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Kisame was having a bad day.
It started with Itachi sleeping in, which was odd, because Itachi never slept well and was almost always up before Kisame, standing at the window of their shared room with a cup of medicinal tea in his hands.
Kisame let him be, of course, because Itachi deserved to sleep in. They knew each other well enough that Kisame could check Itachi’s weapons and supplies for him before today’s mission.
When Itachi did finally wake, he sat swaying on the edge of his bed for a few moments, cheeks oddly flushed. Then he threw himself from the bed to their trash bin and vomited up a fair amount of blood.
“Shit,” Kisame swore under his breath and dropped the kunai he was polishing on his own bed. He grabbed the basket of various drugs they kept on the dresser and stood over Itachi as he dry heaved into the trash bin.
“I’m fine,” Itachi finally rasped out, as he always did.
“Uh huh,” Kisame answered, leafing through bottles and pouches. Vomiting wasn’t usually one of Itachi’s symptoms, but it happened sometimes. Kisame pulled one of the foil pouches and set about making a tisane with the electric kettle they kept by the window sill. Itachi staggered out of the room, presumably to go clean himself up in the bathroom.
“YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT, YEAH,” Deidara screamed from down the hall a few minutes later, and then Itachi slunk back in and dropped ungracefully back down onto the bed.
“We may have to delay our mission a few hours,” Itachi said, taking the tea cup from Kisame with the tiniest nod of thanks. The tips of his ears were as pink as his cheeks, and his breathing was labored.
Kisame watched Itachi drink, considering his options. From experience, he knew Itachi would shoot down any suggestion to take it easy for a day. Kisame had even tried tying Itachi down to his bed to prevent him taking a mission once, and that had resulted in Itachi escaping and meeting Kisame at the front door of the hideout exactly ninety seconds later. The mission had then been filled with wet coughing and Itachi refusing to speak to Kisame beyond necessary communication for a week. Stopping him wasn’t an option.
Still, the mission for the day was easy. Kisame could get it done by himself in only a couple hours not including travel time, and the target wasn’t far.
“How about I get a head start,” Kisame said diplomatically, “and then you catch up when you’re travel ready?”
Itachi eyed him. Even without the sharingan, Kisame felt like Itachi could see every one of his thoughts as easily as if he’d written them out for him.
Kisame was certain Itachi was going to protest, but then there was a sad convulsion of Itachi’s shoulders and he clapped his hand over his mouth. Kisame pushed the trash bin toward him with his foot. Itachi stared down at the vomit-covered rubbish for a few moments, his hand still over his mouth.
“Don’t vomit up your drugs,” Kisame said helpfully.
Itachi sent him a heatless little glare and slowly lowered his hand.
“Fine,” he said, voice scratchy and groggy. “You go ahead and run recon. I’ll catch up in a few hours.”
“Good,” Kisame said, grabbing his travel pack. He paused with his hand on the bedroom door.
“Do you keep any poisons on you?” he asked. They’d gotten the mission late last night, and there hadn’t been time to resupply.
“No,” Itachi said, looking for all the world like he was pouting at his tisane. “You can pick some up from Shigawa-san.”
Kisame nodded. Shigawa was one of Akatsuki’s suppliers, and Itachi went to him fairly frequently for ready-made poisons and medicinal herbs. He was part of the Yuugakure shinobi diaspora, asked few questions, and was generally friendly to work with.
Kisame got about halfway down the hallway before he realized he had absolutely no idea how to contact Shigawa. He’d met him twice, in two different countries, but Itachi had arranged both those meetings.
Kisame’s first thought was to simply turn back and ask Itachi. Then he had a vision of Itachi standing shakily and insisting he do it himself, and Kisame decided against it. Akatsuki had their own poison’s master on-hand, after all.
The basement laboratory in hideout was theoretically for communal use, but Sasori was the only one who used it since Orochimaru’s defection. Kisame knocked before entering.
Sasori was in the process of chemically treating… human skin… and the whole room stank. He did nothing to acknowledge Kisame standing at the doorway.
“Good morning,” Kisame greeted, and Sasori glanced up only briefly. “Do you have any spare poison?”
“What for?” Sasori snapped, moving sheets of skin from one tub of unknown chemicals to another. The skin was stretched across metal frames which hung from the top of the bin, like files in a cabinet. Several of the sheets were decorated with colorful tattoos; Sasori and Deidara’s most recent mission had been something about disbanding yakuza.
“Assassination,” Kisame said, and Sasori nodded once.
Kisame’s mission for today was a revenge-motivated assassination of a man their client claimed had poisoned and killed her son. Kisame’s preferred method of assassination was a sword through the back, but the client had specifically requested poetic justice.
Hence, poison.
Sasori required no further explanation than “I want to poison someone to death,” though, and pulled dark blue box from a back shelf and flipped it open.
“You don’t need much,” Sasori said, and fished a vial out of the box and offered it to Kisame.
Kisame took the vial and held it up to the light. The vial itself was smaller than his own thumb, sealed with wax. The liquid inside was perfectly clear and coated the sides of the vial as he turned it. Good for coating weapons, Kisame thought, although he would have preferred a colored tint for easy handling.
“Bring the vial back when you’re done,” Sasori said, and then went back to his sheets of skin like Kisame wasn’t there.
Kisame rolled the vial in gauze for padding and tucked it safely into his cloak. He took off for their target at a run.
The town wasn’t far, but Kisame wanted to get there as soon as possible. If he rushed, he could get this all done before Itachi showed up, and then he could convince his stubborn partner to get back into bed with a nice cup of tea. It would be fine.
Koburi River wound its way through the country, and their target maintained a mansion in one of the many towns that dotted its banks. It was early enough that a thick mist clung to the river, and Kisame slipped into it and took off at full speed right down the center of the water, hiding his presence in the mist as easily and naturally as breathing. He was in town forty-five minutes later.
The streets of the town were muddy gravel, slick from recent rain. Drowsy looking people shuffled around, opening shops and heading to work. Kisame, being very large and very blue, slipped into the shadows of the wood buildings and stayed there.
The mansion wasn’t hard to find, and Kisame managed to hide himself in a gingko tree in the back garden. The target was the type of man who liked to flaunt his wealth, and he had a full house staff running around and setting up for the day. If Kisame played this right, he could slip the poison into the target’s breakfast and be on his way before Itachi was out of bed.
Kisame shifted restlessly in the tree as he squinted into the kitchen window. The kitchen was a detached building at the back of the garden, and people would occasionally dash around the main house’s veranda to the kitchen and back again. Kisame was not worried about being seen; he was very large and very blue, but he was a ninja and a master of erasing his presence in shadows and mist.
Sneaky assassination missions weren’t Kisame’s favorite, but he’d run countless of them in various positions. They all involved a lot of sitting in vegetation and watching, and standard Kirigakure protocol demanded several days of observation to determine patterns and routines. Akatsuki generally pushed a quicker mission turn over time; Kisame was just going to jump in at first opportunity.
In this sort of situation– covertly infiltrating a busy household, and then dropping poison in something– Kisame would normally be the one waiting outside, ready to provide (violent) back-up in case his partner was discovered. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually poisoned someone. But he’d watched plenty of people do it, had heard their debriefs and written reports on them. He was an elite ninja with decades of experience. How hard could it be?
“ATSUKO,” someone shrieked inside. “GET THE MASTER’S TEA OUT, NOW.”
There was a bang, and a young girl rushed out of the kitchen and onto the veranda clutching a tray. The teapot and cups shifted dangerously along the tray as she hurried around the back porch towards the main house. No one else was currently in the garden. Kisame saw his opportunity, and he took it.
Kisame entered the house in the henge of a fourteen year old maid, holding the tray much more gracefully than he should and walking with all the brashness of a man so scary no one would dare mess with him, and absolutely no one noticed. After loitering in the back room for a while, an older woman with a broom yelled at him for slacking off.
“Um,” Kisame said. How did young girls talk?
“You’re late, again,” the woman chided, “and you’re not even trying to hurry? Get a move on, you little floozy.”
“Where exactly am I going?” Kisame asked. He used the polite form. Young girls used the polite form, right?
The woman looked infuriated for a moment, and then exasperated, and she pointed violently up a flight of stairs.
“Master bedroom,” she snapped, and then made to hit Kisame in the back with the broom as he rushed forward.
Kisame skipped the first two steps in a graceful jump to avoid the broom. What the hell was this poor girl’s life? He’d done her a favor by hiding her unconscious body in a tree.
There were fewer people upstairs, and it took Kisame opening three doors to find the master bedroom. The vial’s contents disappeared into the teapot, and Kisame politely entered and served tea to the target. He watched the target take two sips, and then left as fast as he could. He retrieved the real maid from the tree, left her curled up under the tree so it looked like she’d taken a nap, and then disappeared back into the shadows.
There. Mission complete, easy peasy. Under normal circumstances, he’d stick around to make sure the target actually died. But he was in a rush, and he was confident in Sasori’s poison’s ability to kill, he knew Sasori’s poison had made it into the tea, and he’d watched the target drink the tea. The target was basically a dead man walking now. Kisame left.
The mist over the river had burned off as the morning progressed, so Kisame stayed in the shadows of the trees along the far bank. He was less than a kilometer from the town’s border when he ran into Itachi.
“Have you not been observing the house?” Itachi asked. The bags under his eyes were deeper than ever and his voice was hoarse, but he was less pink than before and stood steady.
“Actually I just finished,” Kisame said. “Why don’t we head back?”
Itachi did not budge. “You verified the target’s death?” he asked.
“Um,” Kisame said.
“We need to confirm,” Itachi said, and very determinedly pushed by Kisame.
“Wait,” Kisame said, and caught his elbow. “I verified he drank Sasori’s poison. He’s as good as dead. Don’t you want to rest?”
“Sasori’s…?” Itachi repeated. “What happened to Shigawa-san?”
“Um,” Kisame said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Itachi said, and pulled his arm free. “We need to confirm mission completion.”
Kisame followed him, feeling the urge to wring his hands like someone’s mother. Maybe this was okay. Itachi did look a lot better. They’d make sure the target was dead– which he definitely was– and then they’d turn around and go home and Itachi could rest in peace. It would take two hours, tops.
They had to cross the river to get into town. With no mist as cover, they went to the bridge at the town’s entrance rather than walk over the water. The town was wide awake now, and fishermen and families out for a walk dotted the bridge.
“Mommy, mommy,” a little girl asked, pointing enthusiastically between the posts lining the bridge. Itachi slowed down ever so slightly, as he generally did with dark-haired children that age. “Why are all the fish dead?”
“Oh, honey,” the mom said, “they’re not dead, they’re– oh.”
There were definitely five or six dead fish floating under the bridge. As Kisame watched, two more emerged from the dark water.
“What on earth?” one of the fisherman muttered, standing from where he’d been sitting on the edge of the bridge, legs between the posts.
Once they got into town, there was a lot of panicked rushing and people screaming for help. This seemed like an overreaction for the death of a single man, even if he was the richest in town. Still, Kisame felt confident this was evidence his plan had gone exactly as intended, and he could get Itachi back home and wrapped in a blanket.
At the entrance to the mansion, Atsuko the maid was sitting on the curb outside and bawling her eyes out. There was a lot of noise and chaos from inside the house itself, as Kisame would expect. There probably wasn’t even a need to sneak around inside for the dead body, as Itachi was probably planning.
“Good morning, Atsuko-san,” Kisame greeted.
Atsuko looked up at him, eyes red and puffy. Snot dribbled from her nose.
She hiccupped grossly and then asked, “Who’re you?” which was basically proof Kisame had done his infiltration perfectly, so he’d definitely done the assassination perfectly, and Itachi could go home with him feeling confident everything was fine.
“Atsuko-san,” Itachi said, stepping forward. Kisame felt a slight twinge in the air, a twist of electricity that was so subtle he only noticed after years of working with Itachi. Itachi’s sharingan was red and spinning, his illusion twisting around Atsuko and bending her mind to his will. “Why are you crying?”
Atsuko hiccupped again. “M-my master didn’t like his tea this morning,” she said, voice breaking. “A-and he said I w-was rude when I served it, even th-though I don’t r-remember. I w-woke up in the garden and m-mistress beat me with her b-broom.”
She let out a pathetic sob, and more snot bubbled in her nose. A small twinge of guilt curled in Kisame’s stomach, and he suddenly realized why everyone was always worried about undercover ninja becoming sympathetic to the enemy. This was somehow worse than just murdering the poor girl.
“Oh?” Itachi prompted, tilting his head ever so slightly. His eyes were still red, as they always were outside the safety of the Akatsuki hideout. No one in their right mind would think Itachi’s monotone voice meant he was sympathetic to their problems. Under his genjutsu, however, Kisame was sure Itachi seemed like to most open and sympathetic person in the world.
“S-so,” Atsuko continued, wiping her snot off on her kimono sleeve, “m-my master h-hit me and made me pour half the tea out in the drain, t-to apologize to the house. And then he–” she blew her nose on the back of her sleeve– “made me p-pour the rest into the street drain to apologize to the town.”
Her next sob was the loudest and most pathetic yet, and Itachi watched her with complete disinterest. Kisame shifted ever so slightly. So she’d poured the excess poisoned tea down the drain. So what?
“AND THEN HE DIED ON THE SPOT,” Atsuko finally wailed, and then broke down into uncontrolled tears once again.
“See?” Kisame said, tuning out the noise. “Target dead. Mission accomplished.”
Itachi, however, was frowning ever so slightly. This was the equivalent of a normal person scowling in deep concentration.
“How much poison did you use?” Itachi asked.
“Sasori gave me a small amount and said it would be enough,” Kisame said. Then he held up his fingers to indicate size. “A vial, about this big.”
It wasn’t a lot, really. Kisame had used more to coat a single kunai, back in his youth before he’d joined the Seven Swordsmen. He was sure Sasori’s poison was more potent than the stuff Kirigakure would administer for free to chunin, but still. How strong could a poison be?
“I see,” Itachi said. A bird dropped dead out of the air and landed in the road between them.
“Try not to drink any water,” Itachi said casually down to Atsuko, who was still weeping on the curb of the street. The he pushed open the front gate and brazenly walked in. Kisame followed, even thought this was wholly unnecessary.
No one seemed to notice them as Itachi led Kisame through the halls of the mansion. This Kisame chocked up to a combination of genjutsu and everyone seeming to be currently having a crisis. People were running around and yelling orders and cries for help and dragging drooling bodies into rooms.
In the main dining room, the table was shoved aside and a total of five bodies were lined out across the room. They were clearly dead, faces puffy and purple, eyes bloodshot and glassy, and blood dribbling from their ears. Two of them were children.
“Well,” Kisame said, pointing at the right-most body. “That’s our target. Dead for sure.”
Itachi gave a sort of half-nod that was him recognizing Kisame was correct. Then he pointed to one of the children.
“That’s our client’s grandchild,” he said.
Ah, yes, there had been something about that in the debrief. The target had had an affair with the client’s daughter and they’d had a bastard child together. The target had agreed to raise the boy in his household in exchange for keeping the affair from public knowledge, but the client’s son had threatened him anyway. Client’s son was poisoned, client hired ninja hitmen for revenge, blah blah blah. Usually, Kisame didn’t care much for client’s motives.
“Did she say not to poison her grandson?” Kisame asked after a beat.
Itachi’s mouth thinned. “It’s generally implied,” he said.
“What, not to kill family?” Kisame asked.
Itachi was quiet for a few moments and then he said, “I suppose you have, in the most technical sense, fulfilled mission parameters.”
Two more dead bodies were being dragged in. Itachi gave Kisame a pointed look.
“What poison did Sasori give you?” Itachi asked, and Kisame retrieved the empty vial from his pocket and passed it over. Itachi took it cautiously, using his nails and avoiding the lip of the opening, obviously trying to minimize skin contact.
Itachi stared the vial down very intensely for a while, but Kisame doubted even Itachi’s sharingan could pick out anything from a clear, odorless liquid.
“You used all of it?” Itachi asked.
“Yes,” Kisame said. “Sasori said I wouldn’t need much.”
The woman with the broom crouched down in the corner, breathing hard as her face turned green and she coughed up spittle.
“So it wasn’t full?” Itachi asked.
“No, it was,” Kisame corrected, frowning slightly. Why had Itachi asked that? Was that tiny vial not a “small amount”?
Itachi stared at him. His eyes were microscopically wider than normal. The broom woman collapsed.
Maybe… a full vial… was a lot for Sasori’s poison. Maybe Sasori had meant to only use a drop.
And then the maid had poured the rest down the drain, which led to who knows where.
“Oh,” Kisame heard himself say. Itachi dropped the vial to the floor and excused himself to wash his hands, stepping over broom woman’s body on the way out.
They went back outside, where Atsuko was still on the curb but crying now with soft little huffs instead of outright weeping. Across the street, a man staggered by, blood trailing from his ears down the line of his jaw.
“You should probably just leave town,” Kisame told Atsuko. “There are nicer bosses out there.”
She just blinked up at him and hiccupped.
On the way back out of town, they passed three bawling citizens, six dead bodies, several dead rats, and a dead cat that made Itachi wince. Kisame barely dodged another dead bird falling from a roof.
The bridge was now empty except for a single fisherman, clutching his pole and leaning against the rail while panting and turning from green to purple. The river could not be seen through the mass of dead fish floating gently.
“That’s going to smell,” Kisame observed.
“Ah,” Itachi agreed.
They walked several kilometers through the forest before they stopped seeing dead animals.
“I appreciate your enthusiasm to complete the mission without me,” Itachi said as they passed a collapsed and twitching deer, “but next time, please reconsider.”
xXx
“You poured HOW MUCH into WHAT?” Sasori shrieked.
Kisame had never heard Sasori raise his voice. Deidara apparently hadn’t either, because he looked up from chopping vegetables with wide eyes.
“We’re upstream,” Itachi said, seated at the kitchen table with another cup of tisane. “And have our own water source, so operations should be unaffected.”
Sasori ignored Itachi though, rounding his tiny figure on Kisame. “I told you a small amount,” he hissed in the quiet, deadly tone Kisame was used to hearing from him. “Now my poison is just floating down Koburi River for anyone to analyze and steal–”
“Wait, how many people did you kill by accident?” Deidara asked, eyes alight with the manic enthusiasm he usually reserved for fire.
“In my defense,” Kisame said to Sasori, pointedly ignoring Deidara, “‘a small amount’ isn’t very precise.”
“Yes,” Itachi agreed, and Kisame was sure that if Sasori hadn’t replaced his blood with absurdly deadly poison, he’d be red in the face. “You should have given more instruction. There is no reason to think Kisame would understand proper dilution for poison stocks.”
Sometimes, Kisame’s partner was mean.
“Whatever,” Sasori snarled and then turned on his partner. “You’re coming with me.”
“What?” Deidara asked, still holding the kitchen knife he’d been using to chop up a cucumber. “Why?”
“Because I need to destroy the ample evidence of my poison I generously lent out in order to prevent it being stolen,” Sasori said, shooting another glare at Kisame. Deidara’s eyes lit up.
“So I get to–”
“Maybe,” Sasori said, voice full of vitriol, and then started pulling him towards the door. Deidara did not object and threw the kitchen knife right across the kitchen into the sink.
“Now, hold on,” Kisame started. He was beginning to feel really bad for that maid.
“Would aerosolizing the poison not cause more problems?” Itachi asked.
“It’s fine,” Sasori said. “We’ll cover it up with a more common poison, and then no one will think to look for mine.”
That was clearly not the concern Itachi was voicing.
“Deidara has the most immunity to my poison collection, anyway,” Sasori said. “He’ll be fine.”
“Wait, since when?” Deidara asked.
“I dose your food everyday,” Sasori said.
Deidara’s face went red and he started to yell something, but Sasori finally succeeded in pushing him out the kitchen door. The two of them loudly made their way down the hallway to pack for Sasori’s insane plan.
Kisame leaned back in his chair and sighed loudly. “Do you know if any of Hidan’s beer is still around?” he asked Itachi. For reasons Kisame thought were extremely valid, he needed a drink.
There was a single can of room temperature beer left under the sink, and Kisame took it outside to enjoy in the warm sun.
Usually, when someone made a mistake with poison, they just failed to kill their target, or killed the wrong person. Very rarely was the problem… killing an entire town… and its animals… and fish….
Kisame leaned back against the wood paneling of the farm house they were occupying. He really hoped “mercilessly wiped out a whole town for no reason” made it into the bingo books. If he didn’t get some sort of benefit out of this mess, he was going to really, really feel bad about the whole thing.
xXx
“But the target was poisoned,” Kakuzu repeated.
Kisame leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples. Usually, when they had payment problems, Kakuzu just went and took care of it by himself. This time, however, Kisame had felt personally responsible and tagged along.
“My grandson and both daughters died,” the client said. She sat behind the desk in her study, face red and offended.
“But the target was poisoned,” Kakuzu repeated, seated alongside Kisame in one of the velvet-lined guest chairs across from her.
“Three towns were decimated,” the client said, voice shrill. “Even I got sick from it, all the way down here.”
“But the target was poisoned,” Kakuzu repeated.
“As you requested,” Kisame added on with much less enthusiasm. It was part of the incredibly uninspired script Kakuzu had given him.
“I didn’t ask for you took kill half a million wild animals!” the old woman yelled. Kisame winced. He did feel bad about that one. Between the poison he let get released, and the extra poison Sasori poured into the river to cover it up, it was doubtful anything would be able to grow along that stretch of Koburi River for years.
“But the target was poisoned,” Kakuzu reminded her.
The poor woman let out a wordless scream of frustration, and then pulled out her checkbook. Kisame followed a very pleased looking Kakuzu out of the office.
“I thought we might have to go down to 75%,” Kakuzu said after they’d left the client’s home. “But she broke easily. Weak.”
Kisame was pretty sure she was a seventy year old woman in mourning, but he chose not to comment.
They passed through the town market on the way out. The client lived in a town much further down Koburi River, so the water should be safe, but that didn’t stop sellers from adding bottled water to their wares. Handmade signs advertised fish and clams NOT from Koburi River. Kisame even spotted a sign in a booth selling pets that advertised a type of turtle now extinct in the wild.
Kakuzu paused in front of the turtle sign.
“Are these a popular pet?” he asked.
“We’re not breeding exotic turtles,” Kisame said.
“You may have created a market,” Kakuzu said. “It’s extinct now.”
Kisame sighed as Kakuzu started to engage the booth owner in conversation. They’d passed a sweets stand. Itachi would appreciate a box of junk food to add to his hoard.
The woman running the stand was seated on a stool, reading a newspaper with the headline MYSTERIOUS KOBURI RIVER MASS DEATH: OVER 500 DEAD AND COUNTING. Kisame did not make eye contact with her as he bought a box of mochi. When was he ever going to live this down?
The answer was the next Tuesday, when Hidan got into an argument with a client’s parrot.