[FIc] "Between the Saltwater and the Sea-Strand" -- Naruto
Summary: Yukiko and Kakashi run an undercover mission in the coastal port of Asase during monsoon season. Rain can make anyone philosophical. Part of the Apartment Manager AU, set after The Guardian in Spite of Herself and before An Unorthodox Pedagogical Approach. (3,515 words)
Note: Written for
warriordrgnmage, in response to the prompt: Naruto: Hatake Kakashi/Ayakawa Yukiko set in the Way of the Apartment Manager Series Timeline. For the Bingo card: Monsoon. It is also a fill for the
genprompt_bingo square monsoon.
For obvious reasons, Yukiko and Kakashi are using fake names while undercover. Yukiko is Aoi, and Kakashi is Hyoujin.
Also, you may notice that this is gen! See, while I am perfectly cool with people shipping Yukiko with Kakashi, that is 100% never going to become Apartment Manager canon, for many, many reasons. If anyone wants a shippy AU, you are welcome to write it yourself, because I flat-out CANNOT. Seriously, even if I tried, you wouldn't want the results. They would be awful. Trust me on that.
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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Between the Saltwater and the Sea-Strand
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Kuwa Natsume looked up as Yukiko slung herself in through the office window in a spray of rain, raised one eyebrow, and then looked back down to her account books. "Misplaced your shadow?"
"Does anyone have a shadow in this weather?" Yukiko said wryly as she shut the window, reducing the sound of rain from deafening to merely incessant and inescapable. "I thought I was used to rain, but coastal monsoons are something new, yeah?"
"We get that a lot from inlanders," Kuwa-san said as she drew a sharp line under a column of numbers and wrote a sum. "You get used to it, and it's easier for shinobi -- you have all that fancy ninpou and whatnot. But in all honesty, Aoi-san, where is your partner? I can't finalize your supply contract without both of your signatures."
Yukiko made a face as she combed water out of her black-dyed hair. "Is it that important to be fussy when this is all ninety percent illegal anyway?"
"The more illegal, the more important to nail down all the details," Kuwa-san said. "What court would adjudicate the case if you sign alone and Hyoujin-san decides next week that he won't pay for his share?"
Yukiko personally agreed with Kuwa-san's caution, but her cover persona would probably make one further push. So, "Oh, don't worry about him. Hyoujin trusts me completely--"
Kuwa-san raised her eyebrow again.
"--nearly completely when it comes to contracts. What's the point of having a partner if you can't split your responsibilities?"
"I would say partners split focus, not responsibility. If you don't maintain some degree of joint liability, what's to stop one of you from turning on the other?"
"Ethics?" Yukiko said with a winning smile, and allowed herself to laugh at Kuwa-san's carefully calculated answering smirk. "Fair enough. Let me look over the terms and I'll drag him over here to pretend he knows how to use a brush sometime before-- when do you close today?"
"Six."
"Before six. Actually, let's say before five, yeah? He's not that hard to track or sweet-talk if you know what you're doing." Yukiko held out her now-dry hand for the supply contract and wiggled her fingers until Kuwa-san passed it across her desk.
She retreated to the broad windowsill and began flicking through the pages. It wasn't complicated, just a dead drop of miscellaneous dry goods in neutral territory that would hopefully establish her and Kakashi as reliable clients and Kuwa-san as a reliable supplier -- a standard way for missing-nin and gray market merchants to feel each other out. If the goods wound up as a cache for a long-term Leaf-nin mission, well, nothing in the contract specified that Yukiko and Kakashi had to be the ones to make the pickup. And their cash was perfectly legitimate Fire Country tender, so as far as Kuwa-san was concerned, there was nothing to worry about.
(Yukiko was fairly certain there was nothing to worry about on Konoha's end of the bargain either. Kuwa-san had a rock-solid reputation for following through on her contracts. Nobody survived twenty years in the gray market without either keeping their word almost religiously or spending a fortune on bodyguards, and Kuwa-san barely bothered to pay for warehouse security.)
"Where do you source kunai?" she asked as the rain's intensity kicked up a notch, beating against the windowpane in a nearly solid sheet of water.
"Wind Country," Kuwa-san said without looking up from her accounts. "Earth Country's metallurgy is better, but the border tariffs aren't usually worth the slight increase in quality. I could change that if you're willing to pay the difference."
Yukiko feigned consideration. "I don't care, but Hyoujin can get picky about steel composition. What would the increase be for this number of kunai and senbon?"
Kuwa-san named a figure.
Yukiko made an exaggerated expression of disgust. "No thanks! He can whine and make do. I'm not paying that much more for what, a half percent less chance of flaws? It's not like anyone expects kunai to last anyway. Use 'em and lose 'em and buy some more, that's what I say. Or steal whatever's left from your targets! That's economy, yeah?"
"Officially, I can't encourage any behavior that would reduce my chance to sell you more equipment, Aoi-san. Unofficially? Yes, that's very economical. If only all my clients were equally practical."
"Eh, there's all kinds of ways to be practical. What we're good at is mostly spying and killing -- it's more efficient to hire a ninja than do that stuff in-house, yeah? Just like you're good at moving stuff around to where we need it, so it's more efficient to hire you instead of us trying to figure all that stuff out from scratch. It's win-win, is how I see it." Yukiko tapped the papers to shuffle them into a neat pile, then handed them back to Kuwa-san. "That looks fine on my ends. Me and Hyoujin will be back sometime this afternoon to sign and pay the next installment."
"It's a pleasure doing business with you, Aoi-san," Kuwa-san said.
Yukiko grinned and dove backward out the window, into the pounding rain.
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Kakashi was lurking in one of Asase's numerous quayside bars, most of which were run out of the back doors of warehouses and also did a brisk side business in assorted seafood dishes. Rain pelted down on the roof tiles in a clattering racket that Yukiko found personally soothing but professionally irritating -- it was a lot harder to eavesdrop through the constant noise, not to mention the complications it added to genjutsu. She and Kakashi had spent their first night in Asase mutually grousing about the unpredictability of electric ninjutsu in waterlogged conditions and the difficulty of filtering ambient sounds out of illusions.
Today Kakashi was sipping a bowl of lobster broth through a long, curved straw that vanished into the deep blue folds of the scarf he'd used to shroud his face. To the casual eye he was staring out an open window toward the rainswept harbor, his oversized gray hood restricting his range of sight and hearing, but Yukiko followed the combined angle of his feet and chopsticks to their targets: a trio of young missing-nin drinking in the far corner, defaced forehead protectors proclaiming their renunciation of Kiri. They were small-time, only a few months out on their own each with barely a name and one line of description in the latest bingo book editions, but anyone willing to go against the Bloody Mist was worth a second look.
Whether this particular investigation would conclude in a job offer or an assassination was still up in the air.
"Heya, Hyoujin. Thinking of roping in some new blood for larger contracts?" Yukiko asked as she dropped into a seat across from him (back to their targets) and set her ramen down on the unsanded wood of the table.
Kakashi shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Three's better than two for flexibility, but more than four on a mission gets awkward without ranks and a chain of command. Nobody who leaves a village wants to go back to those kind of restrictions."
Yukiko tilted her hand. "Eh, there's assholes on power trips and there's division of labor -- not necessarily the same thing. I let you take the lead in a fight and you let me take the lead on retrievals. That's just practical, yeah? But we wouldn't throw each other away. Shinobi are tools, sure, but if you don't look out for your teammates, how can you trust they'll look out for you?"
Kakashi shrugged again and continued sipping his broth.
Targets hear? Yukiko signed under the guise of snapping apart her chopsticks.
Yes, Kakashi signed back as he lifted his bowl and drank the last of his broth under the shadow of his hood and scarf. No bite.
Yukiko slurped a mouthful of noodles and nicely salted broth. "Grouch. Well, whatever we do for future contracts, today we have to sign off on the supply contract with Kuwa-san. We'll need the goods for that thing in Tea Country and she wants both of our names in writing."
"Sign for me," Kakashi said
"Tried that. She won't bite."
"So fake it. Illusions are your thing, Aoi; pretend I'm there and forge my seal."
Yukiko slurped another mouthful of noodles in her best imitation of Naruto's sloppy manners. "Oh, sure. Lying is the best way to establish trust for future contracts, yeah?"
"She's a civilian, how would she know?"
"Not the point. C'mon, Hyoujin. You won't melt in the rain. Let's go make nice with Kuwa-san and I'll make it real worth your while." She ran the edge of her sandal up the side of Kakashi's shin and gave him her best imitation of her cousin Yura's flirtatious smile.
Kakashi twitched.
Yukiko slapped the table and let her smile shade into a more genuine grin. "Ha, I win."
"Fine. Finish your soup and let's go drown ourselves. Again."
"Eh, getting soaked's not that bad. Especially when you've got a partner around to help you peel out of all your soggy clothes and warm up when you get home, yeah?"
Kakashi twitched again, then rallied and let a tiny arc of electricity jump between two raised fingers. "And then get wet again?"
Yukiko held onto her cover persona by the skin of her teeth. "Now you're talking my language. All right, I'm done. Let's go give a little now so we get more back later."
---------------
Signing the contract with Kuwa-san took all of twenty minutes -- half of which was entirely for show, as Kakashi lived up to his cover persona and whined about the kunai quality until Yukiko overruled him -- after which they had the afternoon and evening entirely to themselves and a conveniently established reason to retreat to their rented room and lock themselves inside Yukiko's best privacy genjutsu.
"We can't stay longer than another day now that the contract's signed," Kakashi said as he flashed his hands through the seals for a quick and subtle bit of ninjutsu that left their clothes and skin completely dry without spilling any excess heat. "Do you think the targets will be receptive if we approach them openly?"
Yukiko shook her head, grimaced at the awkward motion of her still-tangled hair, and began working the tie out of her ponytail. "No chance. I don't know if they'd even be open to a joint mission with Aoi and Hyoujin at this point. Sumire wants security and Kenichi likes profit, but they're still raw enough to see tigers in every other shadow, and Eriko's almost too paranoid to make deals with someone as solid and non-threatening as Kuwa-san. On the bright side, they're wildly unlikely to join up with anyone else."
Kakashi slumped back onto the futon with an annoyed set to his eyebrow. "And since they haven't moved against Fire Country assets, there's nothing to justify an assassination without a contract. I hate leaving loose ends."
Yukiko dropped down to sit cross-legged beside him, fingers slowly working through her tangles. "Think of it as a guaranteed vacation in a few months. Our agents will send word the next time our trio pass through Asase, Aoi and Hyoujin turn up to sign a new contract with Kuwa-san, and we sound them out for a joint mission. They ought to be the right balance of calmer and hungrier by then, and we'll get a better reading after a week or so of close contact."
"Ugh."
"Yeah, yeah, talking to people is terrible and scary."
Kakashi rolled over onto his stomach and buried his face in his arms, the soft, voluminous fabric of his hood blocking all apparent lines of sight. "Only the living."
Yukiko froze, then sighed and flopped onto her back with her arms above her head. "Yeah. The dead talk back just as much, but it's still so much easier."
"Sometimes I wonder how many people in Konoha would qualify for a 'Lone Survivor of My Genin Team, Including My Teacher' club," Kakashi said into the futon. "Then I stop wondering because the math is too depressing. But we could start a private chapter just for us."
"Sometimes I hate that you trust me enough to say things like that," Yukiko said to the ceiling. "Then I tell myself not to be an idiot, because it means I get to say equally horrible things to you. Like that I'm pretty sure if we recruit our targets, at least one of them will be dead within two years, and I'm not sure that balances the odds that all three of them will die within one year if they keep working as missing-nin. After all, there's always a chance they might retire and start a farm."
"Says the woman who got so bored with civilian life she jumped into a chuunin exam the minute Sandaime offered her a chance."
"Says the Anbu assassin."
Kakashi snorted. "We're all so fucked up."
"Yeah."
"Might as well be fucked up with other people who understand."
"Yeah."
They lay in silence for some time, listening to the steady thrum of rain on the roof tiles above. The air was warm and sticky, and the breeze eeling through the open window smelled faintly green beneath the ever-present fish-salt-rot odor of the sea.
"Let's accidentally-on-purpose bump into the targets tomorrow morning, buy them breakfast, and float the idea of a joint mission later in the year," Yukiko said eventually. "Might as well plant seeds when the ground is soft."
"You pay."
"It's all mission funds in the end."
"To clarify: you handle all the human interactions. I'll stand behind you and look vaguely menacing so they'll think at least one of us is competent."
"To clarify: you'll look vaguely constipated, while I impress them with my social competency. Networking is an important skill for missing-nin."
"I object to that assessment."
"Which one of us has experience making business deals directly with civilians instead of through the mission office?"
Kakashi flicked a gust of wind at her, re-tangling her hair.
Yukiko pulled out Aoi's grin as she kicked Kakashi gently in the ankle. "Ninjutsu isn't a valid argument, which means I win. Your forfeit is fixing my hair."
"Having teammates and friends is a terrible choice and I should never have made it a second time," Kakashi grumbled, but he sat up and tapped Yukiko's shoulder. "Turn around and hand me your comb."
---------------
They hadn't been able to slap any chakra tags on the targets -- Eriko's paranoia was too thorough for even the subtlest of genjutsu threads to make it past her guard longer than a couple hours -- but Yukiko had gotten a decent sense of their chakra signatures over a series of not-quite-encounters during the past week.
It helped to have rooms in the same lodging house, of course.
Kakashi took first watch, leaving Yukiko to spend the back half of the night with a manual on steam heating systems and the interminable patter of rain. Eventually the sky began to lighten from matte black to flat gray and her spider-light sweep across the building and surrounding streets caught movement from their targets.
"Time to go," she said as she stood. Kakashi remained unmoving until she nudged him with her foot, secure that he was actually awake and wouldn't strike her in reflexive defense.
"I remember pretending to be a morning person when I was too young to know better," Kakashi grumbled into the futon. "It was a terrible idea then and it's a terrible idea now. Nobody should be awake before the sun is halfway up the sky."
"Unfortunately the targets set the schedule," Yukiko said as she tucked her book away into a holding scroll. "Come on, put on your face and let's get to work."
Kakashi flicked a minor wind jutsu in her direction as he rolled to his feet, but Yukiko had braided her hair so this time it stayed secure and untangled. "I wonder if I should switch to bulky scarves as an off-duty option. It's easier to eat and drink through the gaps between layers than to yank a mask up and down very fast or while people are looking away, and people have been much less interested in Hyoujin's face than they tend to be in mine."
"That's because Hyoujin doesn't have a reputation. There's no glory in pulling down some random missing-nin's scarf."
Yukiko grinned at Kakashi's affronted eyebrow and slipped out the window ahead of another wind jutsu.
It wasn't hard to find their targets today: apparently Sumire's morning grumpiness had won over Eriko's paranoia and the trio of former Mist-nin were huddled near a breakfast yatai, half-sheltered from the incessant rain, and haggling over prices with the male half of the married couple behind the counter. Yukiko couldn't have asked for a better opening if she'd tried.
She eeled her way up to the counter and grinned at the woman scraping down the stove from whatever she'd last been grilling. "Two miso and two fish on rice -- salmon for me, mackerel for my partner," she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder at Kakashi, who was standing, smugly dry, under a wind jutsu shaped into an invisible umbrella. "Oh, and how much extra for nori with the salmon?"
The woman named a price. Yukiko rolled her eyes. "I hate bargaining on an empty stomach, so I'll just pay nine tenths of that and we'll all pretend you're not robbing me blind, yeah?" She glanced sideways to where the three young missing-nin were still arguing with the other cook. "I hate listening to arguments on an empty stomach, too, so how about I cover these loudmouths, too? Or at least the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you're asking."
"Deal," the man said, interrupting the mockery of persuasion Kenichi was currently attempting. "Pay up and thank the nice lady for making sure I don't turn you away unfed."
Eriko slapped her hand over Sumire's wallet. "No. It's poisoned."
Yukiko rolled her eyes again. "There's a difference between reasonable caution and paranoia, yeah? I want a peaceful breakfast and our last mission went well, so I'm willing to pay a little extra to smooth things over. It's not like it's that much money. And hey, if it'll make you feel better, consider it a-- a-- Hyoujin, what's the word I want?"
"Why would I know? You handle contracts," Kakashi said as he slipped a bite of mackerel through the folds of his scarf.
"Ugh, why are we still partners?"
"Because I'm very good with knives."
"Point!" Yukiko slapped the yatai counter and turned back to the trio of missing-nin. "Anyway, breakfast. You're right that nothing comes free, so let's say that I'm paying for you to consider a joint mission sometime in the future, if me and Hyoujin have a line on a job that needs more than three people and we're kicking around the same market, yeah?"
Sumire blinked. Kenichi looked like she'd slapped his face with a whole salmon. Eriko scowled and said, "That's not how contracts work."
"Yes it is. It's called a-- a-- it's an option, that's the word! You can ask any of the suppliers in town, they'll tell you. I'm paying for the chance to run a job past you, because anyone who makes it out of Hidden Mist is worth a trial run, yeah? You don't have to accept. You just have to listen. And now I'm done with this conversation because I don't like having arguments on an empty stomach any more than I like listening to them. Don't die, and me and Hyoujin will see you around."
She grabbed her rice bowl, her cup of miso, and her disposable bamboo chopsticks and kicked Kakashi's ankle to make him turn around and stop staring creepily at the trio of missing-nin through the folds of his scarf.
Bite? she asked in handsign masked by a low-level illusion -- the chakra for which ought to be covered by Kakashi's own completely explicable umbrella jutsu.
Maybe, Kakashi signed back, then added aloud, "What do you want to do for our next vacation, if this job goes as well as the last one?"
Yukiko shrugged elaborately as she swallowed a mouthful of fish and rice. "Eh, there's worse places than the ocean. And by then, the rain should be over for the year. I like water a lot better when it stays flat on the ground than when it's trying to crawl up my nose and into my ears, yeah?"
"That's because you have no imagination," Kakashi drawled.
Yukiko considered countering with her own innuendo, but no; they were leaving Asase. They could leave Aoi and Hyoujin behind with the rain and introspection and return to more familiar ground. So she poked Kakashi with her chopsticks instead, and laughed when he neatly dodged the strike.
As they walked past Kuwa-san's warehouse, bickering companionably, a watery ray of sun pierced briefly through the clouds over the storm-wracked sea and laid a path west to the green reaches of home.
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End of Story
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Well, that took significantly longer than it needed to, but I won in the end. \o/
Also, Kuwa Natsume (from Whose Allegiance Is Ruled by Expedience) is now officially part of Apartment Manager continuity. You're welcome. :D If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
Note: Written for
warriordrgnmage, in response to the prompt: Naruto: Hatake Kakashi/Ayakawa Yukiko set in the Way of the Apartment Manager Series Timeline. For the Bingo card: Monsoon. It is also a fill for the
genprompt_bingo square monsoon.
For obvious reasons, Yukiko and Kakashi are using fake names while undercover. Yukiko is Aoi, and Kakashi is Hyoujin.
Also, you may notice that this is gen! See, while I am perfectly cool with people shipping Yukiko with Kakashi, that is 100% never going to become Apartment Manager canon, for many, many reasons. If anyone wants a shippy AU, you are welcome to write it yourself, because I flat-out CANNOT. Seriously, even if I tried, you wouldn't want the results. They would be awful. Trust me on that.
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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Between the Saltwater and the Sea-Strand
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Kuwa Natsume looked up as Yukiko slung herself in through the office window in a spray of rain, raised one eyebrow, and then looked back down to her account books. "Misplaced your shadow?"
"Does anyone have a shadow in this weather?" Yukiko said wryly as she shut the window, reducing the sound of rain from deafening to merely incessant and inescapable. "I thought I was used to rain, but coastal monsoons are something new, yeah?"
"We get that a lot from inlanders," Kuwa-san said as she drew a sharp line under a column of numbers and wrote a sum. "You get used to it, and it's easier for shinobi -- you have all that fancy ninpou and whatnot. But in all honesty, Aoi-san, where is your partner? I can't finalize your supply contract without both of your signatures."
Yukiko made a face as she combed water out of her black-dyed hair. "Is it that important to be fussy when this is all ninety percent illegal anyway?"
"The more illegal, the more important to nail down all the details," Kuwa-san said. "What court would adjudicate the case if you sign alone and Hyoujin-san decides next week that he won't pay for his share?"
Yukiko personally agreed with Kuwa-san's caution, but her cover persona would probably make one further push. So, "Oh, don't worry about him. Hyoujin trusts me completely--"
Kuwa-san raised her eyebrow again.
"--nearly completely when it comes to contracts. What's the point of having a partner if you can't split your responsibilities?"
"I would say partners split focus, not responsibility. If you don't maintain some degree of joint liability, what's to stop one of you from turning on the other?"
"Ethics?" Yukiko said with a winning smile, and allowed herself to laugh at Kuwa-san's carefully calculated answering smirk. "Fair enough. Let me look over the terms and I'll drag him over here to pretend he knows how to use a brush sometime before-- when do you close today?"
"Six."
"Before six. Actually, let's say before five, yeah? He's not that hard to track or sweet-talk if you know what you're doing." Yukiko held out her now-dry hand for the supply contract and wiggled her fingers until Kuwa-san passed it across her desk.
She retreated to the broad windowsill and began flicking through the pages. It wasn't complicated, just a dead drop of miscellaneous dry goods in neutral territory that would hopefully establish her and Kakashi as reliable clients and Kuwa-san as a reliable supplier -- a standard way for missing-nin and gray market merchants to feel each other out. If the goods wound up as a cache for a long-term Leaf-nin mission, well, nothing in the contract specified that Yukiko and Kakashi had to be the ones to make the pickup. And their cash was perfectly legitimate Fire Country tender, so as far as Kuwa-san was concerned, there was nothing to worry about.
(Yukiko was fairly certain there was nothing to worry about on Konoha's end of the bargain either. Kuwa-san had a rock-solid reputation for following through on her contracts. Nobody survived twenty years in the gray market without either keeping their word almost religiously or spending a fortune on bodyguards, and Kuwa-san barely bothered to pay for warehouse security.)
"Where do you source kunai?" she asked as the rain's intensity kicked up a notch, beating against the windowpane in a nearly solid sheet of water.
"Wind Country," Kuwa-san said without looking up from her accounts. "Earth Country's metallurgy is better, but the border tariffs aren't usually worth the slight increase in quality. I could change that if you're willing to pay the difference."
Yukiko feigned consideration. "I don't care, but Hyoujin can get picky about steel composition. What would the increase be for this number of kunai and senbon?"
Kuwa-san named a figure.
Yukiko made an exaggerated expression of disgust. "No thanks! He can whine and make do. I'm not paying that much more for what, a half percent less chance of flaws? It's not like anyone expects kunai to last anyway. Use 'em and lose 'em and buy some more, that's what I say. Or steal whatever's left from your targets! That's economy, yeah?"
"Officially, I can't encourage any behavior that would reduce my chance to sell you more equipment, Aoi-san. Unofficially? Yes, that's very economical. If only all my clients were equally practical."
"Eh, there's all kinds of ways to be practical. What we're good at is mostly spying and killing -- it's more efficient to hire a ninja than do that stuff in-house, yeah? Just like you're good at moving stuff around to where we need it, so it's more efficient to hire you instead of us trying to figure all that stuff out from scratch. It's win-win, is how I see it." Yukiko tapped the papers to shuffle them into a neat pile, then handed them back to Kuwa-san. "That looks fine on my ends. Me and Hyoujin will be back sometime this afternoon to sign and pay the next installment."
"It's a pleasure doing business with you, Aoi-san," Kuwa-san said.
Yukiko grinned and dove backward out the window, into the pounding rain.
---------------
Kakashi was lurking in one of Asase's numerous quayside bars, most of which were run out of the back doors of warehouses and also did a brisk side business in assorted seafood dishes. Rain pelted down on the roof tiles in a clattering racket that Yukiko found personally soothing but professionally irritating -- it was a lot harder to eavesdrop through the constant noise, not to mention the complications it added to genjutsu. She and Kakashi had spent their first night in Asase mutually grousing about the unpredictability of electric ninjutsu in waterlogged conditions and the difficulty of filtering ambient sounds out of illusions.
Today Kakashi was sipping a bowl of lobster broth through a long, curved straw that vanished into the deep blue folds of the scarf he'd used to shroud his face. To the casual eye he was staring out an open window toward the rainswept harbor, his oversized gray hood restricting his range of sight and hearing, but Yukiko followed the combined angle of his feet and chopsticks to their targets: a trio of young missing-nin drinking in the far corner, defaced forehead protectors proclaiming their renunciation of Kiri. They were small-time, only a few months out on their own each with barely a name and one line of description in the latest bingo book editions, but anyone willing to go against the Bloody Mist was worth a second look.
Whether this particular investigation would conclude in a job offer or an assassination was still up in the air.
"Heya, Hyoujin. Thinking of roping in some new blood for larger contracts?" Yukiko asked as she dropped into a seat across from him (back to their targets) and set her ramen down on the unsanded wood of the table.
Kakashi shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Three's better than two for flexibility, but more than four on a mission gets awkward without ranks and a chain of command. Nobody who leaves a village wants to go back to those kind of restrictions."
Yukiko tilted her hand. "Eh, there's assholes on power trips and there's division of labor -- not necessarily the same thing. I let you take the lead in a fight and you let me take the lead on retrievals. That's just practical, yeah? But we wouldn't throw each other away. Shinobi are tools, sure, but if you don't look out for your teammates, how can you trust they'll look out for you?"
Kakashi shrugged again and continued sipping his broth.
Targets hear? Yukiko signed under the guise of snapping apart her chopsticks.
Yes, Kakashi signed back as he lifted his bowl and drank the last of his broth under the shadow of his hood and scarf. No bite.
Yukiko slurped a mouthful of noodles and nicely salted broth. "Grouch. Well, whatever we do for future contracts, today we have to sign off on the supply contract with Kuwa-san. We'll need the goods for that thing in Tea Country and she wants both of our names in writing."
"Sign for me," Kakashi said
"Tried that. She won't bite."
"So fake it. Illusions are your thing, Aoi; pretend I'm there and forge my seal."
Yukiko slurped another mouthful of noodles in her best imitation of Naruto's sloppy manners. "Oh, sure. Lying is the best way to establish trust for future contracts, yeah?"
"She's a civilian, how would she know?"
"Not the point. C'mon, Hyoujin. You won't melt in the rain. Let's go make nice with Kuwa-san and I'll make it real worth your while." She ran the edge of her sandal up the side of Kakashi's shin and gave him her best imitation of her cousin Yura's flirtatious smile.
Kakashi twitched.
Yukiko slapped the table and let her smile shade into a more genuine grin. "Ha, I win."
"Fine. Finish your soup and let's go drown ourselves. Again."
"Eh, getting soaked's not that bad. Especially when you've got a partner around to help you peel out of all your soggy clothes and warm up when you get home, yeah?"
Kakashi twitched again, then rallied and let a tiny arc of electricity jump between two raised fingers. "And then get wet again?"
Yukiko held onto her cover persona by the skin of her teeth. "Now you're talking my language. All right, I'm done. Let's go give a little now so we get more back later."
---------------
Signing the contract with Kuwa-san took all of twenty minutes -- half of which was entirely for show, as Kakashi lived up to his cover persona and whined about the kunai quality until Yukiko overruled him -- after which they had the afternoon and evening entirely to themselves and a conveniently established reason to retreat to their rented room and lock themselves inside Yukiko's best privacy genjutsu.
"We can't stay longer than another day now that the contract's signed," Kakashi said as he flashed his hands through the seals for a quick and subtle bit of ninjutsu that left their clothes and skin completely dry without spilling any excess heat. "Do you think the targets will be receptive if we approach them openly?"
Yukiko shook her head, grimaced at the awkward motion of her still-tangled hair, and began working the tie out of her ponytail. "No chance. I don't know if they'd even be open to a joint mission with Aoi and Hyoujin at this point. Sumire wants security and Kenichi likes profit, but they're still raw enough to see tigers in every other shadow, and Eriko's almost too paranoid to make deals with someone as solid and non-threatening as Kuwa-san. On the bright side, they're wildly unlikely to join up with anyone else."
Kakashi slumped back onto the futon with an annoyed set to his eyebrow. "And since they haven't moved against Fire Country assets, there's nothing to justify an assassination without a contract. I hate leaving loose ends."
Yukiko dropped down to sit cross-legged beside him, fingers slowly working through her tangles. "Think of it as a guaranteed vacation in a few months. Our agents will send word the next time our trio pass through Asase, Aoi and Hyoujin turn up to sign a new contract with Kuwa-san, and we sound them out for a joint mission. They ought to be the right balance of calmer and hungrier by then, and we'll get a better reading after a week or so of close contact."
"Ugh."
"Yeah, yeah, talking to people is terrible and scary."
Kakashi rolled over onto his stomach and buried his face in his arms, the soft, voluminous fabric of his hood blocking all apparent lines of sight. "Only the living."
Yukiko froze, then sighed and flopped onto her back with her arms above her head. "Yeah. The dead talk back just as much, but it's still so much easier."
"Sometimes I wonder how many people in Konoha would qualify for a 'Lone Survivor of My Genin Team, Including My Teacher' club," Kakashi said into the futon. "Then I stop wondering because the math is too depressing. But we could start a private chapter just for us."
"Sometimes I hate that you trust me enough to say things like that," Yukiko said to the ceiling. "Then I tell myself not to be an idiot, because it means I get to say equally horrible things to you. Like that I'm pretty sure if we recruit our targets, at least one of them will be dead within two years, and I'm not sure that balances the odds that all three of them will die within one year if they keep working as missing-nin. After all, there's always a chance they might retire and start a farm."
"Says the woman who got so bored with civilian life she jumped into a chuunin exam the minute Sandaime offered her a chance."
"Says the Anbu assassin."
Kakashi snorted. "We're all so fucked up."
"Yeah."
"Might as well be fucked up with other people who understand."
"Yeah."
They lay in silence for some time, listening to the steady thrum of rain on the roof tiles above. The air was warm and sticky, and the breeze eeling through the open window smelled faintly green beneath the ever-present fish-salt-rot odor of the sea.
"Let's accidentally-on-purpose bump into the targets tomorrow morning, buy them breakfast, and float the idea of a joint mission later in the year," Yukiko said eventually. "Might as well plant seeds when the ground is soft."
"You pay."
"It's all mission funds in the end."
"To clarify: you handle all the human interactions. I'll stand behind you and look vaguely menacing so they'll think at least one of us is competent."
"To clarify: you'll look vaguely constipated, while I impress them with my social competency. Networking is an important skill for missing-nin."
"I object to that assessment."
"Which one of us has experience making business deals directly with civilians instead of through the mission office?"
Kakashi flicked a gust of wind at her, re-tangling her hair.
Yukiko pulled out Aoi's grin as she kicked Kakashi gently in the ankle. "Ninjutsu isn't a valid argument, which means I win. Your forfeit is fixing my hair."
"Having teammates and friends is a terrible choice and I should never have made it a second time," Kakashi grumbled, but he sat up and tapped Yukiko's shoulder. "Turn around and hand me your comb."
---------------
They hadn't been able to slap any chakra tags on the targets -- Eriko's paranoia was too thorough for even the subtlest of genjutsu threads to make it past her guard longer than a couple hours -- but Yukiko had gotten a decent sense of their chakra signatures over a series of not-quite-encounters during the past week.
It helped to have rooms in the same lodging house, of course.
Kakashi took first watch, leaving Yukiko to spend the back half of the night with a manual on steam heating systems and the interminable patter of rain. Eventually the sky began to lighten from matte black to flat gray and her spider-light sweep across the building and surrounding streets caught movement from their targets.
"Time to go," she said as she stood. Kakashi remained unmoving until she nudged him with her foot, secure that he was actually awake and wouldn't strike her in reflexive defense.
"I remember pretending to be a morning person when I was too young to know better," Kakashi grumbled into the futon. "It was a terrible idea then and it's a terrible idea now. Nobody should be awake before the sun is halfway up the sky."
"Unfortunately the targets set the schedule," Yukiko said as she tucked her book away into a holding scroll. "Come on, put on your face and let's get to work."
Kakashi flicked a minor wind jutsu in her direction as he rolled to his feet, but Yukiko had braided her hair so this time it stayed secure and untangled. "I wonder if I should switch to bulky scarves as an off-duty option. It's easier to eat and drink through the gaps between layers than to yank a mask up and down very fast or while people are looking away, and people have been much less interested in Hyoujin's face than they tend to be in mine."
"That's because Hyoujin doesn't have a reputation. There's no glory in pulling down some random missing-nin's scarf."
Yukiko grinned at Kakashi's affronted eyebrow and slipped out the window ahead of another wind jutsu.
It wasn't hard to find their targets today: apparently Sumire's morning grumpiness had won over Eriko's paranoia and the trio of former Mist-nin were huddled near a breakfast yatai, half-sheltered from the incessant rain, and haggling over prices with the male half of the married couple behind the counter. Yukiko couldn't have asked for a better opening if she'd tried.
She eeled her way up to the counter and grinned at the woman scraping down the stove from whatever she'd last been grilling. "Two miso and two fish on rice -- salmon for me, mackerel for my partner," she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder at Kakashi, who was standing, smugly dry, under a wind jutsu shaped into an invisible umbrella. "Oh, and how much extra for nori with the salmon?"
The woman named a price. Yukiko rolled her eyes. "I hate bargaining on an empty stomach, so I'll just pay nine tenths of that and we'll all pretend you're not robbing me blind, yeah?" She glanced sideways to where the three young missing-nin were still arguing with the other cook. "I hate listening to arguments on an empty stomach, too, so how about I cover these loudmouths, too? Or at least the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you're asking."
"Deal," the man said, interrupting the mockery of persuasion Kenichi was currently attempting. "Pay up and thank the nice lady for making sure I don't turn you away unfed."
Eriko slapped her hand over Sumire's wallet. "No. It's poisoned."
Yukiko rolled her eyes again. "There's a difference between reasonable caution and paranoia, yeah? I want a peaceful breakfast and our last mission went well, so I'm willing to pay a little extra to smooth things over. It's not like it's that much money. And hey, if it'll make you feel better, consider it a-- a-- Hyoujin, what's the word I want?"
"Why would I know? You handle contracts," Kakashi said as he slipped a bite of mackerel through the folds of his scarf.
"Ugh, why are we still partners?"
"Because I'm very good with knives."
"Point!" Yukiko slapped the yatai counter and turned back to the trio of missing-nin. "Anyway, breakfast. You're right that nothing comes free, so let's say that I'm paying for you to consider a joint mission sometime in the future, if me and Hyoujin have a line on a job that needs more than three people and we're kicking around the same market, yeah?"
Sumire blinked. Kenichi looked like she'd slapped his face with a whole salmon. Eriko scowled and said, "That's not how contracts work."
"Yes it is. It's called a-- a-- it's an option, that's the word! You can ask any of the suppliers in town, they'll tell you. I'm paying for the chance to run a job past you, because anyone who makes it out of Hidden Mist is worth a trial run, yeah? You don't have to accept. You just have to listen. And now I'm done with this conversation because I don't like having arguments on an empty stomach any more than I like listening to them. Don't die, and me and Hyoujin will see you around."
She grabbed her rice bowl, her cup of miso, and her disposable bamboo chopsticks and kicked Kakashi's ankle to make him turn around and stop staring creepily at the trio of missing-nin through the folds of his scarf.
Bite? she asked in handsign masked by a low-level illusion -- the chakra for which ought to be covered by Kakashi's own completely explicable umbrella jutsu.
Maybe, Kakashi signed back, then added aloud, "What do you want to do for our next vacation, if this job goes as well as the last one?"
Yukiko shrugged elaborately as she swallowed a mouthful of fish and rice. "Eh, there's worse places than the ocean. And by then, the rain should be over for the year. I like water a lot better when it stays flat on the ground than when it's trying to crawl up my nose and into my ears, yeah?"
"That's because you have no imagination," Kakashi drawled.
Yukiko considered countering with her own innuendo, but no; they were leaving Asase. They could leave Aoi and Hyoujin behind with the rain and introspection and return to more familiar ground. So she poked Kakashi with her chopsticks instead, and laughed when he neatly dodged the strike.
As they walked past Kuwa-san's warehouse, bickering companionably, a watery ray of sun pierced briefly through the clouds over the storm-wracked sea and laid a path west to the green reaches of home.
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End of Story
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Well, that took significantly longer than it needed to, but I won in the end. \o/
Also, Kuwa Natsume (from Whose Allegiance Is Ruled by Expedience) is now officially part of Apartment Manager continuity. You're welcome. :D If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
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