Seven sets of footsteps made varying volumes of scuffling sounds on the dirt road out of Konoha one early morning, a cacophony that nearly drowned out the sounds of birdsong and wind tugging at drying leaves. If it had been a little less windy, it might well have muffled all other sounds, even though some of the footsteps were near silent. The bizarrely loud treads from three of the party members more than made up for the deficit.
They'd taken up a variation on a standard formation—a triangle. Sasuke took the tip, with Kakashi walking a few feet behind his right heel, Aiko was to Kakashi's right, and Sai stood way over on the left while their clients huddled between the shinobi.
"Let's hope this mission works out," Kakashi sighed after a few hours of walking in silence, as if he had been mulling over their recent string of missions. Aiko didn't buy it—he was attempting to stir up trouble to get an amusing reaction from the team. The unusually calm, temperate weather and lack of inter-team drama was probably boring him to tears.
Like the predictable chump he was, Sai gave a sunny smile with his eyes creased shut.
'Decent attempt,' Aiko scored mentally. 'Maybe a six out of ten, grading on a curve to compensate for his general ineptitude?'
She'd developed a grading rubric in the weeks they'd been stationed on back-to-back missions together. It wasn't like there was much else to do. The odd tension between Sai and Sasuke and Kakashi's general nonchalance had unfortunately made her the peacekeeper by default. She had no skill at the role whatsoever. At times like this, she desperately missed sweet, charismatic Naruto and even Sakura. The little girl had been a people-pleaser by nature, and clever enough to maneuver conversations that almost everyone was pleased by.
Sai lacked that conversational skill entirely, but hell if he didn't try to make friends anyway. She gave him so many points for effort and unintentional hilarity.
"I happen to like these missions," the boy in question interjected blandly. "I find it very interesting to see how Dickless can destabilize the most mundane of missions with his very presence."
The two possible outcomes of this trip seemed about equally likely :
Sasuke would become a Chuunin and rub it in Naruto's face when he came back home
Sasuke would snap and actually kill Sai with a blunt rock, forgoing all shinobi training in favor of his mindless hate for the other boy even though he factually knew it would endanger his promotion. He would get promoted anyways because Tsunade would just be sick of trying.
Her thoughts might have been on the same wavelength as her Uchiha teammate. Sasuke's fingers twitched as if he was longing to wrap them around Sai's neck, but the impulse was too Naruto-ish for him to actually indulge in.
'To be fair, Sai has a point.'
It wasn't even that Sasuke had done anything—it really did seem to be his very presence that jinxed things. Forget Naruto, Sasuke was a luck token of some sort. (Good or bad, she wasn't sure, but definitely luck).
The civilian family they were going to be escorting looked downright unnerved at this point. The teenage daughter Hana was clutching the straps of her green backpack so tightly that her fingers were turning white. Her young-looking parents (Ichigo and Mei) exchanged uncertain glances.
Aiko leaned around her mentor and aimed a reassuring smile at them, cutely clasping her hands behind her back to portray an unthreatening demeanor that would be more palatable to non-shinobi. "Don't mind them," she explained. "They're just joking around. You have nothing to worry about with us here. I know we look a bit young, but all three of us are competent shinobi, and Kakashi-shishou is one of the best shinobi in the world."
Strangely, they didn't seem reassured at all.
"Suck-up," Sasuke muttered under his breath from the front of the group. Without missing a beat, Kakashi extended a foot and sent him tripping face-first into the dirt. He'd done it quickly enough that Aiko almost missed the motion. She might have, if she hadn't been expecting something similar. He was petty sometimes. Their clients skittered back nervously to keep a distance from the grumpiest party member. Sai merely looked on while Sasuke irritably spat out dirt and regained his footing. His expression was blank but somehow managed to convey curiosity through his tilted head and unblinking stare. Sai was a bit like the world's tallest and hunkiest owl, really.
Aiko took a moment to glare at her teammates, who had just undone all the soothing she'd done. Calming other people just didn't come naturally to her, so she didn't appreciate having her ham-handed efforts undermined. "Whatever," she grunted, purposefully shoving her mentor with a shoulder. He allowed it and pretended to sway away from the force she mustered, which probably didn't help the impression that their aghast clients were gaining about their expensive escort. Even despite knowing that she was a shinobi, they probably didn't put much stock in her physical prowess. She wasn't particularly intimidating in appearance, even with a gigantic dog summons trailing by her side. Unfortunately.
Uncertain or not, they were apparently committed enough that they didn't muster up any complaints and obediently followed along with Kakashi's absent-minded directions.
'Makes sense,' Aiko noted. 'I bet hiring an escort is really pricey. On the bright side, they probably got a great deal, considering they managed to swing two ANBU level shinobi and the Hokage's apprentice.'
She would have told them that if she could—it probably would have soothed their minds. But it would have been grossly inappropriate for her to share confidential information like that about Kakashi and Sai. Sasuke's position wasn't classified, but it would probably be best not to talk about it either.
If this mission somehow went downhill into a spectacular blaze of incompetence and mind-bendingly bad luck, it might be a good idea not to have the highest echelons in their village directly embarrassed by the fiasco.
So their poor clients would just have to suffer nervously until the team got a chance to prove themselves.
'It's amazing that Naruto isn't even here, but having two-thirds of the surviving team seven together is somehow enough to tap into whatever alternate universe stores his weird karma,' she mused.
Then again, even in the manga, Sasuke's story arc had been fucking weird on its own merits. Maybe Naruto was completely blameless. Maybe there was nothing weird about Naruto's luck in the first place. He could just be a normal little boy.
Kakashi startled and gave Aiko a wary stare when she suddenly began choking on what appeared to be nothing. He warily patted her shoulder, pulling his hand back immediately as if he'd been burnt. "Okay there?"
"H-hai," she gasped, fanning her face with a hand. "Sorry, it's nothing."
'No way. Naruto is definitely weird as all hell. S'why I love him.'
Mindful that Kakashi had been downright unnerved by her inexplicable good humor, she wiped her face as blank as possible. She needed to pay attention and be alert, since she was on the clock. With any luck at all, they'd run into a moderately difficult fight that could be used as a justification for giving Sasuke his damn promotion already. A field promotion was perfectly respectable, after all, even if it wasn't as flashy as an exam promotion.
Mitsuo whined, a warm weight brushing against her right hip. Aiko glanced down and ran her fingers through the thick, white fur at his neck soothingly. He leaned his thick neck into her hand, snuffling sadly at her fingers. It was the first time he'd been out with her on an extended mission, but it was starting to seem like they would never have time to bond in Konoha.
"I know, I know," she murmured to the ninken sympathetically. He was having a hard time spending nights away from home. It was lucky that Pakkun had pulled her aside and explained some things to her, because Mitsuo couldn't speak any human language. He would probably never be able to.
That was yet another reason why it was so important for them to spend a lot of time together. If he was going to be her companion, they had to develop camaraderie and the ability to understand one another. He had a fairly good understanding of human speech (something like a toddler's vocabulary, but geared towards shinobi life), and she was learning some barks, but neither of them could properly vocalize the other's language. That meant that nonverbal communication was going to be crucial, as were the coded communications that they were still working out. There wasn't much need for Mitsuo to speak in riddles—it would never be an issue unless they were fighting another ninken summoner (or maybe a wolf or coyote with a similar dialect). But Aiko was actually working on teaching him a bit of English. Kakashi seemed perplexed by the strange sounds – syllables that didn't exist in Konoha, particularly—but she didn't see a reason to make up obscure references when she could teach him things she readily knew. It didn't make things any harder for her ninken, after all.
The only way to get that vital bonding done was just to spend time with each other. Their clients and Sai seemed a bit curious, but Sasuke gave her an unusually wide berth after she had summoned Mitsuo.
It wasn't that he was frightened of or disliked dogs, of course. (Although that wouldn't have been an unusual response to a dog that probably weighed more than Aiko did). No. It was because Mitsuo's hackles had gone up the instant he got a whiff of Sasuke and had insistently circled him, barking and growling for two painfully long minutes while Aiko tried to figure it out. Kakashi hadn't met them by the gate at that point, so she was on her own. Though it felt presumptuous, she eventually summoned Pakkun and begged for help.
He'd looked at her like she was an idiot while Mitsuo insistently danced around Sasuke. "The puppy is saying that one there smells like cats." He licked his nose, apparently oblivious to just how repulsed Sasuke appeared to be by the motion. But perhaps he'd noticed, because the pug continued. "He does reek of cat," Pakkun added decisively. Then he gave a few short barks that appeared to turn into an argument and a royal scolding. Mitsuo perked up his ears and glanced between his elder and the boy he was so insistently keeping corralled away from his summoner. He yipped and whined, but eventually pulled his ears down flat and groveled onto his tummy, awkwardly pawing his way over to Aiko's side.
"There," Pakkun sighed. He turned to Aiko, scratching at his neck with a rear paw. "I explained that you have to tolerate the cat stench because you're teammates."
Sasuke looked more than a bit disgruntled. "I don't even have a cat," he bit out shortly.
Both dogs gave him pitying looks. It was hard not to laugh. Pakkun took one long sniff, and decisively judged, "Is Uchiha."
"Is Uchiha," Kakashi (who she had definitely not heard arrive), agreed solemnly.
Sasuke twitched, looking somewhere between murderous and baffled. "Well-spotted," he eventually condescended.
Mitsuo whuffed. Pakkun gave a growling laugh in reply, and tilted his head so sharply that Pakkun smacked himself in the face with one of his floppy ears. "Then what's the question, boy?"
"I don't see the connection. I don't have the Uchiha nin-cat contract. I don't even have a regular cat." He jerked his head irritably at Aiko, clearly not happy about being growled at. "She has a cat. Growl at her."
"S'not a cat," Pakkun said sagely. Mitsuo agreed with a series of low vocalizations that startled Kakashi into giving Aiko a strange look. "He says he saw it hack up a burning hairball once," Pakkun helpfully supplied. "Can't be a cat. Some kind of furry lizard, probably."
There was a spectacularly awkward silence. Aiko pretended not to feel the stares. "Well, that's all sorted out and everyone's here!" she chirped with false enthusiasm. "Time to set off on an adventure."
"Aiko." Sasuke's disbelieving tone stopped her in her tracks.
She rolled her eyes and shrugged helplessly. Smaug was really more like Hinata's cat now, to be honest. She was either some sort of crazy talented animal whisperer or Smaug just sensed a similar soul in her. "I was uninvolved in that."
That pretty well stopped conversation for the first hour or so of their long walk.
'Come to think of it, that might be when the clients started to seem a bit uncomfortable around us,' Aiko reminisced fondly. She should probably feel guilty, but… couldn't quite muster up the energy. They weren't being paid to make friends. Their job was to safely get their client out of Fire Country, not pretend to be a luxury cruise service.
It was a pretty lazy mission, made even more so by the necessity of putting extra work on Sasuke to give him a crash source in field work. Aiko and Sai lurked around and set up camp that first night while Kakashi followed Sasuke to be sure his procedure running a perimeter check and setting up acceptable traps was up to snuff. They were gone long enough that Aiko eventually felt badly enough for their poor clients (who were obviously unused to long travel) and helped them set up their bedrolls and dug out a campfire for them. Sai merely looked on, idly running a clean brush over a notebook as if drawing invisibly.
"Thanks," Hana panted, wiping her forehead back as if to clear sweaty bangs, but her skin was completely dry.
'That's a bit odd,' Aiko noted without indicating anything about her thoughts externally. 'Her breathing patterns indicate exertion, but no sweat?'
It was unusual, but she didn't comment. All three of their clients seemed in much better shape by the time Sasuke and Kakashi returned, if a bit unpleasantly startled by just how quickly they appeared in the middle of the group toting bloody animals.
"You can cook." Sasuke tossed his directly at Sai. The artist caught both rabbits, but the swinging momentum spattered his face with what was probably still warm blood. Ichigo looked decidedly green, reaching out to take his wife's hand.
Sai gave a very strained smile—more so than usual, and awkwardly wiped the rabbit blood off his cheek and nose with a palm. It smudged a little and didn't entirely come off. "Of course. I am honored that you trust me with such a task." He paused. "Does this mean that you are courting me? This reminds me of a proverb about the duties a man has to his beloved. You see, when a man loves-"
"Ah, maybe we can talk about that later," Aiko hastily interjected, tugging the animals out of Sai's loose grip and pulling him to the fire by his hand. "I'll help. Thank you, Sasuke, Kakashi. They're lovely."
Sai's brow furrowed. He looked first at the rabbits he had been given, then to a fuming Sasuke, and then between Aiko and Kakashi as she snatched the food their team leader had brought back out of his hands.
Before he had a chance to open his mouth, Aiko had shoved everything into his arms and sparked up the fire to make sure it was going strong before laying down a leather tarp and pulling out a kunai. "Sai, would you skin those?" She gave him a meaningful look.
"Yes. We will talk later?"
She choked down a laugh, avoiding looking at Sasuke who was probably breathing smoke at that point. "Of course, Sai. We can talk about anything you want."
'Well, almost anything. I don't guarantee you'll get the answers you want,' she amended. He was probably still spying for Danzo, after all.
Doubtless, she wasn't the only one who knew that. Since Tsunade almost certainly suspected him, Sasuke must know as well. Kakashi could know too—he'd been in ANBU long enough that he could be aware of the other branch and was old enough to remember the scandal of Danzo being ordered to dissolve his private forces. They might even both know that the other knew, but there was no reason for either of them to know that she knew. She'd never been told, after all.
Aiko wasn't particularly worried. She knew how Kakashi treated threats, and none of the signs were present. Oddly enough, he seemed to be doing his best to be friendly to Sai. Of course, 'friendly' for Kakashi was more than a bit stilted and difficult, so she was taking it upon herself to be the bridge to the team. It made sense that he might be trying to ensure the Root nin felt welcomed. Obvious hostility would make it obvious that they knew he was a spy.
'Besides, Naruto managed to convert him in canon. That means that Sai is probably vulnerable to peer influence. He doesn't understand his own emotions, and he's brainwashed enough to think that he doesn't even have them.' (a particularly idiotic move on Danzo's part). 'All in all, Sai is highly susceptible to manipulation from anyone who spends an extended period of time with him. A bit of kindness here, a bit of respect there, and maybe even a semi-friendly rivalry…'
She intentionally did not smile. Sasuke would probably be vexed if he realized that his unfeigned irritation with the other boy was teaching him scripts for semi-hostile but still nonviolent human interaction. Worse, Sai learned by mimicry and repetition. That meant that his insults only got more clever and accurate every time the boys locked horns, and he had discovered that innuendo was one of the best ways to get under Sasuke's skin.
Probably the best part was that she was relatively certain Sai had decided to give the oft-discussed Icha Icha a try. Every once in a while, he'd make a comment or almost-reference that made her suspicions flare up. That made Sasuke the odd man out, actually. He still thought they were foul perversions and seemed to be doing his best to pretend not to notice any references.
As with any escort mission, the days quickly fell into a dull monotony. Kakashi pulled out his books and read while they walked, but no one else had anything for entertainment. The small family occasionally made token attempts to draw their escorts into conversation, but it was stilted and uncomfortable. By the third night, Kakashi let Sasuke run the perimeter alone, and had a chance to see the depressingly fumbled way their clients managed to unpack and pack their belongings. He and Sai exchanged a meaningful glance behind their backs. Aiko had to bite her lip to repress her suspicions as to what they were communicating. There would be no point in saying anything aloud—her comrades knew what she was thinking.
Like the past nights, she took a spot far from the banked fire, letting Mitsuo curl up into her side for the comfort of a half-hearted puppy pile. The shared body heat was nice—she seemed to run pretty cold, and was generally pretty uncomfortable at nights. Even still, she had to tuck her fingers under her shirt onto her belly to keep them from turning into icicles while she slept. Sasuke had given her a vaguely repulsed expression the first day, but by now seemed resigned to her apparently weird decision to share bedspace with a ninken.
She didn't understand why he cared in the first place. It wasn't like Mitsuo was dirtier than the rest of them or anything, and his doggy scent wasn't offensive at all.
'Maybe Pakkun was right', she mused. 'Sasuke's a cat'. (That was actually closer to what he'd been implying that first day. Pakkun and Mitsuo weren't offended that Sasuke had merely been in contact with a cat. Ninken were far too intelligent to hold that sort of grudge—regular cats barely pinged on their radar. Ninja cats like the ones historically linked to the Uchiha to the point where their scent lingered in their compound so many years later, on the other hand…) In her mind, she symbolically linked Yamato and Sasuke as the cat people she had to work with despite their persistent silliness.
It was a shame, but not everyone could be so lucky as to score a ninken partner.
Despite the way that there was constant conversation, Aiko learned surprisingly little private information from quietly listening to their clients' discussion. They didn't seem to be very interesting people.
They had been interested, on the other hand, in the antics of their ninja protectors. After his disastrous attempt to miff Sai by making him do the petty work, Sasuke didn't dare hand Sai food at night. (That might have been for the best, because his roasted rabbit had been a bit dry and bland). Instead, he sullenly ignored the other boy. She was almost convinced that Sai missed the banter by the way he kept glancing at the Uchiha.
Feeling a bit bad for him—she was never certain if Sai genuinely felt left out or if he was antisocial—she sat down by him on the fifth night on a large rock while Sasuke grumbled and did some sort of cooking magic. (The boy had a kami-given talent.) He looked at her curiously. It only took him a second to drastically change the atmosphere.
"Are we going to have that conversation about a man and a woman now?" he inquired innocently. "Sasuke never answered my question."
Movement around the camp stopped.
'Sai is either a fantastic troll, or just the most clueless human being there has ever been.'
"Perhaps later," Kakashi idly interjected from his sudden position on Sai's other side. Aiko pressed her eyes shut to avoid giving him a scathing look. That kind of deflection would never work, regardless of the sincerity behind the first question. Sai wasn't stupid, and he wouldn't appreciate being pushed aside.
Surely enough…
Sai glanced at Kakashi, then Aiko, and then turned to smile at Kakashi. "Is this a threesome?" he asked innocently. "I believe that Icha Icha Tactics contains a scene that begins much like this one. It seems to be an acceptable proposition." Then he frowned contemplatively, examining Kakashi closely. "Although I would like to know one thing before we begin. Am I the banana, or the donut?"
Kakashi slid off the rock as if scalded. "All yours, Aiko," he muttered, unconsciously tugging at that mop masquerading as hair on his head and hustling over to help Sasuke with smoking rations for the next day.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
"No, it's not like Tactics," she answered calmly. "Although I think that's one of the strongest books in the series. What did you think of the depiction of the Daimyo in that one? It's very controversial, you know, though Jiraiya-san technically denied that it was intentional satire."
'There, easily deflected. He likes being asked what he thinks about non-personal things.'
There seemed to be no luck in the world for them in other matters, however. They were only taking the family a bit past Konoha's border with Tea. At civilian speed, they had already been walking for a full week, and there were only a few days left on their mission.
Sasuke was getting decidedly twitch at the possibility of another inexplicably easy mission. It almost seemed unlikely that they would run into no problems at all on such an extended trip. Where were the bandits? Wild animals? Potholes? At this point, she would accept just about any tribulation. It only had to be classified as a combat mission for Tsunade to be able to bend the rules and grant Sasuke a promotion. Sure, she might have to obscure the direct circumstances, but that would probably only serve to make Sasuke seem more impressive with such a mysterious circumstance around his promotion.
Like divine intervention, that was when she sensed four humans with advanced chakra systems coming their way, about a mile off. Granted, they were only moving at low to mid-level Chuunin speeds, (meaning they had a couple minutes) but when combined with the other oddities about this mission…
She'd take it.
"Shishou, orders?"
He looked at her disinterestedly, ignoring the baffled expressions from their clients. Sasuke and Sai looked sharply between the two. Silly non-sensors that they were, they probably didn't know about their soon-to-be visitors yet.
"I think we'll stay the course," he mused idly, spinning a kunai on an index finger using the ringed end. "Steady ahead and all that."
She rolled her eyes. "Is the most recent Icha Icha about pirates?"
(Aiko knew damn well that it was. She had a half-read copy hidden under her mattress at home.)
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Kakashi virtuously lied, glancing at the scandalized man steering his staring daughter away from him. Hana couldn't seem to keep her eyes off of him. "Look, we should just be quiet and pay attention to our surroundings."
"That ship has sailed," Sai cheerily piped in, looking unduly pleased at being able to contribute to conversation.
'Not the worst play on words,' Aiko noted. Really, when grading on a curve of "Sai", it was pretty good.
She took a moment to imagine the group turning to Sasuke for his contribution. In her mind's eye, he turned around with that dead-pan bitch face he wore so well.
"Avast."
And then he turned back around, duty done.
Sadly, it was not to be. Apparently Sasuke didn't like pirate jokes, because Sai's appeared to be the last straw. He whipped around and inadvertently activated his bloodline just in time to catch a sudden movement from behind the group. "Look out!" He spun on his heels, already in an aggressive posture.
Kakashi, for whom the warning was entirely unnecessary, easily twisted Hana's arm behind her back (It was a fake name, if these people were anything less than absolutely incompetent). "I've been wondering for days when you would give up on that idiotic cover of yours," he drawled. "I suppose that's the other half of your ambush coming up?" Dismissively, he gave the girl a hard shove and stepped backwards to avoid the blow that the woman posing as her mother attempted to land on him with (of all the damned things) some sort of weaponized parasol. Aiko had to at least give them credit for disguising their weaponry well.
Not all of her companions appeared interested in giving them any slack.
She blinked, and then Sai was astride a gigantic ink tiger, peering down impassively at their fake clients. "You are highly unskilled," Sai informed them. Aiko was mildly surprised to note he was holding a brush between two long fingers. That had definitely not been there a moment ago. Then again, neither had the tiger. "We knew of your deception by the second day."
"Yes, we all knew," Sasuke agreed unconvincingly in an undertone.
'I had no idea.' He felt a little bit of sweat well up. 'I was just about desperate enough for a fight to push this mission to 'combat' status to bludgeon a raccoon to death and claim it was rabid. Better yet, claim Sai was bit by the rabid raccoon and get two birds with one stone. Of course I would have had to put him down. It'd be a terrible shame, but I'm sure Tsunade would understand.'
It was a nice daydream.
To be fair, he'd been stationed on point and hadn't had the chance the others had to actually keep an eye on their clients while they were walking during the day. It wasn't entirely Sasuke's fault that he didn't tally all the oddities and hypothesize that they weren't really dealing with honest civilians.
Aiko huffed, almost absentmindedly blocking four senbon from the kunoichi posing as the couple's daughter."You're a bad liar," she whispered after making sure that their teammates were out of earshot/ preoccupied by fighting. Sasuke flushed. She jerked her head at the young kunoichi who seemed irked by being dismissed so obviously. "Why don't you take that one, Sasuke?"
He managed to regain enough of his composure to give a cocky little smirk and nod. "This'll be easy," he roared, charging the enemy kunoichi as he pulled an oversized shuriken off his back.
Something twitched in her temple. 'I'm not sure why I thought working with Tsunade would calm his temper and dramatic tendencies,' she realized sheepishly. That had been a mistake. But it didn't matter much. Even if he was a bit ostentatious in battle, he was certainly effective.
Despite the way that the inaction felt completely unnatural, she restrained herself and stood back to let their lone genin fight alone. Sasuke was significantly faster than his opponent and easily ducked her next projectiles. She seemed to be a mid-distance combat specialist, which was poor luck against such a fast taijutsu artist like Sasuke. The fight was practically over the second she conceded that she couldn't keep enough distance from Sasuke and stood her ground to swipe at him with a blade hidden under her sleeve. He easily stopped it with his shuriken, using the curved edges to force her armed hand outward. It only took him two hits that seemed to shatter something where they hit—in her shoulder and a rib—to get her to her knees and gasping.
Aiko tilted her head to the side to watch the way he trussed her up in the next six seconds, vaguely impressed. 'Is it disturbing or kind of hot that he's that good at bondage?' Sasuke certainly didn't look as inexperienced as she knew him to be when he easily whipped all-purpose wire around "Hana's" ankles and wrists, topping it off by stuffing a bit of bandage in her mouth to stop her from shouting out to her comrades.
"Finally," Sai muttered, knocking the 'father' out with a blow to the head. Kakashi grunted in assent and seemed to set a genjutsu on the 'mother' that sent her to the ground in a fetal position, quietly weeping. Aiko just rolled her eyes at the boys' dramatics. It really wasn't that big of a deal, and they could have taken care of their opponents without waiting on Sasuke.
That was when the other half of the hilariously undergunned ambush squad (that had probably expected either three Chuunin or one Jounin and three genin) appeared, about a minute after the youngest kunoichi now whimpering through a gag had jumped the gun and made an attempt to take out Kakashi.
They'd probably become very nervous about their mission when they realized they had somehow scored Sharingan no Kakashi on what should have been a routine mission staffed by Chuunin. The girl might have even been right in thinking that she had a slightly better chance getting him from behind while he was preoccupied with obvious hostiles instead of joining in an attempt to overwhelm him with numbers. He was internationally famous precisely because that kind of thing didn't work well on him, after all. Unfortunately for Hana, getting the drop on Kakashi was so spectacularly unlikely that her best option would probably have been to cancel the mission if at all possible. Doubtlessly they would have done so if there'd been any way to contact their comrades.
"Is that who I think it is?" a bulky man wearing what appeared to be a lightning headband asked uncertainly. He was staring straight at Kakashi and looking a bit nauseous.
"Oh, shit," someone said. Two out of the four back-ups for their 'clients' turned directly around and bolted.
They didn't get very far.
"We're not going to kill them," Sasuke repeated flatly, grumpily doing his part to drag their cargo technically over the border.
("That was our mission, after all," Kakashi had cheerily pointed out despite the fact that it seemed apparent their mission objectives had changed. Perhaps he was just mocking their captives?)
For once, it seemed like Sasuke and Sai were on the same wavelength. To be frank, Aiko didn't know what was going on either, but she did assume that Kakashi knew what he was doing. It wouldn't hurt to wait around and find out what he thought they should do.
The man in question dropped Mei on their pile of enemy shinobi with a thump (and a sad "Oof!") and idly poked at one of their captives with a sandaled foot, mussing up his hair and leaving a shoeprint on his cheek. "Well, we get one of these every once in a while," he explained cheerily. "Some village funds a fake mission fishing for a low-level team in hopes of getting a chance to weaken our forces and make off with a bloodline user. We have more clans than any other village, after all." He shrugged. "But our friends here appear to be from Lightning, who we aren't at war with. I know it's idiotic, but Lightning in particular has a history of demanding reparations from Konoha after their poorly-planned attempts at bloodline theft inevitably fail to fool anyone but the thickest Academy students."
Weak killing intent wafted off of someone in the pile of bound and humiliated shinobi.
Aiko clenched her jaw tightly to keep her amusement hidden. He was intentionally provoking them, of course, but he wasn't lying. He was probably referring to the attempted kidnapping of Hyuuga Hinata that had gotten Neji's father killed in the not-so-distant past. At any minute now…
"That makes no sense," Sai observed with textbook predictability, not seeming at all strained by the shinobi draped over each thin shoulder. "Is Lightning often this incompetent?"
Hana visibly cringed.
Yepp. Aiko had been waiting for the peanut gallery to speak up. Kakashi had a knack for playing the boys like a couple of instruments… but probably drums or something, because she just couldn't see him solemnly picking at a shamisen or something like that. Although he would be great if he tried.
Sasuke had picked up the conversational thread as well. "Historically speaking, yes," he snarked.
She turned her face down to Mitsuo (happily licking at an irritated man's face) so Sasuke didn't see her eyes roll. Big talk, from a guy who hadn't noticed the undercover Chuunin in their midst.
Granted, it wasn't that he was stupid, and he had still easily wiped the floor with his opponents which pretty well proved that he was a high Chuunin-level fighter. He just had little practical experience with real civilians that would have clued him in to the oddities in their friends' charade. There had been hints: like the textbook time it took them to begin to display tiredness every day, or the too-inefficient ways that they went about setting up camp at night without ever improving. Come on, civilians were untrained, not stupid.
Kakashi shrugged, walking away without a care. "If we kill them, Konoha will have to deal with repercussions. It's not like it matters. Konoha ninja are far more skilled than these…"
His pause was uncharacteristic. It probably meant he wanted them to jump in. She was happy to oblige.
"inept hacks?" Aiko piped in at the same time that Sai offered, "weaklings?" and Sasuke monotoned, "uncouth plebians?"
Kakashi tilted his head contemplatively. "I was going to say Lightning shinobi, but those terms all equate to about the same thing."
If she hadn't turned around expectantly for the reaction, she might not have seen the pile-up of bound and disarmed Lightning shinobi wilt even further, as if someone on the bottom had given up out of embarrassment.
It was a particularly humiliating situation to be in. Their mission had failed, and they would have to return home unsuccessful, telling their superiors that they had been bested by a single team that hadn't even thought them worth killing. She actually felt a little bad for them—it hadn't been their fault they'd been assigned such a mission. How were they ever going to explain this away without losing all their dignity? She didn't know how much self-respect she'd be able to muster if she'd been stripped to her underwear to ensure she wasn't hiding any more weaponry and then left in a pile on the road, waiting to be found by helpful travelers.
Oh well. That was their problem, not hers, as long as they didn't try to get back into Fire Country.
"It was Sharingan no Kakashi," Ichigo swore, putting a hand over his heart.
"But not just him!" Kenpachi chimed in. "He had a whole ANBU squad disguised as a Chuunin team with him. Our cover must have been broken before we ever got into Konoha."
"Yeah," Mei added sincerely. "You should have seen them! They had an oni with them, one with hair like fire!" She made a face. "A badly dressed oni at that," she muttered in an aside to a blue-haired man who snickered with her.
"Don't forget the man with the massive shuriken," someone added from the back of the group. "Seven feet tall, he was, and blood in his eyes."
"And the last…" Ichigo shuddered. "Half naked boy, pale as paper, and crazy to boot. Kept trying to start fights with his own companions."
"We barely escaped with our lives," Hana added solemnly, staring deep into her hands and looking genuinely disturbed. "They were after us like Inuzuka hounds. If we'd been just a little bit slower…" she dragged a finger meaningfully across her throat.
"Jeeze," the border guard breathed, looking disturbed. "Just… Here, you'd better go in straight away."
"Hard mission?" His partner asked when he returned just in time to see a large group of shinobi in peasant plainclothes stagger into the village.
A bit smug at having gotten the juicy gossip, he nodded vigorously. "I'll say! They just got back from fighting Sharingan no Kakashi and an entire Konoha ANBU squad! One of them had a demon mask and red hair to match!"
The detail was compelling, after all. Konoha always seemed to use animal symbols for their ANBU. What kind of monsters had that team run into?
"Ha!" his coworker scoffed, toasting the weary travelers' backs with his water bottle. "Course they did. What a few ANBU compared to real shinobi? They're good enough for Konoha work, of course, but up here, ninja just come tougher."