Wildflowers Burning

i. Civilian

Anko liked 44. The training ground was treacherous, sure, it was called the Forest of Death; it’s really not surprising. The thing is, people are worse. You can trust a snake to be venomous, a giant spider to feed you to her young, a plant to be poisonous but really look like regular blueberries, you swear. But people? People couldn't be trusted not to stab you in the back, but you still were supposed to smile and make nice until they did. Anko didn’t do either anyway, but she resented the expectation. People were overrated in her opinion.

The Forest of Death, despite being a vast resource of survival training, was despicably underutilized. Anko wasn't really complaining though, if it kept people out of her hair. Kids were annoying and adults were dipshits: there was no winning either way.

The Forest of Death had nearly been destroyed, bulldozed for construction on a few occasions, and saved only by its wide host of rare species native to the small, enclosed biome. It was too inhospitable to the unprepared, had killed a few too many genin, dumb civilians, and even dumber chunin. The death count was classified, funnily enough.
Frankly, Anko went there to relax.

So when of all things, she stumbles across a fucking person, a mop of brilliant red hair attached to a stranger hanging off of a branch, it was understandable for her to be nonplussed.

Had anyone asked Kaito, he likely would have said that it was less understandable for her to embed three senbon into his back as an immediate reaction to stumbling across a human being in a semi public place, but no one did so it’s irrelevant.
Kaito’s response to the sharp pain was to swing himself up onto the branch he was just doing pull ups from, a hands flying together to start signing when he saw… Anko. Anko, on the other hand, had already pulled out kunai by the time the man had swung to face her from on top of his branch to reveal blue eyes, sunken cheeks, and generally a very familiar face. The man from the gate.

Anko lowers her kunai- Kaito doesn’t relax for a second- and groans. “Oh for fuck’s sake civvie, the hell you’re doin’ in here? Gotta death wish?”
Anko takes a look at the man, warily edging backwards towards the tree trunk, and away from her. He had no shirt on in the heat of the early autumn, she noticed. She ran her eyes over his exposed torso, catching on his defined ribs, the ugly pink burn scars knotting up from his hips and covering the majority of his left side. She waits, he makes no move to engage, frozen up there.

“Civvie, get out of the fucking tree.” Nothing.
“Civvie. I don’t know what you’re doing in here, and frankly I don’t want to. Get the shit down here because you and I are going to have a nice, long talk about why these places are off limits to civilians.”

The guy looks up, and she knows that look. That’s the expression of someone who not only terrified, but is very much about to bolt. A hunted animal. Anko weighs her options, sees if she can just leave him there. He’d probably die. If she sent someone else, they’d ask why she didn’t do it. And, come to think of it Anko’s little game of “you better hope I didn’t just poison you but I guess we’ll see” would probably croak him. Ugh. She fucking hates dealing with people, and reaches a hand down to return her kunai, and perhaps find a paralytic-laced senbon to slip up her sleeve. People who don’t move are easier to deal with. She may suck at people, but even as she failed to find one with the identifying bump, she recognized the time for a tactic swap.

“Shit. Okay. Kaito, that's your name right?” she says, doing her best not to be threatening. She remembered what he’d said, how alone he’d been. “Kaito, I'm not gonna hurt you. This place is dangerous, congrats on being alive right now, but I need you to get of that tree.” Slowly, painstakingly slowly, he creeps forward along the branch. Anko feels like she's trying to coax a cat out from a corner.

“That's it. Kaito, I'm not sure what was on those senbon. I carry a bunch on me, I don’t keep good track, you got me? I need to pull them out, see what was on them. Can you please get down here so I can?” He stops moving. He contorts, leaning into the arm he bends behind him. He drops three bloody senbon onto the ground. Then he looks at her, and jumps down.
“Nothing.” He says.
“What?”

“Not poisoned, the senbon.” He says. He takes a couple of steps back so she can pick them up. She slowly goes down to pick one up and tap it, touches her finger to her mouth, spits. Nothing but blood.

“Looks like you’re right, civ. Are you even a civilian? You don’t look it. You sure as hell ain’t Konoha. The fuck you’re doing here? I should turn you in, toss you up to Ibiki, see what he can get you to say.” The man grimaces. Opens his mouth. Shuts it.
Anko softens, a little. “Just tell me why you’re here. Like, here here. In the forbidden-ass doom forest.”

He takes a moment to think. “People. Too many people, there.” He make a vague gesture in the direction from which she came. That was… understandable, to be honest.

“Fair enough. Come on, I’m taking you in. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do. You got a shirt, somewhere?” Kaito nods, gestures to a wet blue civilian shirt hanging over the branch. He must’ve been washing it. She grabs it, stuffs it into her bag. He can’t exactly avoid attracting attention without it, especially not with those scars. She wonders how he got them.

He grimaces, looks around. She realizes what he’s about to do a second too late, and by then he’d grabbed a sword that she really should have noticed from against the tree and there was nothing left but a few leaves in his place. Definitely not a civilian. She tried to feel for a chakra signature, but there was nothing but some weird rat creature in the foliage behind her, a few birds in the branches above.
This was… an issue.

ii. Obligations

Upon Anko’s discovery- and of course she’d discovered him, how the hell had he thought she’d known so much about the forest of death in the first place? Reading about it? God, he was so incredibly dumb- Kaito realized that wasting time in Konoha was only going to make trouble. His home wasn’t his anymore, and he had a few people he needed to track down, a few obligations he needed to fulfill.
He’d run. He ran and ran and ran until he left Fire Country far behind him, oaks and maples falling away to connifers a unidentifiable behemoths, trunks shrouded in mist.

Now, he sat quietly in a tree, waiting. Hidan was a relatively easy target, in a sense. What it really took was getting him alone- something that had taken a good week of observation. Hidan wasn't a skilled ninja, had never needed to be. By himself, anyone without full knowledge of his techniques and enough skill to take him down as quickly as necessary was roadkill. With his partner? They were fairly unstoppable. Kaito wasn’t ready to rely on his strength alone yet, he was still far too shaky for that. But he could do it.
He had to.

He starts paint a seal onto one of Tenten’s slips while hiding in a birch tree, reopening the scar on his left arm. A few drops of blood drip from his perch, onto ground right on the lightning side of the Shimo-Kumo border. When he thinks about it, he doesn't have any need for ink. Blood was better keyed to his chakra anyway, and he was always carrying it. He’s done a lot of this- sitting around in trees, he means. Though, come to think of it, drawing in his own blood fits as a subject of that thought too. Trees were a fairly obvious place to hide, but people still didn’t look up enough. They were just that much more cover, the high ground gave just enough of an advantage, and any Konoha nin knew how to maneuver and leap among branches with a speed not uncomparable to on land.

He sits now, bloody seal in hand, as he waits. It’s not too long before his mark comes into view, holding a large bag, mouthing what are probably obscenities. He wonders mildly what the man is walking with through this forested no man’s land.

Kaito waits until the ninja is right beneath him and drops, clamping a hand over his mouth and the seal onto his neck. In a dim flash of red, they’re gone.
The first time, when a young Naruto had experimented successfully with his father’s hiraishin seals, the warping of dimension, the intense pressure, the choking, the pain, the perceptory shock, had hit him harder than a hammer to the head. He still couldn't describe the feeling of the gaps between spacetime, the brutal shock of switching reality around. He puked his guts out before falling into the grass with a blinding migraine. He’d since refined and adjusted to the technique, but what twisted his gut uncomfortably now could incapacitate others. Especially if they’re transported just so as to then immediately plant themselves, head first, into a tree. Kaito silently thanked his human airbag, before hitting the back of his head with the hilt of his tanto just in case.

Hidan’s skull makes a cracking noise against the bark and he lets out a groan. Blood starts leaking down his neck.
Kaito knows this is only a short window, but this shock would hopefully give him the chance to end this quickly. He’s learned better than to assume anything, though.
He unsheathes his blade and pulls it back, swings. He separates the body, already wobbling to its feet, from the head in one stroke. He can feel the bending protest of his blade in return as it scrapes through vertebrae. The head makes a squelching thud on the ground, and he hears Hidan curse as he bounced slightly. Kaito ignored him as he first hacked off the left arm, then the right. This blade wasn't built to cut bone, but it served its purpose. He knelt, one hand shoving the jerking torso into the tree to saw through the legs.

Hidan’s head had figured out exactly what was happening at this point, and was screaming bloody fucking murder, and Kaito didn’t feel very bad about grabbing it by its silver hair, taking a kunai to it, and just jamming the wad of stands into his mouth as a makeshift gag before shoving the still-protesting head into a black bag.
Kaito looks at the body. He was hesitant to burn it. Ashes didn't reform, unless they did, and anyway fire was not something he wanted to deal with right now. He looks at his blade. Blood soaks the ground. He places a knee on the shoulder of one arm, begins to saw at the elbow.

This, he can do.
He has to.