanted."
"He knew you were in my shadow."
"He could feel me. If he'd wanted us stopped, we wouldn't have gotten out of his office, much less the village." Shikako stands and flexes her toes in her new shoes, never before worn. At least she had an extra pair. She learned that lesson from Land of Birds. "Family, clan, and allies first. Then the village. Even if he doesn't believe I'm Shikako... you have to be a Nara to do anything with your shadow but kill yourself."
"Yeah, we all get that talk," Sasuke agrees. "No copying Nara jutsu."
Sai makes a sound like he disagrees, but other than both of them sending him an uncertain look they don't react. Now isn't the time for that. Shikako will ask later.
"It might be that this is a cover for you, in which case it's important to complete it," Shikako says thoughtfully. "Or we'll get more help there. Either way, we should keep well-ahead of possible pursuit." Knowing her father there are probably at least three to five reasons they should go to the Nara farm outside Kinchaku-gai but Shikako is too tired and knows too little about this version of Konoha to even want to begin to guess more than that..
"Well, no one can fault us for trying to do our mission as assigned," Sasuke says. "It was marked urgent. And if they catch up with us again... you can just hide."
The mission scroll has instructions about how to get to the Nara farm from Kinchaku-gai, but miles before they get to the town Shikako directs them west, off their straight shot to the town.
"Deer trail," she explains to Sai and Sasuke, gesturing below them at the thin path worn through the understory. She's never been to this farm before, but she knows its general location from maps in her father's office (why wouldn't it be the same in this univese?) and any Nara worth their salt can spot and follow a deer trail. Although, Shikako has possibly cheated in regards to the deer trail; she's been tracking the movement of animals along it for awhile, the pin-prick energy, the same as she'd felt when she was in the chakra-dry room.
She's kind of beginning to suspect that it's not chakra that she's sensing, but now isn't the time to dig in to that.
The farm is a half-dozen buildings, five of them crowded in the middle of fields that Shikako knows have been in use for ten generations, the rotation of their crops carefully monitored. It's a Nara farm, but there will be out-village Yamanaka and Akimichi here, and the occasional local hired hand. In fact there's a likely chance of civilians from Kinchaku-gai and farther afield hanging around — not just seasonal workers but also delivery persons, merchants, and anyone attempting to marry into the out-village portion of the clan — so it's important that Shikako not be seen.
Of course, it's a Nara farm, and the proof of that is in the sixth building, a barn, hanging just barely onto the edge of the cleared property. They keep deer here. They've kept deer here two generations longer than they've grown anything here. The deer path leads nearly straight to the barn.
It's simple for them to slip into the barn; its door sits wide open. Despite the predawn hour there's a man there, and he looks up when they enter, eyes sharp. He's got the black velvet chakra that all Nara share, and looks maybe ten or twenty years older than Shikaku. He's wiry, muscles only where he needs them, and he sets aside the medicine he's measuring when he notices them.
Shikako does not miss that the light in the room are set lowdown and to the back, making the barn very defensible. She wonders if Sai and Sasuke catch that, if they even expect this man to know the basics of the Nara jutsu.
The Uchiha don't have any outlying properties or businesses, sofar as she knows, except maybe Sora-ku, if that counts.
"You're an odd group," says the man. "Am I moving up in the world, getting three couriers?"
"We wanted to go for a light run," Sasuke says, even though all three of them have clearly run flat-out nearly through the night.
"Hm," says the man, amused. It's subdued, but anyone would be at this hour.
Sai already has the second scroll out, the one he's supposed to be delivering. He says, "We're looking for Nara Tōshōdai."
"You found him!" Tōshōdai holds his hand out. "Shikaku-kun must have something important to say to send you all out here with an order I don't need for another week at least."
Shikako stifles a giggle — or tries. She's tired, and the man is so clearly a Nara. It's hard to be professional in a Nara deer barn.
Tōshōdai looks up at her, grinning. "Never heard him called that, huh? I was raised in-village and I still remember him as a little squirt. I won't tell him you laughed if you don't tell him I'm calling him that in front of his very important out-clan jōnin."
"Deal," Shikako says. For the first time since she and Aoba got to Hot Springs she feels like her shoulders can come down from around her ears, metaphorically speaking. Guiltily, she finds herself wishing that Tōshōdai had been around in her childhood. The man might not even exist where Shikako is from.
"Ha! My small, secret reign of terror continues unobstructed," Tōshōdai cackles. "Alright, hand it over."
Sai hands over the slim scroll and Tōshōdai has to hold it up so that it will catch the light behind him and he can read it. He studies it for a long time and then holds it out for Sai to take back.
Tōshōdai says, "Well, it's unconventional, I'll give him that. My orders are to give you and your friend—" Here he gestures at Shikako. "—anything you need and let you read the rest."
Sai takes the scroll back and opens it to read it.
"Oh, and I'm not supposed to ask your name," Tōshōdai says, eyeing Shikako. "Which is suspicious. But apparently you're clan, and that's good enough for me."
"That's me, 'suspicious but good enough,'" Shikako says, and feels a little triumphant at the amused sound Sasuke makes.
Tōshōdai laughs too. What a cheerful person. Naruto would like him.
"I am now on an Intel mission," Sai says. He glances up from the paper, at Shikako. "To get what I can out of you about the... information you promised Tsunade." He looks at Sasuke next. "It doesn't say anything about you."
"Does it say I'm not on the mission?" Sasuke asks. "Does it say it's a solo assignment?"
Sai says no to both questions.
"Then I'm on this mission, too," Sasuke says with a nod. "Who's going to stop me? No one." He pauses. "I guess I might have lied to my mom after all, though."
"Ah... I'm sure she'll understand?" Shikako offers, although she has no basis whatsoever for believing this of Uchiha Mikoto, having never met any version of her. Still, she must understand the way missions sometimes just... happen to you without asking for your permission first.
"She'll be worried," Sasuke mutters. Aw.
"Yes," Sai says. "Especially after the pursuit squad fails to find us. It would be a mistake for either of us to return without substantial information." He glances at Shikako.
"Sure I'll cough it up," she says agreeably. "It'll take a while, though. There's a lot of it."
"Hiding first, then," suggests Tōshōdai. "We have a place for that."
Of course they do, Shikako thinks with some bemusement. Nara are nearly always prepared.