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tozettastone · 10 months ago

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Re: my Naruto OC [x, x]

Here she is, in an unedited version of how she learns to hate Uchiha Itachi

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She had no name. The illusory shape she was currently inhabiting was a man called "Ryouta," who was a missing-nin of middling skill. He was tall enough and symmetrical enough to look sort of attractive if he cleaned up, but average enough to drop off the radar for most people. He was a kenjutsu master, which would pose an issue for her if she was required to actually engage in combat as him... but since her entire repertoire of skills was built up around the central pillar of avoiding combat, she felt that was pretty unlikely.

The real Ryouta was also off living his own life some hundred and ten miles away, deep in Wind Country, where his negotiations with clients formed data points for her research. His image was simply on... temporary loan.

Here and now, this image of Ryouta was following up on her favourite and very long term pet project: the outlier missing-nin, Kakuzu.

She strolled through the market that had popped up on the industrial outskirts of Rain. It was damp—it was always damp—and the place had been set up on a flat, hard-packed area that had gotten absolutely annihilated during the war by what looked like, perhaps, a lava flow? At its edges, aging electrical wires sagged, and hastily patched up buildings loomed, and on the far side the road went straight out to the river and apparently endless rice paddies.

Despite the setting, the little market was cheerful and bright. People called out to Ryouta as she passed through, calling for him to try their deep fried water bugs on sticks, buy their herbs, or marvel at their machine-woven cloth. Two children, under the watchful eye of an older lady selling jars of hot red chillies, were playing with sticks in the mud, stirring the water in their hand-dug hole as if it were a pot of soup.

Rain as a village was... interesting, from Ryouta's perspective. It operated under a system of benign neglect. That the governing body was presided over by an undead missing-nin and his angelic partner was kind of an open secret among the people who'd lived there long enough. And, historically, those two had chosen to address only violent foreign shinobi, two plague outbreaks, a food crisis, and actual invasions. They rarely intervened to regulate or support the population otherwise. Instead, the village had mostly divided itself into small neighbourhoods of ten or twenty families, and those families typically bartered and supported one another.

Such systems, Ryouta knew, only functioned because their communities were small enough that everyone knew everyone else's business: they kept their own informal tallies of what was polite and who owed what assistance to whom. This was also how such small communities managed crime so efficiently... for a value of "crime," that was defined very casually by whether or not most people found something acceptable, and "management," that stood for vigilante justice, of course.

Such societies became more and more alienated from the causes and effects of crime as they grew larger, until you had something like the Grand Court over in Fire Country, where people who barely knew each other committed crimes against one another and were given sanctions that held no relevance to the victims whatsoever. At that point, all crime was basically against the state, not really your neighbours...

It was a fascinating area of study, although it was not her specialty. Her area of study was more elusive, more secretive, and a lot more dangerous.

There was a shinobi walking through this market, and he was the real focus of her attention.

Hidan was an idiot, so she didn't have to try very hard to evade his senses as she tracked him. She just had to be careful she didn't get too close. Occasionally, he stopped to examine something, and then she stopped, too. Simple, right?

Really, her distance was more of a precaution against his personality than it was against his senses. He would never pick her out of a crowd, but he excelled at pointless, aimless violence, so it was possible that he wouldn't need to pick her out of a crowd. Would he act that way in Rain, where Pein and Konan watched over the population with a view to eradicating shinobi threats? Well. Ryouta wouldn't have chanced it... but Hidan rarely shared her risk aversion.

"That's so cool," she said, leaning over some of the ugliest jewellery in the world. Mostly it was insects trapped in amber, fancifully tied up in bright string to form bracelets. "Do you think my girlfriend will like it, Auntie?"

The lady's babble—of course she would, why, any woman would love a juvenile sand scorpion stuck in a fossil!—washed over her. She was paying more attention to Hidan, who'd stopped to buy a bug on a stick.

The shopkeeper gave him a second one for free. From this distance it was hard to say if he knew who Hidan was and was attempting to ward off death with food, or if Hidan was just kind of reaping the rewards of being beautiful in public. Either way, he looked at it, shrugged, and took it too, twirling the stick deftly between his fingers as he moved on. The fried water bug's legs wagged stiffly with its momentum.

"Ah, I think I should check with her before I spend money on it," Ryouta said regretfully. "What if she doesn't like it, and I can't get her something else because I spent all my money?" The stall lady did not, she noticed, hasten to offer a returns policy. "Thanks for your time, Auntie!"

It became harder to follow Hidan innocuously when he passed the edge of the market. There was no longer a crowd in which to immerse herself. Ryouta wasn't sure how they did it exactly, but she knew that she'd be heavily surveilled if she seemed suspicious. She could hide her identity easily, but it was harder to hide a developed chakra system... and someone might show up to chase her off. She'd been chased off once, as Chiriko, and it wasn't lost on her that the real Chiriko (a genin missing-nin from Sand who'd been part of her pay grading study) had died pretty shortly after. She didn't want that.

Luckily, being chased off once gave her plenty information to come back with a work around. She couldn't hide that she was somewhere in Rain—whatever surveillance technique they used was simply too good, or too large, or... she didn't know. But she could cast a broad enough genjutsu to confuse it. For several hours, she could be everywhere in Rain, all at once.

It was still risky, which was why she also paired it with an illusion that layered over her Ryouta mask. She was Ryouta, and over that, she was a relatively wealthy civilian lady she'd copied from the market, and over that, she was wearing a little seal carved into the back of an amulet, a low level genjutsu for hiding skin blemishes.

If someone—Kakuzu, obviously, because it wouldn't be Hidan—managed to sense her genjutsu, she could surrender the amulet, and that distraction would allow her to drop a little illusion over him, a veil so delicate he'd never even see it.

For anyone else, holding onto four separate genjutsu techniques all at once might be a challenge. But Ryouta had been a missing-nin, and, more importantly, a freelance criminologist specialising in missing-nin, for almost thirty years now. She would never attain half her data if she'd been unable to observe and record her subjects. And her subjects hated to be observed.

She'd been the best genjutsu master in Waterfall by the time she was twelve, and she had only improved since leaving that village.

She flicked a senbon at an urn of hot water to cause a little distraction. A child yelped in startled pain as the ceramic broke, and she took the opportunity to lift a cute brooch off a woman's lapel, because why not? And then she became the civilian lady as she passed through a narrow walkway between stalls, just as everyone was distracted by the broken urn.

She emerged from the market a foot shorter and much less threatening, clutching her bag to her side as she went. Her footsteps were quick and her eyes were cast downwards.

Hidan, ahead of her by two hundred paces, did not notice. He was gnawing a deep fried water bug leg, rolling the snath of his giant scythe on one shoulder so the blades twirled dizzily against the black and red cloud design of his Akatsuki cloak, and strolling along as though he hadn't a concern in the world.

A few years ago, she would have thought that he seemed not to notice and that he was playing a long game whose central goal was to drive her paranoid. But time and experience had given her more insight. Hidan really, truly, did not know when he was being followed.

She had, occasionally, seen Kakuzu point out other followers to him—not her, obviously—and usually with an air of faintly murderous exasperation. Hidan never cared. He was... extremely confident in his immortality.

She followed him through the dreary rundown village of Rain, keeping her distance and tracking him mostly by chakra instead of by actually watching him. His eventual stopping point took her, as she expected, directly to Kakuzu. He was an unmistakable character in the grey weather: tall, with powerful shoulders, bare arms shamelessly displaying Waterfall's old prison tattoos, and the most hostile chakra on the planet.

She knew pair would almost certainly end up in a nearby teahouse, because Hidan was a grade-a whiner and he couldn't be stopped by the paltry forces of death.

Ryouta—in her disguise as a civilian whose name she didn't know—gave the missing-nin a wide berth and ducked her head as she walked straight past the pair. If she predicted them well enough, and went into the teahouse before both of them, she would allay most concerns that they might be being followed.

Outside, the pair were having their usual reunion: Kakuzu a murderous little cloud of angry chakra, Hidan a loud, running commentary of his own exploits.

"Oh, here, I got free shrimp," Hidan offered.

"That's not a shrimp," Kakuzu growled.

She couldn't actually see Kakuzu's face as she was moving towards the back of the store, but his tone wasn't very promising.

"They're all just bugs," shrugged Hidan, slouching into his own seat and cramming it into his face instead. "Fried water bug, shrimp. Fried scorpion, shrimp. Fried yabby, shrimp."

Without any indication that this riveting conversation drifting in from outside concerned her, she flagged down the server for a pot of tea and settled inside the teahouse's main room with her notebook and pen, writing down the details of the date and time and location, was well as a little context from her prior observations.

Kakuzu was at least eighty six years old, by the records of his own village (which was once her village, so she came by the information honestly), so there was a lot to contextualise her notes. His career was really what had set her teenaged self on the path to a criminological study of missing-nin.

The thing about missing-nin was that they lived and died by their professional networks. They needed to form trustworthy interpersonal bonds to ensure they kept up to date with vital industry intelligence (gossip), to hear about new jobs, and to ensure they were negotiating their work at a reasonable market price. The stereotype of the lone missing-nin who trusted nobody was based on a real phenomenon, but rarely did it apply to successful missing-nin, where success was measured by longevity and professional achievements.

Missing-nin who lived like aggressive, paranoid hermits actually experienced lower life expectancies and poor mission outcomes, even compared to other missing-nin. She knew because she'd completed several rounds of observation, data collection and analysis to come up with the theory.

Her study had involved tracking and following thirty two missing-nin, careening across the continent at a breakneck pace, over a gruelling five year period. She would have loved to have expanded her cohort but she was, unfortunately, just one researcher doing extremely difficult and dangerous field work, and tracking thirty two people who had been trained to evade pursuit had been a massive outlay of effort on her behalf. Ten of them had been killed in the first year of her study (which was probably lucky for her), and then five had died over the subsequent four years. As far as it went, her social networking theory had held true for basically all of them. Missing-nin like Orochimaru and Momochi Zabuza, who displayed even inconsistently prosocial attitudes towards other missing-nin, were almost always better off over the five year period of her study.

Except Kakuzu.

Kakuzu was a really significant outlier. She'd been watching him for a long, long time.

He was successful, he had lived a long time, and he showed very little prosocial behaviour. A personal professional network had built up around him like the nacre of a pearl, with him the grit at its centre.

She had her theories about that, too. Kakuzu had got to be so old by borrowing time and chakra from others' hearts and becoming virtually indestructible by way of his kinjutsu, and it allowed him to outlive every one of his contemporaries. She had not been studying missing-nin back when he had become one, but the world had been quite different at that time—hidden villages had been only lately established in a much less stable professional landscape. It was possible that different traits had been more valuable in missing-nin at that time, accounting for his ability to establish himself in that era.

Then again, possibly they had valued exactly the same things. Perhaps if you only doggedly killed everyone who got close to you, and worked very hard to become functionally immortal, you would eventually build up a professional reputation regardless of your character.

She didn't know.

She did know that Kakuzu was within the top two per cent of earners across her study (assuming some room for error), and enjoyed a strong professional reputation among missing-nin and bounty collectors while going virtually unnoticed by the big five villages—even by Leaf, whose Shodaime Hokage he had once tried to assassinate. A clerk had simply decided at some point that Kakuzu must have been dead and removed him from their active records, was the working theory.

She tapped her notebook, outwardly preoccupied, as Kakuzu and Hidan finally came into the teashop. They didn't look at her, although they surely knew she was there. If they really wanted to talk about something secret, probably they would just tell her to leave. Akatsuki were in the employ of Rain, after all... technically. They could do that.

It may not have appeared likely to a casual observer, but Hidan was the person with whom Kakuzu was friendliest. His ability to bounce back from drownings, stabbings and decapitations gave him real staying power.

At first she hadn't liked Hidan. She'd been following Kakuzu for thirty years, keeping track of his absolutely absurd shinobi career, and initially Hidan had represented an intrusion into the private lifestyle she shared with Kakuzu. But he was not obstructive, and once she realised Kakuzu quite liked him, she'd come around on him a bit.

It was selfish of her, she later decided, to resent Kakuzu's young man. Besides, Kakuzu didn't know he was sharing his life with her—perhaps he was lonely.

They were a delight to watch from her quiet corner of the teahouse, really. Kakuzu acted so cold, leaning against the back wall, sipping hot water and grunting a disinterested counterpoint to Hidan's wild gestures and loud commentary. But she felt he was unusually tolerant and engaged, comparatively.

The pair appeared to be waiting for another pair of missing-nin. That was interesting, and lent further credence to the idea that the Akatsuki were centrally organised in Rain. Perhaps they even were Rain? She wasn't sure about the mysterious undead leader, but Konan would have fit right in with the rest of them...

Her observations really went pear shaped when the other two missing-nin walked into the tea house. Hoshigaki Kisame she was pretty familiar with, and he wasn't the problem. It was the other guy.

Uchiha Itachi swept the cloth covering the doorway out of the way with one hand, ducked into the teahouse, and immediately looked straight at her in her corner.

The worst part was, it wasn't as if he actually broke her genjutsu. There was no flaw in it, no place to apply pressure. Her genjutsu was good. Itachi just saw straight through all the visual elements of it with his unholy burning eyes.

He paused in the doorway and said, "I think you are not meant to be here," and then she looked him full in the face and fainted.

"What's your name?" said Uchiha Itachi, the moment she regained consciousness.

She recognised Kakuzu immediately, looking fierce over his shoulder. Hidan next, then Kisame. Really, Uchiha Itachi took her the longest to put a name to, of all of them. He had not been on her radar at all—as missing-nin, the Uchiha bloodline had seemed, unfortunately, too dangerous to include in her studies. And then he'd gone and killed them all anyway, which had seemed to make it a bit of a moot point in a representative sample...

She swallowed. He was waiting for an answer.

Who was she today? Where was she? She blinked rapidly. Teahouse. Sprawled on the table. Lying on her back, surrounded by looming missing-nin. Tea cooling on her belly, not yet cold. No sounds from the staff. Memory rose like bubbles in water.

"Ryouta," she said, finally.

Someone grabbed her by the hair—her REAL hair!—and shook her. "That's not a girl's name."

"Don't touch my fucking hair," she snarled, wrenching her head around. It was Hidan's hand buried in her glossy red curls. Of course it was Hidan. She snapped her teeth at his offending hand, close enough that he yanked his fingers back.

Itachi looked at Hidan, and for just a moment he seemed unable to hide his expression of profound disdain. That was interesting, she thought. Itachi clearly thought he was better than Hidan. Fair enough. So did she. But she would bet Hidan didn't agree with that assessment. She wondered if he knew?

He probably did know. Hidan was oblivious to his surroundings but he had strong interpersonal skills. He picked up on nuances in Kakuzu's behaviour that honestly shocked her.

She glanced between the two, thoughts racing, and then settled her gaze on Itachi. He was the most dangerous to her. She needed to pay attention to him, to be compliant with him, to flatter his ego.

"I haven't had a name in decades."

"I don't recognise her," Kakuzu interjected. She wished this was an opportunity to interview him. What he must remember! But it pretty clearly wasn't the time. "We'll get nothing for her head."

"Waterfall isn't shy about posting bounties. She must not be very important. A small fry, huh...?" Kisame mused. "Well, everyone likes to make a reputation somehow." This idea seemed to amuse him greatly. He showed all his sharp teeth when he smiled.

She knew quite a bit about Kisame, as he was another of her study participants. She had watched his missions and negotiations several times, following quietly in his wake of his large-scale destruction.

But Kakuzu's eyes had narrowed. "No. I didn't sense your genjutsu." He looked towards Kisame, who also shook his head.

If Kisame had sensed her genjutsu she would have had to quit her job. He had so much chakra she could have walked by his side, right in step, and hidden herself beneath its friendly shadow. He would never have known she was there.

Except, well, of course he would have, because now he was travelling with Uchiha Itachi, apparently.

Itachi had taken her amulet, the one inscribed with a vanity seal to hide skin blemishes. He peered at it for a few seconds, and then he looked up at her face again. The sharingan really were demonic to look at, black pinwheels spinning lazily against a red so bright it seemed to glow. The sky probably turned that colour at dawn on the apocalypse.

"I doubt she's a small fry," he said. He had one of those deep voices, the kind that didn't so much 'say,' as 'intone.' Each sentence a gonglike proclamation. Ugh. "What's in this?" He waved her notebook.

She clicked her tongue. "Notes. For my research."

"People who are lying—even shinobi—tend to have certain tells. Humans are naturally afraid of being caught telling falsehoods. Their sweat changes. Their pulse beats faster. They blink more rapidly. They change their rate of eye contact. My eyes can capture all these things. But you..." He tapped the notebook against his palm. "...do not have those tells."

"I'm telling the truth."

"Were you telling the truth when you said your name was Ryouta?"

She shrugged. "A truth."

Hidan scoffed loudly.

"What's the key?" Itachi looked down at her. "You can tell me, or we will discover it on our own eventually."

They would. It wasn't a very hard code. Her notes weren't really that secret. She published her work eventually. She just didn't want to get caught writing them, so she coded them, and then they could have been anything. Mission report. Love notes. Who knew?

With a deep sigh, she told him.

He thumbed through the book. At his level, it really only took him a few minutes to piece together whole sentences. Slowly, his expression changed from confusion to understanding to confusion again. This book wasn't especially important. It had only a few notes about the really big outliers from her most recent five year study, and the tally of negotiations at the back. She always tallied negotiations she saw—because every two years, she produced a record of mission prices for missing-nin, copied them by hand and pamphleteered in dive bars across the continent. Industry research was to be shared, after all.

"You observe a great many missing-nin," Itachi said slowly. He flipped back. Paused. "...A great many. A greater number than I would expect."

He handed her notebook off to Kakuzu, who buried his face in it immediately.

"Everyone needs a hobby..?"

Kisame snorted. "Some hobby."

"This might be the most boring thing I've ever heard," Hidan said, in a worrying tone of mounting dissatisfaction.

"She's been watching you, too, fool," said Kakuzu. That was kind of unfair: she only paid attention to Hidan because he was attached at the hip to Kakuzu. Otherwise, Hidan was another dime-a-dozen missing-nin, distinguished only by his little immortality trick. You got ninja like that, sometimes—incredible combatants who were really one trick ponies, but won all the time anyway because it was one hell of a trick.

"What!" Hidan yelped. "Show me."

"...What makes you think Orochimaru is pretending to be the Yondaime Kazekage?" Itachi asked then, distracting her.

"Ah... Well, he was part of the five year study. I'm just following up on outliers right now. He definitely killed Rasa, but I'm honestly not sure why he's pretending to be him. I theorise he's enjoying bonding moments with the Kazekage's children while wearing their dad's skin."

The bonding moments were genuinely pretty wholesome. That was part of the joyous cruelty of it, probably: Orochimaru didn't mind playing the long game, and he just loved to get a reaction.

"The five year study," Itachi repeated.

"I haven't published it yet. My recent work has been tracking the correlation between prosocial behaviour in missing-nin and professional success and longevity across five years. Orochimaru in particular has proven... erratic."

Kisame, who had stood back to loom behind Itachi, gave a rusty laugh. "Erratic, huh."

Kakuzu, though, had gotten to the back of the book—where her notes on pricing were.

"You," he snarled. He jabbed a finger towards her. "You write the cost list."

His chakra leeched like poison into the air, flooding them all with killing intent.

I am in danger, she thought, with every last squealing cell in her body.

"Ohh," said Kisame. "That."

"Who cares about that," said Hidan, scowling furiously. "She wrote that I'm an idiot!"

She probably wasn't going get a better opening than that. She flexed her own chakra.

"It's not like I'm alone in that opinion. Uchiha Itachi has been looking at you like you're an idiot for the last ten minutes."

Hidan sneered. "Nice try."

"She's right," intoned Itachi's deep voice.

His head snapped up. "What did you say?"

"That's a scary face," Itachi's voice mused. His red eyes spun faster. "Do you think you can beat me with just your skills, Hidan?"

Of course, Itachi himself actually did none of these things. But Hidan obviously did know what Itachi thought of him, after all, because he believed them totally.

Thank god.

She manufactured a sniffing noise from Kakuzu, which was as close as she'd ever heard him get to actually laughing. Hidan, she knew, valued Kakuzu's regard, and he was as close to having it as anyone ever had been. If she was right, thinking that Itachi had insulted him and Kakuzu was amused by it was going to hit all of Hidan's berserk buttons.

She was right.

Hidan lunged—and not at her, but at Itachi.

Which meant that the only person who was a real threat to her genjutsu skills was suddenly very occupied. Phew!

The room exploded into noise as everyone reacted to Hidan's sudden attack.

She pulled layer upon layer of illusions over herself as she rolled off the table, and then she hugged one of the walls, camouflaged like a chameleon, and darted away.

Getting out of Rain was her first priority. Then, she'd fix whatever Hidan had done to her hair—her scalp was still sore where he'd yanked on it, ugh. And then she guessed she'd write down what she remembered of her notes.

It certainly wasn't worth going back for them.

#naruto oc: red #naruto oc #naruto fic #akatsuki

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