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Chapter Text

As soon as Akabane Kagura receives her promotion, she knows that the Chunin vest won’t fit. Despite being one of the taller kids in her cohort, Konoha doesn’t make vests for shinobi under a certain size – which is to say, kind of bullshit. Goodness knows how many child soldiers they pump out every graduation year. 

So, instead, she keeps the vest wrapped in its little plastic bag, salutes the tired worker at the first level of the Hokage Tower, and walks back home. 

Only assholes do the “vanish into a million leaves” trick. Is Kagura an asshole? Fuck no. She isn’t going to burden those poor janitors, having to clean up a bunch of debris everytime some cocky ninja know-it-all decides to act all hip and cool with their exit. The property damage from all the low-level jutsu they carelessly throw around the village is probably the reason why the civilians have to pay such high taxes to live here.

It’s the real ninja who behave well.

As in, the one that everyone least suspects to be some high-class, epic warrior. It’s always the quiet ones lurking around, doing the shifty things, that people need to be wary about. That’s the kind of ninja that Kagura strives to be – not some blockhead with a hard-on for attention.

Of course, when she woke up in this random kid’s body, in the middle of trying to run away from the Kyuubi, it really sucked. Rebirth was supposed to be a fresh start from the beginning, not as a bright-eyed, ten year old genin. Lucky (or unlucky) for her, apparently all of her friends and family had died during the attack, so it was as fresh of a start as any – except for the involuntary drafting into a dangerous superpowered military, but whatever. Life was going to be funny like that anyway.

Surprise, surprise, the vest fits.

Kagura stands in front of the mirror in her studio flat, remembering that, oh right, she’s a real tall fucking kid. Ten, almost eleven, and probably the same height as the fourteen year olds.

Hah. Beat that, puberty!

Considering that, according to the past-Kagura’s diary discovered under the unfolded futon (a total lifesaver and a landmine of information), this body belonged to some poor orphan who barely got fed on time with the lacklustre government stipend, being tall was a nutritional blessing. 

But not much can be done about that face. It’s not a bad face, not really, but… well. Hmm.

It’s as if Morticia Addams met Coco Chanel and created an Asian muse, but in the least conventionally attractive way possible. Kagura’s face isn’t made to please noblemen – it’s made to scare them off. She’s like a supermodel in Vogue, but with all the irredeemable parts too: gangly limbs, intense gaze, weirdly sharp smile, and very strong features. 

There’s a knock at the window.

A bird delivers a message from the jounin recruiters – a general message, sent to all the rookie chunin, on the delegations set out for them in the wake of disaster. The Kyuubi attack may have been a few months ago, but every single division is running low on manpower, and it’s up to the latest generations to fix that little issue. Not the fresh faced ones, who just graduated from the academy, but the odd generation of kids like Kagura and her peers.

Past-Kagura, graduating at eight, joining the war as a meatshield so that the village could revv up its real heroes – the ones with clans and actual teachers – and thus laud victory to them. Past-Kagura, writing in her little diary in between missions. Past-Kagura, barely holding on.

And now, the current Kagura, fucking surviving.

She’d taken the few months of clean up duty to familiarise herself with the village, her living peers, her station, and how to actually do ninja things. Thank goodness for the Kyuubi attack, else everyone would notice her not being able to mould chakra in those first few weeks. 

Haha, hilarious. 

And so, Kagura re-reads the letter, shooing the bird away, and thinks about all the divisions the village has to offer that she would want to join. Now that she somehow gained a chunin promotion for running a few missions by herself for the sweet, sweet cash (honestly, they probably only promoted her because the village politics needed a certain amount of ninja in each rank to be certified as “powerful” to the other villages; aka an international dick measuring contest), there’s an expectation that she chooses a specialisation or else they’re gonna choose it for her. 

You know what? Fine. Kagura’s going to choose the one with the actual ninja. Waking up in some loony continent they called the Elemental Nations was bad enough, but this shit? Fake ass ninjas, throwing magic tricks around like a bad Harry Potter parody – this ain’t it, chief. 

She acknowledges the terrible, terrible aspects of this world, too, with her fresh eyes. Her job that she can’t quit without being branded a traitor is just the start – it’s stunningly weird that prepubescent children are given the same amount of responsibility as full grown adults – but then it expands. Outside of the main villages, it’s the feudal system all over again, with piss poor civilians wearing faded kimonos, farming in little settlements, fighting off rogues with hires from afar. Daimyos, the nobles, and rich merchants, all fighting for power, and in turn financing the ninjas (and not in the direction of growth). And with all this, the only way that she can possibly enact change in this ass-backwards world is to be cemented as top dog. Trickle down theory, or whatever.

The next day, Kagura goes to the assignment office and asks to be put into ANBU.

The process is simpler than most expect.

You go up to the funny people wearing name tags, introduce yourself, and voila. How else do the civilian-born nobodies join the discrete forces? The classic ninja way of getting stalked by a mysterious guy in a mask, then recruited in the middle of the night due to one’s irresistible charm is unrealistic for the majority of the ninja population – thus, there’s also a “normie” way to join, through paperwork. Signing up is easy. Getting in is the hard part.

Or, scratch that: signing up is also hard. Apparently ANBU requires a ton of paperwork.

Kagura spends about twenty minutes in the assignment office, filling out the giant stack of papers. A lot of it has to do with being aware of bodily harm, and are you sure you want to do this? You might not like the ANBU division you’ll be sorted into. Are you really, really sure?

But something nibbles at her brain by the time she reaches the last page, which is a giant box where her name was supposed to go. Whose name is long enough to need an entire box the size of the paper? No, no, no, either the ANBU department was wasteful with space, or there’s a hidden message here. 

She flips through the packet again and spots a very obvious hidden message. The first character of every page, put together, says, Write me a poem about Konoha.

Whilst she had paid attention to classic literature studies back in school, poetry is (still) not a forté. Also, this is the shittiest code ever. The first character of every something – this is easy academy shit. Seven year olds could figure this out whilst tied above a volcano, listening to the screams of little goblin people being flayed by unicorns.

So Kagura flips through the packet again, looking for clues. The poem about Konoha was probably a clue, maybe. She doesn’t know shit about poetry, but everyone knows the childhood rhymes about Konohanasakuya-hime and the three trees, even displaced humans like her. Kagura spots the kanji for spruce, the first tree, and looks at the characters under it, because everyone knows that ANBU “live in the shadows.” 

It leads to a dead end.

But no – ANBU don’t just live in the shadows, they were also the protectors of the village, more so than the average ninja. Kagura traces the characters around the kanji for spruce, counter-clockwise, because they’re protecting the tree.

あんみつ. Anmitsu.

The fuck?

Further in the packet, she finds oak, the second tree, and reads the characters surrounding the kanji.

明日の朝. Tomorrow morning.

On the page before the empty text box, the kanji for the last tree, maple, is at the top of the page, surrounded by literal nonsense words. Okay, so maybe the third tree is just filler.

So she has to show up tomorrow morning, at an unspecified time (probably at the asscrack of dawn, because shinobi can be anal like that), at an unspecified anmitsu shop (of which there are probably at least a dozen of those in Konoha alone).

Or no… Kagura reads the kanji around maple again – okay, then. The nonsense words were actually just providing an address. Still no time, but that’s easily resolvable. She’ll just have to arrive at like four in the morning.

Because the assignment officers are starting to look annoyed about her slow thinking and the packet didn’t say not to fill out the poem, she scribbles out a haiku about the Hokage picking his boogers, signs her name at the bottom, and turns the papers in. 

Three months later, Kagura joins ANBU.

She’s eleven now, and maybe even a little taller, despite the obvious lack of nutrients from the matriculation training in the middle of ass country, à la grey skies and crumbly sand. Who knew Konoha trained their Black Ops on a depressing island off the coast of Fire Country? Sounds like a security risk.

Out of the twenty-two candidates on that stupid island, only five remain. 

Lucky her, Akabane comes before the other names, so she’s called up first to receive her mask and designation from the ANBU assignment office – which is less of an office, and more of a shady little desk underground the anmitsu shop, which, she’s discovering, is such a top secret spy thing to do. Most of the ANBU offices are underneath boring shops, scattered around Konoha, with the headquarters and the official training centres in the mountain behind the Hokage faces. 

“Here is your mask and uniform,” the mysterious ANBU drug dealer member says. She wears a mask with a lot of blobs on it, so she’s either some sort of unfortunate crustacean or a particularly fat frog. The department needs to hire better artists. “We recommend wearing the full uniform to the specified armouries to get a discount.”

Kagura wordlessly accepts the scroll.

The sparsely lit environment, the metal shutters, and the Hollywood level of forced “cool” factor really makes the mystery ANBU uniform lady seem like some sort of dealer. It doesn’t help that the desk is built into the wall, and Kagura can’t see what’s behind the glass opening. Maybe a few cabinets or lockers, but everything’s so fucking dark.

No matter. As soon as she gains a modicum of power, either through becoming a captain or the commander, she’s going to find a way to crowdfund these poor babies into letting them keep the lights on.

As soon as Kagura escapes to the safety of her flat, hidden from the eyes of everyone (except her very dead plants, definitely didn’t get watered in at least three months), she opens the storage scroll with her mask and uniform.

“Please don’t be something ugly,” she mumbles.

Lucky (or unlucky, depending on who’s asking), it’s the opposite of ugly. It might just border on dumb or dangerous, because everyone’s going to remember swan. Those dumb fucks gave her a mask with the elegant, beautiful bird, instead of one of the silly animals that everyone groans about. Enemies don’t really remember salamander, fish, or rat. But they sure as hell will remember getting gored by Big Bird. 

In this year alone, Kagura has spent at least ten minutes per day staring into a mirror. Ignoring the ANBU training excursion, for the hell that was – no plumbing infrastructure whatsoever, nevermind bathrooms.

It’s mostly her face.

It’s definitely just her face.

Kagura hopes she’s in her pubescent ugly duckling phase, because even with the Elizabeth Taylor eyes, the haute couture Ehara Miki aesthetic does not look, in any way shape or form, pleasant on an eleven year old girl. Her long, gangly limbs and boyish shape (where are the boobs?!) shows promising signs for an epic, decades-long modelling career – but sadly, Konohagakure remains void of such wonders.

Stupid ninja society.

And in the proper tradition of mourning her previous life and identity, Kagura spends a horribly long amount of time being emo in front of a mirror before getting ready for the day. Hardly a week after the ANBU matriculation ceremony, which was hardly a ceremony and more of being gathered in a room with the four other survivors of the hell-hole, she’s summoned in the early morning back to the ANBU headquarters behind the cliff face, with only one word on the welcoming scroll: Training.

She ties the swan mask firmly to her face, then runs off to face the future.

Bear is a tall, buff man, with a chainsmoker voice and a strict no-nonsense attitude. He’s also the General.

They’re in the sixth-level basement, where walls of cement are padded with what must be cotton and sound-proofing foam because as soon as the five new members enter the training room, Kagura can no longer hear anything that isn’t in the direction of the rickety-looking door. The air tastes musty, the monotonous colour scheme of the plain tiles completely kills any emotions, and the room environment matched with the menacing and obviously experienced general of the entire fucking forces makes for one hell of a time. So much fun.

As always, she’s up first.

“Swan.”

One of the newbies flinches even though Bear’s voice isn’t directed at them. Hah, weakling.

Kagura salutes, then returns to proper form. 

And Bear says, “Your report was the least interesting thing I’ve ever read in my entire tenure in this organisation. You have no notable features, no distinct ninja technique, and the instructors only decided to pass you because they could not figure out your weaknesses in all of the battles and other assessments. But, none of them could figure out your strengths.”

Okay, ouch.

In her defence, she’d woken up as a meek little ten year old Genin in a world she had absolutely no prior knowledge of, and somehow managed to float by solely because all of her friends and family had died – thus, no one suspected a thing when she replaced this poor girl’s entire identity. No one taught her shit – most of Kagura’s ninja knowledge came from stalking the bratty academy kids training on the public fields. Everything else came from absorbing her environment, doing basic chakra exercises and dialling everything up to a hundred. Walking up walls, walking on water, power-jumping, kunai and shuriken, the academy jutsu, standard academy taijutsu, and genjutsu release – that’s her entire arsenal.

More the reason why she suspects that her promotion to Chunin was the village needing extra padding for political reasons.

“You will be placed on Team Kan,” he finishes.

Bear, to her satisfaction, reams the rest of the newbies quite fairly, telling Dragon that her taijutsu is complete shit in a somewhat disappointed, fatherly tone. Giraffe and Chipmunk apparently suck at code decryption, and Oyster (what the fuck?) is told off for his fiery personality. In Oyster’s defence, he was the happiest piece of shit on that island and for some reason, genuinely enjoyed being there. 

Then the general dismisses them. 

Team Kan is… tall.

There are no other words to describe them, seeing as how they’re all wearing ANBU masks and they’re all well trained enough to not give off any social cues if they don’t want to. And about half the forces (or so Oyster gossipped, back in the hell-hole) wear permanent disguises whilst doing ANBU work, due to a prolific career on the topside. The famous clan chuunin or jounin, apparently.

And then there’s Dog, who famously and fabulously shows off his silver hair. His identity is an open secret, anyway.

“Swan, reporting for duty,” Kagura says at the training field, giving a proper salute.

There’s Leopard, Rooster, and Carp. The captain is Leopard, who is a tall man with dark hair and broad shoulders. The second is Rooster, who is a tall man with dark hair and freaky fingerless gloves. Carp is another tall man, possibly somewhere in his teens, judging by his slimmer musculature and the way wrinkles barely form in his skin (even the slightest indents and sun damage are key), with dark hair. Swan is also tall and dark-haired, but obviously not as tall as her new teammates, but enough that none of them give her any shit.

Leopard nods. “Welcome to Team Kan, recruit.”

Then he attacks.

The training field doesn’t have a number, none of the special forces fields do for security reasons (well, she supposes the general has a masterlist somewhere for purely geographic reasons ) , nor does it legally exist within the Konohagakure village structure. It’s in the forest beyond the cliff face, several kilometres away from the nearest toilet.

The fact that there is a public toilet in the middle of the forest is absolutely hilarious, because it means that at one point, a commanding officer got sick of shitting in the bushes and decided that it was worth the security risk to install a septic tank in the middle of the woods.

Kagura does the thing where she tries not to be anywhere near the pointy end.

It’s a method that frustrated her opponents on the hell-hole throughout its entirety, because her complete average-ness means she doesn’t have any exploitable weaknesses to counteract. Of course, this is against peers, not against experienced ANBU captains, who have more than enough tricks to fight against a frustrating little chuunin. 

The captain has her on her back in less than a minute.

“Hmm,” Leopard says. “You are…”

She’s not that boring, right?

“Malleable.”

Carp hoots from the sidelines. “Just say she’s got no cool factor about her, bossman!”

Whilst staring at the looming porcelain captain mask above her, she hears Carp get thwacked in the head by Rooster, followed by a huff.

Leopard scratches the back of his head, an oddly human gesture belonging to a supposedly super scary ANBU captain that could throw her on her back in less than a minute flat. It’s giving embarrassed dad vibes, and Kagura is all for it. Thank fuck, at least her team is showing signs of emotion, and so far nobody’s as hard-ass as those devil instructors from the hell-hole.

Or maybe all recruits go through that form of hazing.

Hmmm.

“I’m going to spin this as a positive,” she says. “Mould me in any way Team Kan needs?”

Team Kan is a stealth squad, with a sub specialisation in assassination. Most of the jobs they’re assigned to are about sneaking important documents to certain locations, or killing someone and fleeing the scene before enemy ninja even know that a crime has been committed. As such, the captain stresses, the primary goal for them is to know how to hide and flee. The squad runs drills focused on speed, endurance, chakra suppression, scent suppression, and even more running. It’s more cardio than Kagura has ever wanted to do in her entire life, but by the end of it, they’ve assigned her a specialty to work towards.

Leopard is an assassination specialist. Rooster is a tracking specialist. Carp is a body guarding specialist. And now Kagura has been assigned to become a…

She blinks.

And raises her hand, like she’s back in primary school.

“It’s not – you read the pamphlets, right?” Leopard immediately says, a touch awkward. “You’re there for the deception and disguise training, not for anything else. Everyone gets shuffled around after a two year period, and you can request a different specialisation once you get a hold of the basics of subterfuge.”

She lowers her hand. It’s a little awkward for an eleven year old to get sorted into Seduction, but at least they don’t expect her to do the sexual part of seduction training. And, from what she learned during lessons of that thrice damned island, it’s a field with a much more nuanced education than most would assume – seduction specialists don’t just use sex, most of the agents are just good with civilian disguises and can gossip their way through getting valuable information that the average semi-sociopathic ninja would have no idea how to achieve without leaving a trail of mutilated baby carcasses.

Befriending the locals is, apparently, part of seduction training. Hmm.

Kagura would not immediately pinpoint herself as charismatic or cute, but whatever. At least she knows how to interact with the normal people, unlike these fucking nutcases polluting the ninja forces. Konohagakure makes them all creepy as hell over here.

They finish training for the day, to which the captain then rounds them all up like stray kittens to head to the ANBU locker rooms to shower. It’s like high school all over again, because it’s just one big locker room for several squads shoved into a tiny, smelly room next to the showers – which are divided by gender even though she’s pretty sure most killing machines don’t care enough about genitals – and some metal benches with ass-shaped sweat stains on them.

Leopard gently pats Kagura’s shoulder. “So. We’ve been a team for six months and we’re all comfortable with each other’s identities, but if you need to be discreet for personal or shinobi reasons, we’re fine with that. With our old teammate, we used to go out whenever we had the time after training or missions, but…”

This sounds like guilt tripping.

Of course, she understands that any captain would want to know his agents better, preferably by knowing their strengths and weaknesses outside of work, especially in a life-or-death field like theirs, but Leopard’s puppy eyes were not subtle. At all.

Ohhh, so that’s why they needed a seduction agent.

Because it’s not against the rules for squads to fraternise (however risky it may be), and becoming friends outside of work will probably improve her sociability by tenfold, Kagura agrees.

“Alright,” she says. “But you’re paying.”

With a promise to meet at the junction between Tobirama and seventh, they all go home to shower. Because only the real psycho pieces of work use the showers – the water pressure is shit, according to Carp, but the locker rooms itself create a wonderful atmosphere for hazing newbies into doing whatever their captains want. 

It’s a civilian kind of night, the captain had said, but the meaning of that phrase severely depends on how mentally disturbed the ninja in question is. Civilian clothes can either mean wearing civilian clothes, or wearing ninja clothes minus the flak jacket and three shuriken.

Leopard seems nice and normal. He probably means the former.

He does not mean the former.

Kagura’s studio flat is on Tobirama street, so she arrives first, waiting next to a Yamanaka-owned flower shop. She wears a cute white sundress with flowers on it, and shiny pink butterfly-themed sandals. Even though she’s almost one hundred seventy centimetres, the outfit makes her look like a normal eleven year old. Kind of.

There are exactly eleven kunai hidden around her body, but the civilians passing by and waving nicely at her don’t need to know that.

Rooster arrives next, because he’s definitely anal enough to want to be early to everything. And Kagura knows that the Hyuuga across the street is Rooster because none of them bothered to hide their hair, given that the entirety of Team Kan has the same dark brown, almost black coloured hair. He looks uppity and snobbish like a proper Hyuuga, maybe around twenty or so, and wearing something along the lines of ninja clothes minus the flak jacket and three shuriken.

Then Carp arrives, a gangly, bumbling teenage boy with no discernable clan features. He’s got beautiful green eyes, a splash of freckles, and a cheery face to offset the Hyuuga. She can hear his voice from across the street, annoying Rooster, and then the captain arrives, slinking in with a playboy attitude. The decision to chew on a senbon is weird as fuck, but it’s too late to turn back now. 

“...Is the newbie late?” Leopard asks his second, but then turns around once he sees Kagura cross the street to approach them.

Now the four of them are standing in front of a grungy looking bar called The Whore and the Kunai.

“I was here first, but no one noticed me,” Kagura says, tugging on a frown to fake being upset. She points back to the flower shop. “Across the street.”

Leopard flinches.

The senbon falls from his mouth.

“How old are you?!”

A lesson is learned: ANBU captains only receive their members’ general skill level reports and code name upon entry to a team. Names, ages, affiliations – that’s all unnecessary, according to headquarters. Unfortunately for Leopard, he was put off by Swan’s height and general emotional stability, and assumed that she was, at least, fifteen or sixteen, without bothering to ask her directly.

“I’m Akabane Kagura,” she says, upon everyone else’s awkward introduction. Shiranui Genma, Leopard, stares guilty at her sundress, the bar entrance, her sundress, then back at his feet. Hyuuga Taira – that motherfucker has the Byakugan, of course he knew – rolls his eyes. Iwabuchi Ritsu, Carp, looks at the plasticky butterfly designs on her feet. Weirdos.

“Alright, change of plans,” Genma says. “New place.”

She cranes her neck to see the menu plastered on the outside wall. “It’s fine,” she assures. “They’ve got pub food.”

Inside, someone screams, then moans.

Genma winces.

Ritsu, a sixteen year old chuunin, puts a hand on her back and pushes her towards this new location – the first thing on the street that the captain saw, a specialty dog-themed cafe, with a primary demographic of civilians.

It’s also meant for kids.

The three bulky adult ninja crowd around Kagura, walking down the street, and stare awkwardly at the cafe. Everything is white, pink, and… fluffy.

“I’ll get the Doggy Delicious Bum-Bun with the Woofy Cream Vanilla Parfait,” she tells the waitress. The waitress is wearing a frilly pink kimono dress with dog print patterns, and is visibly uncomfortable with the three obnoxiously tall and large ninja crammed around a small cafe table.

The waitress, to her credit, smiles kindly at Kagura, then waits for the men to order with a suddenly strained look.

Taira and Ritsu order the same bun, probably out of fear, but Genma looks at the waitress straight in the face, points one finger to the heaven he prays to above, and says, “One beer.”

“Ah– we don’t serve that here, sir.”

Genma frowns. “One vodka, then.”

The waitress pales, opens her mouth as if to say something, then wisely decides to head back to the kitchens.

Kagura thinks it’s weird how Konoha forces its children to behave like adults at such a young age, because Genma is only seventeen and is acting like a total grandpa right now, for reasons unknown. The age of adulthood may be sixteen in this country, but she’s too used to the idea of a heightened age of majority, somewhere between eighteen and twenty, well after a child has finished high school and is moving into university. But even then, Taira is still fairly young for his profession as a tokubetsu jounin, at a ripe two-zero. 

Ah, society. Fucking insane.

A different waitress arrives with their order, equally tentative as the last one. Even without the flak jackets and the ninja headbands stowed in their pockets, it’s extremely obvious that the three males are the most ninja to ever ninja, and the staff appears to be terrified that they’re all hanging around a pubescent pre-teen.

Ritsu presses down on the Doggy Delicious Bum-Bun. Chocolate cream leaks out from the dog shaped bun’s behind. 

Whatever. Those socially inept losers can wither away in awkwardness. Kagura’s going to enjoy the free food.

Chapter Text

Akabane Kagura spends much of the rest of the year in a constant state of pain. Leopard, or Genma, or the senbon-chewer is a sadist, and not even a fun one at that. The captain pretends to be cool and blasé, but never hides his humour whenever he’s finished making his squadmates run around like beheaded chickens. 

Because she’s a blank slate for him to manipulate into the perfect murder weapon, she naturally finally develops a few strengths – mostly out of sheer necessity.

Kagura can run.

Really fast.

She nyoooooms through the forests around the country, keeping speed with the more experienced members, contorting her body like a ballerina with osteoporosis, fighting against gravity and physics to jump around in ways that make her feel every bit of the super scary ninja assassin of the night that all civilians think that they are. She’s that dark blur in the trees, with a shiny new sword bought from the not-as-much-as-she-hoped-for ANBU salary, cutting down enemies and being an intimidating sneak.

At first, the lack of super cool and explosive genjutsu and ninjutsu is a bit of a letdown. During Team Kan's “down-periods,” the ANBU assignments office sends members to trail after genin teams with the famous clan ninja as back-up or contingency plans, and watching the little squirts piss around with their big bad fire jutsu or shadow traps (Uchiha and Nara, respectively) kind of sucks. Never once has she had to step in during the missions for the important genin teams, but holy shit she wished some enemies showed up during those boring C-ranks around Fire country because then she could at least do something to get the irritation out of her system.

But then, after a few more months of becoming secretly bad-ass in her own way, she begins to pity the immature ninja who are peer pressured to be all sparkly and shit on the battlefield instead of keeping consistent with all the base techniques to actually grow stronger.

Kagura turns twelve without knowing a single ninjutsu or genjutsu. 

It’s kinda crazy.

Then, the day after her twelfth birthday, Leopard pulls her aside to teach her the basics of fire manipulation. It ruins the streak of her attempting a holier-than-thou attitude over the privileged clan ninja, but she only dwells in the ungratefulness for a total of five seconds before exploring the intricacies of fire.

It’s Fire country. She has a fire affinity. Very expected.

“Happy birthday, Swan,” he says, ruffling her hair. It doesn’t do anything, because she ties it back tight enough so that stray leaves and branches don’t catch stray hair or skin particles. 

Part of ANBU training is also, apparently, training to not even exist. Team Kan has taught her how to hide so well that apparently the Inuzuka ninja can’t smell her even if she’s standing right in front of them.

Long story short, she’s been permanently banned from visiting that Inuzuka-owned dog cafe after accidentally spooking the clan heir or something.

Kagura smiles at her captain, remembers he can’t see her face with the masks on, and then loudly telegraphs her gratefulness through body language. And purposefully tries to freak him out with her general good mood. This is a daily occurrence. “Thank you for teaching me! Does this mean I get to bump up a stat point in my official profile?”

She means it in a cheeky, teasing way, but Leopard looks at her very seriously and says, “Probably not. It’s a D-rank fire-starting jutsu.”

Bummer.

“Pity,” she says, then asks if this is how ninjas warm up their heroin. 

Leopard vanishes.

After six months in a trial period with their regular ANBU teams, the rookies are pulled to complete long and important missions for training in their specialisations. Swan and Dragon are sent to Grass country with six other Seduction specialists in order to infiltrate a prestigious junior college in the heart of the capital. The civilian society is much more developed over there, compared to its ninja village, so a ton of influential children of Grass are safely sent to study in the country’s high-ranked schools and apprenticeships. 

Captain Frog assesses Swan’s general competence in the Seduction field by taking her on a date.

It’s a little weird.

They’re halfway to the mission point, somewhere around the official civilian borders of Fire and Grass, when Frog tells Swan and Dragon to be prepared for evaluation, to see which parts of the mission they’ll be sent into. Why the ANBU office couldn’t have decided this before, she doesn’t know, but it’s not hard to protest against free food.

Frog is a short, busty woman, who must’ve been blood-born enemies with the ANBU assignment officers because there’s not much difference between the mask and her actual face. To be clear, ANBU Frog looks like a frog.

Batshit ugly.

On the date, Kagura dresses in a way that makes her look older and more feminine, by making her bra a bit heavier and using scentless and waterproof makeup on her bone structure. She paints her nails, but keeps a few of them a little chipped, and chews on her nails a bit for emphasis into the anxious but lovable teenager act that she’s going for. Frog tries to lead the date into something more sensual, but Kagura blabbers on and “accidentally” rants about how horrible school and her parents are, then backtracks and sheepishly asks about Frog’s life. Frog throws a curveball and says her parents are dead, so then Kagura acts clueless and tries to be empathetic but ends up sounding overly sappy and pitying.

Kagura passes with flying colours.

Dragon switches with her, and hot damn, the entire mood of the second evaluation shifts into something sexy.

They’re in a restaurant, with Swan and the six other ANBU members at one table listening in on the date to their left. One of them must also be a genjutsu user, because so far, none of the waitstaff have bothered them or even noticed that two of the restaurant’s tables are being occupied by deadly murder weapons – but a genjutsu to this extent means Uchiha.

None of the other members looks even remotely Uchiha-like. 

Permanent disguises for the famous clan ninja, she realises, at the same time as ah fuck ah shit races through her brain. Clan ninja on her team will always be the priority. If all goes to shit, they’ll be the ones that Konoha will attempt to retrieve the most.

But, well, hopefully the mission doesn’t go down under, because it appears that Dragon has a very unique skill set that is perfect for the… dirtier aspects of Seduction.

Kagura recognises the girl, even with a full face of makeup on, as Yuuhi Kurenai – apparently one of the kids that she had an academy class with at some point. But her entire family is made up of ninja, and she was prioritised during the war to stay away from the war. So they didn’t end up close or as friends, according to the landmine of information in past-Kagura’s diary.

Kurenai has an interesting allure to her, where she effortlessly draws in attention from dark, disturbing audiences. She’s classically beautiful, with almost frail and doll-like features, delicate as porcelain. Her dark, wavy hair frames her face, which is permanently stuck in the emotions of lost innocence and wide-eyed confusion. She’s the type of girl that traffickers want to sell at the highest bidder to the sickest sort of paedophiles.

And fuck, she’s like thirteen.

The second date starts with Frog pushing Kurenai into basic things, with Kurenai shyly giving away more (fake) information like a lost rabbit, until Frog pushes into sexual questions, to which Kurenai pretends not to understand – but when she finally does, she gives such a powerful, frightened expression, that Kagura wonders who the fuck taught a thirteen year old girl to know how to act like this.

The evaluations end.

“Swan, you’ll be enrolled at the school as the target’s classmate. How you approach the target will be based on your best assessment of personality,” Frog says. “Dragon, you’ll be with Octopus, Catfish, and Raccoon, staking out the whorehouses for the target’s guards. Snake and Worm will be running the operations from inside the hide-out. I will be replacing one of the school’s janitors.”

The Academy of Science and Maths is a junior college for intelligent (and/or rich) Grass citizens. The target is the stuck-up heir of the Grass daimyo, who was sent here by his daimyo father because he was a friendless little bitch who needed to learn what the real world was really like.

Kagura thinks the daimyo should’ve sent his kid to a normal public or trade school instead of whatever this fancy ass place is, but at least there is some socioeconomic diversity. Some poor kids with enough brains to pass a few interviews and entrance exams can make it in, to mingle with the higher societies.

They have a test on the first day.

Yeah, it sucks.

Snake and Worm feed her the answers through a miniature radio in her hair, in volumes too low for untrained civilians to hear, but funnily enough, Kagura needs more help answering the basic history questions than the maths questions. Haha, funny, she doesn’t know shit about what they teach little kids here because she very conveniently didn’t even attend the academy .

The opportunity to get close to the target comes easier than anyone would’ve predicted. The next day, the teachers hand back the test, and Kagura scores first place and the heir scores second place. His gaggle of fake fans and friends assure him that he’s still super smart or whatever, but he storms towards her and accuses her of cheating. 

Which, yes, but also no.

“Suck it!” She cows. “I jus’ studied more than you!”

He huffs, obviously trying to show off his superior elegance and manners compared to the country girl she’s emulating. “It’s rude to not use my name, Anzu-san.”

Kagura, or Anzu now, manages to get between a frown and a smirk. “Okay then. What’s your name, mister second place?”

She knows his name, but part of the ploy is being annoying as fuck, and it works wonderfully, because he completely blows up and starts yelling at her for being disrespectful to the daimyo’s firstborn son, and that her family is uncultured, blah blah blah.

Rising to the challenge, Kagura shouts back, slipping into a very strong country accent out of frustration, until the two kids are very nearly about to punch each other’s lights out. 

The headteacher gives both of them detention.

It’s the start of a beautiful rivalry.

Within a month, Megumi, the heir, inadvertently slips personal information into Kagura’s greedy hands. They fight a lot, with a rich noble versus a poor country girl being the main topic of conversation in the beginning, before he slowly begins to respect her as a person, and they instead fight about their personality differences. Because she treats him like any other annoying brat, he learns how to act like an actual person.

He becomes nicer. And more open.

Kagura doesn’t even feel guilty about selling his secrets back to her home country, because at least Megumi is blossoming into a nice young man before her very eyes thanks to her handiwork of just being a down-to-earth friend.

There are Grass ninjas polluting the hallways of the academy, in public and in hiding, mostly to protect their rich clientele or the daimyo’s son. With Kagura’s abrasive attitude and her frenemy relationship with Megumi, there is very little suspicion thrown on her character. They’re looking for kunoichi seductresses, not tempestuous teenagers who look like they hate the heir for most of the time.

Worm and Snake built an amazing backstory for her, holy shit. And the other members of the team are currently weeding out the outsider’s information from the royal guards. Frog is… doing her own thing, most of the time.

After the second month, Frog calls in the radio to finish the mission as soon as possible. The timeline has been moved up.

Raccoon concludes the mission entirely. 

Over the course of a week, there are more and more security threats on the capital’s lands, from supposed Rock ninjas scouting out for more farmland in preparation for the winter months – Worm and Snake’s doing. The school practices safety drills in the event of an attack, with Kagura joining the other kids to grumble and groan about being kept inside. And finally, when restrictions lift a little, Kagura accidentally kicks a football towards where the boys are smoking in the shade of the courtyard.

“Peasant girl,” Megumi sneers.

Kagura, or Anzu, rolls her eyes, and says, “Okay, mister second place.”

After two months of being frenemies, he smirks ever so slightly instead of getting angry, and that’s when Raccoon’s genjutsu takes hold.

The plan is insane. During the night, when the ANBU agents dared to make any moves at all, Frog had been drilling Raccoon and Swan to perfect the timing of the swap or else the Grass bodyguard ninja will fuck up the entire operation. Y’know – good luck!

Kagura completes a substitution jutsu with absolutely zero amount of chakra residue at the exact same millisecond that Raccoon forms her distance-wide genjutsu. The chakra from doing the substitution jutsu requires a minor flare to build up momentum in her core, which can only be hidden during the initial numbing effects of the genjutsu, and not a moment before or after.

The swap is successful.

Kagura watches from a distance away, hidden from the world, as an attack erupts. The illusion of Anzu jumps in front of Megumi, just in time to block an enemy ninja’s sword with her body, and the boy watches in horror as his first real friend dies in front of him, drowning in her own blood, because his own guards were too busy protecting him, without acknowledging the girl who jumped in time before the others.

The ANBU agents, disguised as Rock ninjas disguised as non-village affiliated mercenaries, attempt with great effort to “kill” the daimyo’s son, but in the end, retreat after more Grass reinforcements arrive. In the chaos, Frog swaps the remnants of the illusioned corpse with an actual fresh corpse of a random farmer girl they found on the other side of the country, with some of the battles accidentally further damaging Anzu’s body so that her face is completely unrecognisable by the end.

Good. That other dead girl had very different facial features.

The rookies’ induction into the Seduction field is successful, the village quotes. Kagura’s report on Megumi of Grass’ entire personality and profile is thusly sold to the second daughter of the Fire country’s daimyo, who wishes to court the boy. 

The country needs stronger ties to the breadbowl of the continent, she says. The noble girls from Lightning are eyeing the prize of Megumi’s status and virility, and Fire must win.

Kagura doesn’t know what Kurenai’s job was, exactly, in the brothel, but the other half of the mission assignment seems to please the second daughter, who then makes a joke about how her serving girl friends in the kitchens will be grateful for the heads up when she plans to move her retinue with her to the Grass daimyo’s palace. The kindness is not lost on anyone, but there is still a huge difference between kind and nice.

Wanting information for the sake of her civilian entourage is kind.

Making other people abuse themselves to get that information is not nice.

The ANBU team returns home.

Chapter Text

It becomes incredibly obvious at how horrible even the non-clan ninja-raised ninja are when Kurenai stares into Kagura’s eyes for a full five minutes whilst stirring her drink.

The Yuuhi aren’t a clan, Kagura thinks, but she’s heard here and there about how Kurenai’s parents are both ninja, and one of her grandparents was a ninja, too. With that reasoning, there should be enough civilian upbringing in the Yuuhi family to even out the weirdness of chakra magic, but noooo.

It doesn’t work like that, apparently.

In fact, it becomes even weirder.

“Frog is my mom,” Kurenai says, and Kagura chokes on a strawberry-mango lassi.

After the eventful two month long mission, the two rookies decided to check out the new Fruity Fruity Café on Hashirama street in order to get to know each other better. ANBU Dragon is, unfortunately, an incredibly awkward conversationalist and probably only feels comfortable in the presence of exactly four people.

“ ‘Frog is your mom?’” Kagura asks, trying not to sound horrified, because it does explain a lot but it also raises several uncomfortable questions. “That’s – interesting. Is that why you were sorted into Seduction?”

They drink their lassis whilst slowly revealing new information about themselves – because that is, at its essence, what becoming friends is – with Kagura growing more and more concerned about the state of her new friend’s mental health. There’s not much she can do to stop anyone’s career track, nor is she a trained therapist, so Kagura leads the conversation to a lighter topic and attempts to make Kurenai smile at least once today. 

The mission is unsuccessful.

Still, Kagura perseveres, and the newly formed friends agree to meet again later. 

The next meeting is with a boy named Gekko Hayate and Sarutobi Asuma, the Hokage’s son. They’re all crammed in a booth at a sukiyaki place in downtown, with Kagura deciding to herself to never again trust Kurenai to arrange a friendly meeting -- like. Ever. Please no. It’s unsaid that Hayate, Kurenai, and Kagura are all ANBU agents, and this might’ve been a preteen celebration of throwing their lives away if the Hokage’s son hadn’t attached himself to the group at the last minute.

He also has a crush on Kurenai. A very obvious one.

“Our classes combined in first year for the field excursion trip,” Hayate mentions to Kagura. “Do you remember me?”

It would be rude to say no, and everything spells out bad news if she lies and then has to back up her claim, so she says, with a crinkly smile, “I’m really sorry, but to be honest, I wasn’t exactly the smartest six year old. My memory is just…” Here, she gives a thumbs down and a shrug, and the entire group accepts her answer. 

It’s enough of a non-response to not arouse suspicion, which is exactly what she does for the rest of the night because apparently all four of them had been in the academy together at some point, it’s just that she doesn’t remember. But even so, Hayate doesn’t look thrilled at her words, and she subtly makes it up to him for the rest of the night by acting nice and being generally flirty. It works, mostly, and he loosens up after her third witty remark about Asuma's very very very subtle secret.

The next long mission for Kagura is again, working for the fire daimyo’s second daughter. She works undercover in the palace as a serving girl, darting quietly between silent rooms to deliver more than salacious gossip to the other couriers, or to act as tittering lady-friends for any of the daimyo’s daughters, if need be, to impress visiting noble-friends. 

Kagura’s mission is to discover if there are any plans to murder the daimyo’s first daughter, and the mission, as most seduction missions do, lasts a long time. She celebrates her ANBU matriculation anniversary by herself in the kitchens, sneaking little pieces of sweet rice cake into her mouth during her shifts there. The mission nearly concludes with little to no fanfare, with ANBU agent Swan not having caught any sort of dissident behaviour in the palace that would warrant an assassination against the first daughter.

This is what she reports to the second daughter.

“You have my gratitude, Swan,” Chinami says, lounging back in her seat. “Your country thanks you.”

Kagura bows.

Chinami is a petite girl, perhaps a few years older than Kagura, with the classic traditional beauty of sleek long hair, doe eyes, and porcelain white skin. But she smiles a little too sharply at times, and grows her nails longer than is appropriate for someone who wants to appear delicate and dainty. Her kimono today is a dark crimson, dotted with fresh orange flowers and golden grass motifs, tied with a similarly rich set of outer robes – an outfit of utmost power, matching the innate regality the girl carries with her everywhere.

The planning with Swan and the daimyo’s second daughter has been something fierce this past year. The first daughter, Chinatsu, plans to ascend the throne and become the new daimyo in just a few short years. However, there are many nobles in Fire and other countries who wish to see the first son – the daimyo’s third child, a sprightly little boy of eight – lay claim to power. Chinami is doing everything she can to make sure her older sister ascends, instead of creating an era of a boy king.

Tying herself to Megumi of Grass will surely increase the supply of food to the great country of Fire, and support the reign of Chinatsu.

Kagura misses her friend. Swan hopes prosperity will come to the country.

Surprise surprise, on the last day of the mission, the day that she’s supposed to travel back to Konoha, a poison trap is sprung against the first daughter. Kagura isn’t working as a serving girl on this day, and instead stalks from the shadows. She watches as the two sisters prepare for their noon-day meal, closely looking at all the servants that bring in the trays. One of them, a tiny slip of a woman who’s been working at the palace for many years, sets Chinatsu’s favourite chicken porridge down first. 

Even from metres above, hidden in the corners of the ceiling, Kagura recognises the wobbliness of the serving woman’s hand, the stains of sweat on the back of her neck, and the emptiness of her gaze. This assassin is perfect – not a single hair out of place, the food appears to be an exact replica of the porridge from yesterday, and her pace walking out of the private dining room does not have any tells.

Except Kagura is a master of the face. 

The daimyo’s family are trained to recognise suspicious behaviour, but not even they can smell sweat from a room away by enhancing chakra to their olfactory glands.

The sweat pattern is unusual.

Why?

Kagura steps down in a flash, to stand behind Chinatsu’s seat. No one has noticed her entry yet. From here, there is nothing wrong with the meal. The porridge looks appetising and harmless. The side dishes are also perfectly well made. Leopard taught Kagura that even the so-called “scentless” poisons are never really scentless. Even bland poisons smell like something. 

It’s not in the food.

Chinatsu reaches for her spoon.

This is where the fun begins – the entire room goes still when Swan reveals her presence by reaching out to pluck the first daughter’s hand from the air, gripping onto the woman’s elegant wrist. A few people scream, then very very slowly relax once they see the Konoha ANBU mask. 

“Swan,” Chinami barks. “Report.”

“The cutlery is poisoned,” she says blandly, in her practised ANBU voice. It’s a mix of professional and sultry-mature, to add more confusion on her age and identity.

From there, everyone backs away from the table, and Kagura heads to tie down the culprit before the woman can make a move. 

Her job contract ends that day, still, because her seduction mission is over. Now it’s time for the espionage and tracking specialists to take over, to discern the truth behind Chinatsu’s attempted murder. Funnily enough, the Rooster and Carp are the two new agents for the mission, and they meet at the half-way point between the capital city and the ninja village.

“Any new developments, Swan?” Rooster asks.

Kagura thinks about all the salacious gossip and the real rumours uncovered whilst in the depths of the palace walls. It may not be helpful to their mission, but…

“Yes,” she says, holding out a thumbs-up. Carp stares at it. “I grew an extra centimetre.”

Chapter Text

Carp retires.

It’s an odd sight, to see someone be able to step down from a position once given it, but it’s not too unusual – or so Kagura hears. Retirement is usually due to injury, but there are exceptions given to those of political importance within the country or village. And in this case, Carp retires from ANBU to become an academy teacher – a position of arguably greater importance. 

Scratch that.

It’s not arguable. It’s a damn fact.

The timeline of his retirement fits with the two-year team shuffle that the ANBU division suffers from – a facet of making sure there’s enough environmental diversity in all these nutcases’ lives so that they don’t all go insane. The important commanding teams, the high-ranking ones with only A and S class ninja, don’t change at all usually, but the mid-tier ones like Team Kan shift all the time. Carp retires into a new persona called Iwabuchi Sensei, Leopard and Rooster shift around to different tracking-based teams, and Swan is slotted into the infamous “black hole” spot of the legendary assassination team.

Team Ro.

Captain Dog likes to keep his teams organised the same way every single mission, but due to the nature of the intense assassination jobs Team Ro works with, members keep switching in and out for safety reasons. There’s always three heavy hitters and one agent with subtle skills – healing, traps, long-distance sensing, or seduction. And it’s this position that rotates out all the damn time.

Nobody expects Kagura to last the first month.

Well. She’ll show them.

The second in command for Ro is a very eager puppy – which is ironic, because he’s ANBU Cat. Kagura can see the imaginary tail already wagging for cool, hot, and sexy.

Cool, hot, and sexy, aka Captain Dog, is an enigma. And by that, Kagura means that he’s real fucking weird. On the first day of the new team assignments, he brings them to the furthest legal training area from Konoha proper, almost half a day away, and suddenly announces a four-way brawl before anyone gets a piss break. On the hellhole island, the trainers called this game Last Man Standing, and said that the end prize was revelling in the joy of being better than everyone else. Or something like that.

From here, Captain Dog must be categorising all of the abilities of his new teammates in the most obvious way possible. It feels like a cheat and definitely really annoying, so ANBU Swan does her best to also be an irritating little wanker.

Oyster, that smug shit, attacks first, blasting the clearing with a wide-range fire ninjutsu. He’s one of the ninja that use the full head coverings, which means that he’s got an identity worth hiding behind that mask. Clan kid. Very well trained, versed in many fighting tactics, creative with fire – this is definitely an Uchiha. 

Cat, meanwhile, disrupts their balance with an area based earth ninjutsu, creating centralised earthquakes in the immediate radius. He then uses the chaos to his advantage, clearly comfortable with the shifting ground, to rip out an ocean of shuriken. Swan diverts a few of them coming at her with her own shuriken.

With the onslaught of fire and earth attacks, the entire field becomes a masterclass in destruction. The captain did say it was a four-person brawl, but if he expects her to be a part of this when she can safely take cover and attack from the sidelines, he’s got to either be an idiot or a massive prick. Swan takes her chances and runs back to the treeline, to where all Konoha ninja feel the safest: stuck in a branch somewhere.

In the two seconds it takes her to escape the burning earthquakes, Dog takes out Cat with a kick to the forehead. The Cat mask cracks, and the agent falls to the ground, his back landing horribly straight into a sharp edge of a man-made dirt boulder. The earth jutsu ends abruptly at the cut-off from its chakra source, leaving Oyster to dig out his most impressive but also subtle tactics of evasion. This kid was unpopular on the ANBU training island not just for his serial killer personality, but also because he utilised the flicker jutsu like no other, sometimes even running away from the trainers just to piss them off. 

The moment Dog throws an explosive seal towards Oyster, Swan starts her plan of attack. She’s the “fourth wheel” on this team, metaphorically speaking, and is definitely okay with the lot saving her for last because they’ll think it to be an easy victory. Because, well, yes, but also no. 

Her kunai, tied to a razor wire, flies slowly to incentivise Dog to catch the kunai. He does, because she knows the next thing he’ll want to do is yank it hard enough to bring her off balance or send some sort of lightning or fire jutsu through the connection.

He pulls it.

How to beat a sharingan user? Or, two sharingan users? Dog, or Hatake, or whatever, is one of the best of the best. He won’t fall prey to advanced trickery because he can see everything, and is on top guard due to being attacked by more than one person at the moment. So instead, Swan makes sure to hide her tricks in a way they won’t expect. 

He pulls the wire with ease, Swan loses balance just for a second, her hand slipping on the other end of the wire spool, Dog and Oyster spot the moment of opportunity to redirect their attacks straight at her, and in the slip, her fingers crush together uncomfortably, leaving small cuts by her knuckles.

It forms a hand seal, hiding in plain sight.

Katsu.

This is how to out-predict a sharingan user. Be stupid.

The field rings out with explosions, planted by Swan during the shuriken attack. She’s made it a habit to roll up sheets of explosion paper and stuff them in the middle of the throwing weapon with gratuitous use of tape (not glue, because any good tracker can smell glue from a country away), and the washi paper is so thin that it’s not easily noticeable on the ground amidst the chaos of something like multiple fire jutsu and a mini earthquake. Besides, nearly all of the weaponry has shifted underground, in cracks and crevices.

(Thanks a lot, Cat)

The ground beneath Dog and Oyster erupts in a cacophony of flame and smoke. Debris sprays everywhere, Oyster jumps the wrong way, and Dog stabs Oyster’s hands with a well aimed senbon (why does he use senbon? Who even uses needles anymore?) horrifically.

Oyster screams like a little girl, and Kagura can imagine – hands are integral to jutsu, the tight cords of tendons and bone separating and cracking and splitting must feel awful, even with adrenaline flowing through his body. 

Dog knocks the boy out after a ridiculously one-sided taijutsu match, throwing his limp body on top of Cat’s. 

The smoke hasn’t cleared enough for full visibility yet, which is a shame because Kagura’s best sensory ability is her vision and her current opponent is called Dog .

Woof woof.

She doesn’t rely on the explosion’s aftermath to stunt his sense of smell and hearing, and quickly relies on her best asset, running the fuck away, to somehow survive this. ANBU Swan is fucked.

It’s completely and utterly gratifying, however, after the five-minute mark of fleeing from the site, when she realises that she’s actually physically faster than the captain. Dog does a bit of fuckery now and then with chakra-muscle augmentation, but it doesn’t last long enough for him to catch up. It’s great. It’s amazing. It’s fucking fantastic.

Until the actual dogs show up.

Half an hour later, there are eight dogs on top of Kagura. Only half of them are fast enough to race, but the other half are the brains of the operation. Whilst she has the ability to outrun them, they know the terrain better than her, and surrounded her by all angles during her galavant up the side of a cliff – this part of Fire country has way too many mountains and hills. It’s like fucking Iwa up here. From there, once the captain could close in the distance, he threw his heart and soul into subduing her with elemental ninjutsu and environment-based genjutsu until one of the ninken managed to sneak in for a nasty bite.

Gross.

The big one, a giant dark brown bulldog, pulls Kagura’s sore body on top of his and begins the trek back to the training field.

Or, whatever’s left of it. 

The captain lines his three subordinates on the ground like obedient little pets as soon as everyone’s awake. 

“You,” he tells Cat in a scolding tone. “You need to work on your taijutsu.”

Cat visibly wilts.

“And you already know what to work on,” he tells Oyster. They share a knowing look, and Kagura is one-hundred percent sure that the two of them know each other in the ‘real’ world. 

Oyster raises a heavily bandaged hand. “Permission to speak freely?”

She half expects the captain to say no, just because he’s shown to be an anal motherfucker so far, but luckily enough for the peanut gallery he’s not too disagreeable. Yet.

“Go on.”

“I have a complaint about your training methods, captain,” the (possible) Uchiha says, and raises both mildly mangled hands high in the air. “Because excuse me, what the fuck is this?”

And then the fucker just shrugs and says, “You need to practice the flicker jutsu without signs. There’s your incentive.”

“You maimed me the day before a mission–!”

“--Practice harder, then.”

Oyster screams in frustration but gives up because Dog almost looks like he’s enjoying this now. Weirdo.

“And now you, agent Swan,” the captain says. “You need to work on fighting multiple opponents at once. Your genjutsu endurance is also shit for your level of clearance. Now, Team Ro, Oyster is correct – we have a mission in Otafuku Gai in twenty hours. Until then, we need to work out the kinks. We’ll have another four-way battle in three minutes.”

This fucker.

Chapter Text

Kagura is a seduction expert, which means that the village or its shifty political underbelly (she’s not blind, she lives in a literal military dictatorship made up of ninjas ) can’t take her out without a serious fight from administration because it’s nearly impossible to replicate her skill set. This does mean, in turn, that seduction agents tend to avoid physical battles as much as possible to preserve their lives for the sake of the village and client – so maybe it’s a blessing from the heavens that Kagura can run really fast. 

But this isn’t a fight that she can run away from.

Dog makes a loud sneezing noise outside in the streets during the summer festival in Otafuku Gai. Auxiliary agents are stationed around the rooftops, looking into the window of a business deal that could potentially fuck up Konoha’s wheat trade.

Enter: bad guys.

“So you’re the informant, huh?” The Kumo ninja says, leering over the low table with tea and biscuits. Two other Kumo ninja sit in the back of the private room, keeping their ears and eyes open. Sensor ninja? If that’s the case, then Captain Dog absolutely cannot move from his current position or else they’ll be able to detect it. The ugly one on the left is already twitching like a maniac.

Kagura purses her lips, looks down, and looks back up, pretending to be scared but putting up a brave front. Or, actually, she might not be acting. But the minute dip in her head’s movements is code in ANBU language for shut the fuck up, I got this. 

Hopefully Dog can see it from his point, because if he doesn’t stop his damn sneezing signal then she’s going to literally blow her own brains out with a homemade pipe gun.

“I am,” she says. “Thank you for meeting with me tonight. As promised, I’ll tell you Lady Chinami’s plans for her new agriculture law, but you have to swear to keep me safe. I– I’m risking a lot for this information, I’m starting a family soon, my fiance can’t–.”

The enemy holds his hand up. Kagura stops her rambling and swallows down the jitters.

Dog, outside, sneezes loudly.

She wants to throttle him and tell him to shut the fuck up or else the foreign ninja will get suspicious of some bastard with terrible allergies by the ring toss stall in the festival, if they’re not already suspicious. Because, come on, being a nervous train wreck is the only natural reaction for a civilian informant. If anyone is sensing fear in her words it means the plan is working, leave me alone.

Well, the assurance of Konoha presence is soothing, at least, because these three Kumo ninja are all undoubtedly at least A rank, to be bold enough to infiltrate into Fire country for information gathering. By some god’s luck, the previous stealth team on station had enough pointers in this direction to lead Team Ro into creating a specialised situation for information gathering.

Because fighting these three in a highly public area, in the centre of town, will most likely lead to some very bad political consequences, no matter if they’re the intruders or not. Chinatsu would probably fire her from all future jobs if the swan mask went under media scrutiny.

Enter: seduction specialist Akabane Kagura, thirteen and thriving.

The mission requires Agent Swan to give false information believably and not cause a commotion in one of Fire country’s major civilian settlements, wherein Cat and Oyster are stationed at the secondary location with traps ready to lead the foreigners away on a disorienting genjutsu path back to some other country (not their problem, haha), with Dog acting as overall support (aka if anyone fucks up he pulls them out). The easy camaraderie from Team Kan isn’t present in Kagura’s life anymore, because Team Ro’s captain, Dog, seems to encourage petty rivalries and stupid arguments over any actual teamwork building exercises.

Whatever. That freak.

“It’s here,” she says, and slides over a crumpled note. 

Something happens – a retrieval jutsu? – and the slip of paper disappears in a shimmer, instead of anyone reaching out to grab it. The ninja on the right (marginally less ugly than the one on the left) nods, and stage one of the mission comes to a conclusion.

“We thank you for your services,” the lead Kumo ninja says.

Well. At least someone has manners.

It was pretty strange, at first, in Kagura’s first year living in the Elemental Nations as an oblivious stranger because of the utter lack of diversity juxtaposed with the outrageous amount of colour. Everyone looked mostly Japanese, but if the island of Japan got bulldozed over with the world’s biggest paint brush. People from Lightning country came in different hues, from wall plaster white to burnt charcoal, but their features still remained Asian. Nevermind, Kagura, thinks, the millions of hairstyles from around the continent.

It’s well… hmmm.

Bright?

Kagura claps her hands together and bows lightly. “Please let us change the fate of my country’s future. We wish for a beautiful eternity with the first son.”

Then the foreigners leave, Kagura takes a second to sag in relief, and makes the switch from seduction to stealth mode once Dog sounds the next signal – a loud sigh.

To her, it’s easy to pinpoint his voice out of the crowd of milling civilians amongst the festivities, but to enemy ninjas who aren’t familiar with the voices of her comrades, they most likely brushed off his occasional noises outside. Why? She doesn’t know for the life of her – maybe Dog’s voice is just that annoying. The tone grates her ears because he’s just so, so, so–.

“Huh,” he muses, once she meets him by the stall. “Not bad.”

Condescending.

“...Thanks, captain.”

He pats her back. Yes, it’s terribly awkward and holy shit he’s such a fuckup.

As per protocol, because Dog is a massive hypocrite, he sends her off to the ANBU shrinks after every mission that involves seduction expertise. So whilst he’s stewing in his own brain sludge, bullying Oyster and being a condescending shit of a senpai to Cat (does nobody else see it as harassment?), Swan gets to have nice chats with the shrinks.

Or, not so nice. They don’t like having her in their offices and she can’t imagine why.

“You have a tight hold on your emotions on the field,” Doctor Yamanaka (Kagura doesn’t know which one, there’s like a billion of them blond fuckers in Konoha) applauds. “The compartmentalisation training seems to work very well with you. Now, how do you feel about separating yourself from all your human masks?”

Kagura leans back on the couch. It always smells like sage in this office and man, her nose fucking hurts. “Yeah, no, it’s good.”

The clock on the wall ticks on.

The shrink smiles blandly. “It’s… good? Tell me, Agent Swan, what do you mean by that?”

This is always the worst part.

“I mean,” she says, “I don’t really use masks? It’s my job to understand people and blend in, so I just… yeah. I react accordingly to the situation.”

For example, Megumi had been a great friend. She still feels bad about betraying his trust and traumatising him for the rest of his life in order to manipulate his internal policy-making decisions for the benefit of her country’s prosperity, but what can you do? She recognises her friendship as a real friendship when it lasted, but a lot of time has passed since then and now this job is just a facet of her life. Constantly shifting in and out of psychological masks sounds so tiring.

Doctor Yamanaka blinks. “I see,” he says, in a way that makes it sound like he really doesn’t.

Kagura points at the clock. “My appointment ends in five.”

He presses a hand over his forehead, massaging the tension away, and releases a very deep sigh. “Swan,” he says, perplexed. “You don’t use masks?”

I don’t repress all my emotions like a little bitch, yes sensei, sounds too mean and would probably earn her a strike on some sort of hidden record, so Kagura just smiles and nods dumbly. For extra effect, she sends him a thumbs up.

Something cracks in Yamanaka’s brain, so Kagura slowly inches out of the room, staring at the shrink muttering to himself and reviewing all of her mission reports, then waves at the secretary to confirm her finished appointment. For some reason, the secretary working at this clinic is an old civilian woman, which is bad because civilians are soft and squishy and breakable, but also good because Yamamoto-san seems like a great person.

“Take care, Kagura-chan,” the secretary says.

“Thank you, you too,” she chimes back. “Have a good day.”

There are multiple clinics interspersed in Konohagakure, with the general hospital servicing typical injuries and illnesses, and smaller buildings here and there for specialised purposes. This is the mental health building, sitting on the east side, near Yamanaka street and the produce market. Dog and Oyster have probably never stepped foot in this neighbourhood for obvious reasons – Dog infamously chains all of his emotions in the fifth dimension, and Oyster can legally only discuss his psychosis with his fire-breathing brethren. 

Probably. Maybe. Sure.

And what the fuck is up with Cat? He acts like a seven year old and a hypochondriac grandpa at the same time.

So this is exactly what Kagura asks him the next time they have training together.

The field is sunny and green. Oyster is slamming himself into several trees, practising his body flicker jutsu without hand seals, to a certain degree of success. He’d work wonders at a rock concert, what with all the epic guitar fails and head bobbing. Dog is… somewhere, either licking his own reflection in the mirror or pissing on a disabled person’s wheelchair. The training field is bright and beautiful today, the sun is shining, the dew from the morning’s precipitation leaves a sheen on the dark grasses, there’s nobody around for miles, and Kagura is about to ask her teammate if he’s literally insane.

So much for peace.

“Hey Cat, quick question – when did you join ANBU?” She asks.

He’s nonpuzzled at the change in conversation. It’s a perfectly normal question, of course, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Cat hissed at her and said it was a secret.

Damn. She’s been hanging around the captain too much – they’re always teamed up together in duo formation during missions. The silver lining is that Kagura and the captain are the same height, so he can’t physically look down at her and be condescending at the same time.

“When I was seven years old,” he says.

Hold up.

“Oh,” she says politely. “I’m honoured to train with someone so experienced in this profession.”

Hold the fuck up. Back up. 

What the hell?

Seven?

Okay, it makes sense to Kagura, but her head spins a bit and she sits in her tiny studio flat later that day to just process the information. She came here, in this world, with zero information about her environment, and barely managed to adapt in time before being thrown out into said world. But expectations of decency and morals still exist in her mindset, but apparently there’s even more shady secretive stuff going on behind the scenes. Figuratively speaking, under Konoha’s tree.

Like evil tree roots?

Maybe, maybe not. There’s no evidence yet, other than some seriously disturbed teenagers on Team Ro.

She sits on her crumpled futon, stares at her takeaway noodles, and reflects on the day. Cat came into ANBU at age seven, which is approximately the same age that children enter the ninja academy. That means he must’ve been trained for at least a year or two in advance by some other interested party because he doesn’t seem to be clan-affiliated… which implies that someone, definitely not his family, groomed him into his current position.

There’s also the whole tree thing.

Yeah, okay, Cat can do the tree-based ninjutsu that the First Hokage was famous for and it’s a pretty big secret (one hundred percent success rate that if the enemy sees Cat whip out a bunch of wiggly branches, they’re dead), but Kagura thinks she might’ve underestimated the political implications of it all. 

Mokuton aside, Cat was groomed. Actually groomed.

Who’s to say that he was the only one? There might be dozens of other unstable weirdos like him exploring the ANBU ranks, having been groomed by a non-academy affiliated party, to populate ANBU. 

She sighs and plops down on her back.

Whatever. Not her problem. It’s completely shitty, but she knows it doesn’t affect her because she’s pretty sure that Konoha is doing its best to keep her high and happy. Her expertise in seduction, the rarest field in the organisation, allows her to prance about like a valuable piece of jewellery. Battles aren’t what win wars and earn missions – it’s politics. It’s always politics, and she’s got so many fingers in the daimyo’s metaphorical pies that Konoha can’t retire her without facing serious repercussions. Nobody else can replicate the skill set of an experienced seduction agent, and with Frog’s imminent retirement (announced a few weeks ago, which apparently shocked Kurenai more than anyone else), Kagura’s job security just reached the position of tenure.

Ugh.

She turns around in the futon, almost knocking over a potted plant. 

Groomers. Damn, this is just the worst. Kagura’s moral compass has never been that straight, but Cat is growing on her like an incredibly unlucky parasite, and she knows that she might be the only person in the entire ninja force that can walk away after poking the bear.

So she finishes dinner, eats an entire carton of ice cream to wash it down, then goes to snoop around Konoha for some really shitty easter eggs. 

Chapter Text

Step one of information gathering is to not make a total fool of herself, so Kagura swallows down her basal human pride and stalks the ninja academy. She knows, well, enough, but there may be a time down the line when normal cultural knowledge might save her ass one day. Like, who the Senjus really were (because no one really talks about them in casual conversation) and all the important history dates. She should have been studying this shit whilst she had attended that school in Grass, but unfortunately the curriculum in civilian cities is wildly different from the spoonfed “murder is okay” mantra they teach the ninja hopefuls in Konoha.

Kagura wears a t-shirt with a printed fire symbol, the typical ugly shinobi pants, old sandals that make her ankles look fat, and a cough mask. Like this, she appears as any random off-duty ninja, which helps settle her nerves despite the fact that her planned activities aren’t actually illegal.

Yet.

Ex-Carp greets her at the gate because, fun fact, they don’t let just anyone in. Konoha isn’t stupid enough to let anyone wearing a leaf headband show up randomly at their most vulnerable spot, so Ritsu walks her in and flashes a few hidden signals to the second story windows of the old building. In theory, Kagura could sneak in given her current skill set in being a sneaky piece of shit, but it’s way easier to do everything in broad daylight.

“Yo,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

Iwabuchi Ritsu, at eighteen, feels too young to Kagura to be in any position of authority, but since the average lifespan of a ninja is somewhere in the mid-twenties, he might as well be parading around a respirator and bingo game set. He’s grown up a bit more, with wisps of a beard growing in on his chin, a more defined jawline, and a sturdiness to his frame that wasn’t there before.

She shrugs. “Not that long. Anyway, how’s it going? How’re your students?”

He rambles on about the troublemakers, the nerds, and the popular clan kids, then relates it back to his own stint at the academy. He was a part of the war draft, the last stretches of it, and was pulled out prematurely at about eight or nine to assist with look-out duties in the southern posts. As a civilian born ninja, Ritsu got the short end of the stick when it came to the beginning of his ninja career, but he was eventually granted a field promotion which led to better missions which then led to him signing up for the ANBU forces. 

The story is nice, but here’s the thing about Kagura: people tell her everything. It’s really fucking weird and it doesn’t stop. Ever since she matriculated into the Seduction cohort and seriously immersed herself in this ANBU lifestyle, people just don’t stop talking to her about their lives, like she’s somehow become the most addictive, trustworthy therapist ever. Suspicious ninja remain suspicious ninja, but they’re suspiciously open. Old civilian women at the local market say hi to her and then complain about their kidney stones or ex-husband’s bowel movements. Worm asked Kagura the other day if she could help pop a pimple on their asscheek.

It’s absolutely insane and please help oh god.

“So, what was it that you needed?” Ritsu asks, after a lull in conversation. He’s leading the way, with her hardly a half step behind him, expertly pretending to know how to navigate the academy as well as any other proud alumni.

Kagura shrugs. “I wanted to find my academic record. I was organising some of my old stuff, but my parents’ house got destroyed in the Kyuubi attack and I realised I didn’t have a lot of childhood things to decorate my flat with.”

The academy has to function like an actual school and keep copies of student reports, or else Kagura’s going to go mental.

Ritsu makes a sound of acknowledgement. “Well, you know where the copy room is. I’ll take you to the back, first.”

The academy is bigger than it looks – it appears to be a two story building on the outside, but is actually three stories tall. This deception is achieved through clever architecture, of tall windows, diligently creeping wall ivy, and low ceilings inside. If a genjutsu forced this facade, then it could be easily detected by foreign ninja, which is why chakra bullshit is not the end all be all in terms of security measures – some ability to confuse using basic construction trumps genjutsu, no matter what. It’s cream coloured, with old brick and stone, allowing for illusionary depth in spatial awareness, because light expands space, so the classrooms don’t feel cramped despite being small.

This would’ve been a cosy learning environment for an eight year old Akabane Kagura, learning all the tricks to the interior building with her wee stubby legs. As in, knowing where the copy room is.

But she’s in too deep now. The back room, dark and dusty, has all student files on hand. As an ANBU agent, she supposes the security team trusts her enough to simply leave her stranded in the school unattended, as Ritsu had to attend a teacher meeting, but some help would surely be nice by now. Also, letting a veritable non-academia superior in the room with a fuckton of personal information sounds like a risk to Konohagakure’s political confidentiality. Who knows what gold mines are in these squeaky file cabinets?

Fortunately for the village, Kagura enjoys not being a criminal enough to only leaf through her own student files, curiosity be damned.

There’s probably a camera somewhere, anyway.

After a few minutes of flipping through her old test papers, she decides on an unsuspicious amount of papers to take to the copy room. Then she surreptitiously tries to memorise the syllabi pages on the graded notes assignments, but she’s no Uchiha and her brain blanks out after memorising the seventeenth line of text. 

A lot of things are starting to make sense, now. Little cultural nuances that she’d only passably understood are beginning to turn into basic knowledge in her brain. Kagura is morbidly amazed at how she managed to survive this far without an interviewed background check, because then her cover as a perfectly normal kunoichi would’ve been blown ages ago.

Copy room.

Copy room.

Copy room, where art thou? 

A very good guess later, Kagura emerges from the academy with a few copies of her academic work folded neatly in her pockets, jovial. Mission success. Those academy fuckers don’t label their classroom doors, but the obvious lack of children noises (screaming, crying, and farting, in that order) behind certain doors provide huge clues. The only thing that can deflate her good mood is if the fucking Raikage stomped over and kicked her in the pussy with a stiletto heel.

So, she heads to a food stall in a residential neighbourhood and orders a private booth. Food is always going to be a great celebration tool.

“Mission,” Bear says, dropping behind Kagura as she’s trying to enjoy the last of her tea rice.

She’s well trained enough to hide signs of surprise, but jesus fucking christ the General will spook her out no matter what situation they’re in together. He exudes a raw kind of power that not many others can dream of achieving in their meagre lifetime. 

“Status?” She asks immediately, and slaps a few bills on the table. “Team Ro or solo?”

Bear can barely be contextualised into the form of a person. He’s not in his ANBU garb, but this human looking creature before her can’t be his real appearance. It’s a tall man, bulky, scarred, but there are hints of henge mixed in with a physical disguise, misleading even the most skilled eyes of his true self. He’s invisible until Kagura has to try to see him – and even then, it’s like her eyes are naturally glazing over and looking in other directions for the simplest of excuses.

“Cat and Oyster are on formal training leave tonight,” he says, and hands over a thin scroll with a complicated chakra lock. “Find Dog, you need to get to Minami by sunset. The red building on Monkey lane, fourth floor, second to the left, don’t use the door.”

Minami?

That village is on the southern coast.

Before Kagura can shoot out an affirmative, Bear disappears with a swirl of wind and stray leaves like any other asshole in Konoha. So she sighs, makes sure the bills on the table aren’t going anywhere, then speeds back to her flat to change. There’s a travel pack on the kitchen counter with all the things she needs for an impromptu mission, so she hooks it to the clasps on her uniform, then braves the thunder and seeks out the address.

Dog’s address. Because why not. Might as well stalk her paranoid captain. It's not like he actually waits behind his door with a rusty knife, hoping that a delivery person accidentally comes by so that he can make up an excuse for being stab-friendly. He probably also knows where she and the rest of the team live. And wow, that's a fun thought.

She shows up at Monkey lane hardly a scant minute later, decked out in full gear, in the shadows of the village buildings. There are civilians and genin teams strolling around this residential block, but none of them notice her, and she eventually finds her way on to the window sill of the aforementioned address. No doors, because anyone this high up the ANBU food chain is a psychotic fucker with a boner for lethal booby traps. She has zero doubt that his doorknob is laced with anthrax.

Neurotic ninjas.

The window opens. It’s not Dog yet, just Kakashi. Seeing her captain without his animal mask is a little disorienting, but most of his face is still covered so it’s not that bad.

Still.

“Minami by sunset,” Kagura says. But, for legal reasons, she hands him the mission scroll, and watches him devour the words in a few seconds with his left Sharingan eye.

Wow. When was the last time he actually sat down and read for leisure?

He heads further inside the flat, away from her window sill view, and emerges shortly after with full gear and a tanto strapped to his back. It’s a bit unusual, she thinks, for a person of his size to be using a short sword, when he has better tactical ability with something with reach, but he must have his reasons. There are all kinds of fucked up weapons in this continent, so she’s grateful he uses something she actually knows the name of. 

There was a lady in River Country, a while back, with a sword in the shape of an oblong chicken. Kagura still isn’t sure what to make of it.

“Two point formation,” Dog says, and they’re off.

Two point formation is when two agents of similar ability track through the trees of Fire Country at the same pace, side by side. It’s a huge measure of trust for ANBU Swan, who, despite the two years of experience, is still barely into her teens and is only really in such a great position in the military due to a great personality. Literally. Captain Dog has been doing this ninja thing for over a decade, and has been embroiled in all sorts of classified missions since his balls dropped. By all means, she isn’t an equal to him in any way (except for height, haha), but this shows that he respects her to take equal charge.

It’s a nice, floaty feeling at the bottom of her stomach, and Kagura vows to be a little nicer to her emotionally stunted superior. Maybe.

They pass through familiar forests, tree branch to tree branch, until the ecology diversifies into the rolling countryside, and they glide through rows of farmland. Then, closer to the coast, near the Tea Country border, they’re met with the rainforest jungles of the southern ecosystem and they’re back to tree hopping. Hours pass like this, of silent running.

The mission is to judge the allegiance of one of Konoha’s long-term civilian partners – Bara, a middle aged merchant from a farming town in Fire Country, may or may not be compromised. He worked as a spy in the legislative affairs of Lightning Country, focused on architectural development of satellite cities. And now, Konoha’s Intelligence have since received news that someone spotted Bara headed towards Minami.

Minami, a port city.

Kagura is about ninety-five percent sure this is going to be an assassination mission. The other five percent is that they’ll end up drugging him to drag back to a torture session with a Yamanaka to figure out why such a prominent figure would flee a country assignment for no reason.

When they arrive, the sun is a vibrant red hue in the darkening sky, and they stalk their mission assignment on the road to a quiet izakaya a bit out of the way. The issue with civilian personnel is that they’re used to looking out for ninja trickery, and prefer to keep their entire sense of self within this foreign, civilian bubble that ninja may not be used to. And as a Fire Country native, most of the standard practices in counter intelligence won’t work on him; Bara would sniff out a Konoha trail a mile away.

Luckily for Konoha, ANBU Swan is something of an anomaly.

“Menu’s on the board, plum sake is half off tonight ‘cause we got an extra shipment from Thursday,” Kagura says, rinsing her hands at the sink behind the bar. She pitches her voice a bit higher and airier, to match with the messed-up, sweaty head of hair, and awkwardly long teenage limbs. 

Bara purses his lips and glances at the board. “I’ll do Set A.”

There wasn’t enough time during the set-up to transform her appearance, so this is Kagura’s real, bare face. She can sense Dog’s anxiety going through the roof from his nook on the ceiling, camouflaged from the civilians as he holds together his genjutsu magic. The other patrons, the head chef, and the other attendant blithely ignore Bara’s bar seat, as Dog strains his Sharingan bullshit to the max.

“Set A it is,” she says, and smiles with dimples. She meanders to the kitchens to tell the chef, then back to the bar to pretend to be busy with something.

Part of the charm of being so obviously a lanky teen girl with nothing to do in an izakaya of exactly three customers is being bored. So Kagura allows herself to be bored, half-heartedly wiping down the bar counter twice before fiddling with little origami napkins. One of the customers, in a private booth, leaves, and the actual waiter comes out to clear his table. Kagura blows a stray hair out of her face and continues playing with her little paper toys on the other side of the bar.

The chef rings a bell, and then Kagura goes around back to bring out Bara’s dinner order. 

Bara is nearly done with his pickled vegetables when he takes the bait.

“Are you the owner’s daughter?” He asks, and despite his quiet voice, it’s an abrupt change in atmosphere and Kagura makes a surprised, inquiring face. 

She blinks, then moves closer. “No – they don’t have kids. My parents are friends with them, though. Are you enjoying your meal?”

Fucking finally.

Captain Dog is probably on his last legs in terms of genjutsu usage. Poor sod.

“It’s good,” he says without meaning it. “I mean, you look pretty bored here, kid. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

There wasn’t much time to throw a profile together on Bara. It’s an unsaid thing that Konoha Intelligence tries not to create personality indices on home operatives, out of respect and fear that their own agents will be scared off from it, but the bare bones of one are curated for civilian operatives. The entire mission now is based off of Dog and Swan’s impromptu personality assessment.

Bara. Mid forties. No kids, two ex-wives, both of whom were about half of his age when he met them. A somewhat handsome man of good stature, with a conniving salesman smile. The civilians of a foreign country trusted him to do good work, and he did, but he also sold their secrets to his home country without a blink of an eye. This is a man who likes getting what he wants, and is usually sneaky enough to do so. In Kumo’s satellite cities, his main legislative duties were focussed on the construction of civilian school buildings. Dog said his travel bag smelled like face cream and roses.

It’s not ideal, but Kagura thinks she knows how to crack him.

She shrugs. “Yeah, but,” she says, and droops her shoulders down, subconsciously leaning towards him. “School’s lame. I’m fourteen, I wanna work and save money, y’know?”

Bara sets his chopsticks down and laughs. “You’re mature for your age. I’m Yamada. What can I call you?”

Kagura flushes. “Homura. Flames. My parents weren’t super creative, and they’re die-hard loyalists, so I was almost named Chinatsu.”

There’s a subtle change in Bara’s expression. It goes from mild amusement to something harder behind his eyes, then back to his simple politeness. Kagura’s struck a nerve, and now she gets to explore it. Tick-tock, Dog probably isn’t too happy that she’s taking all this time to crack him, too. But it’s not like they can blitz him with stupid Sharingan mind-games to get the truth out of him, because if he actually is an innocent party, then Konoha will completely lose the trust of one of their best spies.

So, they’re doing this the nitty gritty civilian way.

Seduction.

“That would’ve been a shame,” Bara says. “Homura is a pretty name.”

And then he layers on the heavy flirtation. Another customer leaves. The main waiter leaves to go home for the night. The chef steps outside to smoke a cigarette. The last customer lays his head down, drop-dead drunk, quietly snoring. It’s the perfect centrepiece for a man like Bara, who’s the best salesman she’s ever seen. He’s galiantly nice, listening to Kagura’s made-up rants about school and how she’s too mature to be in a classroom. If she were actually a fourteen year old hick girl in the outskirts of Minami, she thinks she would’ve fallen for him.

Dog drops the genjutsu completely, now that the other civilians are out of the way. The one guy sleeping in the corner smells so strongly of liquor that he could probably sleep through a stampede of fat men gathering for the last order of a limited item action figure.

Then Kagura giggles about a horrendous joke about Bara’s age.

“No, I’m serious,” Bara says, smirking. “Your generation is gonna have it easy. The daimyo in your future means you’ll finally get that shipment of northern foods to the south. I didn’t know what beef tasted like until I was in my thirties! Can you imagine that, Homura-chan? Me, slobbering over a cow at the ripe age of thirty-five?”

A sharp laugh startles out of Kagura, and she flushes again. “I can’t.” She stifles another giggle, fluttering her hands. What she says next is a gamble, but all the signs of the night are pointing in this direction, and the clues are too obvious to pass up. Improvisation is her entire job. “Well, I suppose when he–.”

Then she pauses, horrified.

Kagura slaps both hands over her mouth, eyes wide, looking straight into Bara’s eyes. A heartbeat passes, he settles down, rolls his shoulders, and smirks wider.

“May we have a beautiful eternity with the first son,” Bara says, with a gainful smile.

The code between Swan and Dog, agreed upon before the set-up in the izakaya, was that if she reached for the water pitcher behind the bar, that that would be the code for a compromised agent. If anyone were to ask for a glass of water here, she would simply serve them diluted barley or corn tea instead, and cite something about their healing properties for hangovers. 

She grabs the pitcher.

A blade emerges from Bara’s mouth.

Dog stands behind the spy, still holding onto the tanto splintering through the man’s skull. “Was that a keyword?” He asks, like that excuses the gruesome and sudden death. “And Swan, don’t let any of his blood get in your mouth, I don’t know what kind of diseases he might’ve picked up in Kumo.”

Blood. Brains. Shattered bone.

Kagura leaves her face still, because she hasn’t heard of Kumo being known for biochemical warfare, but it’s not a far off concept, and because Dog is reaching for the napkin box at the bar. He takes off his gloves, with exploded bits of tissue and fluid on the leather, and plucks a delicate tissue from the box. His fingers are like the rest of him – long, limber, with tiny scars from various nicks and bruises collected over the years – except his fingernails are thicker than what Kagura expected, now that she can see them up close. They’re a bit like trimmed claws, almost.

Then Dog extends an arm over the table to wipe Bara’s blood from Kagura’s face.

She waits for him to finish before speaking. 

“You could’ve warned me, captain,” Kagura remarks without any heat.

He crumples up the bloody tissue in his hand. She gingerly opens a hand out for him, waiting, and he deposits it in hers. With a bastardised version of the finger flame jutsu, she opens the chakra points in her palm, redirects fire and yang energy into the point, and begins a small fire where the tissue sits on her skin. The papery material immediately takes the flame like a fish to water, and they both watch it burn into nothing but smoke.

“He was compromised,” Dog says. “The mission was to figure out Bara’s allegiances. He got the traitor’s death. The keyword?”

A blow from behind.

Very fitting.

“That, what he said – a beautiful eternity with the first son – that’s a common phrase for dissenters against the Fire Daimyo’s current political stance,” she says. She learned it when stuck in the underbelly of the capitol city. Secrets, secrets everywhere. An eight year old boy, worshipped by the old lady who steams rice cakes and the samurai stuck on guard duty. And now, enemies from other countries.  “It’s not easy to probe that kind of alliance into someone like Bara, who should’ve been a neutral party.”

He pauses for a moment. Kagura also takes a moment to process the deeper implications here. She may or may not be stuck at the Hokage Tower doing a shit ton of paperwork tomorrow. At least she’ll be able to bring her captain with her to suffer. Misery loves company, and Kagura loves making Dog eat shit. What a bitch.

“I’ll race you home?” She says.

Dog cocks a hand on his hip and tilts his head. “Once the clean up team gets here, you’re on, Swan.”

Challenge accepted.

Chapter Text

Kagura knows exactly how she ended up in this situation, and it’s not very comforting.

First of all, Captain Dog is a dick. That’s it. End of the story. And, well, her shrink should be partly to blame. Doctor Yamanaka can go suck a fat one.

She’s sitting on a hospital bed in a room that’s colder than the Yondaime’s musty grave, in a mint yukata of cloth so thin that it has to be illegal in certain monasteries. She’s not wearing any underwear, which makes everything worse, and she’s debating whether or not becoming an arsonist would be worth the jail time. A girl with no panties is a girl with the ability to murder mortal men.

Her ANBU Captain had ordered her to undergo a physical in the aftermath of their assassination mission in Minami. He spent an awkwardly long time breathing over her shoulder during her report write-up, completely silent, and then said something about her age and health.

The head doctor finally enters, holding a clipboard.

“Swan, was it?” He asks. There’s a name tag on his scrubs that reads Nara Daisuke. “Don’t worry, I treat special ops.”

Kagura taps her fingers on her cold knees. “No, that’s alright, I figured. How are my tests, sensei?”

In the official ANBU interrogation tactics guide, carelessly shoving around a large stack of papers with data sheets upon data sheets is one way to intimidate an enemy into thinking that they’re in more hot water than they really are. Kagura vaguely remembers old procedural television shows doing something similar to beautifully coiffed CW styled villains, but she hadn’t really thought it was an actual thing until she (unwillingly) joined this military dictator state.

The doctor flips through a bunch of yellow papers and pen scribbles. “Seduction unit, right?” He asks without really asking. “Your captain ordered a complete physical. I don’t have clearance for any details of ANBU missions, but I usually get these assignments after a major traumatic event. You’re completely cleared. No injuries. No sexually transmitted diseases. No signs of hormonal disruption.”

That sounds good. Good as expected. Nothing happened on that mission.

Then he flips back to the cover page, then to the back sheets, then back again. He frowns, looks up at Kagura, then back to his funny clip board. “ANBU’s putting thirteen year olds in Seduction?”

Kagura smiles charmingly – as well as she can in this cold, anyway. “Yeah, it’s pretty odd. I guess my skill set just didn’t match up with the combat squads.”

“Not completely true,” he says, obviously fleeing from the hazardous segue. Most people squirm at the idea of a child in the stereotyped sex unit. “You’re in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, and seventieth for weight, for your age group. If you wanted to, you could probably switch into a taijutsu unit once you stop growing.”

Then Doctor Nara finishes up the rest of the appointment by going over her biochemistry and the ins and outs of a growing body. It’s like primary school health class all over again, except much worse, because it’s just the two of them in a stupid freezer, and there’s a giant poster on the wall of the anatomy of a vulva (which, funnily enough, greatly resembles Oyster’s mask). And when the allotted time is up, Kagura has to sign out with the receptionist in the first floor lobby, wait for a nurse’s signature, then run all the way to an ANBU office to drop off her proof of medical appearance.

She’s not dumb. 

Kagura knows the reason why Dog forced a hospital appointment on her. He saw her doing her job a bit too well, flirting with an adult man, and freaked the fuck out. This is his way of taking care of her, even if she thinks he’s dumb and just about three times worse of a captain than Leopard was. So she does her best at not cursing at Dog like a sailor at Team Ro’s next training session.

It begins normally – absolutely chaotic, that is, mostly from Oyster being a cunt by making fun of Cat – and then descends into mental mayhem when Dog pulls her aside to throw a katana at her feet.

“...Captain?” She inquires.

Because Dog is super cool and way too manly for things like politeness and words, he unseals a second katana from a scroll clipped to his thigh, the exact copy of the sword now in Kagura’s hands – a basic model from most weapons shops, with a black leather handle and the average adult sized blade – and unsheaths it from a cheap wood-leather scabbard. She mimics the motion.

He goes through a set of basic kata. There’s a scant few seconds after each kata for her to follow. After ten sets of Essential Katana 101, Dog nods his head and tells her to buy a better sword before their next mission.

As a matter of fact, Kagura actually owns this exact sword. She’d bought it after her first B-rank cheque came in and had Team Kan teach her these basic katas. But she’s not telling him that, because it would ruin his (probably) planned surprise of attacking her full-force with his own superior swordsmanship with his tiny little shortsword that has to be alluding to something. And as always, she’s right, because the next moment comes and the entire day diverges from group training to Dog Eat Bird.

There’s a heady, heavy feeling behind her eyes, an almost pleasant sort of pressure, and Kagura dispels the genjutsu before Dog can behead her with his tanto.

The next genjutsu is harder to detect, with less of a foreign chakra presence invading her mind, and she wastes a precious second to bring her hands together to form a release seal instead of simple chakra regulation. And when she’s back in reality again, the next thing she knows is that there’s a lightning-fast foot kicking at her clasped hands and a bone-deep ache in her knuckle joints. Kagura rolls backwards, carrying the hilt with the pinky, ring finger, and thumb, with no time to process the ugly new bruises that are her genjutsu release fingers. 

That’s bad. Using only half of her fingers to wield a sword means she won’t be able to actively engage all the muscles in the forearm. This is how tendonitis is born! He’s punishing her for being too slow, that asshole.

Maybe, maybe, if they were the funny sort of ninja with inappropriate humour involving nattering tragic backstories for the peanut gallery, this spar would’ve lasted longer. But as it was, Kagura lasts an embarrassingly short time each round of the feathery beat-down and earns several more painful bruises by the end of it. 

“Your genjutsu…” the captain says slowly, squatting on the ground whilst leaning over her very sore and uncomfortable corpse, “could use some work.”

Kagura wants to sigh, but that would only make him cranky, so instead she says, “I appreciate the lesson.”

It’s meant to be a sarcastic little whip, but then Dog positively beams.

Why, she thinks, praying to whatever gods can hear her pleading confusion. Why me? Does he not understand sarcasm?

Then she collects her thoughts. No, of course he does. Dog, when he has to cosplay a normal human being such as the last Hatake (instead of the weird furry persona thing going on with the ANBU codenames), scores famously high on the intelligence and strategy ranks. The Konoha ninja force commemorates agents like him through public speeches and not-so-secret housewife gossip mills. So the only theory that makes sense is that he’s simply too trusting of ANBU Swan to suspect her passive-aggressive nitpicking.

Their two teammates burst through the shrubbery into the katana training clearing.

“Captain!” Oyster yells, jumping up and down like he’s taken a shot of cocaine up his ass. “For the mission on Thursday, can I stay en-pointe with you?”

Dog sighs. “I said no.”

The mission debriefing earlier in the morning had been mildly contentious, mainly courtesy of Oyster’s irritating charm and wanting to tackle the big boy missions for strong and mature manly ANBU agents – front-facing political jobs. 

“Okay cap, but hear me out,” Oyster says, and leans into an imaginary group huddle. Cat, a beat later, leans in as well. “I’m sick of being with Cat’s fat ass all the time. He’s allergic to onions but the Akimichi-brand bars use onion powder and he keeps fucking eating them even though you can just buy generic! And, and, whenever we share stealth camp I have to hear him shitting like crazy later, like boom! Boom! Boom–!”

Cat makes a sad, affronted noise because he’s too pussy to punch Oyster’s fat mouth in defence. Dog looks up at the sky during the rant and finally cuts Oyster off on the sixth “boom” with a raised hand.

Everyone quiets down.

“Oyster,” Dog says ominously, to the guy trying to win Most Annoying Uchiha award. “I don’t give a shit. Ten laps.”

After Oyster disappears, the captain turns all his might on poor Cat. “And you, thirteen laps. Your bowel movements stink, Kitty Cat.”

By the grace of the gods themselves, the captain doesn’t set laps for Kagura, and they use the rest of the time to plan out their upcoming mission. The mission directive was vague at best, and impossible at worst – it’s quite literally two sentences, of the most barebones information they’ve had to deal with yet, and the two crack down on an infiltration plan.

Come Thursday, Dog is actually a useful ANBU captain for once and intercepts a very early mission scroll for the assassination unit for the Koigakubo family – newly wealthy business conglomerates from Lightning country, making weapons and double-dipping amongst suppliers and consumer bases to fund a series of barely legal black market activities. 

The family’s daughter, Maruko, was invited to Megumi of Grass’ lordship ceremony. Two Kumo chuunin stand as her escorts, alongside a mumbling civilian carriage, and it’s easy work to intercept the party once they pass through the borders into Hostprings country, fairly close to the Fire country border. Oyster and Dog work in tandem, standing completely still in their trees, as the entourage settles for the night in a hotel. It further proves the Oyster-Uchiha theory, and Kagura feels a little vindicated, if bad.

At the stroke of midnight, Maruko exits the hotel, and the chuunin don’t follow her. 

Team Ro regroup by a dazed teenage girl in the middle of the woods, and once Oyster confirms that his Sharingan-fuelled genjutsu is holding strong by itself, Captain Dog gets his tanto out and decapitates Maruko.

“Head in a scroll for Mission B, burn the body,” he orders, and shoos his team along with surprising whimsy.

Kagura’s meant to be practising her fire style, so she sets her hands in a yang seal to prepare nature chakra for cremation whilst Oyster kneels down to grab the head. Then Oyster makes a surprised noise and drops the head on the ground. He picks it back up, slowly, and laughs.

“Captain, you’re not gonna believe this,” he says. “Here, hold this.”

Dog steps back. “No.”

“Ugh, fine, you bore,” he says, and tosses the head to Cat, who quietly shrieks and bounces the hot potato in his hands before throwing it at Swan, right next to him. 

And now it’s her turn to be holding the decapitated head of a prissy teenage girl and there’s—. Oh. Wow. She can see what’s making this a laughing matter. The head is so light. It’s like there’s not even a brain in there. This girl must be dumber than rocks.

“Well,” she says, holding the two-kilo head. “This’ll make my job easier.”

Koigakubo Maruko, aka a Henge disguised Akabane Kagura, because Dog says her henge-jutsu is good enough to trick experienced ninja (which is easily the best thing he’s ever said about her), arrives in Grass country’s capital in time for Megumi of Grass’ lordship ceremony. Which, in noble terms, is a sign that he’s ready to be married off and his daimyo father is openly looking for potential partnerships now. 

The mission, an A-rank of all things, is to convince him to marry Chinami of Fire. And this mission will only work through brute forcing his hard-earned personality profile into a box of misfortune. The only thing saving this fiasco is the fact that after Kagura’s fake death as Anzu, Megumi now has a saviour complex towards all precious victims, and Chinami’s willing to play along with this bullshit plan, only to get Chinatsu that stupid ass throne.

In the ceremony, which is more of a fancy gala party than anything, Kagura goes around making rounds, hurting her legs from contorting them awkwardly into the shape of a shorter girl (because Henge has some fucking limits) , chatting up the other snooty ladies and Chinami, until she naturally reaches the timing wherein Megumi of Grass comes out from behind the curtain.

Time to pull out the eternally suffering rich teenage daughter mood.

Kagura discretely rolls her eyes and pretends to pay attention. Then she yawns, cutting off whatever Chinami was about to say to Maruko, and fakes a smile. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she says, in the flat, vaguely monotonous voice that many girls of the upper echelon society use. “I just like, I think someone’s calling me. I, like, have to go.”

Then she wanders off without bowing, and finds a larger group of young women from the business guilds. She titters and flirts around, finding a middling voice in the crowd of socialites before moving on and chatting with foreign nobles. The noblewomen are trained to be more socially perceptive, and Kagura has to really try to tone down the annoying rich girl act whilst simultaneously creating a dumb enough image for them to brush her off as a semi-helpful potential lackey. Her voice is fraying at the end of it, and she sighs obnoxiously loudly upon her turn to greet Megumi of Grass just to clear out her throat.

“My lady,” Megumi says politely, with a short bow.

Kagura smiles sweetly and bats her eyelashes. “You’re too kind to me, my lord.”

It’s been a good while since she’s seen him. He’s grown up quite a bit, taller and broader, into a handsome teenage boy with a wide, pretty face. The black hair and eyes against moon-pale skin create a striking effect, and she can see why all these girls are clamouring over him, if not for his status. But he’s as sharp as ever, high-class and educated as he is, and she can tell he already doesn’t like her. He must’ve been observing all the socialising ladies in the room.

“So what do you think of tonight, Lady Koigakubo?”

Well. A business conglomerate’s daughter isn’t a lady, but Megumi is trained enough to make polite exceptions like this. And the real Maruko would probably demand honorifics anyway.

“It’s simply marvellous,” Kagura cheers, stretching out the last word, clasping her hands together and looking down coyly. “I can’t believe that you’re like, actually a real life person, considering just like, everything that you are. And I like, love, the gold trim on your kimono. My dad is also, like, the biggest fan of the Grass Daimyo’s… charity! And the charity works.”

Megumi closes his eyes for a few seconds. “Indeed.”

Before he can dismiss her, Kagura starts to work on the masterplan. She continues nattering on without a second thought, brainless as the actual girl. “And oh my god, the guest list? I’m friends with soooo many of the girls here tonight. I think we’re all like, super similar! Well, I mean,” and then Kagura looks to the side momentarily, as if to calm herself, “except for, you know, but she just doesn’t count. The guildsman and Lightning nobles, we all have such strong bonds, my lord. And we’re just–.”

In a rare moment of rudeness from Megumi tonight (and he’d been such a rude little upstart back at the academy!), he raises his hand for her to stop. “What do you mean, Lady Koigakubo?” He asks. “I do not know of this other person you speak of.”

Kagura gives a very fake, strained smile, and releases a high-pitched giggle. “Oh, don’t you worry about it. All the girls here will take care of you, my lord.”

“I verily insist,” Megumi says. He’s beginning to sound mad.

My old friend, she thinks wistfully, recognising the signs of his anger in the way he purses his lips in that specific way and taps his foot. Maybe you haven’t changed too much, after all.

Kagura looks up demurely through her lashes, half-disguised disgust twitching at the corners of her painted lips. She takes a second to space out, then breathes out a nearly improper deep exhale. “It’s just that…” She turns her gaze to the side, looking at Chinami for a second of burning jealousy, then back to Megumi. “The Fire Daimyo’s second daughter.”

He turns his head to look at her.

Chinami, to her credit, is standing proud and regal in her corner, with her fancy kimono of crimson blaze and iconic phoenix imagery. She appears as a beacon of light, standing out among the other women in their appropriate spring-time colours – hidden fashion faux pas that a boy like Megumi wouldn’t understand, and would only approve of the prettiest thing he can see.

“She’s just…” Kagura makes a noise in the back of her throat and sighs again. “She just thinks she’s better than everyone else because she’s just so kind. All that peasant work? Who does she think she's fooling? It's obvious that my friends and I just.... It’s common sense that that sort of behaviour can’t survive in our cutthroat world, my lord – as we all well know, of course. And she wouldn’t make a good wife for my lord at all, oh no.” She sighs again, and she’s getting sick of sighing all the time for this stupid character. “With these kinds of respectable events, proper ladies should be wearing make-up, yet Lady Chinami dares to enter my lord’s most handsomest presence with her bare face.”

Which is a lie. Chinami is wearing so much fucking makeup that her pores are begging for sweet mercy, but Megumi’s too much of a male dunderhead to recognise that. 

And she rolls her eyes again discreetly, with Megumi turning around to catch her at the last movement. Disapproval rolls off of him in waves.

“Thank you for your time,” he says scathingly. “You are dismissed.”

Kagura watches Megumi head towards Chinami’s side of the room, and internally congratulates herself on the success. She finds a disguised Dog, going as just Hatake Kakashi, guarding the Fire Daimyo's daughter, in the crowd, twitches her left ear for the signal cue, and the captain seamlessly reappears near the Fire entourage with an apricot in his hand, casually, with a bite taken out of it. And she hears him say excuse me, sorry, as Hatake deliberately passes by Megumi, right in front of Chinami’s smouldering beauty, tossing the fruit in the air. Up, down. Up, down.

The pendulum meets the eye. 

It’s a form of brainwashing. Or, better explained as psychological pressure. Pavlov’s apricot, would’ve been an excellent example, if Pavlov was a thing in this world and psychology was expanded on beyond Yamanakas doing their best to invent Lobotomy-no-jutsu.

Anzu, after all, means ‘apricot.’

By the end of the week, when Team Ro is safely returned to Konoha’s walls, the Third Hokage receives a letter of noble decree, announcing the engagement of Megumi of Grass to Chinami of Fire. 

Kagura discovers the news via gossip mill bulletin board posters and the ten ryo newspaper in the local shops announcing upcoming cheaper rice and wheat prices. The commodity market turning around in Fire Country is all thanks to the newly open trade law, with tariffs and quotas completely slashed to make way for a new economy. And Kagura thinks that she should’ve been paid an S-rank cheque instead of A-rank for this agriculture deal, all thanks to her, and is thinking about going to the bossman himself to complain about her salary bonuses.

That is, until he calls her up to centre stage himself.

A messenger knocks on her door to tell her to come to the Hokage’s office with urgency. She’d been lounging about on her free day in her flat, somewhere in between remembering all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody and checking out her thick thighs in the bathroom mirror. It’s an ANBU summon, not a chuunin one, so she assumes the identity of Agent Swan and heads out in full regalia.

There’s General Bear waiting already in the office, and Dog arrives shortly after Swan. And then Leopard appears, then Frog, and she’s beginning to suspect this may be a serious meeting.

The Hokage is an old, strong man, of myth and legend. At least, that’s what Kagura is supposed to think about her national military ninja dictator, but all she’s picking up here is how old and frail he looks – like someone’s funky Yoda kind of grandpa instead of a world leader. Was there seriously nobody else younger that could’ve taken up the Yondaime’s mantle after the Kyuubi attack? There’s at least one Sannin left, right?

Geriatric support in this country is more sad than terrifying, honestly.

“A commendable agent you are, Swan,” The Hokage says, breaking the silence of the ANBU kneeling.

Oh my god, he even talks like Yoda, Kagura thinks.

“The seduction unit is the most difficult unit to train for,” The Hokage continues, and pulls out a pipe from his sleeves, because, y’know, fuck old people lungs. He probably wants to die from lung cancer at this stage of whatever palliative treatment he’s on. “And the General and all of your captains tell me of your prowess in this unit. Is that right?”

Leopard and Dog raise their heads, look at each other, and nod briskly.

“As it were, there’s an opening in Seduction fit for a fine agent like you. Frog happens to be retiring within the year, and has named Worm as interim, and Swan as successor.”

Then the Hokage rambles on about more gibberish regarding the succession and her expected training times and testimonies from Genma and Dog, which she listens to with her heart in her head. Because, her? Leading the seduction unit? That would make her Commander Swan, as a thirteen year old chuunin with maybe five total jutsu under her belt. Technically, there’s no barrier to be a Commander, but it’s also a status usually granted towards experienced captains in the field. She’d outrank Dog, but he’d still be leading her? Which isn’t supposed to happen. It’s just not.

Well. Well, well, well. Frog stands up to deliver her official line of reasoning, which is that Agent Swan is one of the only agents capable of on-demand public encounters with high-risk individuals, with the bare minimum amount of fighting skills necessary for such scenarios. The other ninja with that kind of experience tend to be civilian-raised career Genin, or flat-out civilian contractors.

The meeting ends with a befuddled and disgruntled Kagura and her impending end-of-year promotion.

Chapter Text

The party starts out just like any poorly planned corporate event – a table of cold food, high-ranking staff standing ominously in the corner, and a pathetic amount of decor. 

It gets worse from there.

There’s a large sign at the front of the underground hall that says Congratulations Swan in messy kanji, written on someone’s old crinkled sealing scroll, with the faint glow of chakra making the paper stick to the cement wall. There aren’t any windows, and ventilation is wish-wash this far underground with this many people, so the entire room smells of egg mayo sandwiches that have been sitting out for too long. So, all in all, newly fourteen year old Akabane Kagura wishes she were anywhere else except for her promotion to Commander Sexy.

Which is, of course, the nickname the funny military types give to whoever’s in charge of the ANBU Seduction Unit. Little do most of the people in the room know that they’d probably try to neuter themselves out of shame if they found out her actual age.

“Man, this party sucks ass,” Oyster says, holding his third plate of egg mayo sandwiches and sardine tarts. “Wanna dip?”

Dog, hovering behind them, makes a strained noise. “There’s a speech. We can’t leave yet.”

Indeed, there’s supposed to be a speech from the General soon. And these sorts of parties don’t happen often, because commanders tend to stick to being commander – they’re promoted because they’re the best of the best in their unit, unlikely to perish on-duty. So it’s all the more special occasion to have this event, with food and drinks and ANBU agents mingling about. Or, more of a miracle that so many high-calibre and politically important ninjas agreed to be stuck in a confined space for such a long time.

“You heard the captain,” Kagura says goodnaturedly.

She kind of wants to die inside, but there are kudos given to the organisers for effort. The crazy types in the ANBU force are definitely the kind of people who enjoy these weird ass parties. Seriously – who thought sardine tarts were a good idea? And why are they so popular?

By the refreshments, Cat is hanging out with Dragon and Gecko. She hadn’t been aware that Cat was capable of having friends that didn’t bully him horrendously. He gives off such strong victim energy.

“My old teammates are over there – I think I’ll say hello,” Kagura says, mostly to Dog because he’s the only friendless bitch here. Oyster is most definitely an Uchiha, so he’s got other clan members to bother at the function. Dog is… a lone wolf. She thinks it’s due to his god awful personality (in another life, Hatake would be the kind of person to blast Evanescence at six in the morning for a daily cry), but it might also have something to do with the political stigma attached to his name.

Oh well. Not her problem.

Kagura wanders off to greet Leopard and Rooster, and Oyster finds Worm in the middling crowd. She’s had suspicions for a while now, but she’s almost positive that Worm was the Sharingan user in the restaurant during the Grass mission – a very shady, quiet Uchiha lady with possible screws loose. No wonder Oyster cosies up to her so quickly.

“Swan,” Leopard says, holding up a hand. “This party is… truly something. Congrats, though.”

Rooster waves awkwardly.

“Don’t be shy, you can say the quiet part out loud,” she says, returning his high-five. “The entire room smells of mayonnaise. The only reason why nobody’s left yet is because of the speech.”

Leopard’s shoulders slump down. “... the speech.”

There’s a certain bitterness in his words that she doesn’t want to poke at. But she understands. It’s highly unusual for the General to be late like this, especially for an important event. Everyone’s starting to get antsy down here in the bomb shelter levels, and too socially awkward to make up an excuse to leave early. If this were anyone else’s party, Kagura could’ve made up some lie by now to weasel her way out of it, but alas, this is the one time that she can’t escape.

Of the two hundred members of the Konohagakure ANBU, only about a fourth made it to the function. Half of the people here are agents that Kagura knows, and the other half are the curious crowd wondering who the hell’s the newest unit commander. 

The hierarchy goes: General Bear, in charge of the entire ANBU military, who reports directly to the Hokage. And then under him are the five unit commanders, for Stealth, Tracking, Assassination, Bodyguarding, and Seduction. The acronym is STABS, which Kagura finds hilarious. And in each unit, there are several different subspecialties, unrelated (or related) to the unit. Commander Boar of Assassination is supposedly a master trapmaker. Most agents in Bodyguarding have to learn the basics of healing. Such and such. And there’s a lot of layover with the village’s T&I – Tactics and Intelligence, but infamously nicknamed as Torture and Interrogation to make it sound cooler – military branch. The General and the current head of T&I are powerful decision makers in Konoha politics, and men not to be messed with.

Kagura is doing her best to resist the urge to flip the bird, however, when the General finally saunters in, twenty minutes late.

The tall, impressive man squares up at the podium. No one knows his identity. There are rumours that he’s been in the village since the Shodaime’s era, and is blessed with strength from the gods to continue being a pillar of support for the country. Nobody knows how old Bear is, but he’s certainly older than everyone here, because no one remembers a time that he wasn’t the General. She tries to imagine what he might look like. Salt and pepper hair? Scruffy goatee? A traditional samurai look? Bear is Bear; he can’t be any random schmuck on the street. He probably doesn’t even have a face. Maybe the porcelain bear drawing is his face, and the entire ANBU uniform was based around it. And his village ranking – what is it? Has he been cosplaying as a career genin this entire time, throwing off his scent? Or is he a highly celebrated jounin in the forces? Nobody’s ever really seen him fight, either, because he mainly deals with mission tactics and training camps.

Everyone holds their breath to hear the speech.

“Congratulations, Swan,” The General says, and then leaves.

The afterparty is better. 

The Whore and the Kunai makes a valiant return to Kagura’s life, a whole three years later. Leopard and Rooster, the only adults here who know Kagura’s age, don’t even try to kick her out or warn her about raucous adult activities, so fourteen must be old enough by their standards to enter a bar and get wasted via belly button shots. Or maybe they’ve given up on treating her like a child now that she outranks them. And her other legal supervisor, Dog, doesn’t even show up, so hell if he cares.

Cat, Dragon, Gecko, and Lynx are sitting in a booth in the back with pretty cocktails and Kagura wants to join them. Dragon is Kurenai, and Gecko greatly resembles Hayate, so she’s assuming that’s the teenager table, because Cat is a vaguely muddy age of fourteen or so and Lynx is giving off noughties Hilary Duff.

But she’s prevented from peer socialisation by an unfortunate Uchiha.

“Yo, birdie,” Oyster calls out, and deftly swings around to get right in her face. “Congrats, Big S. You’re amazing! This is great! I love you, Commander Sexy.”

Kagura tilts her head down at the sloshing glass in his hand. “Someone’s having a good time.”

He’s a little shorter than her, but she thinks they’re also around the same age. Team Ro is a highly skilled, but young, team (judging by how immature the group conversations are). They’ve all got their reasons to be a part of the squad, and Oyster’s is the most mysterious by far. He’s a combat specialist like Dog and Cat, but he’s also more than that, relying more on subterfuge and genjutsu than any front-line fighter she’s seen. Someone of that slender, pretty boy body type shouldn’t be a heavy hitter, yet here he is.

Similar questions can be asked of her, though. She’ll be in Team Ro for another year to gain more experience to her title, but it’s still an odd situation that now someone like her is in a typical assassination squad.

“Not really,” Oyster says, and bobs his head. “Worm’s being weird, as usual. She likes to bother me. It’s kinda like how I mess with Cat. Anyway! I hope you don’t end up weird like Commander Fox – that guy gives me the creeps, eugh. Bad juju, bad vibes. Or Commander Slug, ‘cuz he’s a fucking cunt.”

“I’ll still be me, Oyster,” she says, and reaches out to steady him before he falls on her.

She tries to remember who those commanders are. Fox is in charge of Stealth, and Slug is Bodyguarding. She’s never encountered them before and they didn’t show up to either party, so she can’t say she can form an opinion of them yet… but there’s something about Oyster’s words that’s causing bells to ring in her head. A drunken, hazy character warning. He wouldn’t be deceitful, not like this. There’s too much alcohol radiating off him for him to be able to deliberately form up complicated falsehoods. 

The bar is loud and sweaty. The air feels yellow. Oyster wobbles again with a signature maniac giggle, and teeters into Kagura, who grabs his shoulders and sighs. 

“I know you know my clan name,” Oyster whispers. Kagura shows no tells of surprise, and keeps him rocking in her collar like the drunken bastard he’s emulating. There are quite a few oddball drunks doing the same to their teammates here. “Uchiha. You can call me by my name, y’know. Shisui.”

Kagura lets go of one shoulder to pat his back. “You’re gonna have to deal with the shittiest hangover ever during training tomorrow.”

But it’s just busy distractions, to get him to trust her more. He’s trying to get somewhere with this.

“Worm doesn’t like Commander Fox either. He’s not the kinda guy you want to be left alone with. I hope you avoid him, so you don’t become like him,” Oyster, or Shisui, continues, basically whispering into her chest, the world far away, ears ringing. “I’m not that drunk. There’s – there’s patterns. Worm knows. Cat was in Stealth.”

That’s why I don’t like him, goes unsaid.

Except Cat is the opposite of whatever is being described of Fox. Or, is he? Maybe?

Kagura gently shakes Oyster off and familiarly pats the dust off his head, shoulders, and arms. “Oh, come on Oyster, stop ogling my chest. What do you expect to see with the breast plate, you twerp.”

And she gives another look at his drink and heads back to the teens table.

When she sits down next to Gecko, Oyster is with Worm and a few other ANBU agents with full head coverings on the other side of the bar, which is quickly becoming more and more of an unhinged no man’s land with every drink. Getting a bunch of insane super-powered individuals in one space and providing copious alcohol and salty peanuts is a recipe for disaster – the charred and pockmarked walls didn’t come from nowhere.

She spends a socially acceptable amount of time with her friends, leading the conversations naturally and sneaking quick sips with a straw under the ANBU mask. The orange blossom and pomegranate lemonade is one of the best things she’s ever tasted, but it’s hard to enjoy it with the Uchiha warnings taking over her entire consciousness. Worm. A highly intelligent Seduction agent, mainly working with information off the field. An Uchiha. Two Uchihas, actually. That’s basically the entire clan. And the clan is trying to tell her something. The fact that Shisui would trust her with a character warning for someone so high-rank is touching yet concerning, because she didn’t know he liked her that much, nevermind trust her. 

Damn. Kagura must be making hella impressions with the right people.

Now it’s up to her to decipher the code, and get to the bottom of this mystery that Oyster himself doesn’t seem to fully realise. 

Another day, another horror, she thinks miserably, and socialises the rest of the night away.

Chapter Text

All that chutzpah around yesterday’s party vanishes as soon as she’s given an office in the Hokage tower. It’s not some shady underground lair like the training arenas – instead, there’s a lovely bit of sunshine coming through the window, a very dead cactus, and a door with no lock. 

Well, that’s just suspicious, Kagura thinks. Frog removed all her own fuinjutsu locking mechanisms this morning, leaving the new unit commander, Swan, to be bereft of all safety features. Supposedly the individual is meant to create their own traps and protections, but she doesn’t know any sealing worth mentioning. Or sealing at all. She could probably subtly beg Dog to teach her how to make storage or explosion tags, but security seals are an entirely different ballpark. 

But it might be funnier to leave her office entirely exposed. Intruders worth their salt would shy away from a completely unlocked door in a place like this – that’s just asking for some other invisible fucked up trap to go off.

Then Worm comes by to drop off paperwork and Kagura is left to suffer under the throes of bureaucracy. 

“How does someone kill a cactus?” She asks Worm, by the second rotation of paper. “It died from dehydration.”

The aforementioned agent, who may or may not be exhibiting self-medicating behaviours, twitches ever so slightly, staring uncannily at the dead plant on the windowsill. 

“It’s a mystery indeed,” Worm agrees, which means that she’s definitely done the same before, and it is not comforting to know that Swan’s right hand woman in the seduction unit is a veritable fuck-up with scrambled eggs for brains. Or maybe she’s smarter when she’s off the drugs. But anyway, she wants to cry and sleep and eat because doing sign-offs on bog standard missions isn’t exactly what she’d envisioned for herself as an almighty ninja warrior leader. Memorising everyone’s names and skills is a bit more interesting, so Kagura spends the rest of the work day going over everyone under her command. 

Much to her modern day sensibilities, there aren’t any legal labour protections in the Elemental Nations (or, at least in Fire Country, Kumo seemed to be generally more bureaucratic), so there aren’t any real work hours to start and finish – most people generally show up at a certain time and stay as long as their bosses demand them to. 

Maybe I should put in a request form for labour protectionism, Kagura thinks. And paid lunch. Or union powers.

She looks at the clock.

The clock does not look back at her; it’s an inanimate object. And the clock is extremely broken, so it doesn’t even tick or anything. But next to the wall clock is the door, and there’s someone gently knocking.

“Come in,” she calls out.

Cat enters stiffly. He’s not wearing a mask but she’d recognise that awkward stilted gait anywhere – and pretends not to be surprised at all by his square jaw and big brown puppy-dog eyes. Of all the boys she knows, she (not so nicely) expected Cat to be some sort of terrifyingly ugly teenage boy with buck teeth and gnarly butt acne. Instead, he looks… sort of cute, in a slightly pathetic dorky way. The lack of ANBU gear must mean that he’s technically off-duty today, but she’s always imagined him as a faceless little lackey in the darkness, not a real person like this. He’s just the epitome of an emotionally stunted masked secret agent.

“Congratulations on the promotion,” he says with some sort of genuine kindness. “And, um, captain sent me here with a message.”

He stalls by the door for a second longer than he should and Kagura realises that she’s technically supposed to request for him to approach her desk or not, so she beckons with one hand and Cat leaps up and deposits a slightly singed letter into an awaiting hand.

She reads it.

Cat waits expectantly.

It takes a tremendous amount of effort to not reveal anything on her face. The entire letter is full of puerile insults to Cat for being gullible enough to do a courier run in the first place – that’s a low-level chuunin job, not something for an ANBU agent of his skill level. And then a missive about cancelled training due to Shisui’s hella hangover and a request for a private session after hours.

But his presence here does remind her of last night and Oyster’s odd remarks of the Stealth unit. She’s due to meet Fox and the rest of the commanders at some point this month, but it’s best to do a bit of research, ninja-style, beforehand. 

“Thank you, dismissed,” Kagura says. “But before you go, I hope you know that you’ve been an amazing teammate . I hope that my promotion won’t cause any issues between us during my remaining time on Team Ro.”

And she wheedles a friendly little date from him sometime in the future.  It’s best not to rush information, especially if she doesn’t want to raise suspicions on anyone’s end if she starts digging into Cat’s past.

Dog arrives a bit late to their one-on-one session in a manky basement of ANBU HQ. So, naturally, she teases him for his tardiness. It’s unlike him, anal as he is, to show up like this with no excuse.

He gets very still at her last word.

“I have an excuse,” he says, in the sort of tone that makes her think he’s got a concussion. “I had to… help a grandma deliver a birthday present to her ugly ex-nephew.”

Kagura waits a second for the joke to fly, but it doesn’t and crashes into the ground with an imaginary thump. “Okay,” she says nonchalantly, as if he didn’t just create the worst excuse ever and what the fuck is wrong with him? 

(Little did she know, Kagura just started off an unfathomably painful chain of events.)

And then she puts that awkward interaction to the side to focus on the barrage of ruthless attacks from Dog. Kunai, shuriken, senbon, and then other throwing weapons that definitely should not exist. They pick up their katanas and clash, and then suddenly he’s throwing a tanto in the air and tells her to catch it, and she’s wielding a brand new shortsword in her left hand whilst patting out flames from her vambraces with the other hand. Then there’s another weapon, and another, and another, and it’s pretty obvious that his goal here is to push her into becoming a jack-of-all trades fighter. After she leaves his squad, there won’t be as many opportunities to deal with battlefield experience, so she better learn now and better learn quick.

The variety of giant sticks with pointy bits attached at the end is concerning. She’s lucky enough to have the physical size and ability to wield large weapons of brute force, but realistically there’s never going to be a scenario where a two metre long spiked battle club will be her weapon of choice, however fabulous these giant sticks of death appear to the civilian bystander.

“Genjutsu training will be in two days from now, same time and place,” he says at the end of the sweaty beat-down session.

Kagura does her best to not flop like a dead fish to the ground in protest of her dying muscles. Instead, she stands upright, breathing evenly, definitely not trembling whilst sliding her new weapons into holsters. “I think Cat might need a remedial as well,” she adds. “When’s the last time he’s focused on something other than ninjutsu training with the squad?”

Dog tilts his head. “Fair point. I’ll track him down.”

And he leaves her with the glorious ending scene of lugging a truly monstrous haul of weaponry. There aren’t really any stone-cut rules about leaving things around, but she would get laughed out of the Uchiha Police Force station if she came up to them claiming someone stole a weapon she purposefully left behind in a training ground – genin teams get paid to scavenge there. So Kagura puts on her big girl shoes and uses up the rest of her sealing scroll allotments of the month to pack up the rest of the contraband. Quite a few swords, spears, throwing weapons, and lumbering rods of destruction the samurai use to show off in front of festivals. All of this stuff couldn’t have been cheap, so she’s glad to have not antagonised her captain today. 

The absolutely enormous spiked battle club, the ancient tetsubo, is  stained with… someone’s blood. Not Swan or Dog’s, for sure. Maybe he nicked this off of some battlefield. So once she's all packed, Kagura drags the tetsubo to the shower room for a quick rinse – there are antibacterial soap packets somewhere in the lockers and she's not about to bring home a litany of coagulated diseases into her apartment. 

The showers on this floor are communal. 

Well.

This won’t be so bad, probably. 

There’s no one around when Kagura pokes her head in, so she strips down to her utilitarian undies (the ninja equivalent of a sports bra and running shorts) because like hell would she ever waste her pretty clothes during training days, sits down on the probably extremely gross tiles, turns on a faucet, and starts scrubbing her weapon.

About halfway through, she hears someone enter the lockers.

This is fine, she thinks. They’ll see me in here, crack a few jokes, and then politely go to another floor or they’ll take a very brief shower and leave without further ado.

This is not what happens.

Through the door she left open, she sees a well-built man with a boar mask. He glances at her casually whilst putting his stuff away and stripping. This is fine. She’s not particularly squeamish around nudity, and he’s attractive enough that she’ll just stuff this memory away as one odd encounter. And when a butt-naked Boar enters the showers with soap and cloth, just rawdogging the bathroom experience, bare feet on the mouldy tiles and everything, they ignore each other to complete their respective tasks. 

Then he drops his soap.

Kagura is tempted to say something wildly inappropriate, but then he bends up, ass high in the air, and she quickly looks back down. Wow. 

Boar washes his feet first, really scrubbing in between the toes, with awkward squelching noises from the suds and skin, then moves his washcloth to his legs, then sticks it way into his ass, bending over for a better angle. Then he uses the same cloth to wash his genitals (graphically, with even more squelching noises), then torso, arms, and then his face.

Oh my god, Kagura thinks, unable to tear her gaze away now. Boar. That’s Commander Boar of Assassination. What the fuck is wrong with him?

He looks up. “Oh, you’re the new Seduction Commander.”

She doesn’t ask how he knows that – doubtlessly, the top echelons of ninja can detect identities with or without some mask. 

“That’s me,” she says, keeping her voice level and keeping her eyes squarely above the neck. “I’m Swan. So, any tips or tricks for the newbie? You’ve been Commander for a pretty long time.”

Boar laughs – a nice, heart chuckle. She would’ve found him conventionally attractive, with his short-cropped brown hair, even tan, and masculine face, if she hadn’t known about the foot germs all over his nose pores. “Well, my first thought to share is that you’re pretty weird. I mean, who cleans their weapons in the shower? Just use a water jutsu outside.”

You think I’m the weird one?!

She smiles sheepishly and straightens her posture. “I’m fire-natured, unfortunately. I don’t know any water jutsu. But I appreciate the tip.”

“What? No way. Here, I’ll teach you a basic one.”

Fire is the exact opposite of water, which is something shinobi learn at the academy, but she doesn’t want to say no to a free ninjutsu lesson from one of the top ninja of Konoha, even if his dick and balls are out and she’s in her underwear holding a blood-crusted battle club. So Kagura humours him and mimics the tiger sign. 

“And then convert your chakra to water nature and push it outwards into existing water. Or you can take the shortcut and just wrap neutral-state chakra like a bubble around existing water. It’s like a big ball.”

Yes. Balls. Exactly what Kagura needs to think about to focus away from testicles.

Her chakra control is fairly decent, but it takes most of her concentration to infuse free-flowing water from the faucet spray into a bubble, so she might have to ask Dog later on how elemental transformations actually work. But for now, she’s impressed a fellow commander, who’s actually just a pretty friendly, if weird, nudist. 

She squeezes the rest of the antibacterial soap out of the packet and into the water bubble in her hand, then rubs the trapped water through the weapon like an odd, amorphous loofah.

“Thank you!” Kagura says brightly. “Are the other commanders as nice as you?”

Boar sways to the side to lean against the opposing wall, his penis dangling like a pendulum. She is very much not looking. “You seem pretty sweet. Grasshopper’s cool – I think he’s planning on formally introducing himself to you soon. Slug’s a bitch, but Fox is a right prick. I don’t think Bear even picked Fox for Stealth, the council members put him there.”

She needles more information from him and he gives it easily. It’s more the same, though, complaints about Slug’s behaviour, but nothing else about Fox. Eventually, she finishes up with the tetsubo and hightails it out of the locker room, leaving a still naked Boar to clip his toenails in peace. 

Early the next morning, she sees him again in the Hokage’s office.

It had been a wild summon, at the asscrack of dawn, with a very nervous chuunin knocking at her office door. She’d been up early, reorganising furniture before the acceptable workday began, when the summon came for an important meeting. 

There’s Swan and the rest of the ANBU unit commanders, Bear, several high-ranking jounin, the council members, and the Hokage, arranged neatly in the wide space of the office, the beautiful red sunrise shining through the window. She tries to categorise everyone based on initial observation, but nobody is juvenile enough to give off any obvious tells. There’s Boar, who she knows the most on the basis of having seen everything, and there’s the tall and lithe Grasshopper right next to her, in full anonymous gear. Probably some important clan member. Slug is a short, skinny man with green hair so shiny and plasticky that it has to be a wig, to distract from some other obvious feature, perhaps? The obvious identity trick means that Slug is probably hiding something crazy, like he’s actually a woman. Or maybe his hair is just ugly like that. And then Fox stands off on the far edge from the ANBU line-up, where Swan can’t comfortably examine him without jutting her head out suspiciously, like a pigeon.

The Hokage stands, and everyone bows at attention. 

“The Raikage has sent his regards,” the old man says gravely, tapping a scroll on his desk. “For an anti-war treaty, and future trade prospects. He has sent an elite team of ninja, due by the end of the month, to sign. The civilian contracts are yet to be determined.”

The room stays quiet to digest the news.

Well, that can’t be right. It’s only been three years since the Kyuubi attack on Konoha – the village hasn’t reached a strong enough point to navigate international events such as these. It’s certainly better as of late, and morale within ANBU is at an all-time high, but she doesn’t think the normal ninja forces are faring as well. And Kumo, seriously? They steal bloodlines at the same rate that Kiri kills them off. 

“Swan, I want you in the negotiation room,” The Hokage says.

Chapter Text

The next training session with Team Ro may be ever so slightly tense. No one wants foreign ninja within village walls, especially Kumo-nin. Earth country hates fire country the most out of the five great shinobi nations, but lightning country has actual smart people, therefore the greater risk.

“Disastrous? Perhaps not,” Oyster says. “But we’ll all be stuck on bodyguarding duty for the full two weeks they’re meant to stay. I had plans, cap. Plans!”

Kagura isn’t quite sure what to make of Oyster yet, but she’s certain that these plans of his likely involve terrorising the elderly via microwave induced arson or attempting to drink lava. He seems the type to confuse magma for bolognese sauce.

The village has enacted a soft lockdown in the interim, to prepare for hostiles, thus the team training took place in headquarters, where Kagura passes by Boar in the canteen. He gives her a jolly wave, spoon in the unidentifiable beige mush that most agents avoid as much as humanly possible. She’s still not sure how ANBU agents eat with the masks on – that’s probably a trained skill for the nuttiest nutcases of them all. Dog must be, excuse the pun, the top dog in the matters of secretly shoving goop down his throat, because he’s double masked up. 

That shit looks inedible, she thinks to herself, waving back. 

“I’d rather eat a bag of hair than canteen food,” Cat whispers with a mild shudder. Kagura immediately realises he’s talking to her, reacts appropriately with a bemused head tilt and an elbow to his ribs, and does not question his sudden display of interpersonal relationship growth.

They’ve approached the stairwell corridor, and so goes the long journey upstairs from the deep darkness of the shady ANBU basements. Really, the lighting in here sucks. 

Oyster stops his one-sided conversation with Dog to jump on Cat’s back. “You’d eat a bag of hair? What kind?”

“It was a euphemism–.”

“Are you going to cough up a furball, kitty cat?

Kagura slows her pace to walk alongside the captain, letting the two rascals fight it out in front of them. Oyster’s basically pulling pigtails at this point. 

Next to her, there’s a quiet sigh. Kagura bumps shoulders with her captain, hoping he can smell the real smile on her face. “We can’t be the worst team you’ve ever had, cap,” she says. “I know you like the banter.”

He’s quiet for a moment, shortening his pace, creating distance between them and the bickering duo at the edge of the stairwell. She’s not so sure if his response is as Captain Dog or Hatake. “It’s nice,” he admits, in such a delicate, gentle voice. It juxtaposes against the bulk of his arms, the width of his shoulders, and the blankness of the white mask against the darkness of his usual aura. He turns his head back forward and she sees the sharp outline of his (quite chiselled, actually) tensing jaw.

That’s probably as much emotion as he can handle in one day. He’s like sixteen or seventeen – teenage boys, especially the child soldier ones, are supposed to have weekly quotas on smiles. Happiness rationing.

I can’t believe he actually said something not weird. Did he hit his head? Or did I hit my head?

He doesn’t say much after that, back to being a local cryptid. Training ends, everyone emerges into the light of day, Kagura can finally photosynthesise, and they’re off to their own devices. She heads to her office, finds it delightfully unoccupied despite absolutely zero security, and files away the rest of the paperwork. She brings it up to the Hokage very sneakily, appearing in the corner of his office without being spotted by any of the other inhabitants of the tower – that’s the whole point of “secret agent,” being hidden. Technically, ANBU agents aren’t supposed to be visible at all.

And so she waits, hidden, silent, completely bored out of her mind until the Hokage gives the all clear sign. 

Kagura politely leaves the stack of papers in a neat, uniform pile on his desk. Now that she’s got her own, she suddenly understands how annoying it is to have papers out of order. Well, that was always annoying. Or maybe it’s not and she’s just persnickety. She holds back a twitch, staring dead-eyed at the papers. Oh god, genjutsu practice did a number on her brain. She’s as sane as any celebrity rock star from the seventies.

There’s a new presence at her side. Bear appears out of nowhere, a testament to his skill level. She hadn’t even felt a gush of wind or displacement, so his chakra control must be insane to do a flicker jutsu so perfectly. 

“Good,” the Sandaime says, clearing his throat and setting down his pipe. He leans forward, elbows on the desk, hands firmly tucked together. “Now that the command is here, let’s go over the mission brief for the Lightning retinue.”

And he tells them how it’s going to go. First, a well-known, highly celebrated jounin will greet the envoy at the gate and escort the team to the tower. It would’ve been one of the noble clan leaders, but all the clans are strictly uninterested in dealing with this affair, so the Sannin Orochimaru will be handling it. The first day will be treaty readings. The second day will be treaty corrections. The third day will be drafting a case to the nobility. And then the rest of the days will be additional planning. It’s said in such a lighthearted way that Kagura calls bullshit and knows that they’ll be butting heads and fighting like cocaine-fueled cartel maniacs – as much as legally permissible without breaking international laws and restarting another war. Hopefully. Gosh, a war would suck. The price of beef would go up and Kagura has been living off of discounted sukiyaki for about three weeks now.

As for village security, Fox, the Stealth Commander, will be handling operations. He’ll be trailing all the Kumo ninja and making sure they don’t get up to potential deviousness, AKA stealing kekkei genkai and being really creepy about eugenics. That blitzkrieg aside, Slug and the bodyguarding teams will be on border duty, making sure that there aren’t any trojan horses lying about or secret battalions waiting in the adjacent civilian countries. Boar and Grasshopper chose to stay village-bound for their own clan duties, which isn’t said aloud but their lack of mention means that Kagura does a bit of deductive reasoning on their absence. They must belong to notable clans, to have to sit something as big as this out. 

Seduction Commander Swan will be in the negotiation room itself as a silent entity whilst the rest of the seduction unit will run missions normally, making sure the rest of the world doesn’t catch on to the manpower stretch dedicated to keeping Kumo at bay. She’s not disappointed in being a glorified mannequin, a ‘show of power’ in the back, but it does itch. A little bit. But it’s also first hand experience in international politics. 

How exciting.

“I must admit, I was surprised when I re-read your file,” the Hokage says at the end. “I hadn’t realised we handed leadership to someone so young. Not the youngest, alas, but still young.”

If it helped, Kagura’s actually mentally twenty-something. But she won’t admit that, not while the Yamanaka doctors still foamed at the mouth whenever she dismisses their psychological disbeliefs and misgivings. “Age will not be a deterrent to the success of this procedure,” she promises, putting in all the stops for external pride and the will of fire, puffing her chest out and using a strong voice, despite all common sense telling her that militaristic (child!) indoctrination should be a crime and reincarnation into a land of looneys is as bad as it sounds.

It appears the debrief is over because the Hokage leans back in his chair with a throaty cough and picks his pipe back up. “Of course, of course,” he says. “General Bear, why don’t you impart a few words of wisdom unto Commander Swan before we adjourn? A speech, if you would.”

Swan turns to Bear.

Bear, standing tall and strong as ever, looks down at her. He’s one of the few people that can make her feel short with his hulking, muscular frame. She wonders how many eggs he has to eat per day to maintain those biceps. Which belong to arms that are not patting her back in camaraderie. Instead, the general stands there menacingly, thinking up his speech.

“I apologise for the long speech,” he says. “Either we succeed or go to war. That is all.”

When Lightning arrives, Kagura realises just how often she sees her friends. The entire two weeks, she’s stuck crouched on the ceiling for what would’ve been an illegal amount of overtime in a world with labour laws and functioning governments. She doesn’t see or talk to anyone for over a week, which has to be the most amount of time she’s spent silent since her stint on the training island. It helps her realise that maybe she’s actually a nice, sociable person for real, and that she does have actual friends that she hangs out with. She misses cafe dates with Kurenai, bullying Cat, and the occasional run-in with Team Kan members on the street. Well, she mostly misses the sun and being human again.

“The municipal governments alongside Haran Bay are not represented in this agreement on barley shipments. Are they aware of these proposed tariff changes?”

“The civilian ambassadors are well due to…”

“...Fortunately, Grass and Rice Paddies use similar commodity treatises for both of our honourable countries, moreover…”

Kagura drones out most of the conversations. Most of the days are spent discussing food. If she concentrates too hard, she starts to think about the new bakery that opened up on the junction between Tobirama and Uzu street. So much cheap bread. If the deals with Lightning work out, there might be an influx of dairy products in Fire. Have croissants been invented here yet?

This is going great, she thinks, perched up in the corner.

And then pauses.

It’s going too well, nearly. There’s been very little pushback on either end. From what she knows about politics, mainly boring BBC news conversations, alliances aren’t all beautiful and dandy like this, especially with a historically hostile force. Doubtlessly, the Hokage and his councilmen are dubious at best, but there’s something else that has to be off about this. Usually, the most obvious answer is the correct one. Shinobi tend to be too smart to the point that they’re just dumb. So she’ll assume that Kumo is here to steal kekkei genkai. Except her fellow countrymen are very strong and the ANBU stealth unit is on top of that job.

Oh god, the stealth team, she realises. Oyster, you’ve given me nothing but problems.

Or, Uchiha Shisui. Her least favourite (pretty?) boy with a horrendous case of pink eye (the infectious disease, not the doujutsu, obviously). He’s been radio silent the entire time, on clan lockdown. A huge chunk of her friends have been ordered to shut themselves indoors until the Kumo ninja leave.  Worm and Oyster are wary of Fox, or so he told, so the Uchiha clan should be fine. That leaves every other clan to freak out about. But Kagura doesn’t even know what she’s freaking out about. Lightning is (probably) here to nick a fancy ninja ability, which is expected and normal of this world, except there might not be an appropriate defence against this potential theft due to Oyster accusing Fox of being a… something. Surely, Fox wouldn’t let a foreign nation get away with stealing Konoha property. That would lead to a war. Which is, very obviously, a bad thing. 

Kagura internally cries when she reaches the end of her shift and doesn’t immediately crash at home. Instead, she takes a caffeine pill (coffee and tea have distinctive scents that any tracker worth their salt can trace) and runs laps around the village rooftops. 

The foreigners are due to leave tomorrow. If anything were to happen, it would be tonight. For the mystique of the night and because doing evil deeds is so much cooler in the dark. Although, daytime crimes are highly underrated. No one suspects being robbed at ten in the morning during brunch. 

There’s a pulse in the west. An ANBU code pulse.

She waits about a minute, perched on top of a residential building in the west-central district. There’s an answer from the north-west, from a stealth unit callsign. On a normal day, there would’ve been at least ten answers by now, but everyone’s locked the fuck up. She’s about average in terms of chakra sensing, which is pretty fucking good, because that shit is hard. She’ll never be an Inuzuka or Hyuga, but she knows where all her allies are. Except the sneaky ones. Like Dog. Despite smelling like a kennel up close, she can never sense him from a distance.

Oh, fuck it, she thinks, and follows up on the pulse without sending one of her own. She’s a commander; she can do what she wants. A stealth agent is taking care of the signal, no one else will be coming, but there’s nothing illegal about nosiness.

Using everything Leopard and Dog have taught her, Swan creeps up to the origin point soundlessly. It’s the Hyuga clan compound, a place she’s never been to and has never wanted to visit, except she doesn’t need Byakugan eyes to sense the commotion going on inside the compound walls. 

There’s another pulse from inside the compound, fainter this time, using the emergency code. It’s too faint to reach across the village, so the only people that can respond to it in time are Kagura and the primary responding agent. Who is perched odiously atop an electricity pole, a blurry figure just out of her natural eyesight. The person is there, doing nothing. Watching. Waiting. 

Kagura forgoes her cover and jumps over the wall. The figure atop the pole disappears entirely and she can no longer sense them. 

There isn’t any time to admire the zen gardens or traditional architecture inside – ooh, that’s a massive lazy river of koi fish – because she darts to the signal and breaks Hyuga Hiashi’s arm.

Instead of freaking out over breaking a clan head’s arm, Swan uses the momentum from jump-kicking the arm going in for a kill strike to grab onto the bloodied Kumo ninja on his knees and spin around him, using his body as an anchor, to crouch behind him with the first weapon out of her summoning seals at his neck. It also happens to be a twenty-kilogram, two-hundred centimetre long odachi sword, and Kagura wants to strangle Dog because this is entirely his fault. Honestly, it’s ridiculous that she’s holding a sword this size when a kunai would do the trick.

Or not. She sees the instinctive hesitation from Hyuga Hiashi, clenching his dangling arm across the courtyard, at the sudden appearance of a stupidly large weapon. This entire shinobi business is just a dick-measuring contest, apparently.

She takes in the entire situation.

An injured clan head (courtesy of herself, oops), a bunch of scared spectators around the central gardens in what must be the main family’s home (the decor is really quite fancy), Commander Grasshopper laying on the ground uselessly, holding a teary-eyed toddler, and a Kumo-nin stupid enough to infiltrate the one place where everyone has fucking X-ray vision. What the hell, dude. Literally any other clan would’ve been easier. 

“It would be unwise to kill this man,” Swan says, hoping she’s judged the situation correctly. “Thank you, Grasshopper, for alerting me. I will bring him to the Hokage.”

The kumo-nin tucked against her chest sways slightly, cutting into her obscenely large sword. Blood drips from the fresh cut on his neck, splashing on to the beautiful pale stone tiles below. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, but the guy is extremely worse for wear, just about half-dead from the royal beat down of breaking and entering into clan holdings. Of X-ray vision ninja. Seriously. Someone must’ve given this guy some bad info.

It’s apparently the wrong thing to say. Swan misjudged.

The clan head, fire in his eyes, whirls around to yell the worse-for-wear Grasshopper. “Hizashi! You sent ANBU flares, against my direct order?” And then he glares at Kagura, doing a pretty damn good job of being scary and angry. The pain must help. And oh fuck, she broke a clan head’s arm. In his own home. In front of all his family. “And you will give me that scoundrel. This is a clan matter and you cannot violate clan rights, agent.”

Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack. She needs to reassess.

Someone in the clan obviously caught this Kumo-dunce sneaking in. There aren’t any loose eyeballs on the ground, so that meant kidnapping a whole ass person. The child on the sidelines, most likely. And then Grasshopper must’ve caught on and gotten into a fight for the child – a tiny girl, observing everything with milky eyes – and then the clan head got involved and decided to kill the foreigner for his transgressions. Kagura can’t blame anyone for wanting vengeance, but also murder at this exact point in time would be really really bad for international relations. Maybe she could’ve helped diffuse this whole event if she’d gotten here earlier, but she did not and now she has to deal with the consequences. The stealth agent who did must’ve wanted this to happen. But that’s a thought for another time. A less pressing time.

A man like this, out for blood, only responds to a specific kind of treatment. 

“The Hokage will be less than kind, Hyuga-sama,” Swan says coldly. 

Vague on purpose, overwhelmingly threatening. Men like him need to be whipped into shape, strength respecting strength. He’d do well in a BDSM club.

And without waiting for a response, she sends out three strong chakra pulses, loud enough for any ANBU agent, jounin, or nosy chuunin to sense. One can’t reason with a man like this, all she has to do is tell him to suck up to the chain of command and wait for him to eventually cool off. The last time she was this authoritative, though, the mission target she was trying to charm popped a boner. All sorts of freaks out there.

They end up in a stare-off. Kagura can’t hide behind her mask because Hyuga Hiashi has the fucking Byakugan, of course, so she keeps her face still as possible. Rooster, Taira from her old team, had been able to see her age from the beginning. But that was when she was eleven and looked ambiguously young. Now, at fourteen, she can pass as a very awkward looking twenty year old. The title helps add to the sense of maturity, as well as the height and puberty-blessed (or cursed) assets that are actually quite a hindrance to her job. Boobs do not help when playing a game of limbo against an enemy katana.

Back-up arrives.

It’s a mix of stealth, seduction, and tracking agents, presumably the clanless ones. Swan leaves as soon as possible, numb with shock that she managed this whole debacle. She has no delusions around her strength levels, and most of that exchange was based on hierarchy, not who would actually win in a fight. She broke someone’s arm from running at them at insane speeds, not from the fact that she’s the kind of person who can just casually break elite jounin’s limbs like that. And that both parties were tired from their respective fights. And the kumo-nin hasn’t tried to break out of her grasp yet because he’s been caught and she’s the only one keeping him alive at this exact moment. 

What a nightmare. At least this means she won’t have to spend another second in that negotiation room.

Swan carts her target through the village and to the Hokage’s office, where the old man looks just as scary as legends say. There’s no pipe, no friendly grandfather personality, just the entirety of the old warrior projecting all his enmity into the room. 

“What an unfortunate circumstance we have found ourselves in,” the Hokage says gravely, once a group from T&I take the intruder away. He addresses a room of council members, the jounin commander, Swan, Fox, someone called Morino Ibiki, the brand new head of T&I, a limping Grasshopper, and Hyuga Hiashi, who has stubbornly refused medical treatment and is dangling his broken arm everywhere like a sick creep. God, no one wants to see that much exposed flesh and bone in an office setting, get a grip.

The rest of the known ANBU forces are guarding the Kumo team’s hotel building whilst the normal active duty soldiers are locking up the borders.

There isn’t a good time to seal the odachi back into a scroll, so Swan uselessly holds it, trying to feel as badass and confident as she looks. She wonders if Dog would be upset if he woke up one day missing a testicle. No, that’s too tame. There needs to be a cruel and unusual punishment. She’s conjuring up a plan to circumcise him with sandpaper when one of the council members speaks up, interrupting the Hokage’s narration on what to do with the treaty team.

It’s an old, lumbering figure, covered in bandages and wheezing like crazy. His name escapes her.

“I must commend the stealth unit for protecting village safety, outside of this isolated incident,” he says, painfully breathing out words. This guy must smoke a pack an hour. “And what an unusual commander you are, Swan, to prevent a ninja from killing another ninja in the middle of battle,” he remarks, in a funny sort of lilt. 

Yes, that’s true.

“You must be very good at your job,” the old councilman continues, nodding. “Hiashi-sama, I wouldn’t have thought you to be interrupted. Your daughter was nearly sentenced to a lifetime as a broodmare.”

The Hokage takes back the floor, which is excellent for Kagura’s safety because the Hyuga looks about one domino away from bursting into a second rage. “Danzo-dono,” he says firmly. “That is all.”

The rest of the impromptu meeting goes on until the early morning. Kagura isn’t privy to the rest of the information yet, as the higher authorities are engaged in talks with the daimyo’s men and she isn’t needed to guard the recent prisoners. But as she sits on her futon in her cosy home, unable to sleep despite the long night, she realises that the future political uncertainty isn’t what’s bothering her. It’s that she’s very sure, one-hundred percent sure, that that old councilman had been biting back words, goading and aggressive words, with the force of an avalanche.

Something is afoot.

Chapter Text

Bright and early the next day, Kagura discovers a stray outside her office door. She’s in her ANBU attire, but her hair’s in a loose braid and she’s nowhere near alert enough to handle any actual enemies, so she’s privately relieved that it’s just Grasshopper. Anyone in a mile radius with a working nose can smell the salonpas pasted all over her body – holding an odachi for that long is just begging for muscle strain, no matter how badass it looks. 

“The door’s open,” she says, knocking on it from the outside.

Grasshopper startles ever so slightly when she appears in front of him. She hadn’t even done anything – he’s just out of it, she supposes.

“I was… unsure,” he says, then politely follows her inside. 

Well. The reverse-psychology security measures do, in fact, work. The fact that Grasshopper couldn’t spot a hint of a seal with his Byakugan must’ve freaked him the fuck out. And even now, as she sits down at her desk and he dips into the squeaky chair across, his posture is a perfect picture of wary trepidation.

“So,” she says, keeping her body language open, lounging comfortably. “May I ask why you’ve come to visit me, Commander?”

Grasshopper – or, Hyuga Hizashi, as she discovered last night – bows his head down in apology. She doesn’t know why he’s apologising but he’s not stopping, and suddenly he turns the conversation to being grateful that she came when she did. “My brother has never known when to stop,” he says, still facing downwards, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his thighs. “His overzealous nature is born from passion, make no mistake. He does what he believes is best for the clan. And don’t let him know, but it would’ve been a grave mistake to kill that Kumo-nin. I don’t know what the political repercussions would’ve been for the clan, village, or country.”

“Yes, the Hokage mentioned,” she says.

Damn, they’re brothers? Must be one hell of a family. Kagura can’t even imagine what the clan dynamic must be like.

“And our honourable leader will tell us what he plans to do with the lightning retinue once the interrogations are over,” she continues. “But you didn’t come here to tell me things I already know, I believe.”

Kagura waits in silence. 

Grasshopper stews a bit before finally looking up, unclenching his hands. 

“I came here,” he starts awkwardly, in staccato, “because I felt obligated to inform a fellow commander of the force, that there were a few witnesses to the situation that unfolded last night, at the Hyuga clan grounds. Several, in fact.” He pauses. “Those who were awake laid witness to the exchange between you and my brother.” He pauses again, longer. “The entire clan, I mean. Everyone saw.”

She leans in, slumped at her desk like a disobedient child. “...About how I broke the clan head’s arm?”

Neither of them dignify that with an immediate response.

If I keep having spectacular meetings in my office like this every day, I should install a snack box, Kagura thinks. Like a kindergarten classroom, except all the toddlers are just overgrown man-babies who kill people for a living.

Pocky would be nice. Or gummies. A mason jar with konpeito! 

“It’s been less than a day but the news has picked up amongst the higher ranking troops,” Grasshopper finally says. He’s taken on quite the statuesque pose. “We’ve been able to quell further rumours but the damage has already been done. As your… peer, I come to you with some concern that this may affect your image within the corps.”

What the fuck? No, this is great news. Commander Sexy just got hella cooler.

“I see,” she says severely, knitting her fingers together. Mentally, she’s partying in Ibiza with a sangria and washed up reality TV stars. This entire ninja business, she’s come to realise over the years, is all about who has the bigger dick. Everyone’s unfairly impressed by flashy ninjutsu, which ANBU Swan will never ever have the chance to learn, not with her well-rounded yet average stats. Overpowering a clan head? This is her opportunity to stir up the pot a little and pull a massive prank. “How unfortunate. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, sir.”

Except she doesn’t have the skills to back it up.

Kagura sighs forlornly. “I suppose this means I’ll have to brush up on my taijutsu, Grasshopper. I’m afraid I don’t possess the fighting prowess required, if there were to be an information leak.”

It’s the worst possible outcome and highly unlikely, but it grates on Grasshopper regardless. An information leak would be deadly to her, as she’d be approached and overpowered by combatants on the job, the weaker prey that she is. She sees a muscle tense and hears the stifled click of grinding teeth. He feels morally obligated to offer her a one-on-one combat lesson. He can’t resist. He’s a Hyuga, his taijutsu is better than most. There isn’t a world out there where Grasshopper wouldn’t want to help out someone like Swan, someone he knows he can trust. Her body language, her scent, her words, her small interactions with others in that office last night – hook, line, and sinker.

She hides her satisfaction when Grasshopper asks her out on a date (to the training grounds).

There’s absolutely no chance in hell she actually wants him as a taijutsu mentor – she’s busy enough as is, Dog is a horrendous teacher but he still imparts quite a bit of knowledge without realising, and her strengths lie in the intelligence field, not the actual battlefield. But the chance to observe a taijutsu master in action, wholly interrupted? Now that’s an opportunity she’d be a fool to dismiss. Rooster hadn’t been anything to sniff at, but this man – brother to the clan head – he’s got to be the real deal.

Grasshopper leaves, still tense as hell, and she waits a proper ten minutes until she lets loose a small cheer.

What the fuck, Kagura thinks. What the fuck! What the fuck?

“Haha, very funny Oyster,” she says, putting a hand on her hip playfully and wagging a finger in his stupid vulva mask. “Are you proud?”

Oyster rips the fake cast off his arm and pouts. “Man, nobody appreciates my sense of humour.”

Kagura wants to hang him upside down a vat of boiling water and cook him into a stew for the bogey eating trolls from the Hobbit. Except she would never stoop to Oyster’s childish pranks because she didn’t get stuck in the birth canal as a baby, so she exaggerates a bemused sigh and shakes her head. “We’re very proud, son.”

Then the rest of the team arrives at the training grounds in the valley. The weather’s finally warming up again so she’s enjoying the fresh air and the taste of dew in the breeze. 

Dog brings out a mission scroll and gives a debrief. It’s a fairly basic bounty hunter mission – kill a foreign mistress of the Grass daimyo’s uncle, who the current daimyo thinks is a threat – except the difficulty has been upped because the target location, the mistress’ home, is in the part of Frost country that’s perilously close to Lightning country. With the recent political hurdles in the past few days, Bear had no choice but to send his top assassination squad so the mission numbers seem unaffected by the current climate, to not appear weak to the noble fire court. Swan’s report on the fateful night with the Hyuga can wait, apparently, whilst she’s out in the field on what should be a bog standard B-class mission.

“But we can make time for… three hours,” Dog says, checking the sky. “We can run through the river marshes in the north-east with the high tide. Until then…” He shuts the mission scroll tight and tucks it neatly back into its pouch. “Cat, Swan, you’re both behind on genjutsu practice. Time to shape up.”

Cat wilts.

They really are. They can both break out of incredibly advanced, well-woven illusions no problem, but she knows just about zero genjutsu and Cat’s been preoccupied with honing his destructive techniques to bother. The majority of ninja don’t use genjutsu – it’s more of a specialist ability than taijutsu or ninjutsu. Konoha is the outlier for putting so much emphasis on it, thanks to the Uchiha clan. And Team Ro is way stacked on genjutsu users already, with their two Sharingan-wielding losers. Swan and Cat have no need to learn anything, except Dog is anal and needs to show love through brute-force methods of keeping his team alive as much as possible.

It’s a waste of time, essentially, for them to learn how to cast illusions. What will help keep them alive is sticking to their strengths. 

Except Swan isn’t known for any strengths. She’s outstandingly average, for someone of her political calibre. At least Cat has some knock-outs hidden inside that gangly body of his. Learning genjutsu will just make her even more exceedingly average in all categories, evening out her skills to an overall high-chuunin level.

Oyster’s better at casting but nobody trusts him to teach, so he’s off running laps to expel excess energy. Dog sits them down, in the peaceful quiet of the low-sloping valley, where mushrooms, leaf debris, and crunchy mulch bring about a nostalgic smell. Kagura can already imagine David Attenborough commenting on squirrel mating patterns or the strange creature known as ANBU Dog adapting to his normal habitat of eating glass or scratching his back with decapitated turkey heads. 

“Isolate yin chakra to your cranial chakra point,” Dog begins. “Then project an image in your mind. A kunai, for example. Something you can visualise perfectly and know better than anything else, by its shape, sound, taste, texture, and reflection.”

Who’s out here tasting their kunai?

She’s also a bit disturbed that a kunai knife is the first thing that pops into Dog’s head. She would’ve gone with something normal, like an apple.

The rest of the work is fairly intuitive. Yang and yin chakra feel different and she’s morbidly aware of it, being the bodysnatcher that she is, suddenly thrust into a foreign body, fine tuned to be very aware of alien energy particles inside. So she swirls yin chakra to the base of her skull and thinks about a juicy red apple laying in the palm of her hand. 

There’s an apple.

Kagura jolts up. Dog is squatting, legs spread wide like a grandpa that everyone knows to avoid, next to her. 

“That’s not a kunai,” he says judgingly. “A blood splatter?”

Well, it’s an apple, but in the same way that a random splotch of red paint is an apple. But more importantly, why are all of his initial ideas so violent? A kunai, now blood? What’s next, a ziplock bag of eyeballs?

Her apple improves slightly over the next three hours before Oyster crows about the time and Team Ro packs up the training and leaves for the mission. It’s proper dark by the time they reach the border, with the galaxy on full display, twinkling in the clear skies. These aren’t her stars or her constellations, but that doesn’t matter in the end. She’s long accepted her fate here. The one thing that Kagura values about this new world is the lack of light pollution – although, industrialisation appears to be on the precipice, just almost, if only the major powers stopped murdering all the smart people. 

“The stars are beautiful tonight,” she murmurs.

They’ve set up camp in an alcove steppe in the mountain side, hidden from view with a well-placed thicket. It’s a rare occasion where they can spread their legs outside without an immediate need to tucker away in some dark hole like a mole-rat, hiding from opportunistic spies. But it’s still quite nippy out, so they’ve set up a tent as a special treat. Dog isn’t taking any chances, miserable bint that he is, so he sits out, moodily, in the trees, taking first watch.

Oyster pops his head out of the tent. “The stars? How philosophical. Cat, what do you think of the stars?”

From inside the tent, there’s a muffled response. Kagura vaguely hears something about myths and fairy tales, which does beg the question of how advanced astronomy is here. She can’t recall any conversation about space or meteors during her time in academy in Grass, and there aren’t any notable physicists she can name off the top of her head, like Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s likely that these people still believe that space to be an abstract, far-away concept, with moon goddesses and whatnot. PBS doesn’t have anything on these chumps.

“Errr. Wrong,” Oyster mimics the sound of an alarm. “Try again.”

Cat pokes his head out as well, craning his neck out to the night sky. It’s bright enough for the white porcelain of the cat mask to glow in reflection as he looks upwards, crouched on all fours. “They… are pretty?”

“It’s like you’re not even trying.”

Kagura sticks it out in the tent to get away from the weather, bearing Oyster’s jabs at Cat with gritted teeth. She doesn’t mind it too much because she’s got fourth shift, but it is still annoying. 

“What about the stars?” Cat whispers one last time, before Kagura shushes him to sleep. “They’re useful for navigation, especially in maritime.”

And she drifts away.

She wakes up a scant two hours later, birds chirping in the background. The endless stars glitter and wink, priceless gemstones on noble ladies’ necks. Sleeping with a mask on isn’t the worst part of the job, but she’d love to bask in the fresh air of the cool night whilst stargazing at least once in her life.

“Oh,” Cat says, with an auspicious clarity to his voice. “I get it now. Scientifically, there are thousands upon thousands of stars, completely different worlds from us. It’s been proposed that the skies are limitless. But knowing that, I was born in a world at this exact moment in time, here with my friends, despite the overwhelming vastness of the universe. The stars are so far away, but I’m here.”

“No, you fools. It means I stole your tent,” the enemy ninja says.