Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Itachi will be waiting to meet her at the Red Blossom Tea House in five days. It’s a little place in the Land of Tea, just outside the borders of the Land of Fire. She nearly smacked Jiraiya when he told her, because that has given her approximately no time to return to Konoha, report to the Hokage, request leave, and then head to the Land of Tea, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

She infuses her next leap with a bit more chakra than one could say is strictly needed, and mentally apologizes to the tree when the branch flies clean off in her wake.

She tries to not murder any more unassuming flora on the way back, and by the time she reaches Konoha’s gates she can proudly say that she left the rest of the tree road exactly as she found it. She makes her way to the Missions Office, files her paperwork, and heads immediately to the Hokage Tower.

The guards are much less suspicious of her these days, but there are proper security channels nonetheless; it takes the pulling of some strings and utterances of top-secret codes to get an audience with the Hokage in all of two hours. About as top priority as you can be, short of flying through the window of the Hokage’s office, but Haruko doesn’t want to be killed by a twitchy ANBU guard so the two hour wait time is fine.

Two hours pass, and she slides open the door and steps into the room.

“Hokage-sama,” she says, bowing at the waist. “Ill news is an ill guest, yet the east wind is effervescent.” It’s an irritatingly poetic line that ultimately amounts to ‘I need to speak with you privately, nothing urgent but definitely important’, and Haruko envies Naruto’s ability to just slam the door open and speak his mind. Who the fuck calls the wind effervescent?

The Hokage taps a finger on the table and she feels the ANBU vanish.

“Haruko-san,” he says, evenly. “Report.”

“I need to leave the village, with intent to return as soon as possible,” she says, and the Hokage waits expectantly but she doesn’t elaborate. His brows tick down.

“Haruko-san, you are one of my elite Jounin. I cannot just allow you to come and go as you please.”

“I understand, Hokage-sama. However, I swear to you I am acting in the best interest of Konoha.”

His eyes narrow sharply, and his chakra is tightly controlled but she can feel it like the pressure of a cave-in all the same. “Is there a threat?” He asks, calmly, and Haruko needs to tread very carefully.

“Not as such,” she starts, “this is a… preventative measure.”

“Haruko-san, I can appreciate the desire for secrecy.” His tone sets her teeth on edge. “However, I cannot help but think you are hiding things from me, and I will not tolerate such behavior from my shinobi.”

Haruko’s face could be etched in marble. This is an astronomically stupid direction to take this conversation. It wouldn’t be if she was truly an unknown shinobi, but she has the backing of the Yamanaka clan head and the trust of arguably the strongest jounin in the village. The Hokage, in this moment, is both trying her patience and dragging her into an uncomfortable position.

If this is an attempt at a power play, the Hokage has greatly miscalculated. She’s frankly astounded that he would push about this. It must be some kind of test of her loyalties. He is quickly going to find that her loyalties, unfortunately for him, are to the village. She will not roll over for this ancient piece of history masquerading as their military dictator.

“Hokage-sama, I appreciate your candor. However, let me rephrase my initial intentions.” Sarutobi’s eyebrows pull down further. “I am leaving for a matter of time, with the intent to return.”

“You’re willing to disobey direct orders?”

“If they act against the interests of the village.”

“I could make you a missing-nin,” he responds, and Haruko is flabbergasted that Sarutobi has managed to make a request for leave dissolve into whatever the fuck this is.

“Who would you send after me?” She asks, incredulously, because what? “I surpassed Tsunade years ago. Who in this village would stand a chance against her, much less me?” It looks like he wants to say something, but she continues. “Sarutobi-sama, let me be clear. I am here because I love this village and the people in it. I want to help and protect them. The only thing you will be doing by removing me from Konoha is make it easier for Konoha to fall. If you’d like to take your chances without me, and leave Konoha without one of your biggest assets and whatever teams you send after me, feel free. I do not need you.”

This is asinine. The Hokage has to know that there is no benefit to any of that, and he has to know the position he is in with her. Did he think she was here because- what, because of him? His power? That she couldn’t leave? Her potential as a threat is far outweighed by her confirmation as not only an ally, but a powerful one. The Third Hokage had to have earned his title as The Professor, he can’t be this stupid. He had to know that if he pushed, she was in the position to push back. Did he think she wouldn’t?

This is a battle he can’t win in any sense of the word. She never thought about fighting the Third. She had no reason to. In this moment, however, she finds herself drawing up a battle strategy, just in case. She doesn’t think he is going to fight her, but the conversation took such a drastic left turn that she’s no longer truly sure. She doesn’t know what he’s trying to accomplish, but she has no patience for it.

The room is in a silence pressurized by the chakra of the Hokage and a deeply immovable Haruko. She doesn’t want her careful considerations for protocol and her village reputation to go out the window, but she will not sacrifice the future of this village for the man in front of her. She briefly wishes that her time’s Shikamaru was here, because he would have navigated this interaction with grace instead of her method of being blatantly insubordinate and hoping for the best, but she shuts that pain and that thought out.

The Hokage holds her glare before he nods, once, and the pressure in the room vanishes.

“Good.” He says, and Haruko has officially lost the thread of this entire moment. “You may take your leave. Return whenever you so desire.”

What. The fuck. Was this a test? Of what? For who?!

“Of course, Sarutobi-sama,” she says, barely managing to maintain any scrap of professionalism in the face of one of the Top Ten Most Confusing Encounters in Her Life. She exits the door and walks down the Hokage tower in a bit of a stupor, returning to her apartment and packing her things with all of the gears in her mind churning at full-throttle.

Had her dislike of the man completely thrown her perception of the conversation? Of his motives? He didn’t seem- happy, exactly, when he told her to leave, but he did seem almost satisfied. Did he want her to challenge him? She isn’t sure, and she tries her hardest to push it from her mind. She doesn’t want to go into a meeting with Itachi distracted.

That desire flies out the window when a brief look around for Kakashi sends her to the missions office, where she learns that the Tazuna mission is already underway.

She turns back for a moment, returning to her apartment and stocking her pack with extra provisions, and is thankful that Wave is not all that far from the Land of Tea.

She wasn’t expecting to be in and out of Konoha’s gates as quickly as she was. Her plan was to take the day, prepare, and file all of the necessary paperwork, but the Hokage had granted her blanket leave, apparently, and she was so thrown by the whole encounter that she wanted to be out of the village as soon as possible.

She’s glad for it, because she spends the first day on the tree road paths and it helps to center her. She arrives in the Land of Tea two days early, and it makes her feel better.

She relaxes in an inn an hour’s worth of travel away from the meeting place. She drinks rich tea, indulges in pricey food that she wouldn’t normally buy, and even buys herself a set of Kumihimo cords from a local artisan - two for her twin kodachi sheathes, even though the weapons themselves are sealed away until she’s sure she can use them efficiently, and one for her hair, which is as long as it has been since she was a child.

Her hair brushes the middle of her shoulder blades, and she is meeting Itachi today. She sweeps up her hair and uses her third new kumihimo cord to secure the now-commonplace high tail.

The air is misty-cool. Dew tickles her nose and gathers on the leather of her boots as she walks the final few minutes to the Red Blossom Tea House. It appears in the distance, a very traditionally styled garden buffeting an equally historical building exterior. The place is aptly named, and red spider lilies are tucked neatly into the earth surrounding the scarlet painted wood features of the teahouse.

Jiraiya has left a summons at the door, a sensor toad that all of his spies are apparently familiar with. She greets her politely. The toad is a pink, squat little thing that introduces herself as Gacchan. It’s unusual to introduce yourself with what is clearly a nickname, but the toads have always been just as eccentric as the rest of the great summons so she just nods and tells her to lead the way.

The teahouse is empty, and she isn’t sure if it’s due to the early hour, the S-Class missing nin, a payout from Jiraiya, or some combination of all three. Gacchan leads her to the very back corner. Uchiha Itachi is waiting for her.

“Uchiha Itachi, this is Amano Haruko. Haruko, this is Itachi. You’re both real, I promise!” The toad chirrups, before vanishing in a puff of smoke. They both know what the toad means, so Haruko is more amused than confused, but Itachi is unreadable.

There’s a brief silence.

“That’s some phrasing,” she says, at last, lowering herself onto a cushion across from Itachi. “I was starting to have doubts.”

The corner of his mouth twitches up, and it could very well be a ruse. A waiter with shaking fingers comes over to take their order before they can have any negotiations, and Haruko truly feels bad for the boy but she does want some tea so she doesn’t feel bad enough to not order.

Itachi surprises her with his tea request - she pegged him as a Gyokuro kind of person, not the sweet herbal tea he orders - but not with his opening move. Genjutsu.

It’s by far the best genjutsu she’s ever been on the receiving end of. He has an extremely delicate touch, and the genjutsu is subtle. Instead of creating anything physical, he is weaving a very skillful net of peace and trust through her nervous system. She grins and disrupts it.

He doesn’t startle, he’s far too dignified for that, but she can tell it wasn’t what he was expecting. She imagines most people don’t detect it.

“Beautiful work,” she says, and their waiter appears with their tea.

Itachi is silent as he prepares his to his taste, but the cup is halfway to his mouth when he stops and frowns.

“Release,” he says, softly, and the tea vanishes from his hands. He looks across the empty table to Haruko’s smug grin. She flicks a finger out to the back-of-house in the tea shop, just barely visible from her position.

“He’s still making it,” she says, satisfied at the interested look in his eyes.

“I compliment your talent,” Itachi says, formally, and Haruko is struck with an errant thought of how those manners would sound on Sasuke. She can’t picture it at all.

“And I yours. Anyone but me would have been completely unable to detect that.”

He demurs with a nod, and they wait in a half-awkward, half-tense silence for their tea to arrive properly. The waiter brings it after a few minutes, setting down two pots and two cups and a few accessories and additions, before he all-but flees from the table. Itachi looks at the tea and back to her.

“Am I to assume this tea is real?” He asks, a flicker of amusement in his features.

It startles a breathy laugh from Haruko. She didn’t even know Uchiha could have a sense of humor.

“As real as you and I, according to Gacchan,” she replies, and she pours herself a cup. She doesn’t add anything to her own tea, a house specialty Hojicha, and it’s beautifully bracing. “Now, let’s talk business.”

Itachi waits expectantly, making a ‘go on’ sort of gesture with his hands that somehow manages to be one of the most graceful things she’s ever seen. She’s kind of envious of his poise. She pulls herself out of a passing thought that Itachi would do amazingly in kunoichi lessons, because it started to go to weird places, and she wants to be productive.

“I am your new contact in Konoha. On behalf of the Third, and of Jiraiya, I apologize sincerely for our lack of communication to this point.” Itachi is tightly controlled, unreadable, but she knows he must be suspicious. He may have received her genjutsu in good humor, but she knows that it shifted his view of her.

Shinobi at their level, by nature, ultimately acclimatize to the knowledge that they can kill practically anybody they want. It isn’t quite complacency, because Itachi is too good of a shinobi for that, but she knows he that he, on some level, didn’t acknowledge her as a threat until she managed to ensnare him in a genjutsu.

It’s not his fault, more than any Jounin is at fault for assuming they could easily trounce a genin. It’s usually true, after all.

“We’ve been putting things in place,” she continues.

“To what end?” He asks.

“The complete destruction of the Akatsuki.” The first crack in Itachi’s pristine self control appears, an incredulous turn of his brows before he smooths it out. “We aren’t necessarily planning on killing all of them,” as much as she would like to, “but they must be eliminated in one way or another. I have my own ideas on who could be convinced to leave the Akatsuki, but I’m sure you know better than I. I will be handling things on the outside, to damage their reputation and diminish their ability to work. The more money-motivated may have to leave entirely if Akatsuki can’t afford them.” Haruko pauses, making an opening for Itachi. He frowns.

“Only one of our number is motivated purely by money. The rest are all zealots, in some way or another. That will be harder to discourage.”

“We don’t need to discourage it, we just need to turn it against the Akatsuki’s interest. Even the money for specialized shinobi equipment is a significant sum, and if the missing nin can’t afford to outfit themselves or train their specialties, they may leave.”

Itachi looks uncertain. “I do not think many will be swayed by a lack of money.”

“That’s okay. If even one of them is, then it will be a worthwhile venture. Besides, the outside influence isn’t why we’re meeting. I intend to fully utilize your position as a double agent.”

“How so?”

“I need you to gain the trust of the Uchiha member.”

The atmosphere is suddenly ice, their tenuous alliance standing on the edge of a knife as Haruko is pinned in place by Sharingan vermillion.

“We have no Uchiha member aside from myself.”

Fuck.

“You will. You know him. When the time comes, I need you to be the only person he trusts.”

Itachi scrutinizes her for a long, agonizing moment. Haruko tries to not falter under the weight of her blunder; she knew it was a possibility that ‘her’ Akatsuki wasn’t fully assembled, but she assumed that Obito was visibly present the whole time.

“How do you know this?” He asks.

A crossroads. Before she arrived, Haruko considered, heavily, telling Itachi the truth. If anyone would believe the possibility without a second thought, it very well might be an Uchiha. Itachi’s eye manipulates perception of time, and through a deeply unfortunate encounter with Sasuke, she knows of Izanami and Izanagi. Their eyes can literally go back in time and create time loops, and something like that has to be talked about all over to the most ‘powerful’ of their clan, because the Uchiha are nothing if not relentlessly prideful.

“I cannot speak of such things.”

She ultimately decides not to risk it. She needs him to not think she’s crazy, and even the one percent chance of that is too much. She also, to be perfectly fair to herself, has practically no idea who this man is. ‘Loyal to Konoha’ is about all she knows about Uchiha Itachi, the man. Everything else is Uchiha Itachi, the S-Class missing-nin-turned-mercenary. Not a shot she’s letting him know who she is right now.

It feels strangely like a victory when there’s the briefest flashes of irritation in his eyes, but it passes by, replaced with understanding. He also has a disgusted downturn to the very corners of his mouth, and Haruko is confused.

“I see the roots of the tree still have their hands in matters,” he says, and, oh. That’s- a reasonable assumption, even if she, too, is disgusted by the thought. She’s also left with the impression that Itachi was not only involved in above-ground ANBU, but that Danzo had him under his thumb more thoroughly than just blackmailing him to carry out the coup, which… she needs to do something about that. ROOT is a hornet’s nest of actions and ramifications that she hasn’t quite felt the need to kick, but she needs to figure something out.

“So, my orders are to gain the trust of this theoretical Uchiha member if they join?”

“When, yes. And, if you can, the goal is general internal destabilization. I don’t want you to draw attention to yourself, but if you can whisper in anyone’s ear without doing so, that would be supremely helpful.”

Itachi drinks the rest of his tea in silence, and Haruko is resigned to wait but she really hopes she hasn’t fucked this up. She needs Itachi to work with her, here, and eventually trust her in some capacity, because she will likely have to ask him to do things that will seem insane without the context of her future knowledge. She isn’t exactly antsy, but it is a limit-stretching effort to keep herself still and calm in her seat.

He finishes off his drink and, at last, returns his full attention to her.

“If these are my orders, I will carry them out.” Haruko could wilt in relief. “However,” he continues, and Haruko tries very hard to not despair, “one genjutsu genius to another, I will not continue our meetings unless we can have an infallible method in the way of identity affirmation. Gacchan will not always be available, and if we need to communicate in haste, we cannot rely on a third party.”

“That’s reasonable,” she responds, warily, “what do you have in mind?”

“A chakra seal.”

What.

“What.” And it’s a rhetorical question. Itachi is definitely amused.

“It’s my condition. They need to be invisible, and that is beyond my skill, but perhaps we can enlist Jiraiya-sama.”

She holds up her hand and shakes her head.

“Wait, wait, wait. I can do the basic seals myself, I’ve got some experience in that area,” she says, waving vaguely to the seal on her forehead, “and I can put it inside of the body. It won’t be an issue. But, Itachi-san,” she puts her hand palm-down on the table, half reaching out, “you are aware of what you’re asking for?”

Chakra seals of this nature are unorthodox, to say the least. The premise is similar to a storage seal. Even, to a much lesser extent, her Seal of a Hundred; it is at its bare-bones an amount of chakra sealed inside the body. Sealing someone else’s chakra inside your own body has been done, and likely for reasons exactly like Itachi’s, but it’s wildly invasive at best and downright lethal at worst.

The seal itself isn’t inherently much risk, but if one shinobi betrays the other, it can be an easy and instant death. You could overload the other body with foreign chakra, burn out someone’s coils, manipulate the seal. There’s a whole host of other options if you’re really creative.

If you’re less talented with chakra control, or more straightforward, the physical contact required will leave you vulnerable anyways. It would be easy work to stab someone in the back in any number of ways during the process.

Aside from that, even if there’s no betrayal there — putting someone else’s chakra in your body is a deeply intimate experience. Not sexually, in any sense, but given that half of your chakra is spiritual energy, you’re practically giving a piece of your soul to someone else and letting them hang onto it.

“I do understand,” Itachi says, evenly, bringing her back to the present. “It is my condition.”

She is about to know much more about Itachi’s soul than she planned, it seems. She takes a stabilizing breath, likely the first of many.

“You said that you have the necessary skills and knowledge to make a seal? Inside the body?” He clarifies, and she nods. “Forgive me, but I will request of you to perform this process on yourself, first,” he says, and it’s not unreasonable but she grits her teeth.

It’s impossible to not be on edge, given what they’re about to do, and it makes her nervous system feel like it’s pulling against her body. She instinctually does not want to do this with someone she trusts so little. Her life is, very literally, about to be in Itachi’s hands.

She tries to remind herself that she has a plan, a long game, and goals she needs realized. It cannot be understated how helpful Itachi will be in this venture, and in this moment he has just forced her into a very limited set of opening strategies.

This is her first move, she just has to make it.

“Alright,” she agrees, and if it’s spoken through clenched teeth, any elite shinobi would allow that given what they are about to do. “I can carve the seals into our ribs with medical chakra. Will your Sharingan be able to detect it?”

“Yes,” he informs, with a nod. “I will not be able to see it in the true visual sense, but I will be able to see a disturbance in the chakra. If you activate the seal, I will be able to see it with my Sharingan active.”

“Okay,” she says, trying to breathe out her tension. “Then from you, I ask that in the future, once you confirm my identity, I be allowed to use my medical skills to scan your body. I will be able to see the carvings in your bones.”

“Of course,” he agrees, smoothly, and unstated is the fact that all of that will only happen if he doesn’t kill her immediately when they form her seal.

With the helpful direction of the tea house staff, they end up in a private garden reserved for VIP guests. It’s got a water feature, a zen garden, and a high stone wall. Her and Itachi are by the water, because she wants to sit by the fucking water and she is in charge here even if Itachi is making the demands.

“Are you ready?” She asks Itachi, and she braces at his answering nod. She pulls off her shirt, which seems to startle him, but she certainly wasn’t going to just pull it up and hope it didn’t get in the way. Even if she didn’t have chest wrappings, she certainly isn’t concerned with modesty, of all things. It becomes drastically less important in life-or-death situations, which one could argue this is.

“Put your hands on my ribs, and when I say, release your chakra into my body.”

Itachi moves closer, and it’s a mark of her self control that she doesn’t flinch back. He wraps his hands around her ribs, delicate fingers on bare skin.

“Holy fuck, your hands are fucking freezing,” she hisses, through her teeth.

“I apologize,” he says, but his eyes are laughing at her.

“Shut up,” she breathes, because fuck him, and also she does need to focus. It’s rude but he takes it in stride, and she’s thankful for the grace when it comes to her impoliteness because she is currently trying to carve a seal into her ribs and it isn’t exactly a picnic.

Itachi has his Sharingan active, and she isn’t sure what he’s looking at because it isn’t like it’s the fucking Byakugan, but she cannot bring herself to close her eyes against the distraction. She painstakingly etches each line into the delicate bones of her ribcage, and it isn’t any sort of crippling pain, but it feels bizarre.

She doesn’t know how much time passes, but Itachi’s hands have grown warm against her skin and the sun is visibly elsewhere when she at last adds the finishing touches and braces herself for the next discomfort.

“Okay,” she says, “go for it.”

Itachi’s chakra is like ink. It’s smooth and dark and rich, flowing cool, and it reminds her of the soft whhshhh of ink and brush whispering against paper. It feels like he's painting in her skin.

It’s got another element to it, a lingering taste like smoke in her mouth and a charred feeling like ash crumbling and clinging to her ribs.

She’s left with the unsettling impression that Uchiha Itachi is a man that regrets being alive. She knows this instinctively to be true, the biggest part of his soul, and they don’t exactly write down how this process feels and she is filled with apprehension because she has no idea what her chakra is going to leave Itachi with.

“That’s- enough, stop-“ she chokes, and his hands retract immediately. They don’t take the sensation with them, and Haruko’s hands curl and she folds over her ribs and tries to adjust to the feeling. Part of him has taken up residence inside of her, like something living in her body and she wants it gone but it has to be there so she clenches and unclenches her hands and gasps against the feeling until she gets herself under control.

“Okay,” she tries, and clears her throat when it comes out shaky. “Okay, are you ready?”

His brows come down, and the most open display of emotion she has gotten from him thus far is this concern. She isn’t sure if it’s for her or for him, but it’s plain on his face. “Are you?” He asks, and she glares at him.

“I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t.”

His response is to unbutton his Akatsuki cloak, and he grabs the hem of his black undershirt before looking at her as if to confirm that this is, in fact, what he needs to do. She waves a hand at him, ushering him to continue, not wasting her words as she wrestles the last bits of her frantic breathing down.

She’s sure he would like to pretend he is unaffected, but he’s the same as her. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, it’s deeply entrenched in the very cells of every shinobi to not bare your vulnerable spots like they are doing today.

It’s the equivalent of a cat rolling over and showing you their soft and squishy underbelly, and neither of them even fucking know each other. Itachi can act as sleekly unruffled as he likes. She can see the way all of his muscles are tensed, and the way one of his feet is planted as if to launch away from her at a moment’s notice.

She places her hands around the curve of his ribs and it is, in a strange way, a powerfully euphoric feeling. She could kill one of the most powerful shinobi who ever lived, right now, and he would only live long enough for her to see the betrayal register. The feeling passes because, truth be told, she mostly just feels uncomfortable, and she wants this to be over.

She breathes in and pushes her medical chakra into Itachi’s chest cavity.

Oh, she thinks. That’s not good.

There’s a sickness in his lungs. She wouldn’t be surprised if symptoms are minuscule or haven’t manifested yet — it’s barely there, only the beginnings of a swirling shadow crawling up the organs, and she leaves it. If this all goes to shit and Itachi is an enemy one day, she’d rather have the upper hand than not. She'll accept any problems sleeping at night as a trade off.

She brushes off the observation and moves onto his ribs. He makes the most minute of movements beneath her hands as she scrapes the first line into him, not quite a flinch, but an instinctive reaction to the very unique discomfort of your bones being touched and manipulated by chakra. She imagines there’s only a handful of people who would know what this even sort of feels like. She hasn’t even gotten to the chakra insertion yet.

His breathing is even as she does her work, and it doesn’t hitch when she finishes and he knows what’s coming. If anything, it seems like she is more worried about it than he is, because she wants to know what he learns from her chakra, but she may never know and she has to let it go and do this.

“Okay, Itachi-san. Are you ready?”

“At your leisure.”

She exhales any anxiety and allows her unfiltered, raw chakra to flood into the seal. His breath does hitch, this time, and she feels the exact moment the seal is filled to its capacity and she cuts off the flow immediately. She pulls her hands back like Itachi is on fire, and her heart sinks when she looks at Itachi’s face.

There is unfiltered shock there, only present for a second before it’s wiped away into a perfect, expressionless facade.

What did he feel, what did he feel?! Is screaming in her head, but she knows he won’t say if she asks. They’re at a bit of a standstill, Haruko at the disadvantage, and she really does not like how often that has happened over the past few days. Itachi is stone-cold unreadable as he pulls on his shirt and cloak, and Haruko hopes that this wasn’t a colossal fucking mistake.

***

Haruko finally arrives in Wave Country, and her ribs still feel like a foreign entity. It’s better, but she knows it will take some time to get used to. It isn’t that she feels Itachi’s sentient presence, or anything like that — it isn’t as if they’ve mind-melded or actually become living parts of one another — it’s just strange to know that part of his spiritual energy is quite literally inside of her. If she brushes up against it, she can feel the ink-dark swirls, and it’s deeply off-putting.

That, and she can feel the physical carvings in her ribs. She knows that it’s only due to her downright freakish internal body awareness, and there’s nothing to be done about that.

Time is the only coping method, here, and she grudgingly accepts the discomfort as necessary. It’s the price she’s had to pay to secure Itachi as an asset, and it’s that thought that keeps her steps unwavering as she closes in on Tazuna’s house.

She couldn’t quite remember where it was, but getting information like that in a primarily civilian society like Wave is kiddie work to a shinobi.

It’s evening time, a muggy humidity is pressing in on her skin and making her hair go wild with tangles, and Haruko is relieved when the house comes into view. She comes to a halt in a treetop with a thick branch facing Tazuna’s house, and she sees Team Seven through the open paper doors. They’re having dinner. Warmth blooms in her chest as she takes in the sight.

Kakashi and Sakura are chatting— or, at least, Sakura is, but she knows that Kakashi is listening intently. He is giving her intermittent responses and Haruko feels a weird stab of jealousy for his regard before she packs it away. She turns her gaze to Naruto, who is bickering with Sasuke, but they both have unguarded friendly affection in their eyes and it throws Haruko for a fucking loop.

Maybe she’s being unfair, expecting Sasuke to have not changed at all, even if she knew that as a child he did have some sort of regard for them, but it’s right before her eyes plain as day. Something is shifting. She— doesn’t know how to feel about it.

Her musings are interrupted when Kakashi’s eyes flick up to the treeline, and she knows that he knows there’s someone here. He probably smelled her before he sensed her, which means he may already know it’s her, but she extends her chakra in his direction and allows it to wrap around him in greeting all the same.

She doesn’t show herself to Team Seven, and she isn’t planning to. This mission is critical for them, for all of them. They need to do it on their own. She can only hope that it holds even half of the meaning for this Team Seven as it did for hers. She doesn’t know how it will affect the mission, having Zabuza sworn to not kill any of them, but if Wave isn’t this Team Seven’s turning point, well. She thinks of Sasuke, now downright smiling at Naruto even though it’s barely-there, and can only hope that they will turn out even better for it.

She watches as they finish dinner and clean up, and she is tired. She leans against the trunk of the tree, one arm rested on a pulled up knee, and she tries to meditate to take her mind off of the still innate feeling of incorrect, Do Not Like emanating from her ribs.

“Yo,” she hears, and she nearly jumps out of her goddamn skin because Kakashi can still sneak up on her for reasons known only to the gods. Unfortunately, being taken by surprise means she cannot hide the way she winces and curls in, and Kakashi doesn’t miss it. She looks over at him, sheepish, and meets his lone and deeply apprehensive eye.

“Do I even want to know?”

She barks out a laugh.

“Not fucking at all,” she says, and it does not ease him in the slightest.