In the history of the world, there had probably been worse Tuesdays. Aiko couldn't think of one off-hand, but that was probably more her fault than that of the universe at large. She had sensed other shinobi approaching, but she hadn't expected them to be especially high level or to be an organized team. All she could do was push Ando-san's team into moving along in hopes that whoever it was would find them uninteresting.
The only people who should have bothered to disturb her would be small-time missing nin without more profitable ventures than harassing travelers. That level of threat was one that she could handle easily.
But the three-man team that had touched down in front of her were wearing Iwa forehead protectors and smirking. The combination didn't bode well.
The four shinobi waited in what was a tense stand-off, at least on Aiko's end. She kept her face locked into boredom. After a few seconds of silence, the Iwa shinobi's smiles seemed a bit forced. What, were they waiting for her to shriek and flail? Not happening.
Slowly, hostile chakras began seeping, weighing the air down. Yepp. They were spoiling for a fight.
Chusei was outright shaking from exposure to killing intent, but Fukuju appeared to be frozen stiff.
'Not good. Three on one is poor enough odds when I'm not responsible for two people who are panicking.'
"Pull yourself together," Aiko ordered, harsh times leaving no room for coddling. "Stay out of the way."
It was an odd situation, but she could win this. Talking them down would be preferable—this had to be a mix-up or coincidence. Sure, she had a bounty, and Obito's warnings about what happened to girls with bloodlines were ringing in her ears, but she pushed the thoughts down. After all, it wasn't as if they knew who she was.
"Uzumaki," the tall man with silky black hair hanging loose greeted civilly.
'Oh, hell.'
And hell was exactly what broke loose with a flurry of motion.
~~~
Something clenched in his chest at the hidden fear he recognized on Aiko's face, but he had a job to do. Obito pressed his lips together and remained unseen. It wasn't hard. She was too busy to look for him at the moment.
It had been a cruel stroke to make her think of the explanation she had been given for why it was important to keep her identity quiet, but a necessary one. Desperation would erode her capabilities for rational thought and make her more reliant on instinct.
She wasn't in real danger, after all. Not when the Iwa-nin chasing her were under control of his genjutsu.
Obito had hired them through an intermediary. They weren't actually contracted for the purpose of bringing Aiko in, of course. It would be far too dangerous to actually let Iwagakure know where an Uzumaki could be found outside of a village's protection. The Tsuchikage would have enjoyed that far too much and sent the proper amount of shinobi to take care of the problem.
A three-man Jounin squad controlled through hypnosis was perfect for Obito's purposes. They were swift and skilled enough that Aiko was hard-pressed to defend herself and the two civilians that she traveled with, but not so numerous that she didn't have the skill set to fend them off. She was merely unable to gain the upper hand.
'It is a shame that I have to lie to her.' He licked his lips, eyes nearly going dry from lack of blinking in his intense focus of the running fight. 'But this is the best way. I've come too far to go back. And having the Rinnegan won't hurt her. Besides, helping her activate her chakra chains is a favor. A powerful, long-distance ninjutsu is a rare skill.'
From what he understood, the chains functioned something like Sharingan did, in that need and fear for one's life made it much easier to manifest the bloodline. Unlike his eyes, chakra chains were a pure manifestation of will upon the environment, so Aiko should have little difficulty learning to use them once she was first startled into recognizing that she could.
Indirectly, her dedication to her act as a mundane, harmless civilian was a boon to his plan. There weren't many weapons that could be totally concealed while going undercover, and senbon weren't going to be enough to win Aiko this fight. Her taijutsu and speed were more than up to par, but without a weapon or ninjutsu to close the gap, she was struggling.
She was a blur in the distance, trading blows with one shinobi before she darted off to pull one away from her self-assigned charges. Very foolish, and rather more sentimental than Obito would have predicted. If Aiko gave up on keeping the civilians alive, she would have much less difficulty with her opponents.
'On the other hand, Kushina did claim that positive emotion was key,' Obito mused thoughtfully. 'Perhaps Aiko would be more easily inspired in protecting others than herself.'
The thought was inspiration to allow the man fighting Aiko to pull her slightly away from her charges (still running to the perceived safety of the village not ten miles away). Their cargo had been abandoned at the first sign of trouble, which made Aiko the only employee doing her job here. Quitters. That made him feel a little better about directing the kunoichi of the Iwa team to swoop in a bee-line, gathering angry, hot chakra that he knew Aiko could sense.
She was too far to run in time to intercept. Either this would work, or there would be some crispy civilian corpses in a moment.
'Come on, Aiko. You can do it. Reach.'
The eerie glow of blueish-white that lit the clearing brought an incredible feeling of satisfaction. If he hadn't been maintaining silence, he might have laughed in relief.
'Ridiculous. I thought that her file indicated that her chakra chains were subpar,' Obito noted, satisfied and duly impressed as Aiko's jutsu rocketed out and speared the other kunoichi, dragging the body twenty feet before colliding with an outcropping of rock. 'Either Tsunade is mad, or Aiko has gotten better with them.'
As much as he'd like to claim responsibility for that—he had invested a great deal of effort into her training—if anything he would have thought that her chakra chains would be less impressive than previously. Her chakra control when he had begun training her had been childish and inexpert, as if she was constantly miscalculating the effort needed to expend the correct proportions of yin and yang energies. She had made great strides in the past months, but still.
Ah, well.
Obito ducked back another hundred feet to ensure that Aiko would be unable to sense his chakra expenditure, and flicked through the handseals to form his projection. Zetsu wavered into visibility. "Now," Obito ordered curtly. He cut off the jutsu immediately, and bounded back to watch the end of the fight. Luckily, Aiko hadn't taken long to cut through the aggressive Iwa nin, and one more followed nearly instantaneously. She looked shocked even from his distant view, but easily bisected the last shinobi when he moved toward her.
Three silhouettes- Aiko, and the two men who had been hired to move Ando-san's merchandise—stood still for a moment, backlit by the fading glow. But when Aiko's knees hit the ground, someone gave a surprised shout—and the scum ran off!
Obito actually felt a bit indignant on Aiko's behalf as her eyes slid shut and she collapsed face-down into the grass, unintentionally letting her hair tangle in the growing puddle of blood watering the turf from her last kill. He shunshined to her side and pulled her out of the mess before she got soaked.
That lack of loyalty was disgusting. She'd just saved their miserable lives from- well, him- and that was how they repaid her?
'I'll kill them later,' Obito decided, gently rolling Aiko over and hefting her in his arms. Limp as she was, she felt far too light to be the same person who had sliced a man's spine in half like she was cutting pudding. He brushed off the three swollen blobs of Hashirama wood latched onto the crook of Aiko's neck and let them fall with a plop, crushing them under his heel before they could grow into Zetsu clones.
First priority was taking Aiko to Zetsu, so that she could get taken care of and then be allowed to regenerate chakra and awaken… somewhere far away and safe from Black Zetsu. Second priority was cleaning up these very distinctive kills. Third, he'd find the runners before they had a chance to get too far.
A twinge of guilt bothered him. Obito sighed, frowning off in the direction that they'd run. 'Perhaps I will allow Aiko to make the decision on their fates.'
She really did seem to like them, after all, and these silly drug running missions had solved some of their problems. It had been relatively safe for Aiko, had kept her busy, and had made Kakuzu happy. It would be unnecessarily unkind to close that door for her.
He readjusted the weight in his arms closer to his chest, glancing down fondly. Aiko would probably be both miffed and confused when she woke up, as his need to persuade her to awaken her bloodline had trumped her hobby.
Guilt pulled again, and damnit that was ridiculous. This- this wasn't morally acceptable, and he knew that. He shouldn't lie to her, it wasn't nice to lie to friends (and in an odd way she was, he hadn't had a friend in a very long time but he could still recognize the signs). But this one moral violation was so insignificant in face of the fact that he was going to make it all better. He was going to make a perfect world.
He'd tell Aiko then. Surely she wouldn't hold it against him.
His arms tensed a little with the effort of holding another human being without harming them. When had been the last time he had done that? A decade, probably. Obito pulled himself through Kamui—and wondered not for the first time at the reflexive jolt that Aiko made, even in her unconscious state. Well, that ruled out his theory that she subconsciously associated Kamui travel with the day he had accidentally frightened her in Konoha. That was something of a relief, although the discovery only raised more questions.
'Now is not the time.'
Carefully, he deposited her on a bed in a hideout that she had never been to. He did not trust Zetsu alone with Aiko at all, but there were things that absolutely could not be put off. Zetsu was relatively close—perhaps ten minutes away. That gave Obito plenty of time to flicker back to the scene of Aiko's fight and destroy the evidence, catch the cowardly civilians and dump them for safekeeping in a cell below ground, and move back to her side several minutes before Zetsu appeared at the door. Obito's heart was pounding even as he handed Zetsu the little glass bottle he had been holding onto since he had killed Nagato.
Obito felt the oddest urge to reach out and squeeze Aiko's limp hand when Zetsu briskly jabbed her with enough drugs to keep her unconscious and unfeeling for quite some time.
What a useless gesture. First of all, she wasn't conscious to appreciate the thought. More relevantly, Zetsu couldn't know that he actually liked the girl at all. As far as Zetsu was concerned, Aiko was completely disposable.
(It pained him to think it, but with the Eye of the Moon plan, she was. Even if he had decided he needed Madara and killed her to get the old man back, she would be revived in full once he had succeeded. So really, there was no logical reason at all for his heartbeat to pick up the way that it did).
He was far too experienced a shinobi to get queasy about a little thing like the calm way that Zetsu pinned Aiko's eyelids open with senbon and carefully scooped out her unseeing eyes, using careful flicks to sever the nerves just so in order that they might be neatly reattached to her shiny new set. The way that Aiko whimpered slightly in her sleep shouldn't have shaken him either.
Still. Obito glanced away to the side, just in time to miss Zetsu giving him a shifty glance and hurriedly pop the eyes in his open mouth like candy.
(It wasn't like they were worth storing, after all, and they were rather pretty.)
He stayed as Zetsu underwent the laborious process of guiding Madara's eyes into Aiko's sockets and attached them. There was a bit of a scare when they discovered that the size didn't line up exactly, but Zetsu did some voodoo that made it work. Obito winced, and made a mental note to get a doctor at some point very soon to make sure that everything would be alright.
The plant man hummed low, sending green chakra into Aiko's flesh through the pale hand laid across her brow. "It will take days to establish an average measurement, but the eyes are pulling on her depleted reserves. I might estimate that they are going to require twenty to thirty percent of her chakra at any given time."
"We expected that," Obito replied with a calm he didn't feel.
So much could go wrong. Those eyes had been Madara's—they had been Sharingan at one point. For all he knew they could be parasitic, maintain hints of his chakra, show Aiko images that Madara had memorized with his Sharingan, or they could be rejected by Aiko's body in a mundane but still dangerous issue of genetic incompatibility.
'She's an Uzumaki. It should be fine.'
"Will there be any side effects from the drugs?"
Zetsu gave him a curious look, but answered promptly as he began to drift out of the room. "She should wake up within four to five hours with a terrible taste in her mouth and no recollection of anything since first losing consciousness." With that he was gone.
"Fine," Obito said to a nearly empty room. Fine. He felt like the worst kind of monster as he bundled the girl up in sheets to pick her up again. He didn't quite feel worthy of touching her directly at the moment. That didn't stop him from moving them back to another safehouse with Kamui—one in the land of Lightning, far away from Zetsu despite the fact that she was probably safe from him now. Obito didn't need the plant man putting more spores on her.
'Doctor, doctor, I should get her a doctor for an examination at least, just to make sure there aren't any complications.' Logistical concerns ran through his head as he carefully settled her down on a couch and fetched a glass of cold water to leave beside her for when she woke. After a moment's contemplation, he grabbed an apple as well. Water wouldn't do much for a bad taste in her mouth, after all.
'Taking her to a doctor is too risky. She'll get much better care here under my supervision. Where do I get a doctor for her?'
Konoha had the best medical program in the world, but they were right out of the question. Putting Aiko in reach of anyone who recognized her would be a terrible idea, as would putting her within conversational distance of a shinobi who wasn't loyal to Obito. Shinobi were trained in psyche analysis and how to survive or recognize when they weren't going to survive a hostage situation—there were too many complicating factors. He couldn't risk someone persuading Aiko that she wanted to leave. Obito didn't want to think about what he would have to do to stop her if she tried to escape. Tobi's suggestion of breaking her legs was a conservative estimate of what he would have to do, but it would be a good start. No, that needed to be avoided at all costs.
Where on earth was he going to get a medic-nin who wouldn't recognize Aiko and wouldn't question why Obito had her isolated in the middle of nowhere instead of in a hospital?
The answer came quite suddenly. He wasn't, there was no such medical ninja. On the other hand, he could easily find a civilian practitioner, persuade them to stay a few weeks or months with a patient using genjutsu, and drop them off safely with a fat paycheck once they had done their job.
That would also help keep this incident off any shinobi radar. No one paid that much attention to the people outside of their direct purview.
He left and returned not two hours later with a confused middle-aged man. Fujihito-sensei was under the impression that he had traveled to a house in the country by wagon. The doctor toddled off to put his bags in the guest room that would be his before returning with the tools he would need for an examination.
At that point, Obito very carefully ensured that he hadn't dazed the doctor too much. He knew very little about medicine, but he did suspect that it required a clear head.
Luckily, that was when Aiko woke up—a good hour before Zetsu's earliest estimate, Obito noted. Uzumaki constitution indeed—which made it easier for the good doctor to gauge her symptoms.
~~~
Aiko woke up with a splitting headache and tears leaking out from her eyelashes. She tried to open her eyes—and immediately regretted it. Light was downright painful.
If asked later, she would forever deny that the sound she let out was a pathetic little whimper. But it totally was.
"Oh, shit, I didn't think about that," a familiar voice muttered, before raising slightly. "Aiko, don't try to open your eyes yet. You're overstimulated. Just let me get the light." Obito. Obito was here.
Wait. Where was here? The last thing she remembered was fighting Iwa-nin… weird glowing metal sprouting from her back… and then feeling tired and eating dirt. Lovely. Obito had probably come looking for her. She should thank him for that at some point. How embarrassing.
"How am I supposed to work in the dark?" a second voice asked in bemusement.
That man was not familiar at all. She tensed, muscles thrumming even as they creaked painfully. She trusted Obito, she really did, but waking up all but blind in a place that was definitely not where she last remembered being was unsettling enough without knowing that there was a stranger hovering.
Thank kami for Obito, who must have known what she was thinking.
"Aiko, this is Fujihito-sensei," he said quietly, his voice nearing again. "He's here to make sure that you're alright. I didn't expect- your eyes," Obito changed the subject abruptly. "You- well." He cleared his throat. "I think that you awakened your bloodline. You look a bit, um different."
'His voice gets oddly high when he's nervous,' Aiko noted. At another time she might have been distressed, but she felt oddly sluggish and heavy. A result of chakra drain, perhaps? She felt like she'd been banging around inside a spinning dryer for an hour: sore, hot, and depleted.
And apparently when she had passed out on the ground, something had crawled in her mouth and died. Oh god, what was that taste—rotten squirrel? Spiders and mold?
Nearly the instant that she made a disgusted face, Aiko felt a warm hand guiding her into a seated position on what must be a couch. A moment later, a cold glass was pressed in her grip.
God, Obito was a saint.
She drained the water in one go, only belatedly taking note of how thirsty she was. Far too late, she realized that she hadn't replied to what Obito had said and that she didn't exactly remember what it had been. She was feeling a bit off, really.
"I'm feeling a bit off," Aiko summarized thickly, swallowing. God, what was happening? There was just no reason for this kind of awakening. Was waking up after chakra exhaustion always like this?
She drifted in and out, gradually acclimating to the light enough to peel her eyes open. Obito hovered like a worried mother hen, so she docilely answered the questions that Fuji-fuji-the bearded man asked her. Aiko didn't even reach out and suckerpunch the old man for shining a light in her eyes. She was a little proud of that.
Aiko didn't remember falling asleep, but gaining consciousness again was a memorable experience. The thick haze had totally fled, leaving her instead feeling pain from her sinuses out to her ears, centering around her disgustingly dry eyes. She blinked furiously in an attempt to stimulate tears. No matter how much she blinked, her vision remained oddly cloudy—like she was looking through a tinted lens.
Well, that couldn't be good.
'I think it's fair to say that Obito was right about something weird happening with my eyes. Why did I want this again?' She laid very, very still, and tried not to draw any more of the universe's attention.
The chakra chains had been cool. No joke, the experience had been one of effortless destructive power. It had been thrilling for the forty seconds that it had lasted. Obito's description of how useful the jutsu could be had undersold it, if anything. She could understand why he would have thought that the chains were worth a change in eyes.
Assuming, of course, that this was a very temporary side effect. Was she going to be this sore and fatigued regularly?
What the hell did Obito even know about what had happened? She hadn't maintained consciousness for three minutes after activating the bloodline he was so excited about. Had that enormous chakra drain been from the chakra chains, or a result of whatever had happened to her eyes? If the energy drain had been from the chains, then there was no way she was using them again, especially against a jinchuuriki. What a stupid, useless bloodline.
Had her eyes been like this yesterday when she had passed out? She didn't remember them itching. Was it because she had failed to de-activate them or whatever?
'A mirror might be nice. I need to know what's happened.'
Of course, getting up was a nearly insurmountable effort. Aiko peeled herself off the sheets with a grimace, unpleasantly reminded that she had clearly missed at least one shower. One cold bare foot had barely touched down on the floor before Obito crested the door, already frowning at her.
"Should you be up? I think that you should lie down." Still, he stepped into the room and immediately helped her to her feet with a steadying arm around her waist.
"I have a headache," Aiko said dryly. "My legs aren't broken."
Obito made a dissenting noise in the back of his throat, and his fingers twitched on her back.
'He looks tired,' Aiko realized. 'How long was I out?'
Wow, she really needed to know what was going on. "I don't suppose I could get a hand mirror?"
"Uh, yeah-" he moved to jerk away, and then paused. "Wait. I don't have a hand mirror."
That seemed important, in retrospect. "I don't either. Help me to the little girls' room?" she asked sardonically, hating how weak she felt.
The girl she saw in the mirror didn't match up with her expectations. The skin around her eyes was swollen and red, which provided a nice contrast to the purple bruising underneath them. The rest of her face was wan, and her hair was—was that dried blood? Aiko cringed.
And that was the part of the package that didn't include her freakish new peepers. She made a distressed sound, leaning forward almost until her nose touched the glass.
"They don't even look like eyes," she realized, grimacing.
There was a soft scrape against the floor as Obito shifted his feet. She could see cautious concern on his face in the mirror. He hovered uncertainly at her shoulder, dark eyes locked on her face. "They're not so bad."
They were that bad. When she had asked about the Rinnegan, he'd described them as purple. She'd thought that meant that the teal part of her eyes would turn purple! Not that the white and the black parts of her eyes would meld together.
'How am I even seeing?' She shuddered. 'That doesn't even make sense. I guess I don't know what the white part of the eye is for, but I know that the pupil is the part that humans see through.'
"Do I still have a pupil?" she asked herself aloud, blinking slowly. It was rhetorical. She couldn't see it, but she had to have a pupil. Otherwise she would be blind. And that would be a particularly crappy bloodline limit.
A theory was forming—but she couldn't see any possible benefit to developing a purple film over her regular eye. That seemed to be what had happened, however. The type of substance was—well, it had to be partially transparent from looking out of the eye, and opaque from an observer's standpoint. She had no idea what it might be made of—she wasn't a medic of any sort. Maybe the doctor that she remembered seeing when she first woke could help.
'So this is probably a new layer over my regular eye,' Aiko summarized, biting her lower lip. 'Whatever effects it has as a dojutsu probably has something to do with the way it focuses chakra. It must be like Obito's Sharingan—a focus for casting jutsu, instead of using hands or emanating chakra evenly. It's gotta be heavily tinted with whatever chakra that the chains are made of. You would think that they would be the same color, though. I'm sure the chains were blue. So why purple?'
Skeptically, Obito shook his head. "I don't think so." He leaned in so close that Aiko found herself breathing in his scent. "I can't see one."
She blinked, remembered what she had asked, and then consciously tried not to give him a pitying look. Obito wasn't much of a critical thinker. Of course she had pupils.
'And he's still my best resource for information about this. That's surprisingly depressing.'
"How does your Sharingan work?" She sucked on her lip, turning her body away from the mirror and hefting herself up to sit on the counter with shaking arms. (and wow, chakra exhaustion was just the worst.)
He clearly did not see the correlation between the conversational points. The blank look on his face was disheartening.
'He is not at his best today.'
"I turn it off and on by altering the chakra fed to it," Obito asked more than said.
Well, at least he was obliging. Suddenly tired again, Aiko managed a thin smile. "Not what I meant, but that could be helpful."
Obito lifted one shoulder in a slow shrug, rubbing at his neck with the other arm as he glanced down. The overall effect was endearing. "Maybe. The Uzumaki and the Uchiha have a common ancestor from way back. I was never close enough to Nagato to ask him about the way that his Rinnegan worked," he qualified, spreading his fingers out with palms up. "But maybe it works a little like a Sharingan?"
'Maybe is not that reassuring.' She pulled her face into a reluctant smile. "I don't suppose there's a way to ask someone, or to get medical records?" At the shake of his head, Aiko nodded slightly. "It was worth a shot." Glumly, she glanced down at her knees. 'Ugh, this is awful. I can't see right, my bloodline apparently knocks me unconscious, and I look like a freak. Perfect. So useful.'
Wait, actually. "What are these good for?" Aiko jabbed the top of a cheekbone with an index finger, pointing at an eye. "Please tell me they're good for something."
'Other than raising the dead, that is.'
Oh god. OH GOD. She was like that freak now. Nauseous and light-headed, she tried to curl into her knees and lost her balance, nearly falling off the counter. Obito stepped forward fast enough to catch her, and she ended up with her nose pressed against the curve where his neck met his shoulder.
"I think it might be time to go sit down," he said, very calmly. Too calmly.
Aiko nodded slowly, and didn't protest when he easily scooped her up—he was frighteningly strong. Instead of turning back into her room, he settled her on the couch, fetched hot tea and a peach, and sat down a safe distance away.
"I think that the Rinnegan work as a genjutsu aid," Obito said softly.
She lifted her eyebrows in lieu of responding, since she was currently trying not to seem like a total pig at the same time that she sucked down her fruit as top speed. That didn't sound so terrible. She needed all the genjutsu help that she could get.
"I don't exactly know how, but I do know that it allows access to several powerful ninjutsu techniques." He leaned back, crossing an ankle over his knee. "I've seen Nagato perform quite a few of them, I'm sure we could reverse engineer them. There's the almighty push, an ability to summon animals-"
"Animals?" Aiko perked up, suddenly much more interested. "What kind of animals?"
Obito gave her a perplexed look, mouth slightly open. "Any kind you want?" he asked uncertainly. "I think that you just have to know where they are."
"Sweet," she hissed happily. Puppies. She was going to summon a litter of puppies and cuddle them until she felt better. As soon as she figured out how to use that summoning technique. Best jutsu ever.
'No, that's stupid. I can already summon dogs.'
Wait. What? No she couldn't. Confused, she opened her mouth and furrowed her brow, trying to formulate a question.
He misinterpreted her expression entirely, butting in, "There's a lot more, of course. But we can talk about that later." Obito stood hastily, brushing off the knee his foot had rested on. "I was supposed to fetch Fujihito-sensei to take a look at you once you woke up. You really scared me, you know." He gave her a troubled look with those big, dark eyes before he left the room, and Aiko suddenly felt so guilty.
She should have been better armed. Playing civilian to slip past the border had been a mistake that she wouldn't make again.
'I fucked up long before that fight,' Aiko thought darkly.
It rankled, but it had to be true. Those nin had recognized her. If she'd been more observant, she wouldn't have gotten pinned so easily by those Iwa-nin. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She must have said her name somewhere, or gotten recognized and sold out.
The list of people who could have sold her out was tragically short. Ando-san would have known her route, as had the two men who had been with her (and wasn't it just convenient that they had turned tail to run? Fuckers.) The only other person who had known where she was going had been Obito.
And as far as she could tell, there was absolutely no reason for him to sell her out to Iwa. If he wanted to collect her bounty, he could do so easily. If he took her in himself, he'd get the full amount. No matter how paranoid she was, that just didn't make sense as a theory.
Ando-san, on the other hand, had never hidden that Aiko frightened her. That was such a load of crap! Aiko had saved her wrinkly skin from Kakuzu, and then done a damn good job as an employee.
'If it was her that sold me out, I'm going to kill her slowly.'
"Look into the light, please." Aiko tilted her face up to glower at the kindly older man who had bustled into the room. It was impossible to maintain her bad mood for long. He didn't even seem to notice it all, which just made her feel guilty and childish.
"There's a lot of swelling and irritation," Fujihito-sensei mused distractedly, wrapping the stethoscope back around his neck after he'd listened to her vitals and breathing. "Hydration will help keep that down. I'm afraid I've never seen anything like your eyes before, miss, but there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger."
That was not the most reassuring summation she could have received.
He turned back to Obito, who had been watching from the door. "You said that she wasn't sleeping well, correct?" At the nod, the old man mumbled something under his breath, shaking his head slightly. He glanced back at Aiko. "I'll assume that was due to a migraine, judging by the apparent sensitivity to light and sound that you are experiencing."
Sensitivity to-
"Not so much right now," Aiko said doubtfully. "I just have a bit of an ache."
The old man hummed noncommittally. "Well, we shall see. I wouldn't be surprised if they come and go."
And damn it all, the doctor was right. The pain hit her again in the shower not an hour later. Aiko gritted her teeth together, pretended that the liquid on her face did not contain any tears, and very carefully massaged shampoo into her scalp in hopes that rubbing the skin might release some of the tension. If it helped, the difference was negligible.
She was breathing heavily by the time she shakily stepped out and pulled on a robe. The pain distracting from her concentration combined with the blurred fog of her vision to make navigating the hall back to her bed much harder than it should have been.
That was about the time she discovered that Obito was ridiculously overprotective.
"It's just my bloodline," Aiko tried two hours later, bundled up in bed while he hovered indecisively over where to put the tray he was holding. "It sucks a bit, yeah, but if it's natural it's not likely to kill me."
(It could clearly be completely awful and hideous, but it still shouldn't kill her)
He did not appear reassured in the slightest. The headaches and dry eyes came and went ("don't rub at them, Aiko-san", reminded Fujihito-sensei) but Obito stayed all day to keep her company. He wasn't exactly unwelcome, considering that reading made her head pound and there wasn't much else to do.
The real highlight was when he absentmindedly put his arms over the headboard they sat against and his fingers brushed against her scalp. Oo. That felt good. Aiko pushed her head against his fingers like a cat, eyes pressed shut as he fell silent mid-sentence, apparently bewildered. She made a note to trick him into rubbing her head properly later.
Later, when the fatigue of chakra drain had worn off and the only real problem was occasional headaches, she was no longer willing to lay around the house.
"There's gotta be a way to reduce how much chakra my eyes are using," Aiko theorized aloud. "Do you think I could restrict the amount being directed to the area? Would that turn them back to usual? I mean," she elaborated. "That's how you turn the Sharingan off and on, right?"
Obito looked up from where he was painting her toenails yellow (she honestly hadn't expected him to do that when she asked). His expression was doubtful. "That's how the Sharingan works. But I don't think that's possible for you. At least, I don't think that Nagato ever tried."
Her eyebrows shot up. That she could hardly believe. "He didn't try?" Aiko repeated skeptically. "He woke up one day with eyes that drained a third of his chakra (and suddenly Obito's refusal to allow her to become reliant on chakra-draining ninjutsu made all kinds of sense) and he never tried to do anything about it? Was he a complete moron, or just stupid on an amateur basis?"
Her friend took a deep breath, measuring his words. Obito tilted his head slightly, dark eyes focused on the tiny brush he was wielding in cold strokes across her nails. She shivered. "He had his eyes from a very young age," he said absently. "I suppose that he was just used to the drain and didn't even notice the difference."
Aiko pursed her lips and blew out, fluttering her bangs. That seemed… "I can't imagine getting that accustomed to this," she mused. "Automatically having such huge chunk of your chakra just gone is exhausting." She made a face.
"You'll get used to that," Obito assured in an oddly tight voice. "You're young, and your reserves will grow very quickly under the constant strain. In a few months, your available pool will be as large as your old one."
"Alright," Aiko agreed, just to pacify him. He was acting strangely involved. Maybe he just didn't like seeing her feel poorly. That was fair enough. Whining wouldn't help anyway, so she tried to keep the complaints and winces whenever her eyes pounded to a minimum.
Note that she did not agree to give up on her idea. She blinked into the mirror before bed, swallowing revulsion. Kami, her bloodline was ugly. The chains had been eerily pretty, but these… Her throat felt strangely tight and she sucked on her lower lip, staring.
Aiko didn't want to be shallow. She didn't think she was, really. But those eyes…
They just looked so wrong in her face. She hadn't hated the idea of her eyes changing up-front (Obito's changed back and forth and that was fine), but she couldn't possibly have expected to find out that they were lavender even in the places they were meant to be white, and that they were marked up by concentric rings in a much darker purple. When she leaned in very close Aiko could spot flecks of color variation in the rings—dark blue, black, and purples—but the majority of her eyes was a uniform shade.
Aiko shuddered, unnerved, and looked down at the sink. She felt oddly repulsed by her reflection.
"I'm a freak," she mumbled under her breath, mindful that Obito was still somewhere in the house.
Well. If she was right, she might be able to look like herself again. Encouraged by the thought, she closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to pick out the tenketsu that lead to her eyes.
That was harder than it sounded. She ended up sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor and quietly meditating, feeling for just the right trickle of energy.
'Either this is the right one, or I'm about to shut down my brain,' Aiko thought with black amusement, licking her lips. This would be easier if she were a medic. Ah, well. She was mostly certain it was the right line of chakra. Not certain enough that she tried to stopper off both her eyes at once, of course.
Readjusting the flow of chakra to her eyes wasn't hard, once she'd located the right spot to mess with. Aiko sort of squeezed it, creating a blockade, and hoped that wouldn't end up backfiring horribly. She thought that she'd managed to slow the chakra consumption, though she didn't try to stop it altogether. That could be bad, theoretically. Baby steps, baby steps.
She opened her eyes, and swayed just a little. That was disorienting. What she saw through her left eye was still hazy and purple. By contrast, her right eye's vision was almost shockingly sharp. Wow, had she already forgotten what normal sight was like? It had only been a few days.
'I think I did it? Hello normal eye?'
The right eye was sucking down noticeably less energy than the left, at any rate. Aiko moved to get up for a look, cursed that her legs had gone to sleep, and eventually managed to crawl up the counter to peer into the mirror.
"Ah," she said, very intelligently.
It was definitely not how her eye had used to look. She swallowed, closing her eyes and opening them again hopefully. No. Not a trick of the light, then.
'At least the purple is gone,' Aiko counted as a blessing. 'And. There's, um. There's white parts now. And a little pupil.'
That was an undeniable improvement, but it didn't begin to explain why the colored part of her eye was red with black squiggles, not unlike Obito's. She didn't exactly miss the purple, but where had it gone? Why?
She whined, just a little, from the back of her throat. "It's like puberty," Aiko whispered aghast, pressing her forehead against the glass. "My body keeps changing and I don't know why."
'Calm down, think it through.'
She could do this. She could figure this out. There was always a reasonable, logical explanation. Aiko firmly believed in the power of deductive reasoning.
Okay. Starting now, she was thinking logically. Red was… purple… the circles had gone because. Because.
… That wasn't working.
"Fuck it," she sighed. Then she raised her tone and voice plaintively, knowing that the higher pitch carried much better than her normal alto. "Obito? I need help."
'Well, he did say that we were distantly related,' she consoled herself, licking her lips. 'It's not the Sharingan—the black bits are different from Obito's—but it does look like evidence for that claim.'
Freaky. So, the Rinnegan used the most chakra, the not-sharingan used less, and then her regular eyes used none?
Well. That just meant that she would have to figure out how to shut off the chakra to her eyes completely. And then she'd be back to normal. Having purple eyes that constantly ate at her chakra was not an appealing concept.
She huffed a laugh, despite not feeling amused at all. It looked like she was going to be wearing henge an awful lot. Just as well. The hair had to change, too. It was too damn distinctive. She couldn't be caught out like that again. If she'd passed out just a little sooner… No. It didn't bear thinking about what would have happened to her.
She had trained way too hard to get dragged off to some shithole village and used. Her showing had been utterly pathetic. She was far more skilled than any of those hacks that she'd fought, and had ended up eating dirt anyway. Pitiful. There was just no excuse for playing around.
Never again.
"Aiko? What's wrong?"
She pretended not to see the wide-eyed flinch Obito gave when she turned her face towards where he stood in the door, one eye purple and one eye red.
~~~
'This is the worst week of my life,' Obito thought dully. 'Nothing is going right.'
If he hadn't been wracked by guilt, he never would have allowed Aiko to talk him into such a stupid venture. Or at least he would have remembered to keep her away from the countdown calendar with the date circled in red pen. But god, the last four days had been a guilt trip. She wasn't even doing it on purpose!
As unbelievable as it sounded, Madara's Mangekyou Sharingan took considerably less out of Aiko than the Rinnegan had. No wonder Pein had been such a lazy bastard. Still, it was insane. Uzumaki really were something. She had been a bit less fatigued since she had managed to do what Pein hadn't in thirty years of having Madara's eyes. (And that was just embarrassing, frankly. Had he never talked to anyone with a dojutsu?)
Obito closed his eyes and prayed for strength. Even though she was wearing a henge for safety, this was still a terrible idea that he would be suffering from for a while. It wasn't even that inconspicuous. Sure, she was impossible to identify, but that was because she had transformed into a real life version of the heroine of Jiraiya's most recent book. That gave away that she was a shinobi.
Well. Hopefully people would think she was just being festive instead of hiding her identity. It wasn't like she was the only person who had dressed up for the premiere of whatever awful pornographic novel that had been made into a movie.
Despite feeling better, Aiko still wasn't looking well. She was pale and thin with stress.
It was pitiful enough that he had agreed to something that he should never have considered. She had asked, and he had brought her to this pit of vipers. He couldn't leave her alone here. Who knew what might happen in a crowd like this?
Some awful person might snatch her up and do terrible things. Like convince her that they were best friends and shove a 200 year old man's organs into her body while she was unconscious. And then let her think that it was her fault that she couldn't figure out how to make her eyes turn teal again. She was really kicking herself over that perceived failure.
'I am scum. The worst, just the absolute worst.'
"Stop pouting," Aiko sighed, squirming against his shoulder. He didn't bother trying to escape—her arm was already curled around his, effectively meaning he either had to stay put or shake her off. And he didn't quite have the heart to do that. Especially since it would have meant elbowing her in a sensitive spot. An area that he was determinedly Not Looking At and Not Touching.
'I either need to have Kakuzu give her the speech about respecting boundaries, or have her make an honest woman out of me so that I'm not going to inadvertently touch a boob out of wedlock,' Obito thought morosely. 'This is not appropriate. Does she even know what she's doing?'
He was soft, and weak, and sitting next to a girl wearing the hot pink promotional Icha Icha rhinestone studded bikini top, available only at the premiere. She had been embarrassingly eager at the giftshop when she saw it. Obito was hyperaware that said bikini top was pressed against his arm and that her shirt and lacy yellow bra were in his hip pouch. He slunk down a little further in pure shame, hoping for lightning to strike him down.
'At least I talked her down from changing into the bikini bottom,' he consoled himself. 'God, what the hell is wrong with Jiraiya? That man is sick, sick, sick.'
And the theatre was packed full of men in the promotional shirts and tipsy, giggly young women dressed just like Aiko. He was trapped in a dark room full of perverts.
(and worse, the toad Sannin was here somewhere. Obito had heard his voice earlier. That was a fight he did not want to get into. If Jiraiya recognized Aiko somehow, or she recognized him, it would be all over)
Obito cringed slightly, shuddering. This was risky.
"Hey, hey," Aiko whispered, shaking him slightly. "Do you like the tiara, 'ttebane?"
Obediently, he glanced down at the glittering circlet nestled in her hair. "Very nice," Obito assured her.
'How much money did she spend? And why did she need two commemorative kunai holsters? The ones she has at home are higher quality, I'm sure.'
Granted, the ones at home weren't red leather that hung low asymmetrically across her hips and then strapped around her thigh.
Obito swallowed uncomfortably and shifted in his seat, and thought about kittens. Fluffy kittens, with sickly-sweet bows and absolutely no lingerie thinly disguised as shinobi gear.
The thick red curtains raised, and a beam of colored light shone down from the back of the room. It coalesced into the form of a woman wearing only kunai holsters and a bikini, just like the ones that had been sold at the gift shop.
'Ah. So it's a joke from the book,' he realized, without feeling relief at all. The director started some sort of pandering speech that he didn't listen to at all while the indecent picture flickered and winked.
Yeah, that might actually make it worse.
"Are you going to change into your t-shirt?" Aiko whispered. It wasn't really a question. Obito knew perfectly well that she would have hurt feelings if he didn't like what she had bought for him with his money. "I have a matching tank top, too." She turned her face up and grinned tiredly at him, clearly putting on a brave face and trying to enjoy herself despite not feeling well. Obito knew that if he tried, he could see through the blue-green shine of her eyes to the red underneath.
Scum, scum, scum. Not even pond scum. Goldfish tank scum.
He forced his face into a queasy smile. "I'll wear it at home."
~~~
"Well, a lead is a lead," Tsunade decided optimistically, stretching her legs out underneath her desk.
'It's not exactly what I'd hoped for, but it's better than what I expected. Akatsuki is getting sloppy. What was the point of dropping off our radar for months, only to be seen menacing farmers?'
The toad planted in front of her licked its own face, clearly bored.
That soured her mood a little. "Thank Jiraiya, please," she ordered. "Tell him that I'll be sending a team to investigate." The amphibian didn't even have time to whine before she reached into her drawer for a piece of hard candy and threw it directly into a waiting mouth.
It beamed. "Thanks, Tsunade-hime!"
The summon animal left, presumably to go back to Jiraiya. The Hokage took a moment to think things over, frowning slightly.
'Now that I think about it,' Tsunade realized. 'Perhaps it wasn't sloppiness that led to this sighting. Akatsuki might have heard that Konan betrayed them and have decided to change strategies. Or this could just be a trap. They may want me to send a team to investigate.'
That incident hadn't been that long ago, after all. What, three months had passed? If she were Akatsuki and had recently learned that Konan had attempted to buy time and leniency by sharing their secrets, Tsunade would see that as grounds for changing tactics. Konan was in custody now, but that wouldn't last. It would take months to arrange the trial: as a courtesy, Mei would have to release the younger woman so that Ame didn't go entirely to pot.
For an organization interested in stirring up trouble, now was an ideal time to cause some confusion, while diplomatic missives were flying and the great nations were tensely waiting for a chance to argue their perspectives.
That possibility didn't sit well at all.
But could she really pass this opportunity up? Akatsuki was her only lead on finding Aiko, which was important for the girl's own sake but also to preserve Konoha's international standing in terms of the upcoming trial for Konan. Even if none of that mattered, they still needed to hunt down Akatsuki to keep Naruto and other jinchuuriki safe.
And damn it, Akatsuki would know that. It didn't matter if this was a trap or lucky happenstance: her response had to be the same.
"I hope two teams will be enough," she muttered to herself, rifling through rosters. The report had already been days old by the time that Jiraiya got it, so haste was imperative. Information was already low—a sensor had noted a frightful fight occurring not far out of town. Digging had led to an old account of Akatsuki cloaks being spotted in the area months prior. Eyewitness accounts were about all that they could hope for, considering that there certainly wouldn't be any physical tracks by the time their team arrived.
'That's not strictly true. It's not likely, but it can't hurt to send some of our best trackers.'
There was no chance in hell she would get away without sending some configuration of team seven on this mission, of course. They had extensive experience with Akatsuki already. So eight soldiers : two full squads. That would hopefully be enough that the odds were stacked in Konoha's favor if the teams really did find two S-class missing nin.
"Team seven would probably lose their collective shit if I didn't send some amalgamation of such," Tsunade muttered, absently tucking her pen behind her ear. She licked her thumb and flipped pages. "Kakashi as team leader, Naruto, Sasuke, and…" she made a face. "Yamato, I suppose. Although it's a bit of a boys' club at that point. And for the other team…"
Bright and early in the morning, Hinata tried not to yawn. She buried her face a little deeper into her hood, squinting away the unpleasant reality that sunlight was in her face.
Kurenai checked her mission parameters at a glance out of habit, despite already knowing what it said. "It looks like we're investigating in a village called Kiichigo Fīrudo." Shino sidled up beside her, glowering at the world for daring to exist so damn early.
"Cute name. That sounds nice," Kiba yawned, white teeth flashing.
"Prepare to be surprised," Kurenai said dryly.
He snorted disagreeably, and the group slid into a comfortable silence as only people who had worked together for five years could.
Six minutes before they absolutely had to be out of the village, the other team slouched up, arguing within themselves. Hinata's eyebrows shot up.
"-op your whining," Sasuke barked, red eyes narrowed.
That in itself wasn't unusual. The target of his displeasure was. Naruto was grinning with his arms crossed behind his head, and Yamato was busy looking as though he would much rather be anywhere in the world. Like inside a live volcano, perhaps.
"I should have just taken the week off and gone to the premiere," Kakashi said mournfully with no apparent regard for just how dangerously close he was to being punched halfway across Konoha. He spread his arms expressively. "I thought, fine. It's only released one day later in Konoha. I'll save the trip and see it here. Three or four times, to make up for the lateness, of course."
"Seriously, drop it," Sasuke growled over the sound of Hatake bemoaning the cruelty of being sent on a mission the day before Konoha's theatres would be playing the Icha Icha movie. "She was never going to let you go anyway. It's a complete waste of time. You would have accomplished nothing and spent thousands of ryo. She did you a favor, you degenerate scofflaw."
'Hatake is going to die,' Kurenai realized with a little thrill of terror. 'The Hokage's apprentice is going to rip his arm off and beat him with it.'
"Doesn't Tsunade have a heart?" Kakashi plaintively asked the back of Yamato's head. Yamato determinedly did not look or answer.
The Uchiha's fist tightened so hard that the material of his gloves squeaked ominously. "Shut up about your porn."
Hatake sighed, thin shoulders somehow slumping even further. "The world is so very bleak."
Kurenai clapped her hands and pasted on a tenuous smile as everyone's focus shifted from the approaching bloodbath to her. "Ready to go, everyone?"