A world with you in it - 2
II.
One hour later saw Kakashi and Obito checking into an inn three towns over. Dawn was not so far away, but sleep was the furthest thing from their minds at the moment.
Kakashi set out to secure the door and window of the bedroom they were sharing, while Obito sat down cross-legged on top of one of the beds to initiate contact with the Leaf ANBU Black Ops headquarters. He carried a flare scroll that, once activated, would flash a warning to their fellow ninjas at the Intelligence Division in the village that one of their teams was waiting to establish contact and that was what Obito used to signal to his incorporeal sweetheart that he had news to report. Afterwards, all that he had to do was wait for that lovely presence to step inside his soul.
“Tiger, hello!” that warm voice that was by now equal parts familiar and unknown resonated inside his head, making his ANBU codename sound like music and putting an unconscious smile on his lips. “How is my favorite Uchiha doing?”
Obito wished he could indulge in a little conversation with his siren as he normally would, but A-ranks were A-ranks and bad news should never be delayed. Besides, just beyond the barrier of his closed eyelids, he could feel Kakashi silently judging the reflexive blush coloring his cheeks.
“Hey, Crane. I’m afraid I’m calling in with bad news. Dog and I failed our mission.”
“Failed?” the girl asked, shocked. Obito was touched that she apparently thought so highly of him as to assume that he would never let any such thing happen. Or perhaps that was just his wishful side jumping to conclusions. On top of being a complete mystery, this girl had the power to rob him of his ability to think rationally with her mere presence. “Are you all right? And Dog? Are any of you hurt?”
They were unscathed, but the question brought to mind the momentary panic that Obito had felt just before engaging the Mist ninjas, when the noise of that ship’s horn piercing the night had paralyzed him, making him feel like he had never left the battleground where the Allied Shinobi Nations had fought against the Juubi. He wanted to tell Crane about it, to share the burden of the terror he had experienced with her, but ultimately decided that this was not the time to bring it up, not when there were more important things to discuss and Kakashi was standing in the same room as him, listening to his every word.
“We’re fine, but our target vanished without a trace. We think it had something to do with a seal we found at his last verified location. We’ve enclosed it in the two-way storage scroll for you guys back home to look at. For the moment, though, Dog and I are abandoning pursuit since we have no way of tracking him.”
“Understood,” she acknowledged. “I’ll pass on your report and get a team of seal experts to analyze your package. Is there anything else you need?”
To spend time with you... To learn your every secret... To know your name...
“No, that’s all, Crane. Thanks,” Obito, codename Tiger, said.
“Then I’ll contact you again as soon as I have news. In the meantime, your orders are to keep trying to find out more about what this guy’s planning. He is too dangerous to be walking around free.”
“Got it,” he said. Something about her last statement made his instincts tingle, though.
Was that lame businessman dangerous? Sure, otherwise the Leaf would not have bothered to send an ANBU team to deal with him, least of all the best team in the village with a long-standing record for the greatest chain of successfully accomplished missions. To term that man as “too” dangerous, however, was encroaching on an area of entirely different worries.
The mission had first started when the Leaf village had received reports of unusual activities down in Water country - aggressive moves made by their target’s company, Ootsuki Global, that forced the Daimyou to surrender control of the greater part of their economy into that businessman’s, Taro Shigeki’s, hands. But those had only been the early premonitions of the storm no one could have guessed was coming. Unchallenged by the institutions of Water, the company had quickly grown and secured enough power to set itself up as a shadow government, in direct competition with the Daimyou’s authority, often instructing the population to proceed in opposition to the orders of the Daimyou’s officials.
Around that time, when it became clear that the ninja villages would have to intervene to prevent the dismemberment of one of the Great Five Nations, the Mizukage had sent a letter to the other four Kages, informing them that the Mist ninjas were working towards restoring harmony and balance in the country and requesting that they please stay out of Water until the brewing tension in their nation could be defused.
Obito and Kakashi, who had been at Water country at the time, gathering information, had been recalled to the Leaf. With them, they brought back accounts of just how fragile the situation was, of how it looked like Shigeki was isolating the provinces under his control from the rest of Water country, of how he had created border inspection posts, recruiting samurai and ninjas from lesser villages to strengthen his cause. Just as the Mizukage had said, tension was building and it seemed that the slightest disturbance might shatter the tenuous illusion of peace that kept the country from descending into civil war.
At first, all the ninja villages had honored the Mizukage’s request, but once they received news that there were Mist ninjas aiding Shigeki’s efforts to wrest power away from the Daimyou, their compromise to remain inactive had been abandoned. Obito and Kakashi had received the orders to capture the businessman directly from their Hokage and that was how they had ended up in the Land of Hot Springs.
“Crane,” he called, “is everything all right over there?”
“We received a new report about Water country shortly after you left the village,” Crane said.
Her voice sounded closer, more intimate all of a sudden, making Obito blush all the harder. At the back of his mind, he could just imagine the teasing he would get from Kakashi once he finished giving this report. At the forefront, however, he realized that whatever his beautiful Crane was about to say was so top secret that her ingrained training to keep anyone from overhearing sensitive intelligence was instinctively kicking in, even on a private conversation inside Obito’s mind that no one else could possibly spy on.
“What did it say?”
“It came from a team of Lightning ninjas who infiltrated Water, so there are no doubts about its veracity. They said that they saw the Mizukage at the Ootsuki Global headquarters.”
Obito had to play with the words for a few seconds to make sense of what Crane was trying to tell him. “So she is still negotiating with them to work out a compromise?”
“No, no, Tiger, you don't understand!” she hurried to clarify. “The Mizukage is helping them! The Lightning ninjas saw her take orders from one of the company men and instructing the Mist ninjas to help them achieve their goals in any way they can! It’s terrible!”
An image of the six Mist ninjas who had been acting as bodyguards for Shigeki came to Obito’s mind. Back at the dingy bar and when he had been fighting them alongside Kakashi he had simply assumed that they were rogues, but apparently not.
“Damn. What the hell is the Mizukage thinking?” Obito wondered.
“We’re all as surprised as you are. I hear that lady Tsunade even broke her desk when they told her.”
Obito did not like the sound of that. The situation looked bad indeed, but his siren sounded stressed and that made him want to soothe her worries, if only a little.
“Huh... she’s been spending way too much time with the Raikage...” he joked.
Crane’s reply was a chirping birdsong of giggles that made his heart soar in happiness. “Don’t let her hear you say that! But, seriously, you and Dog need to be careful. Watch out for any Mist ninjas. We don’t know what they might do.”
“Got it, my darling Crane, and don’t worry! It would take more than a few lousy ninjas to make Dog and I work up a sweat. We went toe to toe with Madara Uchiha himself back in the war, you know?”
Bragging about his fighting skills was his fall back tactic to reassure anyone, it seemed. Crane did not sound any more at ease when she answered, though.
“Just be safe, all right, Tiger?”
“Of course,” he said calmly. How good it felt to know that she cared about him too.
“Good luck, to the both of you!”
Obito knew it was coming and he was more than used to the feeling of a breaking telepathic connection after all the years he had been in ANBU. It was not as though it hurt or was uncomfortable or damaging in any way, but every time his Yamanaka left him after contact, he felt like she took a tiny little piece of him along with her.
Stretching out his legs on the mattress, he let himself fall back, his head hitting a satisfyingly plump pillow as he sighed mightily. He felt a sudden exhaustion, an unwillingness to move as he savored the vestigial memories of his latest conversation with the object of his fixation, short as it had been. He had no energy to spare to removing his equipment or pulling a blanket over himself.
“You are such a schoolgirl,” he heard Kakashi say off to the side.
The comment elicited little more than a faint wave of annoyance, hardly enough to pull Obito away from his listlessness. It was not the first time he had heard it, though usually it came up whenever Kakashi visited his house and realized that Obito had found yet another overly cheerful pop music sung by teenage girls to listen to on repeat.
“And what would you know of love, mister ‘I’m a tool, I live to serve’?” Obito bit out.
Kakashi’s one visible eye squinted. Obito knew him well enough to be certain he was making a face behind the cloth mask covering every other feature. It was, perhaps, a bit of a low blow to remind Kakashi of his insufferable pre-jounin personality, given the events that had caused his change to come about, but Obito was unrepentant.
As punishment, he got a wooly blanket that smelled of dust and mould thrown across his face.
“Anyway, what are our orders now?”
Right, Obito thought. He did have a tendency to forget that Kakashi could not listen to Crane’s side of the conversation. He busied himself unfolding the blanket and laying it over his legs as he answered.
“She said that we should keep digging for information. Apparently, things are a mess back in Water because the Mizukage decided to switch to the bad guys’ side.”
Kakashi’s eye was wide as he made sense of the news. Both he and Obito had personally met the Mizukage, a woman by the name of Mei Terumii, during the final battle of the Fourth Shinobi World War and it seemed out of character to him that she would now turn her back on the peace agreement that the Five Great Nations had signed in the aftermath.
“What did the Hokage have to say about it?”
“Nothing, or at least nothing that anyone could hear over the noise of breaking furniture. All Crane said was that we’re to be on the lookout for Mist ninjas.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he mocked, thoughts undoubtedly going back to the bodyguard squad they had fought before, just as Obito’s had. Then his shoulders slumped, his head lowered and the fabric of his mask stretched over a yawn. “If we’re going to look for information, though, our best bet would be to track those friends our mark was with at the bar, so that’s where we’ll start tomorrow.”
“Oh, joy, to go back to that house of wonders...” Obito said, rolling his eyes and punctuating his statement with a yawn of his own.
“Yeah, well... shut up and get some rest, little schoolgirl,” Kakashi said. “We leave at sunrise.”
Now those were orders Obito could get behind. Bidding his best friend good night, he closed his eyes and let himself be swept by dreams of his sweetheart’s melodious voice and long blond hair, of giant plants obscuring the moon and of the despair of fighting losing battles.
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