#i've been going back and forth on if team 4 calls her kushina-sensei or just kushina in-text

[mixelation]

starting a new thread for reborn au from this one

the beginning of the exam :)

Deidara woke up in a surprisingly good mood. The start of the exam meant he’d have an opportunity to do something with all his pent up energy. Set some fires, blow up some things. It could be fun, even if Iwa was annoying them. 

His mood was immediately ruined by one of the Taki genin hogging their bathroom, and then by the front desk still denying them weapons. 

“You don’t need them for the first stage,” the Iwa-nin insisted. “If you pass, you’ll be given weapons at the beginning of the next stage.”

Kushina’s fist clenched, and a few strands of hair twitched. Deidara would pay money to see her go full Red Hot Habanero on this guy. 

“We were promised them at the start of the exam,” she insisted. “We were invited here as a show of good will. Why are you discriminating against my team?”

The Iwa-nin just held her gaze. “I’m just doing as I’m told, ma’am.”

Typical Iwa-nin. Not a creative or unique thought in his head. Deidara didn’t remember this guy, but he hated him. 

Unfortunately, Tori stepped in before Kushina could lose her temper. “When’s the next stage?”

“When the first stage ends,” the Iwa-nin replied. 

“But where do we go? Will someone find us?” Tori pressed. 

Deidara zoned out as she needled him. One of the benefits of having nerds like Tori and Itachi on his team was that they could worry about all the boring details. 

Breakfast was a lot of fruit, which at least looked decent, along with some salted meat and very hard bread. They also had pine needle tea out, which Deidara poured himself an extra large cup of. 

Kushina was already wandering over to the Kiri duo before Tori had finished pouring her own tea, and Tori made an annoyed little hum at the back of her throat. 

“I thought you wanted to be friends?” Deidara teased. 

“I think he’s… too friendly,” Tori bemoaned. “Oh well.”

“Okay,” Deidara announced conspiratorially as he set his tray down next to Mangetsu’s. “First stage they told us we don’t need weapons, so it’s probably combat-free. But second stage… I say we get rid of the idiots hogging our bathroom, yeah.”

Mangetsu laughed. “Deal,” he said, showing off his horrid pointed teeth. 

A group of Iwa-nin took them back up to the same building where they’d done their security check. They were then left in a waiting area as Iwa genin slowly filtered in in pairs and trios. Both Kushina and Kisame disappeared at some point, but Deidara barely noticed because he was fixated on one genin in particular. 

Kurotsuchi, granddaughter of Oonoki and next in line to inherit his title, was in this exam. She sat perched on the back of one of the few chairs scattered around the room, chatting with two other Iwa-nin that Deidara assumed was her team. He didn’t recognize either of them; they were both in their mid-teens, and Deidara assumed they were assigned specifically to fill in Kurotsuchi’s team. 

Deidara had liked Kurotsuchi, before. She was a chill person who thought his art was cool even if she never really got it, and she was willing to get him out of trouble when he “disobeyed orders” and “broke important rules.”

She was also an incredibly spoiled little thing. She hadn’t gone to the Academy with the plebians; she’d been trained from birth by private tutors. She’d always had everything handed to her, never having to do her own chores or take shitty D-ranks. Deidara hadn’t even been on her radar until he’d made Jounin and had his own reputation in the village, so he hadn’t met her until they were both teenagers. 

Kurotsuchi had once confessed to him that she used to look down on other shinobi, who didn’t grow up with all the special training she did. She hadn’t realized it didn’t make her special or better until she was a chunin and was running missions with shinobi that were just as good if not more skilled than her. He didn’t know what she’d be like as an eleven-year-old; he suspected he wouldn’t like her. 

He didn’t think she’d be much to worry about, in terms of the exam. Kurotsuchi was talented and well-trained, which would make her a standout among a more normal group of shinobi, but she wasn’t the screaming genius he or Itachi were. Tori might have to be careful, but… 

“What?” Itachi asked, following his gaze. “Ah.”

Deidara thought about hitting him. No way he recognized her; he had to just be pretending to preserve how smart he was. 

“Oh!” Tori exclaimed, like she also recognized her. 

“Who is that?” Mangetsu asked, dropping his voice. Like they would just tell him–

“She’s the Tsuchikage’s granddaughter,” Tori supplied. Mangetsu blinked at her in surprise.

Goddammit, Tori, Deidara thought. 

Tori turned to Deidara curiously. “Do you think she’ll be a problem?”

“I’m not an Iwa expert,” Deidara snapped in a bid to maintain his cover, but Itachi just raised his eyebrows at him like he was stupid. Which he wasn’t– he just had a cover story to stick to, why did Itachi have to– ugh! “Look, Iwa’s not like Konoha or Kiri. Tsuchikage is a hereditary title. They all expect her to be the next one; they’ll have given her all sorts of special training, regardless of how talented she is or isn’t, yeah.”

“Oooh,” Mangetsu said, turning to give her another one-over. He then much more subtly watched Tori out of the corner of his eye for a reaction. 

Tori did not seem to notice, scanning the room and taking in the other entrants. Deidara was easily the youngest person here. Most people were in the range of fourteen to sixteen, which reflected the average age of promotion at fifteen. There weren’t any adults; if you got into your late teens and wanted a chunin promotion, you basically had to do it within your village’s internal mechanisms. The exams were for showing off new, young people. 

Mangetsu pouted. 

Eventually they were funneled into a line, at the end of which a bored looking Iwa chunin handed each one of them a form. 

“It’s a liability waiver,” he said. “All exams have them. Don’t worry, it’s basic stuff.”

Tori, ex-secretary extraordinaire, became the first person in line to attempt to read the three page document of tiny text. 

“Could you hurry up?” the chunin asked. “You’re holding up the line.”

“You cannot honestly expect me to sign something I haven’t read,” Tori replied. 

Next to her, Itachi’s eyes flickered red as he flipped through the pages. 

“It’s fine,” he concluded. “Tori, you can sign it.”

“Well,” Tori said, sounding annoyed, “can I get a copy for my records?”

“No,” the Iwa-nin replied flatly as Mangetsu snorted with laughter. “Sign it now or forfeit your exam.”

Tori signed it, although she looked incredibly unhappy about it. 

“If a ninja tells you not to worry, you should worry,” Tori grumbled as another chunin directed them down a hallway. 

“I read it, it’s fine,” Itachi told her. “If you’re that upset, I can recite it to you.”

He only got through one line before they were being ushered into a small briefings room. Mangetsu, who’d been trailing behind them, was directed to a different one. Each of them were handed a thin, short scroll, the kind you could tie to an animal or swallow in an emergency. Each was capped with a different color. 

“Spread out,” one of the three chunin in their room commanded. They complied. Well, Deidra stayed where he was; Itachi took several steps back from him, and Tori retreated all the way to a corner. “Open your scroll and memorize it. Do not say anything or communicate with your teammates.”

Deidara’s was a string of coordinates. Easy. 

“You will each follow one of us,” the chunin commanded after a few minutes. 

They separated them. 

Interesting, Deidara thought as he was led into an empty room. He was instructed to sit, and then the chunin tied his hands to the chair. Very interesting. 

“The first stage of this exam is traditionally an information gathering exercise,” the chunin told him, dead serious. “This year, we have elected to test your ability to keep the information you’ve gathered confidential. The waiver you signed authorized the use of torture.”

“It’s fine,” Deidara mocked Itachi in his mind. Asshole. 

“Okay,” Deidara said, grinning cheekily up at the proctor. “Bring it on, then.”

They didn’t actually torture him. Or, rather, they just left him alone for an hour and turned the AC up really high. He heard several muffled screams from both neighboring rooms, which would maybe freak some genin out. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone back for a second cup of tea… 

Eventually the guy came back and started asking Deidara questions. Deidara didn’t think this was a very good interrogation, and he gave a lot of smartass answers. The guy had a lightning jutsu he used for a few mild shocks, but it wasn’t really what Deidara would classify as torture. 

The proctor went away again. Deidara’s bladder situation was getting kind of dire… should he just escape, or would they count that as a fail? Decisions, decisions. 

Eventually, the proctor came back with a napkin in his hand. As he shut the door behind him, the screams next door got louder.

“Your teammate is on the brink of talking,” he said. “But I’ll give you a deal. If you talk, you’ll pass. No questions asked.”

Deidara cocked his head to the side. “Not really the point of this test, is it?” he asked. 

“Alright, I’ll explain,” the proctor said. “If none of you had talked, you would have passed. But…” 

He opened the napkin in his hand. It contained a bloody tooth. 

“The girl on your team got a more enthusiastic interrogator. She’s going to talk at any second, so you’re basically screwed,” He shoved the gross tooth under Deidara’s nose. “But I have a bet with her interrogator that I’d get you to talk first. Help me out, and I can convince my superior to let you into the next stage of the exam.”

Deidara leaned back in his seat so he could make eye contact with the chunin. 

“Is that all?” he asked. 

“Yes, that’s all you have to do to pass,” the interrogator confirmed. The screams next door kept going. 

“No,” Deidara said, letting a grin spread over his face. “Is that all you did to Tori? Because if it is, that’s not even close to enough to break her, yeah.”

He was pretty sure the streaming was on a loop, anyway. Kiddy shit, honestly. 

xXx

“The waiver you signed authorized the use of torture,” the proctor informed Itachi. 

“No, it didn’t,” Itachi replied. 

The waiver had been the standard rigamarole that Konoha couldn’t start a war over him being killed or maimed as part of regular exam activities, with the understanding that Iwa had a responsibility to his safety, health, and wellbeing outside of explicit exam activities, as well as a clause about Iwa not assigning unusually cruel or difficult tasks. It honestly was only a page’s worth of text; they’d shrunk the font and repeated it five times over for the illusion of length to deter examinees from reading it. 

Maybe he should have let Tori read it… oh well, she’d be fine. 

The proctor seemed unsure what to do with this statement, as he then just left. Rude. 

They started recordings of a lot of screams in neighboring rooms. Itachi’s nose itched. He slipped  a hand free of his restraints and scratched it, then replaced his hand. Sometime later his proctor returned. 

With a twitch of his fingers, the proctor was in his genjutsu and explaining the parameters of… whatever this was. 

“So an escape counts as a pass?” Itachi verified. 

“Yes.”

Itachi walked out of the room. 

xXx

“Oooh, the prisoner’s dilemma,” Tori said. “How fun. So we all pass if none of us say anything, but you��re going to tell me I’ll pass if I talk and my teammate’s don’t?”

The proctor looked vaguely taken aback. Just a little; Iwa-nin were pretty good at hiding their emotions. 

“How does this work for solo entrants?” Tori asked, wondering what they were making Mangetsu do right now. 

The proctor walked right out and left her for a very long time. The room got significantly colder, and the muffled screams got louder. Tori stretched out her legs in front of her and eyed her toe nails. She should have let Kushina paint them green… 

This was pretty uncomfortable. And boring. And twice the fake proctor came in and shocked her with a device in his hand, promising it would only get worse. Would other genin think this was torture? 

The proctor came back with a bloody tooth and said it was Deidara’s.  

Tori raised her eyebrows. “From which mouth?”

The proctor was struggling more and more to control his face. What a horrible fake interrogator.  “The one in his head.”

This obviously wasn’t Deidara’s tooth for several reasons, one of which being that the building was still standing, and the main one being that Tori was pretty sure that it wasn't even a real tooth. 

So how did she pass? She obviously wasn’t supposed to do what the interrogator wanted her to do and hand over the list of names she had, even as the interrogator promised she'd pass if she just talked before Deidara or Itachi as a favor to the proctor. Did she just have to hang out for a certain period of time, or give a speech about how she would never yield? The desk-nin said they’d get an hour break for lunch, and that someone would find them then and they’d have their weapons by the time the second stage started at noon, so they had to be done by eleven… 

“....no,” she said when the interrogator was done with his lie about winning a bet. Then much more firmly she repeated, “No.”

“Your teammate is going to break anyway,” he said, hilariously dire. 

“No, he’s not,” Tori replied. “And neither is Itachi, and neither am I. You’re wasting everyone’s time. Doesn’t the next stage start at noon?”

The Iwa-nin paused. He frowned.

“Who told you that?”

“I’m not supposed to talk,” Tori said, smiling benignly. 

A very pained look flashed across the proctor's face, and then he left. Around fifteen minutes later, a woman showed up to untie her and tell her passed. 

Tori was led into a cafeteria for their promised meal break, where Itachi found her immediately.

“You could have just escaped,” he told her. “I had to talk to Mangetsu for an hour without you.”

“Sorry?” Tori replied. 

“Tori!” Mangetsu yelled from a seat at one of the long tables in the room. He waved enthusiastically at her. 

“Sorry,” Tori repeated. 

Deidara showed up a few minutes later. Probably only about two-thirds the entrants had passed, and they were able to spread out over the tables. 

“What’s a normal pass rate?” Tori asked. “Is this high? It seems like that was too easy. Also, Mangetsu, what did they make you do?”

Mangetsu had no idea. They’d given him three scrolls and the spiel about having authorized torture, and then he’d just left. 

“Is the best way to avoid revealing info to just leave?” he said when Tori expressed surprise at how quickly he’d made this decision. 

“Gods,” Deidara said, craning his head back and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I should have just left, yeah. I almost pissed myself.” 

“Why didn’t you leave?” Itachi asked. “Surely you could escape a test meant for a genin. Or did you not think of it?”

Tori sighed and moved down one seat away from them as Deidara threw a punch at Itachi. Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t currently have clay on him.