Gai was the ANBU physical conditioning leader.
'No,' Aiko internally corrected, trying not to breathe too hard. She was winded, but the panting hurt her ribs. Her first assessment didn't quite sum up the situation.
GAI. WAS. THE. ANBU PHYSICAL CONDITIONING LEADER. Gai.
It was the sort of thing that had to be expressed in all capitals, even in her head. The whole experience was a miserable, humiliating cesspit. She was the only person beginning the introductory physical conditioning, although there were two men who were several weeks ahead of her in the program. That meant that they shared workouts, and that they had had a chance to adjust to the hellish regimen. Consequently, they were not interested in bonding over the muscle pain and semi-frequently cracked bones that high intensity training with Maito Gai involved.
At least ANBU had damn good medics on call—it was pretty much expected that trainees would need medical attention after every workout, so someone was always there to briskly fix them up. Their practices went so long that Aiko thought Gai almost had to be using a solid clone: there was no way Lee wouldn't question his absence for six hours at a time every morning from 6:30 am until half past noon.
The first time he had broken her radius bone after a sloppy block barely executed in time to save her poor aching ribs, she had dismissed the theory that she was sparring with a clone. No. This had to be the real Gai. The sheer physical power that he used all spar, every spar, would have dispelled even the hardiest of clone techniques.
'Although I suppose that for all I know he's invented a diamond clone,' she snarked internally, carefully rotating her newly healed ankle when directed. She didn't speak: her mouth still tasted of bile when she'd thrown up during the workout, and the medic didn't deserve a face-full of dinosaur breath.
The idea of a diamond clone was ridiculous, of course. But there wasn't much else that could withstand that much abuse. He really was a monster—a cheery monster, but a monster nonetheless. She was never going to even allow herself to feel amused about his posturing and self-given titles. If he wanted to declare himself the queen of Sheba, she would just fucking smile and nod.
If he had wanted to be her eternal rival, she would have defected. For the first time, she thought that Kakashi was fucking nuts for having anything to do with Maito Gai. She knew Kakashi's skill set inside and out—he wasn't as physically strong as Gai, and even his prodigious speed wasn't enough to make up the difference.
Of course, the assessment may not have been fair, because she knew damn well that Kakashi was a ninjutsu specialist. Just because he couldn't defeat Gai with straight taijutsu didn't mean that he wasn't still the stronger combatant on the whole. If they'd had a no-holds barred, with-
The medic released his grip on her with a jolt, tugging her shirt back down to cover the newly healed contusion. It brought her sufficiently back to the real world to wonder, 'Why am I contemplating who would win in a Mortal Kombat match-up? It's not like I can pit them against each other.'
She was almost glad that Gai didn't know who he was training… Would this be worse if he knew he was helping the girl who had ditched his student, or would he be more lenient because she was his rival's student?
Aiko just didn't want to find out. Leniency in her training could kill her later on, but it was hard to wish for a stricter regimen.
She both loved and hated the anonymity in processing. Everyone but ANBU Turtle wore blank masks. As far as she knew, she was the only one with a wig, but there was no way to know for sure. Gai wasn't wearing one (unless he always wore one, she supposed). Tsunade had really pulled through on the wig. On some level Aiko had thought that was a joke, but she was now the owner of a 100% human hair sky-blue wig. It was relatively short—it barely pulled back into a messy ponytail at her nape that did give it an air of authenticity it would have lacked if it were perfect. Originally she had thought that a totally human hair wig was a ridiculous investment. It had to have been very expensive, and it wasn't like anyone would be complimenting her on her hair.
The purpose behind that detail was now vividly clear. By the time she was given four minutes for the first water break of the day, she was soaked with sweat. It was utterly repulsive. Aiko had barely enough time for the salt to dry on her skin before it was time to limp back to work. If the wig hadn't been real hair, she couldn't have properly washed it. It was so well-made that she actually was able to shower with it on in an ANBU locker room attached to the training facility. That was a blessing, because the idea of having to drag herself home before she could clean up was almost enough to make her want to cry. She had stumbled through the first two days with difficulty—on the third, she had actually passed out on the shower floor and woke up an hour later, shivering and blue because the water had turned cold. No one had noticed or cared enough to do anything about it. That, more than anything else, told her that the patterns she was seeing in training weren't in her imagination.
ANBU processing was designed to mold a specific kind of soldier. She could easily recognize the influence of various psychological truths: the vicious brutality was meant to inure recruits to physical discomfort. The mindless repetition was preparation for nudging minds to follow orders at all costs. The facelessness of her fellow recruits was meant to isolate her, so that recruits didn't form possibly disruptive friendships that could endanger missions or manage to spread malcontent within the ranks. It was designed to force the recruit to internalize everything. (And now that she saw it with her own eyes, it made so much more sense that Danzo could have hidden another organization in here).
She knew that, and it was still all but impossible not to see the results it had on her. Being aware of the manipulation didn't make it all go away, even if she refused to accept it blindly.
Dragging herself home after training ceased to be an issue the second week, when she was required to temporarily move into the barracks. Aiko had the goddamn lonely realization that she didn't have to tell anyone. Karin had gotten assigned to a temp team for the Chuunin exams coming up very soon and was doing last minute team training so they could push through, and Hinata was nowhere to be found. Probably she was on her own mission.
Not having to sneak home had its charm. The logistics of not being seen as Aiko in or near the training facility but also not being seen as an ANBU trainee in public made her head hurt, after all. But it quickly became clear that the second stage of training had been in order to control their daily conditions and not a kindness. The second week was when the sleep deprivation started.
She wasn't entirely sure that what they had her doing to force her to stay awake was important. It might have been. Alone in a room with a single lightbulb, she plowed through what must have been a literal pile of paperwork as quickly as she could in order to get a chance to go to bed soon. There was no way to know how much work she had done—the blank sheets were passed through a metal tray under a one-way mirror, one at a time after she pushed over what she had just done. There literally seemed to be no end, and there was no way to judge the passage of time except by how often a shrill alarm was blasted to force her awake if she'd been beginning to nod off or slow down. Her initial instructions had been that how much 'free time' (sleep isn't free time, she'd thought indignantly, back when she could care about things like that) she had was dependent on how efficiently she performed the small tasks they had for her.
It was ham-handed mental manipulation, she had scoffed when it began. When it began to grow wearisome, her pace had slipped for a while, but desperation to just get it over with and get out of that goddamn tiny room had taken over her body and she frantically sped through the work. That meant she made mistakes, signaled by that horrible shrill alarm and the torturous necessity of waiting for the person on the other side of the glass to stop fucking with her and pass the paper back so she could fix it and move on.
Eventually, she couldn't ignore the sinking feeling that she was not going to have an opportunity to sleep at all.
She was right. The next thing she knew was that the door had opened, releasing what looked like but couldn't be morning light into her prison cell. Then it was blocked by the disapproving form of a masked man. "That was pathetic. I hope that your next performance is more satisfactory. You have half an hour for bathroom and rations before you report to conditioning."
'You're full of shit,' she thought angrily, pushing her way out of the room. (She knew better than to talk back.) 'I didn't do anything wrong. The intention was to keep me here all night from the start.'
Knowing that factually didn't stop her from actually crying something like seven hours later when she was collected from the mess hall and brought straight back to that same box of a room after Gai had finished brutalizing her for the day. The constant pain (the medics didn't heal muscle soreness because that would undo the work building muscles) was somehow ever worse when she just. couldn't. stop. shaking. Taijutsu had been even worse than usual—she was exhausted and literally could not stop wavering and misjudging blows. Gai mercilessly harangued her for falling below her previous low marks while her two peers looked on with what seemed to be amusement behind their white masks. Aiko hated them. She hated them.
At this point, her body seemed to have given up on nodding off regardless of consequences, leaving her in a hazy, wide form of consciousness where she knew she wasn't thinking like she usually would but she couldn't dig deeper into anything without losing her train of thought. It was terrifying for someone who spent most of their time thinking. She'd do anything to make it stop.
The first document of the night was ruined by saltwater falling on it, and that horrible alarm went off again almost immediately. Somehow, she managed to collect herself in the long stillness while that man who had scolded her that morning got a replacement. She had to hold together. Having an emotional reaction to the stress was only making things harder on herself.
Despite being more exhausted than she had ever been before in her life, Aiko managed to slip into a focused state. It didn't require thinking—it was just scanning and motion. She just had to do what she was told and they would stop jolting her with that sound. She did task after task, and she did them perfectly. Eventually, her mind settled into a deep meditative calm, and she felt the stress fade. The lightbulb still swung above her head, but the shifting shadows didn't bother her as much as they had before. It was just an inconvenience. Just an obstacle. They had to be planning on letting her rest at some point. When she'd finished what they wanted, they would let her go.
If they didn't, she would die here. Or worse, live like this every day.
'Or use the Hiraishin to get out,' her mind whispered, naturally rebelling against the idea of letting these people reduce her to their mercy. No. She wasn't. She could leave at any time, if she was over her head. They had no idea she had a nearly effortless escape route. No matter what they did to her, she could always leave if it was too much. Aiko was miserable, but she wasn't broken. She was in ANBU training because she wanted to be, and no other reason. It certainly wasn't to be someone else's tool. She had her own agenda, even if it was the frighteningly vague 'Don't die and don't let Naruto die'.
It wasn't like she gave a shit about Konoha one way or the other. It was just a place to live, not a home like it was for Naruto. Aiko wasn't stupid enough to claim she hadn't been affected at all by the propaganda and conditioning, but she knew she hadn't come to the conclusions Konoha would have wanted.
Konoha worked hard to inspire collectivism and patriotism—a genuine belief that they were somehow intrinsically different and superior to all other places. They were the kindest, they were the strongest, they had the best dango. It was widespread inundation meant to resonate with all types of people. By inverse, all other places were either enemies, pitiable, or allies to be kept at a distance. There were exceptions, of course, but on the whole Konoha was looking out for number one.
Aiko took a decidedly Marxist perspective on it. Konoha wasn't really a nation belonging to the people. Konoha was a highly centralized military power run by a few elites who were a class as removed from the people they ruled as Konoha supposedly was from Rock. It was those people, like Danzo, who intentionally manipulated and sacrificed other human beings for power and privilege that she despised. Most of her comrades were just chumps. Their mealy-mouthed repetition of the party line was due to the fact that they didn't really know better.
Really, coming to other conclusions would provide severe cognitive dissonance. No one wanted to think that they might die so a few old people might get more powerful. No, Konoha shinobi died for a cause.
Her own sarcasm almost gave her a headache in her weary state.
She did genuinely like Tsunade. Their Hokage seemed to want to serve her people, not gain power or privilege. For her, Aiko would be willing to keep an eye out for Root subversion.
But her first loyalty wasn't to the office of Hokage. It was still with the one person she could honestly consider family (because no matter what anyone said, it gave her severe cognitive dissonance to think of herself as ever having been a child and therefore having parents. She had been an adult consciousness for as long as she'd lived in this world: adults couldn't have parents if they hadn't had a childhood). But Naruto could be family without straining her sense of self. She'd raised Naruto—he felt more like a son than a brother sometimes, but she was willing to blur the lines between those roles to obfuscate her own oddities. If he'd wanted to leave, she would have been long gone. Maybe they would never have had to get involved in all of this ninja stupidity.
She couldn't help but give a sad smile at that. 'No chance of that, Naruto was brainwashed by the glamour of being a ninja since he was like, six.'
To comfort herself, she reached out and lightly strummed the connection she felt to one of her seals. Aiko had no idea which one it was—either Kakashi or Yamato had gone north—but she didn't much care either. If things got bad enough that she wanted to leave, she would be willing to deal with even the embarrassment of ending up in Yamato's lap.
'Whoever designed this really isn't as thorough as they think they are,' she noted, doing her best to contain the muscle spasm that made her calligraphy ugly. At least, not with the mental conditioning and testing. The physical requirements were certainly rigorous enough. But if they'd really done an accurate mental profile, she would have been rejected for service when it became clear that she wasn't particularly loyal to Konoha. Her loyalty was to a couple of people. If they died or left...
Well. In any case, she'd lied all over her entrance paperwork and association tests, but there was always a way to tell. No lie was perfect, and all falsehoods had patterns unless you knew the test.
"You've earned yourself a break."
Her fingers tightened around her ink brush in surprise, but she didn't argue. She carefully laid it down on her workspace, neatly and horizontally. These people wanted preciseness and outward perfection. She could give it to them, since they were so insistent on seeing meaning in the mundane.
Morino Ibiki checked his watch, knowing that no one would judge him or ever care if he woke recruit 279 up from her rest period early so he could just go home already. "Sixteen minutes…" He settled back down to wait. 'May as well give her as much time as possible'. She wasn't looking too well. Of course, that was largely his fault.
"Hell, I hate this part of the job," he grumbled to himself. He put up with it, though. It would be pretty shitty of him not to be able to see recruits through the gauntlet he had designed for them personally. ANBU conditioning wasn't meant to be wasteful. It was his job to tailor the programming that each soldier would need to get them sufficiently obedient and emotionally distant from their job.
He fuckin' hated it, if he were to be honest. Sometimes it felt like Konoha wasn't any better than, say, Mist. Granted, this sort of conditioning would be ham-handedly done to one standard regardless of the individual being processed, but that only made it less precise and not less amoral. Mist just got a lot more nutjobs because they put all of their shinobi through conditioning like this periodically without any apparent regard for just how delicate the human mind was. At least Konoha only did this for their black ops. It wasn't pretty, but it was necessary in order to build soldiers who could compete with the nastiest everyone else had to offer.
Now that the first 37 hours of intentional sleep deprivation was over, the recruit had been afforded three hours to crash. They didn't want to kill her, after all, which was a definite possibility with all the stress that the physical conditioning put on raw recruits.
It was hard to do this to someone who looked an awful lot like a kid in the oversized black uniform that disguised the fact that the girl was a petite teen. He'd been surprised to find out she was going to turn fifteen during the course of her training—that was shitty luck, and she sure didn't look that old with her face and body covered.
Even harder to swallow was the bitter medicine of knowing that she'd had the shit luck to test into one of the highest intelligence categories and possessed more than a healthy amount of independent thought for an ideal shinobi. If she'd been more pliable or less intelligent, she probably would have slipped by with 30 hours sleep deprivation so that they could do their best to mold her psyche in the most vulnerable state. As it was, when she woke up thinking it was time for her workout, she would instead be fed and then taken back to the working room for another 4 ½ hours before it was the six am wakeup call.
Regardless of how unpleasant what they were doing was, it was necessary. Elite ANBU, those who got the most stressful and fucked-up missions possible, couldn't be too resistant to authority. That never ended well, and Ibiki hated having to put his own soldiers down if they got rabid. He quietly hoped that the kid sleeping in a fetal position on her camp bed had used that brain of hers to downplay any rebellious personality tendencies in her processing files. It was always a shame to see a personality totally quashed during this process, even if that was supposedly the goal.
She was over the worst of it, now. The next time he checked his watch it was one minute past her free time, so he wordlessly signaled an assistant to drag her out of bed and strode away from his monitors. If she had been going to have a breakdown, it would have been in the last session. Now that she had displayed unquestioning obedience, she would gradually be rewarded with more and more sleep and less critiques. In a few days, she'd reach the next phase of training—where they would build her up around her new identity. Her profile had displayed a natural proclivity towards utilizing compartmentalization, so separating her ANBU identity from her outside identity should be piteously easy. He really did mean that—it was both strange and sad for such a young teenager to have the mindset of a traumatized adult. But it worked well for their purposes.
Inadvertently, he glanced back down at the statistics he'd been working with while compiling the new ANBU's profile. It wasn't the first time he'd seen it, but he still had to shake his head in disbelief.
'I bet that if the Hokage had known what exactly the mental conditioning entailed, she would not have honestly handed over the corrected intelligence data.' Ibiki would certainly never have expected to see that number attached to a teenager's file. 4.5? That was just ridiculous. He wouldn't have known the damn difference. But Tsunade had never been ANBU, and she had never asked in too much detail about his methodology for determining how to tailor this program. The results spoke for themselves: since he had taken over, their ANBU had been much more healthy, mentally stable, and effective than in past.
It wasn't like she'd been honest about the kid's stats anyways. Tsunade had pretty obviously classified something above his pay grade, because the total stats number he had definitely did not reflect the 'good-but-not-shockingly-good' graph he'd been given. The preliminary graph showed 22.5 on the skill count-up, but Tsunade had marked the total as 26 in another area. 3.5 points were just missing.
It was a hell of a jump, especially since it almost had to be between just a couple stat categories. There would have been no reason to hide a gradual, all-around increase in abilities. Seeing as she'd trained with Sharingan no Kakashi and had a measly '2' for her ninjutsu score, he would bet his right ass cheek that some of the discrepancy came from a seriously destructive ninjutsu.
'Actually,' he mused, 'Didn't I hear something about Rock claiming we had a chakra chains user? Could be hysteria, or it could have been her. It'd make sense for Tsunade to keep that as quiet as possible, and it would be a decent bump in Ninjutsu…'
Oh well. It wasn't like he was going to find out anytime soon. It was a weird decision on Tsunade's part, but part of keeping his job was not asking stupid questions. He'd just have to trust her assessment of Uzumaki's combat readiness level without knowing what exact skills contributed. Of course, with her lowest skills being taijutsu, strength, and genjutsu, it had made most sense to push her off onto Gai for a high-intensity training session.
With the expedient of having their newest recruit around full-time and getting what was essentially private tutoring from the best taijutsu artist Konoha knew of, Ibiki would be damn shocked if Gai didn't manage to shoot both her strength and taijutsu up by half a stat point.
Such a thing was very hard on the body, but the recruit was young enough that she would probably bounce back. Gai knew how to give just as much as a student could handle.
ANBU could push their recruits in ways that would be considered shocking on the outside. Damaging a student severely during every training session was more than a bit discouraged on the outside: chakra healing wasn't perfect. What the body could do on its own over time was best in many cases. But for ANBU, the immediate benefits outweighed the potential ramifications and increased burn-out rate. Shinobi like Hatake who were capable of staying in ANBU for ten years were stupidly rare. It was mostly a short 3-5 years or irregular assignment instead of a career.
The taijutsu assessment he'd received had looked to be a little outdated anyways—she'd clearly been working on it since that evaluation. It was standard to give a full ability assessment after they were done. It wouldn't matter much to Ibiki (who would never get to see the full compiled records after she left his care), but Tsunade would know exactly what her new resource was.
Regardless of what that test showed, Uzumaki's genjutsu abilities were definitely unacceptable for ANBU. They'd have to work on that as well.
While he closed up his office for the night, Ibiki made a note to check and see what identity the Hokage had chosen for the Uzumaki girl. She'd bemoaned that it was unfortunate Hound was unavailable, but her sick sense of humor would no doubt pull through with something painfully apt. Then he pulled on his coat and headed for the door.
It was the end of his shift and he had to get to his own bed soon, after all.
After a while, a body just stopped noticing the buzz of low-level pain.
Factually, Aiko knew that she had to have been in training for considerably less than 3.5 weeks. That was the projected ending time they had given her to pass around as the length of her supposed mission, after all.
ANBU wouldn't risk people looking into what had happened to her by making her late. Late returns from missions were a nervous affair—every so often, she spotted a team or girlfriend or just a concerned comrade hanging around the notice board to see if a late arrival had been updated. It was a rather nice service. It didn't share anything crucial, of course, but if there was any news at all, people wouldn't be left to wonder if their loved one was dead in a ditch somewhere.
'But it feels like I've been here for an eternity…'
At least they were done jerking her around, making her sleep and eating schedules erratic to ensure that she knew how to take orders like a good dog.
She didn't even blink at physical training anymore. –Not that she was somehow up to snuff, of course. No, it was more that the variations on Konoha standard that she had beat into her flesh felt as natural as her old katas did. So did broken bones and the massive, melon sized bruises scored into her flesh every day. There was no point in getting a little upset about a bit of pain. Before this experience, she would not have been capable of standing so stoically to wait her turn for the medic, fingers laced lightly behind her back. At least, not with the throbbing on her left shoulder from where Gai had come down with a high kick that sent her to the floor. It wasn't like Kakashi had trained her with kid gloves, but he had never been that brutal either.
"Recruit 279. Come with me." Aiko flicked her eyes over to look at the person she'd thought to be just an observer for the day. It wouldn't be the first time that someone had silently sat by to watch training.
Just like everyone else in this place, they wore loose black clothing and a mask. This one, however, had a design on it. Not a trainee, then. ANBU Turtle didn't make a comment one way or another, striding out of the room purposefully and leaving her to decide whether or not she should go with this stranger.
She went. Commenting would have been pointless. She wouldn't get an answer. These people had a serious grudge against intellectual curiosity. It wasn't like they were going to quash hers, but it would be easier to let them think they had than to go through more of that sadistic reprogramming.
She followed along a series of hallways she had never seen before. They seemed to be traveling down. The air became frigid, which made the sweat drying against her skin particularly unpleasant.
"Kai."
The polished hallways fled without a whisper, turning into a cement enclave. The person she'd been following was standing at attention, head cocked. "Acceptable."
Aiko wasn't certain, but she thought that might be a woman. Either that, or a young man. They were relatively slight, and the voice was a bit androgynous.
She didn't accept or reject the compliment, just keeping her expression bored under her mask. No one would know, but Aiko found that schooling her features helped her match her posture to what she wanted to convey.
"I was informed that your abilities are very low."
That was a request for clarification.
"I have some talent in dispelling genjutsu. I have never attempted to learn an illusion."
Actually dispelling most genjutsu wasn't difficult. The hard part was knowing when one was affecting you. Being observant helped with that… as did relying on senses other than sight. She was never going to be a ninken, but she'd realized that she no longer smelled floor polish when she had been walking earlier. Most illusions relied on fooling sight.
"So I see." The person in front of her seemed to waver, then melted into a pillar of lilac colored petals that collapsed out in all directions.
Aiko wordlessly turned her head to the left, following the shinobi she could sense but not see. They were good—completely silent, signature obscured to a point that she doubted anyone but Karin could pick out, and moving fast—but they still smelled faintly like the compound upstairs and not like this stuffy, dry chamber.
"You seem aware of a fundamental truth of genjutsu. The senses cannot be fooled… unless the caster possesses senses comparable to their victim."
She froze, back stiff. Eyes wide, Aiko worked to keep her neck as still as possible.
Her new friend had an ANBU short sword held to it, after all… and they must have taken off their mask, because she felt hot breath on her ear, and a hand caressing her left hip, fingers digging in painfully to the clothed skin. She grimaced, muscles taut with tension.
"Don't think you're better than anyone here, rookie," the genjutsu user whispered into her ear, leaning their chest into her back in a bizarre parody of a hug. She was pretty sure it was a man, now. Either that or a woman with a tightly bound chest, because there was nothing soft about the figure pressed against her scapulae.
It was getting a little bit creepy at that point.
'If this freak licks me, I'm going to get out of here so fast they won't believe it.'
Luckily, the blade withdrew, and the body pressed against her back moved away. She didn't turn her head, but the 'scent' she'd been using to track had suddenly disappeared and she appeared to be alone. Aiko had the unnerving realization that she couldn't assume she was alone in headquarters now after this.
"In order to create a perfect illusion, you must be intimately familiar with your subject matter. Genjutsu difficulty goes up in class for two reasons: the layers an illusion possesses, and the number of senses involved."
She was actually paying attention at this point, and not just because the omnipresent voice was unnerving. Her education hadn't gone into much depth with genjutsu. The Academy had taught her how to dispel them, and Kakashi had taught her how to spot them by using them on her. But he couldn't do anything like this. His genjutsu all tapped into what a mind either wanted or most feared to see and let the victim do the work for him.
"I will not concern myself with teaching you genjutsu. That is your concern, and should be undertaken in your personal development time. But I have been tasked to ensure that you can detect genjutsu. How would you go about trying to locate me now, in this specific room? List all possibilities."
"Irregularities," Aiko offered immediately. "Shadows or object placement that does not reflect the original configuration of the room. Scent, hearing, sound, vision, Chaka sensing…" She trailed off.
"And taste." The addition sounded a bit amused. "Your sense of smell is connected to your sense of taste, but very few genjutsu users are thorough enough to account for the possibility that a scent user will have the creativity to try to taste the air. And, of course, the sense of touch cannot be fooled with genjutsu alone, but a genjutsu user can make use of solid clones and henge to take care of those discrepancies, as well as create a tailored illusion that compensates for what the victim physically feels. Attempt to find me again."
She felt monumentally stupid, but she concentrated chakra to her olfactory glands to enhance her sense of smell and flicked her tongue out like a snake, breathing in to pass air over her taste buds.
'God, I hope I don't look like Orochimaru doing this…'
It was the most bizarre ninja skill she'd even been taught, a poor man's trick to substitute for a precisely suited jutsu for the situation. What was worse—it worked. She could 'smell' something, though she didn't know the exact origin. She tried again, breathing in more slowly and walking forward a bit. It was… it was like…
"Kai."
'Well, that is fantastically disturbing.' Aiko shifted uneasily. The first release she had done had been part of a multi-layered illusion.
The underground chamber of cement she'd 'discovered' was actually her own assigned sleeping room. She'd managed to taste the scent of her own laundry soap on the clothes she had worn in on the first day, neatly folded on the dresser at the head of the bed. Aiko was standing directly in front of her bed, and hadn't even noticed her toes digging into the thin rug. That implied there had been a distracting element to the genjutsu—it had been fooling not just her senses but her perception using her expectations. This person… was excellent.
The person reclining on her bed gave her a slow once-over from behind their mask. "That wasn't what you were supposed to do, but it was an acceptable job nonetheless." She registered that there were no creases on her bed indicating the weight of a human being before she realized that there was no one on it at all.
'Not the disembodied voice trick again…'
"I have my own duties to attend to, but I will be your tutor in future. Don't bother looking for me—I'll find you when I have time."
After a few minutes of stillness and silence, Aiko reluctantly sat down, pulse thumping and body in fight-or-flight mode. 'I have no way to tell if I'm observed or not.' She swallowed, hard.
Despite her exhaustion, getting to sleep that night was difficult. It was hard to rest when you didn't feel safe.
Not giving a single fuck about procedure at the moment, Kakashi blew by the gate and left his subordinates to check him in. That's what minions were for. He made a straight path across the village to Hokage tower. At one point an ANBU patrol route spotted him and jerked as if they wanted to intercept him. It was generally considered worrisome to see people sprinting from the village entrance to their center of power, so he didn't blame them for the impulse.
That didn't mean he was about to indulge them and stop for a chat. Most of them knew him by reputation. Hell, he'd participated in training no small number of them. If he wanted to go and get in a fist fight with the Hokage, no one was going to stop him.
Of course, that wasn't his intention. He actually had a time-sensitive report to make, one of the kind that even Kakashi wouldn't dare be late bringing in. It probably wouldn't be addressed for at least a day, but since his normal modus operandi was to wait anywhere from half a day to a week to report, well... His tardiness was a tribute to Obito and mockery of his own adolescent stuffiness, not an indulgence or excuse to endanger his fellow shinobi.
The thought of his fellow shinobi brought up guilty thoughts about his own various students. Naruto would be returning soon, of course. The other two would be delighted in their own ways. Sasuke put up a front, but it was easy to see that Naruto was his best friend. And Aiko was crazy for the kid. Kakashi almost sighed to try to push off the heaviness on his chest at the reminder of a topic he'd been recently circling, but refrained.
ANBU was no place for a teenager. He and Yamato had both been younger than Aiko when they enlisted, but it was too late to do anything about that.
'Of course, it's now too late for Aiko as well.' So there was no point in mulling it over. Still, it kept bothering him.
Really, it had been too late to dissuade her at the instant Tsunade recommended it to her. If there was a specific reason that his Hokage wanted his student, Kakashi had to give her up. He could back-talk and dig in his heels at times, but he could not outright fight the will of the village head. It would be treason. Tsunade wasn't a woman who did things without plan and cause. He had to trust that, and hope he'd eventually know what was going on,
Knowing that he had trained a young woman who was so talented that the highest authority in the country (the Daimyo was a useless idiot) sought out her skills was both a source of pride and sorrow. It was impossible to deny that his student had grown into an adult when she sought him out with such a serious expression. He'd really thought that she'd intended to tell him she was ending the apprenticeship, to be honest. It would have been a sensible decision, one that he'd been putting off for a while. Aiko was not an apprentice level shinobi by any stretch of the imagination. Despite showing absolutely no desire for command, she was qualified to lead her own team by now.
He had tried to tell himself that meant he had done his job. He had originally set out to ensure that his students could take care of themselves and planned to drop them like hot rocks as soon as that was possible. Kakashi had never seen himself toting around baby shinobi. The very idea that someone would trust him with them was ridiculous. Yet it had happened, and he was in the strange position of feeling a bit melancholy at the idea of his long-time subordinate leaving the team forever. Despite not having the sheer hitting power he expected from an equal like Gai, Aiko wasn't dead weight on a team anymore—she felt like a teammate. She was like a member of the pack with a specialized skill: it was okay and logical to steer her away from the most difficult targets in a head-on confrontation to be on the safe side because she could fulfill other roles.
Finding out that she had instead moved to redefine herself as a normal subordinate like Tenzou instead of an equal team head with Genin or Chuunin of her own was… a bit of a relief, frankly. He could do that—he could treat her like Tenzou. If she had thought he was smothering her Aiko would have left entirely, so it wasn't a painful move indicating he had failed yet again. This role would be a much more comfortable set of interactions. She had been straining at the way the apprenticeship fit her for a while, wiggling and pushing for more freedom.
He'd known something like this was coming when she made the decision to give the Kazekage a Hiraishin tag independent of his guidance. There had been a time when she didn't want to so much as choose a route home without his approval.
Her decision hadn't exactly been a wrong one (he saw the sense in it even though he disliked the concept) but it was irrefutable proof that their working relationship needed to be redefined.
That had been his overwhelming sense when she'd confronted him, which had made the casual way she continued to touch him and enter his personal space a bit baffling. Either she was a young kunoichi under his protection or she was an equal. Conceiving of a circumstance in which her behavioral patterns didn't adjust for that change in status was difficult. Perhaps the problem was with his perception and not her behavior. Was sitting immediately next to someone when there was plenty of space normal and acceptable between two coworkers?
Granted, he didn't care much about what convention said, but he had assumed that Aiko's habit of physical affection would fade in time. Perhaps it was just something that made her feel comfortable and safe; like her habit of deferring to him even when she could have come up with the same plan. Or it could be part of how she communicated. Naruto and Sakura had incorporated a lot of touching into their communication, even if it wasn't positive.
Possibly it was just something he had never learned and didn't quite understand. He'd missed out on no small number of lessons on human interaction in his youth.
"I wouldn't go in there if I were you."
Kakashi blinked and turned to look at a very serious Shizune. "Why not?"
She cast a wary glance at the closed office door. "Well… Ah. Tsunade is in a bit of a temper. Sasuke's getting the brunt of it, but it would probably be in your best interest to wait a minute. Naruto thought it would be clever to send an entire cake along with the toad who was delivering their report."
He had a sinking feeling he knew where this was going.
"It ate the entire thing, of course," she said, clearly vexed. "And then proceeded to vomit all over Tsunade-sama's office when transporting here disturbed his stomach. Toads really aren't that bright, are they?"
"Not particularly."
It was the truth. He was torn between amusement and pity. In no way did he consider opening that office and getting drafted to help. Speaking of which…
"Am I correct in assuming Sasuke is cleaning it up?"
Shizune did a rather poor job of hiding her smirk. "Yupp." She leaned over, as if confiding a great secret. "It's rainbow colored. That carpet is never going to be the same, but Tsunade hasn't given up yet. Since Naruto is unavailable, I think she's punishing Sasuke by association."
The 'and you are more responsible for his behavior than Sasuke would be, seeing as how Naruto was your student' didn't need to be said.
"I see."
He sat down on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, painfully aware that it was too short and his knees were almost up to his chest. (It was intended to be an indignity that would keep long lines from accumulating. And to think that Tsunade thought he was passive-aggressive).
That report could wait a few minutes. How long could Tsunade really watch a grumpy teen scrub at what had been white fibers in a previous life before she admitted defeat and sent Jiraiya a bill for a new carpet?