Time Braid

19. Infiltration

Obligatory Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.

We started with the meager information that was available from the ANBU files. Akatsuki members rarely bothered to hide their affiliation, and although the organization was only a few years old they were already gaining a reputation as an exceptionally nasty group. Unfortunately agents who actually identified an Akatsuki member rarely lived to report it, but the pattern of sightings made a few things clear. The group didn’t have many members, but they were all S-rank opponents. There were probably about a dozen of them, and there was a good chance they had some instant means of communication. I knew from Jiraiya that they wanted to collect the bijuu, but they wouldn’t actually start for another couple of years.

Unfortunately none of that offered a good starting point. Itachi was a member, so in theory I could have gone back to my ‘lost Uchiha’ ploy, but even stealing Sasuke’s eyes instead of growing my own might not be safe for me now. There was still a scar on my soul where my demon self’s Nidhogg connection had been, and that was one brand of fire I wasn’t eager to play with again.

Hinata and I discussed angles repeatedly during one long loop of covert research, as we systematically ferreted out every scrap of information Konoha had about the elusive group. Then we went to work.

Our first try at infiltrating Amegakure was an obvious route. I left an aspect at home to carry on with the chuunin exam, while Hinata and went to scout the farms and villages around the enemy stronghold to get a feel for how they did things. You can’t really seal off all access to a major city for long unless you want all the inhabitants to starve, so there had to be a process for shipping in goods. Once we knew their procedures it shouldn’t be hard to put together a cover that would get us inside.

Except that the little paper angel charms the locals hung everywhere were actually tied into some sort of elaborate spying jutsu that spanned the entire country, and it was only a matter of hours before Pein showed up to deal with us. If not for Hinata’s eyes I wouldn’t even have known what gave us away. So we let him kill us without doing anything to reveal that we weren’t some random chuunin spy team, and went back for another look. This time we started with a careful examination of one of those charms.

“It’s very convenient to be able to try again without resetting,” Hinata commented as she examined the folded slip of paper. “I’d hate to have to redo the written exam every time we get this wrong. I don’t know how you used to do it.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” I pointed out as I probed the delicate weave of chakra. “Oh, and are you sure this thing doesn’t transmit sound?”

“Oops.” She had the grace to look chagrined. “You’re right, it probably does. Sorry.”

I shrugged. “No worries. Unless he can teleport he isn’t going to catch us before we get back over the border, anyway. So, is it just me or is this thing actually a quasi-stable chakra matrix?”

She nodded. “Yes, it’s a clone of a transformation, very elaborate. I see a connection branching off into summon-space, so I think it’s live, but I can’t trace what it’s connected to. You’re better at seals than I am, can you tell what this part here does?”

I focused my perception as best I could out here in the real world, and got a fuzzy impression of the maze of seals that made up the technique. “Hmm. I think that’s an eye. Yeah, these things are definitely sensing devices. But there’s another stretch that looks like an animation technique, and probably a locator. That means… oh. Wow. That’s amazing.”

“What?”

“Picture someone who can transform themselves into paper, dissolve it into a swarm of little origami birds or butterflies or something, and clone parts of the swarm pretty much indefinitely. I think that’s what we’re up against.”

“You’re kidding,” Hinata protested. “I know swarm transformations are possible, but to clone the parts and hold them permanently? There are thousands of these things, Sakura. How does she handle the sensory input?”

“You got a gender off the chakra? Good, that helps. I think she’s cloning her mind too, or at least part of it. The paper charms are like a swarm of Shadow Clones, except that they can send reports back to their maker without dispelling.”

“That’s amazing,” Hinata said. “I wish she was on our side. Oh, here comes Pein. Six miles out on a flying summon, under an A-rank cloaking genjutsu.”

This time we ran, but he proved perfectly willing to follow us across the border. We were a couple of miles inside Fire Country when his six bodies dropped out of the sky around us and started taking us apart in full view of a small farming village.

I wanted to find out a bit more about his abilities, so this time we pretended to be jounin instead of chuunin. That was enough to force him to actually use a few techniques, but even on that level he beat us with startling ease. First one of him blew Hinata into a rock face with some kind of invisible repulsion field, and another reached over and… ripped her soul from her body? Holy crap.

I invoked our contract to pull her out of his grip and into my mindscape, but the instant of distraction was enough for another one to stab me in the gut with one of those odd metal rods they fought with. My chakra immediately went haywire in a rather familiar manner.

It was a lot like Naruto’s interference aura, but Pein could apparently see what he was doing since he immediately countered my efforts to work around the interference. It was like being targeted by a puppet technique, except that he was just trying to stop me from moving. Hell, I couldn’t even detonate my chakra with that level of interference, let alone do anything coherent.

The one who had tried to steal Hinata’s soul bent over me thoughtfully. “That was an interesting technique,” he commented. “But how long can you protect your comrade’s soul when you yourself are under attack? Are you prepared to know the pain you sought to spare her?”

“I’m prepared to face eternal torment for her sake, Pein,” I said levelly. “Nothing you can do would compare to that.”

“Brave words,” he countered. “But will you stand by them? Know pain!”

He put his hand on my head and invoked the nastiest torture technique I’ve ever had the misfortune to be targeted by. But I just smiled.

“No thanks,” I said. “You can scramble my body’s chakra, but you can’t take away my control of my own mind. Wait, your hand is cold, and you don’t have a pulse. You’re a corpse. This is a puppet technique!”

He frowned. “Now you truly know too much. There will be no escape for you until we learn your purpose here.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I agreed. “There’s no way I’m going to escape with you on guard, and I’m sure your interrogation techniques are just as incredible as everything else you’ve got. I give up, I need to go back and start over.”

For all the trouble it had caused us, the loop was really quite useful in that kind of situation. I blinked, and found myself sitting up in bed on the first day of the chuunin exam.

The Amegakure ninja on border patrol duty all had their brains booby-trapped with a maze of shields and detection wards that informed Pein when I tried to mind-walk them. Elapsed time to beat-down: an hour and thirty-five minutes.

All goods coming into the country were handed off to local merchants, who were almost as heavily booby-trapped as the ninja. Knocking one out and replacing him didn’t work much better, but at least it took them a few hours to track me down.

Simply avoiding the patrols and ghosting around the towns under an invisibility genjutsu seemed promising at first. But around sunset a flock of little squares of paper floated by on the breeze, and I quickly discovered their maker was actually good enough to see through my illusions. Total time to beat-down: nineteen hours.

I was starting to get frustrated. Compared to these guys, Konoha’s ANBU were a bunch of little kids playing ninja. I was still sure we’d find a weakness eventually, but at this rate we’d end up getting nowhere before our next meeting with Naruto.

“Sakura, I think the rain is a sensory technique.”

I paused under a tree to stare at Hinata. We’d spent a week slowly working our way across the country disguised as stray animals, only to find that the city of Amegakure was completely surrounded by water. Neither of us could henge into a flying form, but I’d been confident we could just turn into cute, cuddly kittens and find some sucker to adopt us. But we were both exhausted from maintaining such radical henges for so long, so we’d taken the risk of hunkering down in a patch of woods to rest in our real bodies for a bit before we made our play. Then the rain had started, and Hinata had dropped her little bombshell.

“You’re joking,” I said. “This is a real rainstorm. It’s got to be, what, thirty or forty miles across?”

“Every rain drop has a tiny trace of Pein’s chakra in it,” my partner explained. “I can see them giving off little flashes of it when they touch us. He knows we’re here.”

I groaned. “How many S-rank surveillance techniques do these people have? Alright, fine, I give up. Apparently we’ve been rushing this too much, and I don’t feel like dying again today. Let’s just drop out of the loop and rethink.”

“Oh, good,” Hinata replied. “Being stabbed and crushed repeatedly is never fun, and I definitely don’t want him ripping my soul out of my body again. I propose you change your mindscape to have a hot spring overlooking the lake, and we both take a nice long soak.”

“Sounds good to me,” I agreed.

She stepped into my arms, and turned her face up to meet my kiss. Her soul leapt from her body as our lips touched, and I felt the warmth of her presence settle into my mindscape. I smiled, and closed my eyes.

“I want to go back and fix everything,” I whispered, and left the cold rains of Amegakure behind.

“We’ve been coming at this all wrong,” I said.

It was the night before we were due to go into the Forest of Death. I stood atop the city wall staring out into the darkness, trusting in my cloaking genjutsu to ensure that I didn’t draw attention from patrolling chuunin. Hinata perched atop the battlement watching me, and I noted with satisfaction that her invisibility illusion was almost as tight as mine.

“We don’t need to penetrate their security right now,” I went on. “We don’t have a deadline. They haven’t even recruited a lot of their members yet. Which may be an opportunity, now that I think of it.”

Hinata cocked her head curiously. “So, you want to get them to recruit us? I like it, but how do we make that happen?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ve been thinking about it, and I realized I don’t know enough about the world of missing nin to figure out how he recruited the ones he did. The ANBU reports we went through a few years ago just didn’t give a complete enough picture of how the underworld works. So I figure there’s only one thing to do.”

She clasped her hands beneath her chin and looked up at me eagerly. “You mean…?”

“That’s right, we’re going on a road trip,” I confirmed with a grin. “After the exam we’re going to go missing nin together. We’ll come up with a story that makes us look like young prodigies that might be easy to manipulate, and wander the world for awhile kicking over anthills and learning how missing nin live. If we’re lucky Pein will decide to recruit us, and if not we can at least meet some of the guys he does recruit and figure out how they think.”

“Oh, goodie!” Hinata exclaimed. “I’ve always wanted to travel. See exotic places, experience strange food and clothes and customs, meet interesting people and kill them.”

“Psycho,” I chuckled. “Why would we kill innocent strangers?”

“Oh, not the innocents,” she said primly. “But seriously, two beautiful girls traveling together? Lots of people will volunteer to die. We’ll be making the world a better place and building a reputation at the same time.”

“Uh huh. You’re just looking for an excuse. Why do you enjoy killing so much, anyway?”

Her smile died, and she gave me a sad look. “I have to. Naruto told me that above all else I should learn to be happy again, and then you… the demon you… made me love her so much I could deny her nothing, and set me lose on everyone I ever hated. So I had to learn to be happy with killing evil people in creative ways. Although… I suspect now that some of them didn’t deserve it.”

“Oh.” I sighed. “I wish I’d been able to get free sooner. I suppose there are worse problems for a ninja, but… did merging with your younger self help?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “That’s how I know I punished people I shouldn’t have. I wish you’d let me do it again, actually. I don’t want to go back to being the girl I was, but there are feelings I used to have that I need to get back somehow.”

“Hmm. Promise me you’ll take the time to explain to her what’s really going on, and what it means for her if she merges with you? If she’s willing that’s one thing, but no one should be tricked into something like that.”

“Of course,” Hinata promised. “I was an innocent then, and protecting innocents is important.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Naruto complained. The local kid version, that is. Unfortunately we weren’t due to meet our version again for a few loops.

Still, he was as real as we were and I didn’t want to just vanish on him, so I’d arranged for Hinata and I to meet him on our way out of town. I’d already done a little enhancement on us both, but we could still pass for the Sakura and Hinata everyone expected.

Of course, this was after we’d set up a cover story that gave us a reason for leaving. Hinata was wearing a snug leather collar with a tag that read ‘Sakura’s Bitch’, and looking adorably smug about it.

“Naruto,” I said, “the Hyuuga will never let Hinata and I be together. We have to be gone now, tonight, or their assassins will kill me and take her back by force. Then they’ll put the Caged Bird seal on her, just like Neji. You don’t want that, do you?”

He shook his head. “No, of course not. But I could come with you.”

“Don’t you dare!” I insisted. “How will you become Hokage if they declare you a missing nin? Besides, they’d never give up on catching you if you left. They can’t afford to lose the Kyuubi.”

He started. “The… but… um… you know?”

Hinata giggled. “I’ve been able to see it since I was seven, Naruto-sama.”

I nodded. “Yeah, we know. A secret that every adult in the village knows isn’t much of a secret. It doesn’t matter to us, Naruto, we both know you aren’t the fox. Anyway, it isn’t forever. When you become Hokage you can reinstate us, and by then we’ll be strong enough to handle the Hyuuga.”

He sighed. “You’re really counting on me for that, aren’t you?”

“We believe in you, Naruto,” I said firmly. Then I smiled. “But if you need a little incentive, how about this? When you get the hat, you also get two sexy girlfriends.”

Hinata beamed. “I like this idea, mistress! Should we kiss him goodbye?”

“Why not?”

Being an S-rank missing nin was a lot more fun that I’d expected. We had a few skirmishes with Konoha hunter-nin at first, but since we weren’t hiding our abilities this time around they gave up pretty quick. The fact that we killed those Hyuuga assassins may have had something to do with that. We always left the hunter-nin alive, but they were probably afraid we’d changed our minds about being gentle. That, or Hana didn’t want me to leave her tied to a tree under a twelve-hour Heaven Viewing Technique again.

We got into a lot of bar fights in the early days, and it’s amazing how many slavers and bounty hunters tried to catch us with tired old tricks like drugged food and disabling genjutsu. I learned some new techniques that way, and discovered that reversing drug effects is actually much harder than healing trauma. But between us we had so many detection and resistance abilities that no one ever came close to succeeding, and I made a point of letting Hinata get creative with those guys.

After the first few bloodbaths the rate of kidnapping attempts slowed dramatically, and for some strange reason the bar toughs didn’t harass us nearly as often. It was quite a rush to walk into a room full of hardass missing nin with Hinata on my arm, and have them all step out of my path and nervously look away.

But we usually had better things to do than hang out in sleazy bars.

The ninja of the Bokura clan encircled us nervously as their clan head shuffled into the courtyard to meet us. The Bokura were a strong clan of earth specialists with dozens of active ninja, and the fort of chakra-hardened stone they lived in could probably withstand any normal siege. But their clan head was almost as old as Sarutobi, and the fact that we’d simply appeared in the middle of the main courtyard had to be disturbing. That, and we were already getting a reputation.

“So, the jutsu thieves have come to Taikoju,” the old man said slowly. “We have heard of your encounter with the Itisara clan, but you’ll find the Bokura are not so weak.”

A pair of thirty-foot stone statues with giant maces for hands rumbled out of the keep to stand menacingly on either side of him. Rumor had it they were some kind of permanent golem rather than a temporary animation technique, and nearly impossible to destroy. Several smaller statues of various designs were emerging from the fortifications around us to join the encirclement, but I ignored them.

“The Itisara were hot-headed idiots,” I said airily. “They attacked us in the middle of parley, but we still crushed them and ripped their secrets from the minds of the fallen. They should have listened to our offer, instead.”

“I see. What, then, is your offer?” The elder asked dryly.

“We’ve come to trade techniques,” I said. “For each ninjutsu or genjutsu you’re willing to part with, we’ll trade you two of the same rank. For each secret skill, such as puppetry or a taijutsu style, we will trade instruction in two of the secret skills we have already mastered. And for a prized clan secret, like your golem creation method, we will trade either the prized secrets of two other clans, or two S-rank ninjutsu.”

A murmur of conversation sprung up among the crowd. It was a very good offer indeed, but secrecy is such an ingrained habit for the minor clans that they might still reject it. The old man considered us for a long minute as the murmuring grew, no doubt weighing the benefit of our proposal against the obvious risks. After all, we might try to give them worthless techniques, or subtly flawed ones, or just use a few days of mutual training time as a chance to scout out their defenses before launching a surprise attack. Not to mention the political issue.

A man of about twenty stalked angrily over to the elder. “Grandfather, you can’t possibly be considering this!” He protested. “They’re missing nin! If we shelter them Konoha will only use it against us. They can’t possibly have anything to trade that would be worth the risk!”

“I wasn’t aware that the Bokura had become vassals of Konoha,” I said loudly. The murmuring turned angry at that. The Bokura were one of a dozen minor clans that the Fire Daimyo relies on to counterbalance Konoha’s power, which made them political rivals at best and blood enemies at worst.

“We don’t ask for shelter,” I went on. “Their hunter-nin have been learning that they can’t handle us, but if they make another try we’ll be happy to take the fight outside your walls. The Fire Daimyo has issued no proclamations regarding our activities, and Konoha’s inevitable complaint will only make them look weak.”

The young hothead turned to us, and looked Hinata up and down in a way that made it quite obvious what he wanted to do with her. “You think we’re fools!” He shouted. “But I see through you! You’re nothing but a pair of weak kunoichi trying to bluff the world with genjutsu and fast talk. You’ll discover your precious bedroom techniques are of no use against cold, hard stone. Iroko, capture them!”

One of the larger golems shifted at his order, and suddenly charged us with a lot more speed than you’d think a twenty-ton mass of stone could manage. Hinata shifted to guard my back as I stepped up to meet it with a Rasengan already forming in my hand. I eyes the mass of the statue and the depth of its chakra reinforcement for a split-second, and added fire to the whirling ball of power in my hand. The distinctive warble of a Flame Rasengan started up, rising into a sudden shriek as I tapped my storage seal and fed in enough chakra to grow it into a two-foot sphere.

The golem reached for me, but at the last second I sprung lightly over its hands and slammed the overpowered Flame Rasengan into its chest. The golem’s entire torso blew apart spectacularly, but I’d timed my body flicker to get me away and back on the ground before the blast could hit me. Our audience watched aghast as the thing’s legs toppled, it’s arms landing just inside the circle of ninja while the head flew far, far up into the night sky.

I noted that the head’s trajectory was going to bring it down outside the circle, among a small group of younger spectators that might or might not have ninja training. Well, that wouldn’t do. I body flickered into the air next to it and kicked it back towards the middle of the circle, then flickered back down and caught it as it landed. Then I turned back to the old man, completely ignoring the hothead’s horrified stare.

“That’s one method for countering golems,” I said. “I have more. Do we have a deal, or shall I demonstrate them?”

The old man raised his hand, and the crowd stilled.

“The Bokura clan agrees to your terms,” he announced. “Let all members of the clan be aware that the presence of these two is now a clan secret, to be concealed from all outsiders for as long as possible. Roku, as your recklessness has resulted in the loss of your companion you are hereby demoted to genin until you can construct a replacement.”

“Now, if you ladies would care to step inside, perhaps we can discuss details over tea?”

The Bokura were the fourth clan we visited, and the last before we left Fire Country. After that came a leisurely tour of Earth Country, with side trips to some of the minor powers like Grass and Rain. I aged us both by a couple of months every week, until we were physically fifteen and making love with Hinata didn’t leave me feeling like a pedophile. We both missed Naruto, but being able to be together openly made up for a lot.

About a third of the clans we visited agreed to our deal, and we spent several weeks with each of them. Some were completely paranoid, trading a handful of techniques they’d stolen from outsiders but refusing to part with anything important. Others were more strategic, trading many of their own secrets for those of their major rivals, and we picked up some interesting tricks from them. More importantly, we finally had the chance to ask questions about the sorts of things most villages only teach jounin, and get answers from teachers who weren’t cooperating with each other to hide things from us.

Hinata was still focused on improving her combat power, and her ninjutsu abilities improved markedly as we traveled. I showed her a number of my more interesting water techniques to supplement the ones she picked up from our jutsu trades, and her shape manipulation was already good enough to handle Rasengan. My own studies were more esoteric, concentrating on the sealing arts, jutsu design, and further refining my chakra sight. The last project turned out to be the easiest, since nearly every clan we traded with seemed to have a subtly different approach to training chakra sensors. I was never going to match Hinata’s Byakugan for range or clarity of perception, but even in the real world I soon reached the point where I could figure out what a strange technique did just by looking at the chakra release.

Of course, jutsu trading wasn’t exactly safe. A third of the clans we contacted tried to kill or capture us instead of just saying no, and that kept us on our toes. Fighting an entire ninja clan is a hair-raising experience, especially when you don’t know what special techniques they have or how good their best people are. Some clans were relatively straightforward, like the fire users that tried a simple ambush. Others were very, very sneaky, and in one of those encounters we actually died.

Fortunately I’d aspected myself not long after we left Konoha, and the other me was currently an assistant to one of Snow Country’s better seal masters. Since she looked nothing like me there was nothing to connect us, and it was trivial for her to set us up with new bodies so we could set out again. I suspect the guys who killed us were rather disconcerted when they started hearing stories about us still being alive, but we never visited them again.

We made quite a bit of money looting the bodies of the ninja that tried to kill us, but our lifestyle wasn’t exactly frugal. Fancy hotels and nice clothes and the occasional night of partying added up, especially as our reputation spread and the assassination attempts slowed down. We started to do a bit of bounty hunter work on the side, which gave us information as well as another source of income. Some of the jobs on offer were pretty disgusting, but after a bit of debate we decided we’d just ignore them in favor of the more legitimate targets.

We spent nearly a year touring the elemental countries that way, learning and making our presence known while we found out how the seedy side of the ninja world really works. We got screwed over several times, and had some interesting little contract disputes, but it quickly became apparent that there were very few missing nin who could make either of us break a sweat in a fight. Together we had more combat power than some of the smaller hidden villages, so unlike a lot of ninja we actually survived our mistakes and learned from them.

Then Sarutobi decided he wanted us back.

“I don’t believe this,” I grumbled as I eyed the team we’d found waiting for us on a deserted forest trail. “You’re telling me the Hokage formed a special hunter squad with three jounin and sent you halfway across the continent to hunt down a couple of missing genin? What did the Hyuuga do, threaten to leave the village if they don’t get Hinata’s eyes back?”

“Technically I’m only a special jounin,” Anko pointed out cheerfully. “But yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

“Now, now, no need to get so excited,” Kakashi put in. “They’ve agreed to reinstate you, and you can even stay together. There’s a special ANBU group that has an interest in Fire Country’s strongest kunoichi.”

“Oh, we are so not going to work for Danzo!” I exclaimed. “Do you even realize the brainwashing he puts his people through?”

Kurenai sighed. “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. Hinata, please, won’t you see reason? You can’t keep on running like this forever.”

“I’m not running, sensei,” Hinata replied serenely. “I’m living. Don’t think that being my teacher will protect you if you try to hurt Sakura.”

Kurenai shook her head, and glared at me angrily. “What have you done to her, Sakura? She was never like this before.”

“Children grow up,” I pointed out. “Guys, if we trusted Konoha to keep a deal we wouldn’t have left in the first place. Now go home, before I decide I need to kick all your asses and come up with some kind of special incentive to make you leave us alone.”

Hana paled at that, and backed away nervously. “Um, guys, can we please not piss her off? I really don’t want to know what she’d come up with this time.”

I chuckled. “Oh, I’ll make sure you enjoy it, cutie. Maybe I’ll give you to Hinata as a pet.”

“I don’t much like dogs,” Hinata observed. “Maybe you could make her a cat-girl instead?”

Anko snickered. “Hey, if you think you’re that good, maybe we should have a little contest. Let me tag along with you for a few weeks, and we’ll see who turns who. I’ve got enough of a rep the old men will give me some time to work my magic.”

Kakashi sighed. “That’s all very well, Anko, but it won’t satisfy the Hyuuga.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll give them what they want. Hinata?”

I held out my hand. She nonchalantly plucked her own eyes out, and handed them to me.

The whole Konoha team stared at her with varying degrees of shock and horror. I had to resist the urge to facepalm.

“I just wanted a blood sample, psycho-girl,” I complained.

“I know,” she said sweetly. “But certain people need to see how serious I am about this. Besides, you can fix it.”

“True.” I slapped a biostasis field on the eyes, slipped them into one of the empty sample vials I’d taken to carrying, and tossed it to Kakashi. “Here, this should take care of the Hyuuga for now.”

He frowned at me. “But what about cute little Hinata?”

“Oh, she’ll be fine,” I said, and put my hand on her shoulder. A moment later she had eyes again.

“My Sakura is the best medic-nin in the world,” Hinata said smugly. “Oh, and Kurenai-sensei, your invisibility genjutsu isn’t fooling either of us. If you step any closer I’ll have to hurt you.”

Kakashi uncovered his Sharingan, and I tensed. With Hinata at my side I wasn’t worried about winning this fight, but doing it without killing anyone would be hard. The Kurenai we’d been talking to was an illusion, of course, and the Anko must be a shadow clone, because the real kunoichi had circled around behind us during the conversation. I traded a glance with Hinata, and she changed her stance minutely as she prepared to charge the Copy Nin. Her inhuman speed would largely negate his Sharingan, and once she engaged him there was no way he’d be able to break contact. Meanwhile I shifted my chakra nature to water, a hint of mist forming in the air around me as I prepared to spin and engage the pair behind us. My mist shroud wouldn’t hamper either of us, but if I added a silence illusion it would give all our opponents serious trouble.

Of course, they weren’t exactly rookies. Anko realized she’d been made, and I felt her ready a replacement with her clone in hopes of catching me from behind when I completed my spin. Kakashi’s stance shifted slightly as he readied himself to duck underground, but Hinata just smiled serenely and readied a Cutting Water Lance. Knowing Anko’s clone was almost as dangerous as she was, I formed a marble-sized Water Rasengan in the palm of my hand where neither of her could see it, and prepared to body flicker it into the clone. Any second now they’d make their move, and my timing had to be perfect or I’d hit the wrong Anko and kill her…

Kakashi relaxed, and covered his Sharingan eye.

“Well, well, what a surprising pair,” he commented. “Alright Anko, we’ll be counting on you.”

Anko switched places with her clone and dismissed it with a relieved look that said she’d suspected she was about to get her ass kicked. Hana frowned in confusion. “Sir, not that I’m complaining, but I thought we had orders to fight them?”

“We lost, Hana-chan,” he explained. “No need to go on, and deprive Konoha of our services while we recover, eh? Besides, the Hokage will want to hear about this.”

“I’m sure,” I nodded. “Oh, and Kakashi? Tell him… tell him that we’ll follow Kushina’s son gladly, when the time comes.”

Maybe that would get him off our backs. Probably not, but it was worth a try.

Since I knew Anko’s abilities inside and out I figured my contest with her would just be a diversion and a chance to stay in practice. There was no way she was going to turn me into a lovesick puppet, and I made it clear from the beginning that if she tried it on Hinata there was going to be bloodshed. But at the same time I knew that she’d been resisting Orochimaru’s cursed seal since she was a kid, so the odds of me turning her were also just about zero.

But it was actually a lot of fun to flirt and tease and play little technique tricks on each other. It reminded me of the loops where I’d been her student, and the good times we’d had together. She and Hinata circled each other like strange cats for a couple of days until we reached our destination, and ended up being attacked by a ninja clan that was so paranoid they took the fact that we’d even found them as an insult. By the time the bodies stopped falling the two had decided they were kindred spirits, kami help me.

“So, what are you really up to out here?” Anko asked me one day. “You could have gone back and taken over the Hyuuga months ago if you’d wanted, so why didn’t you?”

“It’s a secret. I’ll tell you about it after you swear your undying devotion,” I teased.

She pouted. “Aw, come on! You won’t even remember by the time I’m done turning your brain to mush, so if you don’t tell me now I’ll never know.”

I laughed. “Dream on, Anko. Tell you what, track down Minato’s son and swear fealty to him, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“The Fourth had a kid?” She frowned thoughtfully. “That’s actually kind of intriguing, but I don’t even know him.”

We bantered on in that vein for days, and by the end of our first week I think she was more interested in figuring us out than subverting us. We were all getting pretty comfortable together by then, so when she woke one morning to find me examining her cursed seal she didn’t react violently. She just stretched, and asked me what the hell I was doing.

“Oh, I’ve always wondered what made these things so hard to remove,” I told her. “My chakra sight is getting pretty good these days, and I wanted to see if I could spot the problem. I’m not having much luck, though. I can see the seal itself is so booby-trapped it’d be impossible to alter, and that demonic chakra leaking out of it can’t be doing you any good. But I don’t see any ties to your soul, and the other links could all be severed.”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s why it’s on my neck, dummy. It’s not like we can amputate my head.”

“Oh.”

I sat back on the bed, my mind racing as I contemplated the strands of dark chakra the seal had sunk into her body. It was attached to her chakra circulatory system in a dozen places, but none of them were above the neck. So that meant…

“Sakura-sama can,” Hinata said softly. “She can make a whole body with her healing techniques, and I’ve seen her reattach limbs before.”

“What, seriously?” Anko asked. “Because I’m going to be really pissed if you’re just yanking my chain.”

“No, she’s right,” I said. “I’ve done it before. I can do it right now if you want.”

For once, Anko was speechless.

“What do you want?” She finally asked. “No one does favors like that for free. Do I have to trade your chain for his?”

“Anko, I despise mind control,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t do that to you even if you let me. Why do you think I’ve just been having fun with you, instead of seriously trying to influence you? Besides, I think you’ve figured out by now that I actually like you. Let me do this for you.”

She nodded shakily. “Ok. If you’re sure you can do it. Damn, I’m going to owe you big time for this.”