Kagura - lulu_lisbon - Naruto [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

As soon as Akabane Kagura receives her promotion, she knows that the Chunin vest won’t fit. Despite being one of the taller kids in her cohort, Konoha doesn’t make vests for shinobi under a certain size – which is to say, kind of bullsh*t. Goodness knows how many child soldiers they pump out every graduation year.

So, instead, she keeps the vest wrapped in its little plastic bag, salutes the tired worker at the first level of the Hokage Tower, and walks back home.

Only assholes do the “vanish into a million leaves” trick. Is Kagura an asshole? f*ck no. She isn’t going to burden those poor janitors, having to clean up a bunch of debris everytime some co*cky ninja know-it-all decides to act all hip and cool with their exit. The property damage from all the low-level jutsu they carelessly throw around the village is probably the reason why the civilians have to pay such high taxes to live here.

It’s the real ninja who behave well.

As in, the one that everyone least suspects to be some high-class, epic warrior. It’s always the quiet ones lurking around, doing the shifty things, that people need to be wary about. That’s the kind of ninja that Kagura strives to be – not some blockhead with a hard-on for attention.

Of course, when she woke up in this random kid’s body, in the middle of trying to run away from the Kyuubi, it really sucked. Rebirth was supposed to be a fresh start from the beginning, not as a bright-eyed, ten year old genin. Lucky (or unlucky) for her, apparently all of her friends and family had died during the attack, so it was as fresh of a start as any – except for the involuntary drafting into a dangerous superpowered military, but whatever. Life was going to be funny like that anyway.

Surprise, surprise, the vest fits.

Kagura stands in front of the mirror in her studio flat, remembering that, oh right, she’s a real tall f*cking kid. Ten, almost eleven, and probably the same height as the fourteen year olds.

Hah. Beat that, puberty!

Considering that, according to the past-Kagura’s diary discovered under the unfolded futon (a total lifesaver and a landmine of information), this body belonged to some poor orphan who barely got fed on time with the lacklustre government stipend, being tall was a nutritional blessing.

But not much can be done about that face. It’s not a bad face, not really, but… well. Hmm.

It’s as if Morticia Addams met Coco Chanel and created an Asian muse, but in the least conventionally attractive way possible. Kagura’s face isn’t made to please noblemen – it’s made to scare them off. She’s like a supermodel in Vogue, but with all the irredeemable parts too: gangly limbs, intense gaze, weirdly sharp smile, and very strong features.

There’s a knock at the window.

A bird delivers a message from the jounin recruiters – a general message, sent to all the rookie chunin, on the delegations set out for them in the wake of disaster. The Kyuubi attack may have been a few months ago, but every single division is running low on manpower, and it’s up to the latest generations to fix that little issue. Not the fresh faced ones, who just graduated from the academy, but the odd generation of kids like Kagura and her peers.

Past-Kagura, graduating at eight, joining the war as a meatshield so that the village could revv up its real heroes – the ones with clans and actual teachers – and thus laud victory to them. Past-Kagura, writing in her little diary in between missions. Past-Kagura, barely holding on.

And now, the current Kagura, f*cking surviving.

She’d taken the few months of clean up duty to familiarise herself with the village, her living peers, her station, and how to actually do ninja things. Thank goodness for the Kyuubi attack, else everyone would notice her not being able to mould chakra in those first few weeks.

Haha, hilarious.

And so, Kagura re-reads the letter, shooing the bird away, and thinks about all the divisions the village has to offer that she would want to join. Now that she somehow gained a chunin promotion for running a few missions by herself for the sweet, sweet cash (honestly, they probably only promoted her because the village politics needed a certain amount of ninja in each rank to be certified as “powerful” to the other villages; aka an international dick measuring contest), there’s an expectation that she chooses a specialisation or else they’re gonna choose it for her.

You know what? Fine. Kagura’s going to choose the one with the actual ninja. Waking up in some loony continent they called the Elemental Nations was bad enough, but this sh*t? Fake ass ninjas, throwing magic tricks around like a bad Harry Potter parody – this ain’t it, chief.

She acknowledges the terrible, terrible aspects of this world, too, with her fresh eyes. Her job that she can’t quit without being branded a traitor is just the start – it’s stunningly weird that prepubescent children are given the same amount of responsibility as full grown adults – but then it expands. Outside of the main villages, it’s the feudal system all over again, with piss poor civilians wearing faded kimonos, farming in little settlements, fighting off rogues with hires from afar. Daimyos, the nobles, and rich merchants, all fighting for power, and in turn financing the ninjas (and not in the direction of growth). And with all this, the only way that she can possibly enact change in this ass-backwards world is to be cemented as top dog. Trickle down theory, or whatever.

The next day, Kagura goes to the assignment office and asks to be put into ANBU.

The process is simpler than most expect.

You go up to the funny people wearing name tags, introduce yourself, and voila. How else do the civilian-born nobodies join the discrete forces? The classic ninja way of getting stalked by a mysterious guy in a mask, then recruited in the middle of the night due to one’s irresistible charm is unrealistic for the majority of the ninja population – thus, there’s also a “normie” way to join, through paperwork. Signing up is easy. Getting in is the hard part.

Or, scratch that: signing up is also hard. Apparently ANBU requires a ton of paperwork.

Kagura spends about twenty minutes in the assignment office, filling out the giant stack of papers. A lot of it has to do with being aware of bodily harm, and are you sure you want to do this? You might not like the ANBU division you’ll be sorted into. Are you really, really sure?

But something nibbles at her brain by the time she reaches the last page, which is a giant box where her name was supposed to go. Whose name is long enough to need an entire box the size of the paper? No, no, no, either the ANBU department was wasteful with space, or there’s a hidden message here.

She flips through the packet again and spots a very obvious hidden message. The first character of every page, put together, says, Write me a poem about Konoha.

Whilst she had paid attention to classic literature studies back in school, poetry is (still) not a forté. Also, this is the sh*ttiest code ever. The first character of every something – this is easy academy sh*t. Seven year olds could figure this out whilst tied above a volcano, listening to the screams of little goblin people being flayed by unicorns.

So Kagura flips through the packet again, looking for clues. The poem about Konoha was probably a clue, maybe. She doesn’t know sh*t about poetry, but everyone knows the childhood rhymes about Konohanasakuya-hime and the three trees, even displaced humans like her. Kagura spots the kanji for spruce, the first tree, and looks at the characters under it, because everyone knows that ANBU “live in the shadows.”

It leads to a dead end.

But no – ANBU don’t just live in the shadows, they were also the protectors of the village, more so than the average ninja. Kagura traces the characters around the kanji for spruce, counter-clockwise, because they’re protecting the tree.

あんみつ. Anmitsu.

The f*ck?

Further in the packet, she finds oak, the second tree, and reads the characters surrounding the kanji.

明日の朝. Tomorrow morning.

On the page before the empty text box, the kanji for the last tree, maple, is at the top of the page, surrounded by literal nonsense words. Okay, so maybe the third tree is just filler.

So she has to show up tomorrow morning, at an unspecified time (probably at the asscrack of dawn, because shinobi can be anal like that), at an unspecified anmitsu shop (of which there are probably at least a dozen of those in Konoha alone).

Or no… Kagura reads the kanji around maple again – okay, then. The nonsense words were actually just providing an address. Still no time, but that’s easily resolvable. She’ll just have to arrive at like four in the morning.

Because the assignment officers are starting to look annoyed about her slow thinking and the packet didn’t say not to fill out the poem, she scribbles out a haiku about the Hokage picking his boogers, signs her name at the bottom, and turns the papers in.

Three months later, Kagura joins ANBU.

She’s eleven now, and maybe even a little taller, despite the obvious lack of nutrients from the matriculation training in the middle of ass country, à la grey skies and crumbly sand. Who knew Konoha trained their Black Ops on a depressing island off the coast of Fire Country? Sounds like a security risk.

Out of the twenty-two candidates on that stupid island, only five remain.

Lucky her, Akabane comes before the other names, so she’s called up first to receive her mask and designation from the ANBU assignment office – which is less of an office, and more of a shady little desk underground the anmitsu shop, which, she’s discovering, is such a top secret spy thing to do. Most of the ANBU offices are underneath boring shops, scattered around Konoha, with the headquarters and the official training centres in the mountain behind the Hokage faces.

“Here is your mask and uniform,” the mysterious ANBU drug dealer member says. She wears a mask with a lot of blobs on it, so she’s either some sort of unfortunate crustacean or a particularly fat frog. The department needs to hire better artists. “We recommend wearing the full uniform to the specified armouries to get a discount.”

Kagura wordlessly accepts the scroll.

The sparsely lit environment, the metal shutters, and the Hollywood level of forced “cool” factor really makes the mystery ANBU uniform lady seem like some sort of dealer. It doesn’t help that the desk is built into the wall, and Kagura can’t see what’s behind the glass opening. Maybe a few cabinets or lockers, but everything’s so f*cking dark.

No matter. As soon as she gains a modicum of power, either through becoming a captain or the commander, she’s going to find a way to crowdfund these poor babies into letting them keep the lights on.

As soon as Kagura escapes to the safety of her flat, hidden from the eyes of everyone (except her very dead plants, definitely didn’t get watered in at least three months), she opens the storage scroll with her mask and uniform.

“Please don’t be something ugly,” she mumbles.

Lucky (or unlucky, depending on who’s asking), it’s the opposite of ugly. It might just border on dumb or dangerous, because everyone’s going to remember swan. Those dumb f*cks gave her a mask with the elegant, beautiful bird, instead of one of the silly animals that everyone groans about. Enemies don’t really remember salamander, fish, or rat. But they sure as hell will remember getting gored by Big Bird.

In this year alone, Kagura has spent at least ten minutes per day staring into a mirror. Ignoring the ANBU training excursion, for the hell that was – no plumbing infrastructure whatsoever, nevermind bathrooms.

It’s mostly her face.

It’s definitely just her face.

Kagura hopes she’s in her pubescent ugly duckling phase, because even with the Elizabeth Taylor eyes, the haute couture Ehara Miki aesthetic does not look, in any way shape or form, pleasant on an eleven year old girl. Her long, gangly limbs and boyish shape (where are the boobs?!) shows promising signs for an epic, decades-long modelling career – but sadly, Konohagakure remains void of such wonders.

Stupid ninja society.

And in the proper tradition of mourning her previous life and identity, Kagura spends a horribly long amount of time being emo in front of a mirror before getting ready for the day. Hardly a week after the ANBU matriculation ceremony, which was hardly a ceremony and more of being gathered in a room with the four other survivors of the hell-hole, she’s summoned in the early morning back to the ANBU headquarters behind the cliff face, with only one word on the welcoming scroll: Training.

She ties the swan mask firmly to her face, then runs off to face the future.

Bear is a tall, buff man, with a chainsmoker voice and a strict no-nonsense attitude. He’s also the General.

They’re in the sixth-level basem*nt, where walls of cement are padded with what must be cotton and sound-proofing foam because as soon as the five new members enter the training room, Kagura can no longer hear anything that isn’t in the direction of the rickety-looking door. The air tastes musty, the monotonous colour scheme of the plain tiles completely kills any emotions, and the room environment matched with the menacing and obviously experienced general of the entire f*cking forces makes for one hell of a time. So much fun.

As always, she’s up first.

“Swan.”

One of the newbies flinches even though Bear’s voice isn’t directed at them. Hah, weakling.

Kagura salutes, then returns to proper form.

And Bear says, “Your report was the least interesting thing I’ve ever read in my entire tenure in this organisation. You have no notable features, no distinct ninja technique, and the instructors only decided to pass you because they could not figure out your weaknesses in all of the battles and other assessments. But, none of them could figure out your strengths.”

Okay, ouch.

In her defence, she’d woken up as a meek little ten year old Genin in a world she had absolutely no prior knowledge of, and somehow managed to float by solely because all of her friends and family had died – thus, no one suspected a thing when she replaced this poor girl’s entire identity. No one taught her sh*t – most of Kagura’s ninja knowledge came from stalking the bratty academy kids training on the public fields. Everything else came from absorbing her environment, doing basic chakra exercises and dialling everything up to a hundred. Walking up walls, walking on water, power-jumping, kunai and shuriken, the academy jutsu, standard academy taijutsu, and genjutsu release – that’s her entire arsenal.

More the reason why she suspects that her promotion to Chunin was the village needing extra padding for political reasons.

“You will be placed on Team Kan,” he finishes.

Bear, to her satisfaction, reams the rest of the newbies quite fairly, telling Dragon that her taijutsu is complete sh*t in a somewhat disappointed, fatherly tone. Giraffe and Chipmunk apparently suck at code decryption, and Oyster (what the f*ck?) is told off for his fiery personality. In Oyster’s defence, he was the happiest piece of sh*t on that island and for some reason, genuinely enjoyed being there.

Then the general dismisses them.

Team Kan is… tall.

There are no other words to describe them, seeing as how they’re all wearing ANBU masks and they’re all well trained enough to not give off any social cues if they don’t want to. And about half the forces (or so Oyster gossipped, back in the hell-hole) wear permanent disguises whilst doing ANBU work, due to a prolific career on the topside. The famous clan chuunin or jounin, apparently.

And then there’s Dog, who famously and fabulously shows off his silver hair. His identity is an open secret, anyway.

“Swan, reporting for duty,” Kagura says at the training field, giving a proper salute.

There’s Leopard, Rooster, and Carp. The captain is Leopard, who is a tall man with dark hair and broad shoulders. The second is Rooster, who is a tall man with dark hair and freaky fingerless gloves. Carp is another tall man, possibly somewhere in his teens, judging by his slimmer musculature and the way wrinkles barely form in his skin (even the slightest indents and sun damage are key), with dark hair. Swan is also tall and dark-haired, but obviously not as tall as her new teammates, but enough that none of them give her any sh*t.

Leopard nods. “Welcome to Team Kan, recruit.”

Then he attacks.

The training field doesn’t have a number, none of the special forces fields do for security reasons (well, she supposes the general has a masterlist somewhere for purely geographic reasons ) , nor does it legally exist within the Konohagakure village structure. It’s in the forest beyond the cliff face, several kilometres away from the nearest toilet.

The fact that there is a public toilet in the middle of the forest is absolutely hilarious, because it means that at one point, a commanding officer got sick of sh*tting in the bushes and decided that it was worth the security risk to install a septic tank in the middle of the woods.

Kagura does the thing where she tries not to be anywhere near the pointy end.

It’s a method that frustrated her opponents on the hell-hole throughout its entirety, because her complete average-ness means she doesn’t have any exploitable weaknesses to counteract. Of course, this is against peers, not against experienced ANBU captains, who have more than enough tricks to fight against a frustrating little chuunin.

The captain has her on her back in less than a minute.

“Hmm,” Leopard says. “You are…”

She’s not that boring, right?

“Malleable.”

Carp hoots from the sidelines. “Just say she’s got no cool factor about her, bossman!”

Whilst staring at the looming porcelain captain mask above her, she hears Carp get thwacked in the head by Rooster, followed by a huff.

Leopard scratches the back of his head, an oddly human gesture belonging to a supposedly super scary ANBU captain that could throw her on her back in less than a minute flat. It’s giving embarrassed dad vibes, and Kagura is all for it. Thank f*ck, at least her team is showing signs of emotion, and so far nobody’s as hard-ass as those devil instructors from the hell-hole.

Or maybe all recruits go through that form of hazing.

Hmmm.

“I’m going to spin this as a positive,” she says. “Mould me in any way Team Kan needs?”

Team Kan is a stealth squad, with a sub specialisation in assassination. Most of the jobs they’re assigned to are about sneaking important documents to certain locations, or killing someone and fleeing the scene before enemy ninja even know that a crime has been committed. As such, the captain stresses, the primary goal for them is to know how to hide and flee. The squad runs drills focused on speed, endurance, chakra suppression, scent suppression, and even more running. It’s more cardio than Kagura has ever wanted to do in her entire life, but by the end of it, they’ve assigned her a specialty to work towards.

Leopard is an assassination specialist. Rooster is a tracking specialist. Carp is a body guarding specialist. And now Kagura has been assigned to become a…

She blinks.

And raises her hand, like she’s back in primary school.

“It’s not – you read the pamphlets, right?” Leopard immediately says, a touch awkward. “You’re there for the deception and disguise training, not for anything else. Everyone gets shuffled around after a two year period, and you can request a different specialisation once you get a hold of the basics of subterfuge.”

She lowers her hand. It’s a little awkward for an eleven year old to get sorted into Seduction, but at least they don’t expect her to do the sexual part of seduction training. And, from what she learned during lessons of that thrice damned island, it’s a field with a much more nuanced education than most would assume – seduction specialists don’t just use sex, most of the agents are just good with civilian disguises and can gossip their way through getting valuable information that the average semi-sociopathic ninja would have no idea how to achieve without leaving a trail of mutilated baby carcasses.

Befriending the locals is, apparently, part of seduction training. Hmm.

Kagura would not immediately pinpoint herself as charismatic or cute, but whatever. At least she knows how to interact with the normal people, unlike these f*cking nutcases polluting the ninja forces. Konohagakure makes them all creepy as hell over here.

They finish training for the day, to which the captain then rounds them all up like stray kittens to head to the ANBU locker rooms to shower. It’s like high school all over again, because it’s just one big locker room for several squads shoved into a tiny, smelly room next to the showers – which are divided by gender even though she’s pretty sure most killing machines don’t care enough about genitals – and some metal benches with ass-shaped sweat stains on them.

Leopard gently pats Kagura’s shoulder. “So. We’ve been a team for six months and we’re all comfortable with each other’s identities, but if you need to be discreet for personal or shinobi reasons, we’re fine with that. With our old teammate, we used to go out whenever we had the time after training or missions, but…”

This sounds like guilt tripping.

Of course, she understands that any captain would want to know his agents better, preferably by knowing their strengths and weaknesses outside of work, especially in a life-or-death field like theirs, but Leopard’s puppy eyes were not subtle. At all.

Ohhh, so that’s why they needed a seduction agent.

Because it’s not against the rules for squads to fraternise (however risky it may be), and becoming friends outside of work will probably improve her sociability by tenfold, Kagura agrees.

“Alright,” she says. “But you’re paying.”

With a promise to meet at the junction between Tobirama and seventh, they all go home to shower. Because only the real psycho pieces of work use the showers – the water pressure is sh*t, according to Carp, but the locker rooms itself create a wonderful atmosphere for hazing newbies into doing whatever their captains want.

It’s a civilian kind of night, the captain had said, but the meaning of that phrase severely depends on how mentally disturbed the ninja in question is. Civilian clothes can either mean wearing civilian clothes, or wearing ninja clothes minus the flak jacket and three shuriken.

Leopard seems nice and normal. He probably means the former.

He does not mean the former.

Kagura’s studio flat is on Tobirama street, so she arrives first, waiting next to a Yamanaka-owned flower shop. She wears a cute white sundress with flowers on it, and shiny pink butterfly-themed sandals. Even though she’s almost one hundred seventy centimetres, the outfit makes her look like a normal eleven year old. Kind of.

There are exactly eleven kunai hidden around her body, but the civilians passing by and waving nicely at her don’t need to know that.

Rooster arrives next, because he’s definitely anal enough to want to be early to everything. And Kagura knows that the Hyuuga across the street is Rooster because none of them bothered to hide their hair, given that the entirety of Team Kan has the same dark brown, almost black coloured hair. He looks uppity and snobbish like a proper Hyuuga, maybe around twenty or so, and wearing something along the lines of ninja clothes minus the flak jacket and three shuriken.

Then Carp arrives, a gangly, bumbling teenage boy with no discernable clan features. He’s got beautiful green eyes, a splash of freckles, and a cheery face to offset the Hyuuga. She can hear his voice from across the street, annoying Rooster, and then the captain arrives, slinking in with a playboy attitude. The decision to chew on a senbon is weird as f*ck, but it’s too late to turn back now.

“...Is the newbie late?” Leopard asks his second, but then turns around once he sees Kagura cross the street to approach them.

Now the four of them are standing in front of a grungy looking bar called The whor* and the Kunai.

“I was here first, but no one noticed me,” Kagura says, tugging on a frown to fake being upset. She points back to the flower shop. “Across the street.”

Leopard flinches.

The senbon falls from his mouth.

“How old are you?!”

A lesson is learned: ANBU captains only receive their members’ general skill level reports and code name upon entry to a team. Names, ages, affiliations – that’s all unnecessary, according to headquarters. Unfortunately for Leopard, he was put off by Swan’s height and general emotional stability, and assumed that she was, at least, fifteen or sixteen, without bothering to ask her directly.

“I’m Akabane Kagura,” she says, upon everyone else’s awkward introduction. Shiranui Genma, Leopard, stares guilty at her sundress, the bar entrance, her sundress, then back at his feet. Hyuuga Taira – that motherf*cker has the Byakugan, of course he knew – rolls his eyes. Iwabuchi Ritsu, Carp, looks at the plasticky butterfly designs on her feet. Weirdos.

“Alright, change of plans,” Genma says. “New place.”

She cranes her neck to see the menu plastered on the outside wall. “It’s fine,” she assures. “They’ve got pub food.”

Inside, someone screams, then moans.

Genma winces.

Ritsu, a sixteen year old chuunin, puts a hand on her back and pushes her towards this new location – the first thing on the street that the captain saw, a specialty dog-themed cafe, with a primary demographic of civilians.

It’s also meant for kids.

The three bulky adult ninja crowd around Kagura, walking down the street, and stare awkwardly at the cafe. Everything is white, pink, and… fluffy.

“I’ll get the Doggy Delicious Bum-Bun with the Woofy Cream Vanilla Parfait,” she tells the waitress. The waitress is wearing a frilly pink kimono dress with dog print patterns, and is visibly uncomfortable with the three obnoxiously tall and large ninja crammed around a small cafe table.

The waitress, to her credit, smiles kindly at Kagura, then waits for the men to order with a suddenly strained look.

Taira and Ritsu order the same bun, probably out of fear, but Genma looks at the waitress straight in the face, points one finger to the heaven he prays to above, and says, “One beer.”

“Ah– we don’t serve that here, sir.”

Genma frowns. “One vodka, then.”

The waitress pales, opens her mouth as if to say something, then wisely decides to head back to the kitchens.

Kagura thinks it’s weird how Konoha forces its children to behave like adults at such a young age, because Genma is only seventeen and is acting like a total grandpa right now, for reasons unknown. The age of adulthood may be sixteen in this country, but she’s too used to the idea of a heightened age of majority, somewhere between eighteen and twenty, well after a child has finished high school and is moving into university. But even then, Taira is still fairly young for his profession as a tokubetsu jounin, at a ripe two-zero.

Ah, society. f*cking insane.

A different waitress arrives with their order, equally tentative as the last one. Even without the flak jackets and the ninja headbands stowed in their pockets, it’s extremely obvious that the three males are the most ninja to ever ninja, and the staff appears to be terrified that they’re all hanging around a pubescent pre-teen.

Ritsu presses down on the Doggy Delicious Bum-Bun. Chocolate cream leaks out from the dog shaped bun’s behind.

Whatever. Those socially inept losers can wither away in awkwardness. Kagura’s going to enjoy the free food.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

Akabane Kagura spends much of the rest of the year in a constant state of pain. Leopard, or Genma, or the senbon-chewer is a sad*st, and not even a fun one at that. The captain pretends to be cool and blasé, but never hides his humour whenever he’s finished making his squadmates run around like beheaded chickens.

Because she’s a blank slate for him to manipulate into the perfect murder weapon, she naturally finally develops a few strengths – mostly out of sheer necessity.

Kagura can run.

Really fast.

She nyoooooms through the forests around the country, keeping speed with the more experienced members, contorting her body like a ballerina with osteoporosis, fighting against gravity and physics to jump around in ways that make her feel every bit of the super scary ninja assassin of the night that all civilians think that they are. She’s that dark blur in the trees, with a shiny new sword bought from the not-as-much-as-she-hoped-for ANBU salary, cutting down enemies and being an intimidating sneak.

At first, the lack of super cool and explosive genjutsu and ninjutsu is a bit of a letdown. During Team Kan's “down-periods,” the ANBU assignments office sends members to trail after genin teams with the famous clan ninja as back-up or contingency plans, and watching the little squirts piss around with their big bad fire jutsu or shadow traps (Uchiha and Nara, respectively) kind of sucks. Never once has she had to step in during the missions for the important genin teams, but holy sh*t she wished some enemies showed up during those boring C-ranks around Fire country because then she could at least do something to get the irritation out of her system.

But then, after a few more months of becoming secretly bad-ass in her own way, she begins to pity the immature ninja who are peer pressured to be all sparkly and sh*t on the battlefield instead of keeping consistent with all the base techniques to actually grow stronger.

Kagura turns twelve without knowing a single ninjutsu or genjutsu.

It’s kinda crazy.

Then, the day after her twelfth birthday, Leopard pulls her aside to teach her the basics of fire manipulation. It ruins the streak of her attempting a holier-than-thou attitude over the privileged clan ninja, but she only dwells in the ungratefulness for a total of five seconds before exploring the intricacies of fire.

It’s Fire country. She has a fire affinity. Very expected.

“Happy birthday, Swan,” he says, ruffling her hair. It doesn’t do anything, because she ties it back tight enough so that stray leaves and branches don’t catch stray hair or skin particles.

Part of ANBU training is also, apparently, training to not even exist. Team Kan has taught her how to hide so well that apparently the Inuzuka ninja can’t smell her even if she’s standing right in front of them.

Long story short, she’s been permanently banned from visiting that Inuzuka-owned dog cafe after accidentally spooking the clan heir or something.

Kagura smiles at her captain, remembers he can’t see her face with the masks on, and then loudly telegraphs her gratefulness through body language. And purposefully tries to freak him out with her general good mood. This is a daily occurrence. “Thank you for teaching me! Does this mean I get to bump up a stat point in my official profile?”

She means it in a cheeky, teasing way, but Leopard looks at her very seriously and says, “Probably not. It’s a D-rank fire-starting jutsu.”

Bummer.

“Pity,” she says, then asks if this is how ninjas warm up their heroin.

Leopard vanishes.

After six months in a trial period with their regular ANBU teams, the rookies are pulled to complete long and important missions for training in their specialisations. Swan and Dragon are sent to Grass country with six other Seduction specialists in order to infiltrate a prestigious junior college in the heart of the capital. The civilian society is much more developed over there, compared to its ninja village, so a ton of influential children of Grass are safely sent to study in the country’s high-ranked schools and apprenticeships.

Captain Frog assesses Swan’s general competence in the Seduction field by taking her on a date.

It’s a little weird.

They’re halfway to the mission point, somewhere around the official civilian borders of Fire and Grass, when Frog tells Swan and Dragon to be prepared for evaluation, to see which parts of the mission they’ll be sent into. Why the ANBU office couldn’t have decided this before, she doesn’t know, but it’s not hard to protest against free food.

Frog is a short, busty woman, who must’ve been blood-born enemies with the ANBU assignment officers because there’s not much difference between the mask and her actual face. To be clear, ANBU Frog looks like a frog.

Batsh*t ugly.

On the date, Kagura dresses in a way that makes her look older and more feminine, by making her bra a bit heavier and using scentless and waterproof makeup on her bone structure. She paints her nails, but keeps a few of them a little chipped, and chews on her nails a bit for emphasis into the anxious but lovable teenager act that she’s going for. Frog tries to lead the date into something more sensual, but Kagura blabbers on and “accidentally” rants about how horrible school and her parents are, then backtracks and sheepishly asks about Frog’s life. Frog throws a curveball and says her parents are dead, so then Kagura acts clueless and tries to be empathetic but ends up sounding overly sappy and pitying.

Kagura passes with flying colours.

Dragon switches with her, and hot damn, the entire mood of the second evaluation shifts into something sexy.

They’re in a restaurant, with Swan and the six other ANBU members at one table listening in on the date to their left. One of them must also be a genjutsu user, because so far, none of the waitstaff have bothered them or even noticed that two of the restaurant’s tables are being occupied by deadly murder weapons – but a genjutsu to this extent means Uchiha.

None of the other members looks even remotely Uchiha-like.

Permanent disguises for the famous clan ninja, she realises, at the same time as ah f*ck ah sh*t races through her brain. Clan ninja on her team will always be the priority. If all goes to sh*t, they’ll be the ones that Konoha will attempt to retrieve the most.

But, well, hopefully the mission doesn’t go down under, because it appears that Dragon has a very unique skill set that is perfect for the… dirtier aspects of Seduction.

Kagura recognises the girl, even with a full face of makeup on, as Yuuhi Kurenai – apparently one of the kids that she had an academy class with at some point. But her entire family is made up of ninja, and she was prioritised during the war to stay away from the war. So they didn’t end up close or as friends, according to the landmine of information in past-Kagura’s diary.

Kurenai has an interesting allure to her, where she effortlessly draws in attention from dark, disturbing audiences. She’s classically beautiful, with almost frail and doll-like features, delicate as porcelain. Her dark, wavy hair frames her face, which is permanently stuck in the emotions of lost innocence and wide-eyed confusion. She’s the type of girl that traffickers want to sell at the highest bidder to the sickest sort of paedophiles.

And f*ck, she’s like thirteen.

The second date starts with Frog pushing Kurenai into basic things, with Kurenai shyly giving away more (fake) information like a lost rabbit, until Frog pushes into sexual questions, to which Kurenai pretends not to understand – but when she finally does, she gives such a powerful, frightened expression, that Kagura wonders who the f*ck taught a thirteen year old girl to know how to act like this.

The evaluations end.

“Swan, you’ll be enrolled at the school as the target’s classmate. How you approach the target will be based on your best assessment of personality,” Frog says. “Dragon, you’ll be with Octopus, Catfish, and Raccoon, staking out the whor*houses for the target’s guards. Snake and Worm will be running the operations from inside the hide-out. I will be replacing one of the school’s janitors.”

The Academy of Science and Maths is a junior college for intelligent (and/or rich) Grass citizens. The target is the stuck-up heir of the Grass daimyo, who was sent here by his daimyo father because he was a friendless little bitch who needed to learn what the real world was really like.

Kagura thinks the daimyo should’ve sent his kid to a normal public or trade school instead of whatever this fancy ass place is, but at least there is some socioeconomic diversity. Some poor kids with enough brains to pass a few interviews and entrance exams can make it in, to mingle with the higher societies.

They have a test on the first day.

Yeah, it sucks.

Snake and Worm feed her the answers through a miniature radio in her hair, in volumes too low for untrained civilians to hear, but funnily enough, Kagura needs more help answering the basic history questions than the maths questions. Haha, funny, she doesn’t know sh*t about what they teach little kids here because she very conveniently didn’t even attend the academy .

The opportunity to get close to the target comes easier than anyone would’ve predicted. The next day, the teachers hand back the test, and Kagura scores first place and the heir scores second place. His gaggle of fake fans and friends assure him that he’s still super smart or whatever, but he storms towards her and accuses her of cheating.

Which, yes, but also no.

“Suck it!” She cows. “I jus’ studied more than you!”

He huffs, obviously trying to show off his superior elegance and manners compared to the country girl she’s emulating. “It’s rude to not use my name, Anzu-san.”

Kagura, or Anzu now, manages to get between a frown and a smirk. “Okay then. What’s your name, mister second place?”

She knows his name, but part of the ploy is being annoying as f*ck, and it works wonderfully, because he completely blows up and starts yelling at her for being disrespectful to the daimyo’s firstborn son, and that her family is uncultured, blah blah blah.

Rising to the challenge, Kagura shouts back, slipping into a very strong country accent out of frustration, until the two kids are very nearly about to punch each other’s lights out.

The headteacher gives both of them detention.

It’s the start of a beautiful rivalry.

Within a month, Megumi, the heir, inadvertently slips personal information into Kagura’s greedy hands. They fight a lot, with a rich noble versus a poor country girl being the main topic of conversation in the beginning, before he slowly begins to respect her as a person, and they instead fight about their personality differences. Because she treats him like any other annoying brat, he learns how to act like an actual person.

He becomes nicer. And more open.

Kagura doesn’t even feel guilty about selling his secrets back to her home country, because at least Megumi is blossoming into a nice young man before her very eyes thanks to her handiwork of just being a down-to-earth friend.

There are Grass ninjas polluting the hallways of the academy, in public and in hiding, mostly to protect their rich clientele or the daimyo’s son. With Kagura’s abrasive attitude and her frenemy relationship with Megumi, there is very little suspicion thrown on her character. They’re looking for kunoichi seductresses, not tempestuous teenagers who look like they hate the heir for most of the time.

Worm and Snake built an amazing backstory for her, holy sh*t. And the other members of the team are currently weeding out the outsider’s information from the royal guards. Frog is… doing her own thing, most of the time.

After the second month, Frog calls in the radio to finish the mission as soon as possible. The timeline has been moved up.

Raccoon concludes the mission entirely.

Over the course of a week, there are more and more security threats on the capital’s lands, from supposed Rock ninjas scouting out for more farmland in preparation for the winter months – Worm and Snake’s doing. The school practices safety drills in the event of an attack, with Kagura joining the other kids to grumble and groan about being kept inside. And finally, when restrictions lift a little, Kagura accidentally kicks a football towards where the boys are smoking in the shade of the courtyard.

“Peasant girl,” Megumi sneers.

Kagura, or Anzu, rolls her eyes, and says, “Okay, mister second place.”

After two months of being frenemies, he smirks ever so slightly instead of getting angry, and that’s when Raccoon’s genjutsu takes hold.

The plan is insane. During the night, when the ANBU agents dared to make any moves at all, Frog had been drilling Raccoon and Swan to perfect the timing of the swap or else the Grass bodyguard ninja will f*ck up the entire operation. Y’know – good luck!

Kagura completes a substitution jutsu with absolutely zero amount of chakra residue at the exact same millisecond that Raccoon forms her distance-wide genjutsu. The chakra from doing the substitution jutsu requires a minor flare to build up momentum in her core, which can only be hidden during the initial numbing effects of the genjutsu, and not a moment before or after.

The swap is successful.

Kagura watches from a distance away, hidden from the world, as an attack erupts. The illusion of Anzu jumps in front of Megumi, just in time to block an enemy ninja’s sword with her body, and the boy watches in horror as his first real friend dies in front of him, drowning in her own blood, because his own guards were too busy protecting him, without acknowledging the girl who jumped in time before the others.

The ANBU agents, disguised as Rock ninjas disguised as non-village affiliated mercenaries, attempt with great effort to “kill” the daimyo’s son, but in the end, retreat after more Grass reinforcements arrive. In the chaos, Frog swaps the remnants of the illusioned corpse with an actual fresh corpse of a random farmer girl they found on the other side of the country, with some of the battles accidentally further damaging Anzu’s body so that her face is completely unrecognisable by the end.

Good. That other dead girl had very different facial features.

The rookies’ induction into the Seduction field is successful, the village quotes. Kagura’s report on Megumi of Grass’ entire personality and profile is thusly sold to the second daughter of the Fire country’s daimyo, who wishes to court the boy.

The country needs stronger ties to the breadbowl of the continent, she says. The noble girls from Lightning are eyeing the prize of Megumi’s status and virility, and Fire must win.

Kagura doesn’t know what Kurenai’s job was, exactly, in the brothel, but the other half of the mission assignment seems to please the second daughter, who then makes a joke about how her serving girl friends in the kitchens will be grateful for the heads up when she plans to move her retinue with her to the Grass daimyo’s palace. The kindness is not lost on anyone, but there is still a huge difference between kind and nice.

Wanting information for the sake of her civilian entourage is kind.

Making other people abuse themselves to get that information is not nice.

The ANBU team returns home.

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

It becomes incredibly obvious at how horrible even the non-clan ninja-raised ninja are when Kurenai stares into Kagura’s eyes for a full five minutes whilst stirring her drink.

The Yuuhi aren’t a clan, Kagura thinks, but she’s heard here and there about how Kurenai’s parents are both ninja, and one of her grandparents was a ninja, too. With that reasoning, there should be enough civilian upbringing in the Yuuhi family to even out the weirdness of chakra magic, but noooo.

It doesn’t work like that, apparently.

In fact, it becomes even weirder.

“Frog is my mom,” Kurenai says, and Kagura chokes on a strawberry-mango lassi.

After the eventful two month long mission, the two rookies decided to check out the new Fruity Fruity Café on Hashirama street in order to get to know each other better. ANBU Dragon is, unfortunately, an incredibly awkward conversationalist and probably only feels comfortable in the presence of exactly four people.

“ ‘Frog is your mom?’” Kagura asks, trying not to sound horrified, because it does explain a lot but it also raises several uncomfortable questions. “That’s – interesting. Is that why you were sorted into Seduction?”

They drink their lassis whilst slowly revealing new information about themselves – because that is, at its essence, what becoming friends is – with Kagura growing more and more concerned about the state of her new friend’s mental health. There’s not much she can do to stop anyone’s career track, nor is she a trained therapist, so Kagura leads the conversation to a lighter topic and attempts to make Kurenai smile at least once today.

The mission is unsuccessful.

Still, Kagura perseveres, and the newly formed friends agree to meet again later.

The next meeting is with a boy named Gekko Hayate and Sarutobi Asuma, the Hokage’s son. They’re all crammed in a booth at a sukiyaki place in downtown, with Kagura deciding to herself to never again trust Kurenai to arrange a friendly meeting -- like. Ever. Please no. It’s unsaid that Hayate, Kurenai, and Kagura are all ANBU agents, and this might’ve been a preteen celebration of throwing their lives away if the Hokage’s son hadn’t attached himself to the group at the last minute.

He also has a crush on Kurenai. A very obvious one.

“Our classes combined in first year for the field excursion trip,” Hayate mentions to Kagura. “Do you remember me?”

It would be rude to say no, and everything spells out bad news if she lies and then has to back up her claim, so she says, with a crinkly smile, “I’m really sorry, but to be honest, I wasn’t exactly the smartest six year old. My memory is just…” Here, she gives a thumbs down and a shrug, and the entire group accepts her answer.

It’s enough of a non-response to not arouse suspicion, which is exactly what she does for the rest of the night because apparently all four of them had been in the academy together at some point, it’s just that she doesn’t remember. But even so, Hayate doesn’t look thrilled at her words, and she subtly makes it up to him for the rest of the night by acting nice and being generally flirty. It works, mostly, and he loosens up after her third witty remark about Asuma's very very very subtle secret.

The next long mission for Kagura is again, working for the fire daimyo’s second daughter. She works undercover in the palace as a serving girl, darting quietly between silent rooms to deliver more than salacious gossip to the other couriers, or to act as tittering lady-friends for any of the daimyo’s daughters, if need be, to impress visiting noble-friends.

Kagura’s mission is to discover if there are any plans to murder the daimyo’s first daughter, and the mission, as most seduction missions do, lasts a long time. She celebrates her ANBU matriculation anniversary by herself in the kitchens, sneaking little pieces of sweet rice cake into her mouth during her shifts there. The mission nearly concludes with little to no fanfare, with ANBU agent Swan not having caught any sort of dissident behaviour in the palace that would warrant an assassination against the first daughter.

This is what she reports to the second daughter.

“You have my gratitude, Swan,” Chinami says, lounging back in her seat. “Your country thanks you.”

Kagura bows.

Chinami is a petite girl, perhaps a few years older than Kagura, with the classic traditional beauty of sleek long hair, doe eyes, and porcelain white skin. But she smiles a little too sharply at times, and grows her nails longer than is appropriate for someone who wants to appear delicate and dainty. Her kimono today is a dark crimson, dotted with fresh orange flowers and golden grass motifs, tied with a similarly rich set of outer robes – an outfit of utmost power, matching the innate regality the girl carries with her everywhere.

The planning with Swan and the daimyo’s second daughter has been something fierce this past year. The first daughter, Chinatsu, plans to ascend the throne and become the new daimyo in just a few short years. However, there are many nobles in Fire and other countries who wish to see the first son – the daimyo’s third child, a sprightly little boy of eight – lay claim to power. Chinami is doing everything she can to make sure her older sister ascends, instead of creating an era of a boy king.

Tying herself to Megumi of Grass will surely increase the supply of food to the great country of Fire, and support the reign of Chinatsu.

Kagura misses her friend. Swan hopes prosperity will come to the country.

Surprise surprise, on the last day of the mission, the day that she’s supposed to travel back to Konoha, a poison trap is sprung against the first daughter. Kagura isn’t working as a serving girl on this day, and instead stalks from the shadows. She watches as the two sisters prepare for their noon-day meal, closely looking at all the servants that bring in the trays. One of them, a tiny slip of a woman who’s been working at the palace for many years, sets Chinatsu’s favourite chicken porridge down first.

Even from metres above, hidden in the corners of the ceiling, Kagura recognises the wobbliness of the serving woman’s hand, the stains of sweat on the back of her neck, and the emptiness of her gaze. This assassin is perfect – not a single hair out of place, the food appears to be an exact replica of the porridge from yesterday, and her pace walking out of the private dining room does not have any tells.

Except Kagura is a master of the face.

The daimyo’s family are trained to recognise suspicious behaviour, but not even they can smell sweat from a room away by enhancing chakra to their olfactory glands.

The sweat pattern is unusual.

Why?

Kagura steps down in a flash, to stand behind Chinatsu’s seat. No one has noticed her entry yet. From here, there is nothing wrong with the meal. The porridge looks appetising and harmless. The side dishes are also perfectly well made. Leopard taught Kagura that even the so-called “scentless” poisons are never really scentless. Even bland poisons smell like something.

It’s not in the food.

Chinatsu reaches for her spoon.

This is where the fun begins – the entire room goes still when Swan reveals her presence by reaching out to pluck the first daughter’s hand from the air, gripping onto the woman’s elegant wrist. A few people scream, then very very slowly relax once they see the Konoha ANBU mask.

“Swan,” Chinami barks. “Report.”

“The cutlery is poisoned,” she says blandly, in her practised ANBU voice. It’s a mix of professional and sultry-mature, to add more confusion on her age and identity.

From there, everyone backs away from the table, and Kagura heads to tie down the culprit before the woman can make a move.

Her job contract ends that day, still, because her seduction mission is over. Now it’s time for the espionage and tracking specialists to take over, to discern the truth behind Chinatsu’s attempted murder. Funnily enough, the Rooster and Carp are the two new agents for the mission, and they meet at the half-way point between the capital city and the ninja village.

“Any new developments, Swan?” Rooster asks.

Kagura thinks about all the salacious gossip and the real rumours uncovered whilst in the depths of the palace walls. It may not be helpful to their mission, but…

“Yes,” she says, holding out a thumbs-up. Carp stares at it. “I grew an extra centimetre.”

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

Carp retires.

It’s an odd sight, to see someone be able to step down from a position once given it, but it’s not too unusual – or so Kagura hears. Retirement is usually due to injury, but there are exceptions given to those of political importance within the country or village. And in this case, Carp retires from ANBU to become an academy teacher – a position of arguably greater importance.

Scratch that.

It’s not arguable. It’s a damn fact.

The timeline of his retirement fits with the two-year team shuffle that the ANBU division suffers from – a facet of making sure there’s enough environmental diversity in all these nutcases’ lives so that they don’t all go insane. The important commanding teams, the high-ranking ones with only A and S class ninja, don’t change at all usually, but the mid-tier ones like Team Kan shift all the time. Carp retires into a new persona called Iwabuchi Sensei, Leopard and Rooster shift around to different tracking-based teams, and Swan is slotted into the infamous “black hole” spot of the legendary assassination team.

Team Ro.

Captain Dog likes to keep his teams organised the same way every single mission, but due to the nature of the intense assassination jobs Team Ro works with, members keep switching in and out for safety reasons. There’s always three heavy hitters and one agent with subtle skills – healing, traps, long-distance sensing, or seduction. And it’s this position that rotates out all the damn time.

Nobody expects Kagura to last the first month.

Well. She’ll show them.

The second in command for Ro is a very eager puppy – which is ironic, because he’s ANBU Cat. Kagura can see the imaginary tail already wagging for cool, hot, and sexy.

Cool, hot, and sexy, aka Captain Dog, is an enigma. And by that, Kagura means that he’s real f*cking weird. On the first day of the new team assignments, he brings them to the furthest legal training area from Konoha proper, almost half a day away, and suddenly announces a four-way brawl before anyone gets a piss break. On the hellhole island, the trainers called this game Last Man Standing, and said that the end prize was revelling in the joy of being better than everyone else. Or something like that.

From here, Captain Dog must be categorising all of the abilities of his new teammates in the most obvious way possible. It feels like a cheat and definitely really annoying, so ANBU Swan does her best to also be an irritating little wanker.

Oyster, that smug sh*t, attacks first, blasting the clearing with a wide-range fire ninjutsu. He’s one of the ninja that use the full head coverings, which means that he’s got an identity worth hiding behind that mask. Clan kid. Very well trained, versed in many fighting tactics, creative with fire – this is definitely an Uchiha.

Cat, meanwhile, disrupts their balance with an area based earth ninjutsu, creating centralised earthquakes in the immediate radius. He then uses the chaos to his advantage, clearly comfortable with the shifting ground, to rip out an ocean of shuriken. Swan diverts a few of them coming at her with her own shuriken.

With the onslaught of fire and earth attacks, the entire field becomes a masterclass in destruction. The captain did say it was a four-person brawl, but if he expects her to be a part of this when she can safely take cover and attack from the sidelines, he’s got to either be an idiot or a massive prick. Swan takes her chances and runs back to the treeline, to where all Konoha ninja feel the safest: stuck in a branch somewhere.

In the two seconds it takes her to escape the burning earthquakes, Dog takes out Cat with a kick to the forehead. The Cat mask cracks, and the agent falls to the ground, his back landing horribly straight into a sharp edge of a man-made dirt boulder. The earth jutsu ends abruptly at the cut-off from its chakra source, leaving Oyster to dig out his most impressive but also subtle tactics of evasion. This kid was unpopular on the ANBU training island not just for his serial killer personality, but also because he utilised the flicker jutsu like no other, sometimes even running away from the trainers just to piss them off.

The moment Dog throws an explosive seal towards Oyster, Swan starts her plan of attack. She’s the “fourth wheel” on this team, metaphorically speaking, and is definitely okay with the lot saving her for last because they’ll think it to be an easy victory. Because, well, yes, but also no.

Her kunai, tied to a razor wire, flies slowly to incentivise Dog to catch the kunai. He does, because she knows the next thing he’ll want to do is yank it hard enough to bring her off balance or send some sort of lightning or fire jutsu through the connection.

He pulls it.

How to beat a sharingan user? Or, two sharingan users? Dog, or Hatake, or whatever, is one of the best of the best. He won’t fall prey to advanced trickery because he can see everything, and is on top guard due to being attacked by more than one person at the moment. So instead, Swan makes sure to hide her tricks in a way they won’t expect.

He pulls the wire with ease, Swan loses balance just for a second, her hand slipping on the other end of the wire spool, Dog and Oyster spot the moment of opportunity to redirect their attacks straight at her, and in the slip, her fingers crush together uncomfortably, leaving small cuts by her knuckles.

It forms a hand seal, hiding in plain sight.

Katsu.

This is how to out-predict a sharingan user. Be stupid.

The field rings out with explosions, planted by Swan during the shuriken attack. She’s made it a habit to roll up sheets of explosion paper and stuff them in the middle of the throwing weapon with gratuitous use of tape (not glue, because any good tracker can smell glue from a country away), and the washi paper is so thin that it’s not easily noticeable on the ground amidst the chaos of something like multiple fire jutsu and a mini earthquake. Besides, nearly all of the weaponry has shifted underground, in cracks and crevices.

(Thanks a lot, Cat)

The ground beneath Dog and Oyster erupts in a cacophony of flame and smoke. Debris sprays everywhere, Oyster jumps the wrong way, and Dog stabs Oyster’s hands with a well aimed senbon (why does he use senbon? Who even uses needles anymore?) horrifically.

Oyster screams like a little girl, and Kagura can imagine – hands are integral to jutsu, the tight cords of tendons and bone separating and cracking and splitting must feel awful, even with adrenaline flowing through his body.

Dog knocks the boy out after a ridiculously one-sided taijutsu match, throwing his limp body on top of Cat’s.

The smoke hasn’t cleared enough for full visibility yet, which is a shame because Kagura’s best sensory ability is her vision and her current opponent is called Dog .

Woof woof.

She doesn’t rely on the explosion’s aftermath to stunt his sense of smell and hearing, and quickly relies on her best asset, running the f*ck away, to somehow survive this. ANBU Swan is f*cked.

It’s completely and utterly gratifying, however, after the five-minute mark of fleeing from the site, when she realises that she’s actually physically faster than the captain. Dog does a bit of f*ckery now and then with chakra-muscle augmentation, but it doesn’t last long enough for him to catch up. It’s great. It’s amazing. It’s f*cking fantastic.

Until the actual dogs show up.

Half an hour later, there are eight dogs on top of Kagura. Only half of them are fast enough to race, but the other half are the brains of the operation. Whilst she has the ability to outrun them, they know the terrain better than her, and surrounded her by all angles during her galavant up the side of a cliff – this part of Fire country has way too many mountains and hills. It’s like f*cking Iwa up here. From there, once the captain could close in the distance, he threw his heart and soul into subduing her with elemental ninjutsu and environment-based genjutsu until one of the ninken managed to sneak in for a nasty bite.

Gross.

The big one, a giant dark brown bulldog, pulls Kagura’s sore body on top of his and begins the trek back to the training field.

Or, whatever’s left of it.

The captain lines his three subordinates on the ground like obedient little pets as soon as everyone’s awake.

“You,” he tells Cat in a scolding tone. “You need to work on your taijutsu.”

Cat visibly wilts.

“And you already know what to work on,” he tells Oyster. They share a knowing look, and Kagura is one-hundred percent sure that the two of them know each other in the ‘real’ world.

Oyster raises a heavily bandaged hand. “Permission to speak freely?”

She half expects the captain to say no, just because he’s shown to be an anal motherf*cker so far, but luckily enough for the peanut gallery he’s not too disagreeable. Yet.

“Go on.”

“I have a complaint about your training methods, captain,” the (possible) Uchiha says, and raises both mildly mangled hands high in the air. “Because excuse me, what the f*ck is this?”

And then the f*cker just shrugs and says, “You need to practice the flicker jutsu without signs. There’s your incentive.”

“You maimed me the day before a mission–!”

“--Practice harder, then.”

Oyster screams in frustration but gives up because Dog almost looks like he’s enjoying this now. Weirdo.

“And now you, agent Swan,” the captain says. “You need to work on fighting multiple opponents at once. Your genjutsu endurance is also sh*t for your level of clearance. Now, Team Ro, Oyster is correct – we have a mission in Otaf*cku Gai in twenty hours. Until then, we need to work out the kinks. We’ll have another four-way battle in three minutes.”

This f*cker.

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

Kagura is a seduction expert, which means that the village or its shifty political underbelly (she’s not blind, she lives in a literal military dictatorship made up of ninjas ) can’t take her out without a serious fight from administration because it’s nearly impossible to replicate her skill set. This does mean, in turn, that seduction agents tend to avoid physical battles as much as possible to preserve their lives for the sake of the village and client – so maybe it’s a blessing from the heavens that Kagura can run really fast.

But this isn’t a fight that she can run away from.

Dog makes a loud sneezing noise outside in the streets during the summer festival in Otaf*cku Gai. Auxiliary agents are stationed around the rooftops, looking into the window of a business deal that could potentially f*ck up Konoha’s wheat trade.

Enter: bad guys.

“So you’re the informant, huh?” The Kumo ninja says, leering over the low table with tea and biscuits. Two other Kumo ninja sit in the back of the private room, keeping their ears and eyes open. Sensor ninja? If that’s the case, then Captain Dog absolutely cannot move from his current position or else they’ll be able to detect it. The ugly one on the left is already twitching like a maniac.

Kagura purses her lips, looks down, and looks back up, pretending to be scared but putting up a brave front. Or, actually, she might not be acting. But the minute dip in her head’s movements is code in ANBU language for shut the f*ck up, I got this.

Hopefully Dog can see it from his point, because if he doesn’t stop his damn sneezing signal then she’s going to literally blow her own brains out with a homemade pipe gun.

“I am,” she says. “Thank you for meeting with me tonight. As promised, I’ll tell you Lady Chinami’s plans for her new agriculture law, but you have to swear to keep me safe. I– I’m risking a lot for this information, I’m starting a family soon, my fiance can’t–.”

The enemy holds his hand up. Kagura stops her rambling and swallows down the jitters.

Dog, outside, sneezes loudly.

She wants to throttle him and tell him to shut the f*ck up or else the foreign ninja will get suspicious of some bastard with terrible allergies by the ring toss stall in the festival, if they’re not already suspicious. Because, come on, being a nervous train wreck is the only natural reaction for a civilian informant. If anyone is sensing fear in her words it means the plan is working, leave me alone.

Well, the assurance of Konoha presence is soothing, at least, because these three Kumo ninja are all undoubtedly at least A rank, to be bold enough to infiltrate into Fire country for information gathering. By some god’s luck, the previous stealth team on station had enough pointers in this direction to lead Team Ro into creating a specialised situation for information gathering.

Because fighting these three in a highly public area, in the centre of town, will most likely lead to some very bad political consequences, no matter if they’re the intruders or not. Chinatsu would probably fire her from all future jobs if the swan mask went under media scrutiny.

Enter: seduction specialist Akabane Kagura, thirteen and thriving.

The mission requires Agent Swan to give false information believably and not cause a commotion in one of Fire country’s major civilian settlements, wherein Cat and Oyster are stationed at the secondary location with traps ready to lead the foreigners away on a disorienting genjutsu path back to some other country (not their problem, haha), with Dog acting as overall support (aka if anyone f*cks up he pulls them out). The easy camaraderie from Team Kan isn’t present in Kagura’s life anymore, because Team Ro’s captain, Dog, seems to encourage petty rivalries and stupid arguments over any actual teamwork building exercises.

Whatever. That freak.

“It’s here,” she says, and slides over a crumpled note.

Something happens – a retrieval jutsu? – and the slip of paper disappears in a shimmer, instead of anyone reaching out to grab it. The ninja on the right (marginally less ugly than the one on the left) nods, and stage one of the mission comes to a conclusion.

“We thank you for your services,” the lead Kumo ninja says.

Well. At least someone has manners.

It was pretty strange, at first, in Kagura’s first year living in the Elemental Nations as an oblivious stranger because of the utter lack of diversity juxtaposed with the outrageous amount of colour. Everyone looked mostly Japanese, but if the island of Japan got bulldozed over with the world’s biggest paint brush. People from Lightning country came in different hues, from wall plaster white to burnt charcoal, but their features still remained Asian. Nevermind, Kagura, thinks, the millions of hairstyles from around the continent.

It’s well… hmmm.

Bright?

Kagura claps her hands together and bows lightly. “Please let us change the fate of my country’s future. We wish for a beautiful eternity with the first son.”

Then the foreigners leave, Kagura takes a second to sag in relief, and makes the switch from seduction to stealth mode once Dog sounds the next signal – a loud sigh.

To her, it’s easy to pinpoint his voice out of the crowd of milling civilians amongst the festivities, but to enemy ninjas who aren’t familiar with the voices of her comrades, they most likely brushed off his occasional noises outside. Why? She doesn’t know for the life of her – maybe Dog’s voice is just that annoying. The tone grates her ears because he’s just so, so, so–.

“Huh,” he muses, once she meets him by the stall. “Not bad.”

Condescending.

“...Thanks, captain.”

He pats her back. Yes, it’s terribly awkward and holy sh*t he’s such a f*ckup.

As per protocol, because Dog is a massive hypocrite, he sends her off to the ANBU shrinks after every mission that involves seduction expertise. So whilst he’s stewing in his own brain sludge, bullying Oyster and being a condescending sh*t of a senpai to Cat (does nobody else see it as harassment?), Swan gets to have nice chats with the shrinks.

Or, not so nice. They don’t like having her in their offices and she can’t imagine why.

“You have a tight hold on your emotions on the field,” Doctor Yamanaka (Kagura doesn’t know which one, there’s like a billion of them blond f*ckers in Konoha) applauds. “The compartmentalisation training seems to work very well with you. Now, how do you feel about separating yourself from all your human masks?”

Kagura leans back on the couch. It always smells like sage in this office and man, her nose f*cking hurts. “Yeah, no, it’s good.”

The clock on the wall ticks on.

The shrink smiles blandly. “It’s… good? Tell me, Agent Swan, what do you mean by that?”

This is always the worst part.

“I mean,” she says, “I don’t really use masks? It’s my job to understand people and blend in, so I just… yeah. I react accordingly to the situation.”

For example, Megumi had been a great friend. She still feels bad about betraying his trust and traumatising him for the rest of his life in order to manipulate his internal policy-making decisions for the benefit of her country’s prosperity, but what can you do? She recognises her friendship as a real friendship when it lasted, but a lot of time has passed since then and now this job is just a facet of her life. Constantly shifting in and out of psychological masks sounds so tiring.

Doctor Yamanaka blinks. “I see,” he says, in a way that makes it sound like he really doesn’t.

Kagura points at the clock. “My appointment ends in five.”

He presses a hand over his forehead, massaging the tension away, and releases a very deep sigh. “Swan,” he says, perplexed. “You don’t use masks?”

I don’t repress all my emotions like a little bitch, yes sensei, sounds too mean and would probably earn her a strike on some sort of hidden record, so Kagura just smiles and nods dumbly. For extra effect, she sends him a thumbs up.

Something cracks in Yamanaka’s brain, so Kagura slowly inches out of the room, staring at the shrink muttering to himself and reviewing all of her mission reports, then waves at the secretary to confirm her finished appointment. For some reason, the secretary working at this clinic is an old civilian woman, which is bad because civilians are soft and squishy and breakable, but also good because Yamamoto-san seems like a great person.

“Take care, Kagura-chan,” the secretary says.

“Thank you, you too,” she chimes back. “Have a good day.”

There are multiple clinics interspersed in Konohagakure, with the general hospital servicing typical injuries and illnesses, and smaller buildings here and there for specialised purposes. This is the mental health building, sitting on the east side, near Yamanaka street and the produce market. Dog and Oyster have probably never stepped foot in this neighbourhood for obvious reasons – Dog infamously chains all of his emotions in the fifth dimension, and Oyster can legally only discuss his psychosis with his fire-breathing brethren.

Probably. Maybe. Sure.

And what the f*ck is up with Cat? He acts like a seven year old and a hypochondriac grandpa at the same time.

So this is exactly what Kagura asks him the next time they have training together.

The field is sunny and green. Oyster is slamming himself into several trees, practising his body flicker jutsu without hand seals, to a certain degree of success. He’d work wonders at a rock concert, what with all the epic guitar fails and head bobbing. Dog is… somewhere, either licking his own reflection in the mirror or pissing on a disabled person’s wheelchair. The training field is bright and beautiful today, the sun is shining, the dew from the morning’s precipitation leaves a sheen on the dark grasses, there’s nobody around for miles, and Kagura is about to ask her teammate if he’s literally insane.

So much for peace.

“Hey Cat, quick question – when did you join ANBU?” She asks.

He’s nonpuzzled at the change in conversation. It’s a perfectly normal question, of course, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Cat hissed at her and said it was a secret.

Damn. She’s been hanging around the captain too much – they’re always teamed up together in duo formation during missions. The silver lining is that Kagura and the captain are the same height, so he can’t physically look down at her and be condescending at the same time.

“When I was seven years old,” he says.

Hold up.

“Oh,” she says politely. “I’m honoured to train with someone so experienced in this profession.”

Hold the f*ck up. Back up.

What the hell?

Seven?

Okay, it makes sense to Kagura, but her head spins a bit and she sits in her tiny studio flat later that day to just process the information. She came here, in this world, with zero information about her environment, and barely managed to adapt in time before being thrown out into said world. But expectations of decency and morals still exist in her mindset, but apparently there’s even more shady secretive stuff going on behind the scenes. Figuratively speaking, under Konoha’s tree.

Like evil tree roots?

Maybe, maybe not. There’s no evidence yet, other than some seriously disturbed teenagers on Team Ro.

She sits on her crumpled futon, stares at her takeaway noodles, and reflects on the day. Cat came into ANBU at age seven, which is approximately the same age that children enter the ninja academy. That means he must’ve been trained for at least a year or two in advance by some other interested party because he doesn’t seem to be clan-affiliated… which implies that someone, definitely not his family, groomed him into his current position.

There’s also the whole tree thing.

Yeah, okay, Cat can do the tree-based ninjutsu that the First Hokage was famous for and it’s a pretty big secret (one hundred percent success rate that if the enemy sees Cat whip out a bunch of wiggly branches, they’re dead), but Kagura thinks she might’ve underestimated the political implications of it all.

Mokuton aside, Cat was groomed. Actually groomed.

Who’s to say that he was the only one? There might be dozens of other unstable weirdos like him exploring the ANBU ranks, having been groomed by a non-academy affiliated party, to populate ANBU.

She sighs and plops down on her back.

Whatever. Not her problem. It’s completely sh*tty, but she knows it doesn’t affect her because she’s pretty sure that Konoha is doing its best to keep her high and happy. Her expertise in seduction, the rarest field in the organisation, allows her to prance about like a valuable piece of jewellery. Battles aren’t what win wars and earn missions – it’s politics. It’s always politics, and she’s got so many fingers in the daimyo’s metaphorical pies that Konoha can’t retire her without facing serious repercussions. Nobody else can replicate the skill set of an experienced seduction agent, and with Frog’s imminent retirement (announced a few weeks ago, which apparently shocked Kurenai more than anyone else), Kagura’s job security just reached the position of tenure.

Ugh.

She turns around in the futon, almost knocking over a potted plant.

Groomers. Damn, this is just the worst. Kagura’s moral compass has never been that straight, but Cat is growing on her like an incredibly unlucky parasite, and she knows that she might be the only person in the entire ninja force that can walk away after poking the bear.

So she finishes dinner, eats an entire carton of ice cream to wash it down, then goes to snoop around Konoha for some really sh*tty easter eggs.

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

Step one of information gathering is to not make a total fool of herself, so Kagura swallows down her basal human pride and stalks the ninja academy. She knows, well, enough, but there may be a time down the line when normal cultural knowledge might save her ass one day. Like, who the Senjus really were (because no one really talks about them in casual conversation) and all the important history dates. She should have been studying this sh*t whilst she had attended that school in Grass, but unfortunately the curriculum in civilian cities is wildly different from the spoonfed “murder is okay” mantra they teach the ninja hopefuls in Konoha.

Kagura wears a t-shirt with a printed fire symbol, the typical ugly shinobi pants, old sandals that make her ankles look fat, and a cough mask. Like this, she appears as any random off-duty ninja, which helps settle her nerves despite the fact that her planned activities aren’t actually illegal.

Yet.

Ex-Carp greets her at the gate because, fun fact, they don’t let just anyone in. Konoha isn’t stupid enough to let anyone wearing a leaf headband show up randomly at their most vulnerable spot, so Ritsu walks her in and flashes a few hidden signals to the second story windows of the old building. In theory, Kagura could sneak in given her current skill set in being a sneaky piece of sh*t, but it’s way easier to do everything in broad daylight.

“Yo,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

Iwabuchi Ritsu, at eighteen, feels too young to Kagura to be in any position of authority, but since the average lifespan of a ninja is somewhere in the mid-twenties, he might as well be parading around a respirator and bingo game set. He’s grown up a bit more, with wisps of a beard growing in on his chin, a more defined jawline, and a sturdiness to his frame that wasn’t there before.

She shrugs. “Not that long. Anyway, how’s it going? How’re your students?”

He rambles on about the troublemakers, the nerds, and the popular clan kids, then relates it back to his own stint at the academy. He was a part of the war draft, the last stretches of it, and was pulled out prematurely at about eight or nine to assist with look-out duties in the southern posts. As a civilian born ninja, Ritsu got the short end of the stick when it came to the beginning of his ninja career, but he was eventually granted a field promotion which led to better missions which then led to him signing up for the ANBU forces.

The story is nice, but here’s the thing about Kagura: people tell her everything. It’s really f*cking weird and it doesn’t stop. Ever since she matriculated into the Seduction cohort and seriously immersed herself in this ANBU lifestyle, people just don’t stop talking to her about their lives, like she’s somehow become the most addictive, trustworthy therapist ever. Suspicious ninja remain suspicious ninja, but they’re suspiciously open. Old civilian women at the local market say hi to her and then complain about their kidney stones or ex-husband’s bowel movements. Worm asked Kagura the other day if she could help pop a pimple on their asscheek.

It’s absolutely insane and please help oh god.

“So, what was it that you needed?” Ritsu asks, after a lull in conversation. He’s leading the way, with her hardly a half step behind him, expertly pretending to know how to navigate the academy as well as any other proud alumni.

Kagura shrugs. “I wanted to find my academic record. I was organising some of my old stuff, but my parents’ house got destroyed in the Kyuubi attack and I realised I didn’t have a lot of childhood things to decorate my flat with.”

The academy has to function like an actual school and keep copies of student reports, or else Kagura’s going to go mental.

Ritsu makes a sound of acknowledgement. “Well, you know where the copy room is. I’ll take you to the back, first.”

The academy is bigger than it looks – it appears to be a two story building on the outside, but is actually three stories tall. This deception is achieved through clever architecture, of tall windows, diligently creeping wall ivy, and low ceilings inside. If a genjutsu forced this facade, then it could be easily detected by foreign ninja, which is why chakra bullsh*t is not the end all be all in terms of security measures – some ability to confuse using basic construction trumps genjutsu, no matter what. It’s cream coloured, with old brick and stone, allowing for illusionary depth in spatial awareness, because light expands space, so the classrooms don’t feel cramped despite being small.

This would’ve been a cosy learning environment for an eight year old Akabane Kagura, learning all the tricks to the interior building with her wee stubby legs. As in, knowing where the copy room is.

But she’s in too deep now. The back room, dark and dusty, has all student files on hand. As an ANBU agent, she supposes the security team trusts her enough to simply leave her stranded in the school unattended, as Ritsu had to attend a teacher meeting, but some help would surely be nice by now. Also, letting a veritable non-academia superior in the room with a f*ckton of personal information sounds like a risk to Konohagakure’s political confidentiality. Who knows what gold mines are in these squeaky file cabinets?

Fortunately for the village, Kagura enjoys not being a criminal enough to only leaf through her own student files, curiosity be damned.

There’s probably a camera somewhere, anyway.

After a few minutes of flipping through her old test papers, she decides on an unsuspicious amount of papers to take to the copy room. Then she surreptitiously tries to memorise the syllabi pages on the graded notes assignments, but she’s no Uchiha and her brain blanks out after memorising the seventeenth line of text.

A lot of things are starting to make sense, now. Little cultural nuances that she’d only passably understood are beginning to turn into basic knowledge in her brain. Kagura is morbidly amazed at how she managed to survive this far without an interviewed background check, because then her cover as a perfectly normal kunoichi would’ve been blown ages ago.

Copy room.

Copy room.

Copy room, where art thou?

A very good guess later, Kagura emerges from the academy with a few copies of her academic work folded neatly in her pockets, jovial. Mission success. Those academy f*ckers don’t label their classroom doors, but the obvious lack of children noises (screaming, crying, and farting, in that order) behind certain doors provide huge clues. The only thing that can deflate her good mood is if the f*cking Raikage stomped over and kicked her in the puss* with a stiletto heel.

So, she heads to a food stall in a residential neighbourhood and orders a private booth. Food is always going to be a great celebration tool.

“Mission,” Bear says, dropping behind Kagura as she’s trying to enjoy the last of her tea rice.

She’s well trained enough to hide signs of surprise, but jesus f*cking christ the General will spook her out no matter what situation they’re in together. He exudes a raw kind of power that not many others can dream of achieving in their meagre lifetime.

“Status?” She asks immediately, and slaps a few bills on the table. “Team Ro or solo?”

Bear can barely be contextualised into the form of a person. He’s not in his ANBU garb, but this human looking creature before her can’t be his real appearance. It’s a tall man, bulky, scarred, but there are hints of henge mixed in with a physical disguise, misleading even the most skilled eyes of his true self. He’s invisible until Kagura has to try to see him – and even then, it’s like her eyes are naturally glazing over and looking in other directions for the simplest of excuses.

“Cat and Oyster are on formal training leave tonight,” he says, and hands over a thin scroll with a complicated chakra lock. “Find Dog, you need to get to Minami by sunset. The red building on Monkey lane, fourth floor, second to the left, don’t use the door.”

Minami?

That village is on the southern coast.

Before Kagura can shoot out an affirmative, Bear disappears with a swirl of wind and stray leaves like any other asshole in Konoha. So she sighs, makes sure the bills on the table aren’t going anywhere, then speeds back to her flat to change. There’s a travel pack on the kitchen counter with all the things she needs for an impromptu mission, so she hooks it to the clasps on her uniform, then braves the thunder and seeks out the address.

Dog’s address. Because why not. Might as well stalk her paranoid captain. It's not like he actually waits behind his door with a rusty knife, hoping that a delivery person accidentally comes by so that he can make up an excuse for being stab-friendly. He probably also knows where she and the rest of the team live. And wow, that's a fun thought.

She shows up at Monkey lane hardly a scant minute later, decked out in full gear, in the shadows of the village buildings. There are civilians and genin teams strolling around this residential block, but none of them notice her, and she eventually finds her way on to the window sill of the aforementioned address. No doors, because anyone this high up the ANBU food chain is a psychotic f*cker with a boner for lethal booby traps. She has zero doubt that his doorknob is laced with anthrax.

Neurotic ninjas.

The window opens. It’s not Dog yet, just Kakashi. Seeing her captain without his animal mask is a little disorienting, but most of his face is still covered so it’s not that bad.

Still.

“Minami by sunset,” Kagura says. But, for legal reasons, she hands him the mission scroll, and watches him devour the words in a few seconds with his left Sharingan eye.

Wow. When was the last time he actually sat down and read for leisure?

He heads further inside the flat, away from her window sill view, and emerges shortly after with full gear and a tanto strapped to his back. It’s a bit unusual, she thinks, for a person of his size to be using a short sword, when he has better tactical ability with something with reach, but he must have his reasons. There are all kinds of f*cked up weapons in this continent, so she’s grateful he uses something she actually knows the name of.

There was a lady in River Country, a while back, with a sword in the shape of an oblong chicken. Kagura still isn’t sure what to make of it.

“Two point formation,” Dog says, and they’re off.

Two point formation is when two agents of similar ability track through the trees of Fire Country at the same pace, side by side. It’s a huge measure of trust for ANBU Swan, who, despite the two years of experience, is still barely into her teens and is only really in such a great position in the military due to a great personality. Literally. Captain Dog has been doing this ninja thing for over a decade, and has been embroiled in all sorts of classified missions since his balls dropped. By all means, she isn’t an equal to him in any way (except for height, haha), but this shows that he respects her to take equal charge.

It’s a nice, floaty feeling at the bottom of her stomach, and Kagura vows to be a little nicer to her emotionally stunted superior. Maybe.

They pass through familiar forests, tree branch to tree branch, until the ecology diversifies into the rolling countryside, and they glide through rows of farmland. Then, closer to the coast, near the Tea Country border, they’re met with the rainforest jungles of the southern ecosystem and they’re back to tree hopping. Hours pass like this, of silent running.

The mission is to judge the allegiance of one of Konoha’s long-term civilian partners – Bara, a middle aged merchant from a farming town in Fire Country, may or may not be compromised. He worked as a spy in the legislative affairs of Lightning Country, focused on architectural development of satellite cities. And now, Konoha’s Intelligence have since received news that someone spotted Bara headed towards Minami.

Minami, a port city.

Kagura is about ninety-five percent sure this is going to be an assassination mission. The other five percent is that they’ll end up drugging him to drag back to a torture session with a Yamanaka to figure out why such a prominent figure would flee a country assignment for no reason.

When they arrive, the sun is a vibrant red hue in the darkening sky, and they stalk their mission assignment on the road to a quiet izakaya a bit out of the way. The issue with civilian personnel is that they’re used to looking out for ninja trickery, and prefer to keep their entire sense of self within this foreign, civilian bubble that ninja may not be used to. And as a Fire Country native, most of the standard practices in counter intelligence won’t work on him; Bara would sniff out a Konoha trail a mile away.

Luckily for Konoha, ANBU Swan is something of an anomaly.

“Menu’s on the board, plum sake is half off tonight ‘cause we got an extra shipment from Thursday,” Kagura says, rinsing her hands at the sink behind the bar. She pitches her voice a bit higher and airier, to match with the messed-up, sweaty head of hair, and awkwardly long teenage limbs.

Bara purses his lips and glances at the board. “I’ll do Set A.”

There wasn’t enough time during the set-up to transform her appearance, so this is Kagura’s real, bare face. She can sense Dog’s anxiety going through the roof from his nook on the ceiling, camouflaged from the civilians as he holds together his genjutsu magic. The other patrons, the head chef, and the other attendant blithely ignore Bara’s bar seat, as Dog strains his Sharingan bullsh*t to the max.

“Set A it is,” she says, and smiles with dimples. She meanders to the kitchens to tell the chef, then back to the bar to pretend to be busy with something.

Part of the charm of being so obviously a lanky teen girl with nothing to do in an izakaya of exactly three customers is being bored. So Kagura allows herself to be bored, half-heartedly wiping down the bar counter twice before fiddling with little origami napkins. One of the customers, in a private booth, leaves, and the actual waiter comes out to clear his table. Kagura blows a stray hair out of her face and continues playing with her little paper toys on the other side of the bar.

The chef rings a bell, and then Kagura goes around back to bring out Bara’s dinner order.

Bara is nearly done with his pickled vegetables when he takes the bait.

“Are you the owner’s daughter?” He asks, and despite his quiet voice, it’s an abrupt change in atmosphere and Kagura makes a surprised, inquiring face.

She blinks, then moves closer. “No – they don’t have kids. My parents are friends with them, though. Are you enjoying your meal?”

f*cking finally.

Captain Dog is probably on his last legs in terms of genjutsu usage. Poor sod.

“It’s good,” he says without meaning it. “I mean, you look pretty bored here, kid. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

There wasn’t much time to throw a profile together on Bara. It’s an unsaid thing that Konoha Intelligence tries not to create personality indices on home operatives, out of respect and fear that their own agents will be scared off from it, but the bare bones of one are curated for civilian operatives. The entire mission now is based off of Dog and Swan’s impromptu personality assessment.

Bara. Mid forties. No kids, two ex-wives, both of whom were about half of his age when he met them. A somewhat handsome man of good stature, with a conniving salesman smile. The civilians of a foreign country trusted him to do good work, and he did, but he also sold their secrets to his home country without a blink of an eye. This is a man who likes getting what he wants, and is usually sneaky enough to do so. In Kumo’s satellite cities, his main legislative duties were focussed on the construction of civilian school buildings. Dog said his travel bag smelled like face cream and roses.

It’s not ideal, but Kagura thinks she knows how to crack him.

She shrugs. “Yeah, but,” she says, and droops her shoulders down, subconsciously leaning towards him. “School’s lame. I’m fourteen, I wanna work and save money, y’know?”

Bara sets his chopsticks down and laughs. “You’re mature for your age. I’m Yamada. What can I call you?”

Kagura flushes. “Homura. Flames. My parents weren’t super creative, and they’re die-hard loyalists, so I was almost named Chinatsu.”

There’s a subtle change in Bara’s expression. It goes from mild amusem*nt to something harder behind his eyes, then back to his simple politeness. Kagura’s struck a nerve, and now she gets to explore it. Tick-tock, Dog probably isn’t too happy that she’s taking all this time to crack him, too. But it’s not like they can blitz him with stupid Sharingan mind-games to get the truth out of him, because if he actually is an innocent party, then Konoha will completely lose the trust of one of their best spies.

So, they’re doing this the nitty gritty civilian way.

Seduction.

“That would’ve been a shame,” Bara says. “Homura is a pretty name.”

And then he layers on the heavy flirtation. Another customer leaves. The main waiter leaves to go home for the night. The chef steps outside to smoke a cigarette. The last customer lays his head down, drop-dead drunk, quietly snoring. It’s the perfect centrepiece for a man like Bara, who’s the best salesman she’s ever seen. He’s galiantly nice, listening to Kagura’s made-up rants about school and how she’s too mature to be in a classroom. If she were actually a fourteen year old hick girl in the outskirts of Minami, she thinks she would’ve fallen for him.

Dog drops the genjutsu completely, now that the other civilians are out of the way. The one guy sleeping in the corner smells so strongly of liquor that he could probably sleep through a stampede of fat men gathering for the last order of a limited item action figure.

Then Kagura giggles about a horrendous joke about Bara’s age.

“No, I’m serious,” Bara says, smirking. “Your generation is gonna have it easy. The daimyo in your future means you’ll finally get that shipment of northern foods to the south. I didn’t know what beef tasted like until I was in my thirties! Can you imagine that, Homura-chan? Me, slobbering over a cow at the ripe age of thirty-five?”

A sharp laugh startles out of Kagura, and she flushes again. “I can’t.” She stifles another giggle, fluttering her hands. What she says next is a gamble, but all the signs of the night are pointing in this direction, and the clues are too obvious to pass up. Improvisation is her entire job. “Well, I suppose when he–.”

Then she pauses, horrified.

Kagura slaps both hands over her mouth, eyes wide, looking straight into Bara’s eyes. A heartbeat passes, he settles down, rolls his shoulders, and smirks wider.

“May we have a beautiful eternity with the first son,” Bara says, with a gainful smile.

The code between Swan and Dog, agreed upon before the set-up in the izakaya, was that if she reached for the water pitcher behind the bar, that that would be the code for a compromised agent. If anyone were to ask for a glass of water here, she would simply serve them diluted barley or corn tea instead, and cite something about their healing properties for hangovers.

She grabs the pitcher.

A blade emerges from Bara’s mouth.

Dog stands behind the spy, still holding onto the tanto splintering through the man’s skull. “Was that a keyword?” He asks, like that excuses the gruesome and sudden death. “And Swan, don’t let any of his blood get in your mouth, I don’t know what kind of diseases he might’ve picked up in Kumo.”

Blood. Brains. Shattered bone.

Kagura leaves her face still, because she hasn’t heard of Kumo being known for biochemical warfare, but it’s not a far off concept, and because Dog is reaching for the napkin box at the bar. He takes off his gloves, with exploded bits of tissue and fluid on the leather, and plucks a delicate tissue from the box. His fingers are like the rest of him – long, limber, with tiny scars from various nicks and bruises collected over the years – except his fingernails are thicker than what Kagura expected, now that she can see them up close. They’re a bit like trimmed claws, almost.

Then Dog extends an arm over the table to wipe Bara’s blood from Kagura’s face.

She waits for him to finish before speaking.

“You could’ve warned me, captain,” Kagura remarks without any heat.

He crumples up the bloody tissue in his hand. She gingerly opens a hand out for him, waiting, and he deposits it in hers. With a bastardised version of the finger flame jutsu, she opens the chakra points in her palm, redirects fire and yang energy into the point, and begins a small fire where the tissue sits on her skin. The papery material immediately takes the flame like a fish to water, and they both watch it burn into nothing but smoke.

“He was compromised,” Dog says. “The mission was to figure out Bara’s allegiances. He got the traitor’s death. The keyword?”

A blow from behind.

Very fitting.

“That, what he said – a beautiful eternity with the first son – that’s a common phrase for dissenters against the Fire Daimyo’s current political stance,” she says. She learned it when stuck in the underbelly of the capitol city. Secrets, secrets everywhere. An eight year old boy, worshipped by the old lady who steams rice cakes and the samurai stuck on guard duty. And now, enemies from other countries. “It’s not easy to probe that kind of alliance into someone like Bara, who should’ve been a neutral party.”

He pauses for a moment. Kagura also takes a moment to process the deeper implications here. She may or may not be stuck at the Hokage Tower doing a sh*t ton of paperwork tomorrow. At least she’ll be able to bring her captain with her to suffer. Misery loves company, and Kagura loves making Dog eat sh*t. What a bitch.

“I’ll race you home?” She says.

Dog co*cks a hand on his hip and tilts his head. “Once the clean up team gets here, you’re on, Swan.”

Challenge accepted.

Chapter 7

Chapter Text

Kagura knows exactly how she ended up in this situation, and it’s not very comforting.

First of all, Captain Dog is a dick. That’s it. End of the story. And, well, her shrink should be partly to blame. Doctor Yamanaka can go suck a fat one.

She’s sitting on a hospital bed in a room that’s colder than the Yondaime’s musty grave, in a mint yukata of cloth so thin that it has to be illegal in certain monasteries. She’s not wearing any underwear, which makes everything worse, and she’s debating whether or not becoming an arsonist would be worth the jail time. A girl with no panties is a girl with the ability to murder mortal men.

Her ANBU Captain had ordered her to undergo a physical in the aftermath of their assassination mission in Minami. He spent an awkwardly long time breathing over her shoulder during her report write-up, completely silent, and then said something about her age and health.

The head doctor finally enters, holding a clipboard.

“Swan, was it?” He asks. There’s a name tag on his scrubs that reads Nara Daisuke. “Don’t worry, I treat special ops.”

Kagura taps her fingers on her cold knees. “No, that’s alright, I figured. How are my tests, sensei?”

In the official ANBU interrogation tactics guide, carelessly shoving around a large stack of papers with data sheets upon data sheets is one way to intimidate an enemy into thinking that they’re in more hot water than they really are. Kagura vaguely remembers old procedural television shows doing something similar to beautifully coiffed CW styled villains, but she hadn’t really thought it was an actual thing until she (unwillingly) joined this military dictator state.

The doctor flips through a bunch of yellow papers and pen scribbles. “Seduction unit, right?” He asks without really asking. “Your captain ordered a complete physical. I don’t have clearance for any details of ANBU missions, but I usually get these assignments after a major traumatic event. You’re completely cleared. No injuries. No sexually transmitted diseases. No signs of hormonal disruption.”

That sounds good. Good as expected. Nothing happened on that mission.

Then he flips back to the cover page, then to the back sheets, then back again. He frowns, looks up at Kagura, then back to his funny clip board. “ANBU’s putting thirteen year olds in Seduction?”

Kagura smiles charmingly – as well as she can in this cold, anyway. “Yeah, it’s pretty odd. I guess my skill set just didn’t match up with the combat squads.”

“Not completely true,” he says, obviously fleeing from the hazardous segue. Most people squirm at the idea of a child in the stereotyped sex unit. “You’re in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, and seventieth for weight, for your age group. If you wanted to, you could probably switch into a taijutsu unit once you stop growing.”

Then Doctor Nara finishes up the rest of the appointment by going over her biochemistry and the ins and outs of a growing body. It’s like primary school health class all over again, except much worse, because it’s just the two of them in a stupid freezer, and there’s a giant poster on the wall of the anatomy of a vulva (which, funnily enough, greatly resembles Oyster’s mask). And when the allotted time is up, Kagura has to sign out with the receptionist in the first floor lobby, wait for a nurse’s signature, then run all the way to an ANBU office to drop off her proof of medical appearance.

She’s not dumb.

Kagura knows the reason why Dog forced a hospital appointment on her. He saw her doing her job a bit too well, flirting with an adult man, and freaked the f*ck out. This is his way of taking care of her, even if she thinks he’s dumb and just about three times worse of a captain than Leopard was. So she does her best at not cursing at Dog like a sailor at Team Ro’s next training session.

It begins normally – absolutely chaotic, that is, mostly from Oyster being a c*nt by making fun of Cat – and then descends into mental mayhem when Dog pulls her aside to throw a katana at her feet.

“...Captain?” She inquires.

Because Dog is super cool and way too manly for things like politeness and words, he unseals a second katana from a scroll clipped to his thigh, the exact copy of the sword now in Kagura’s hands – a basic model from most weapons shops, with a black leather handle and the average adult sized blade – and unsheaths it from a cheap wood-leather scabbard. She mimics the motion.

He goes through a set of basic kata. There’s a scant few seconds after each kata for her to follow. After ten sets of Essential Katana 101, Dog nods his head and tells her to buy a better sword before their next mission.

As a matter of fact, Kagura actually owns this exact sword. She’d bought it after her first B-rank cheque came in and had Team Kan teach her these basic katas. But she’s not telling him that, because it would ruin his (probably) planned surprise of attacking her full-force with his own superior swordsmanship with his tiny little shortsword that has to be alluding to something. And as always, she’s right, because the next moment comes and the entire day diverges from group training to Dog Eat Bird.

There’s a heady, heavy feeling behind her eyes, an almost pleasant sort of pressure, and Kagura dispels the genjutsu before Dog can behead her with his tanto.

The next genjutsu is harder to detect, with less of a foreign chakra presence invading her mind, and she wastes a precious second to bring her hands together to form a release seal instead of simple chakra regulation. And when she’s back in reality again, the next thing she knows is that there’s a lightning-fast foot kicking at her clasped hands and a bone-deep ache in her knuckle joints. Kagura rolls backwards, carrying the hilt with the pinky, ring finger, and thumb, with no time to process the ugly new bruises that are her genjutsu release fingers.

That’s bad. Using only half of her fingers to wield a sword means she won’t be able to actively engage all the muscles in the forearm. This is how tendonitis is born! He’s punishing her for being too slow, that asshole.

Maybe, maybe, if they were the funny sort of ninja with inappropriate humour involving nattering tragic backstories for the peanut gallery, this spar would’ve lasted longer. But as it was, Kagura lasts an embarrassingly short time each round of the feathery beat-down and earns several more painful bruises by the end of it.

“Your genjutsu…” the captain says slowly, squatting on the ground whilst leaning over her very sore and uncomfortable corpse, “could use some work.”

Kagura wants to sigh, but that would only make him cranky, so instead she says, “I appreciate the lesson.”

It’s meant to be a sarcastic little whip, but then Dog positively beams.

Why, she thinks, praying to whatever gods can hear her pleading confusion. Why me? Does he not understand sarcasm?

Then she collects her thoughts. No, of course he does. Dog, when he has to cosplay a normal human being such as the last Hatake (instead of the weird furry persona thing going on with the ANBU codenames), scores famously high on the intelligence and strategy ranks. The Konoha ninja force commemorates agents like him through public speeches and not-so-secret housewife gossip mills. So the only theory that makes sense is that he’s simply too trusting of ANBU Swan to suspect her passive-aggressive nitpicking.

Their two teammates burst through the shrubbery into the katana training clearing.

“Captain!” Oyster yells, jumping up and down like he’s taken a shot of cocaine up his ass. “For the mission on Thursday, can I stay en-pointe with you?”

Dog sighs. “I said no.”

The mission debriefing earlier in the morning had been mildly contentious, mainly courtesy of Oyster’s irritating charm and wanting to tackle the big boy missions for strong and mature manly ANBU agents – front-facing political jobs.

“Okay cap, but hear me out,” Oyster says, and leans into an imaginary group huddle. Cat, a beat later, leans in as well. “I’m sick of being with Cat’s fat ass all the time. He’s allergic to onions but the Akimichi-brand bars use onion powder and he keeps f*cking eating them even though you can just buy generic! And, and, whenever we share stealth camp I have to hear him sh*tting like crazy later, like boom! Boom! Boom–!”

Cat makes a sad, affronted noise because he’s too puss* to punch Oyster’s fat mouth in defence. Dog looks up at the sky during the rant and finally cuts Oyster off on the sixth “boom” with a raised hand.

Everyone quiets down.

“Oyster,” Dog says ominously, to the guy trying to win Most Annoying Uchiha award. “I don’t give a sh*t. Ten laps.”

After Oyster disappears, the captain turns all his might on poor Cat. “And you, thirteen laps. Your bowel movements stink, Kitty Cat.”

By the grace of the gods themselves, the captain doesn’t set laps for Kagura, and they use the rest of the time to plan out their upcoming mission. The mission directive was vague at best, and impossible at worst – it’s quite literally two sentences, of the most barebones information they’ve had to deal with yet, and the two crack down on an infiltration plan.

Come Thursday, Dog is actually a useful ANBU captain for once and intercepts a very early mission scroll for the assassination unit for the Koigakubo family – newly wealthy business conglomerates from Lightning country, making weapons and double-dipping amongst suppliers and consumer bases to fund a series of barely legal black market activities.

The family’s daughter, Maruko, was invited to Megumi of Grass’ lordship ceremony. Two Kumo chuunin stand as her escorts, alongside a mumbling civilian carriage, and it’s easy work to intercept the party once they pass through the borders into Hostprings country, fairly close to the Fire country border. Oyster and Dog work in tandem, standing completely still in their trees, as the entourage settles for the night in a hotel. It further proves the Oyster-Uchiha theory, and Kagura feels a little vindicated, if bad.

At the stroke of midnight, Maruko exits the hotel, and the chuunin don’t follow her.

Team Ro regroup by a dazed teenage girl in the middle of the woods, and once Oyster confirms that his Sharingan-fuelled genjutsu is holding strong by itself, Captain Dog gets his tanto out and decapitates Maruko.

“Head in a scroll for Mission B, burn the body,” he orders, and shoos his team along with surprising whimsy.

Kagura’s meant to be practising her fire style, so she sets her hands in a yang seal to prepare nature chakra for cremation whilst Oyster kneels down to grab the head. Then Oyster makes a surprised noise and drops the head on the ground. He picks it back up, slowly, and laughs.

“Captain, you’re not gonna believe this,” he says. “Here, hold this.”

Dog steps back. “No.”

“Ugh, fine, you bore,” he says, and tosses the head to Cat, who quietly shrieks and bounces the hot potato in his hands before throwing it at Swan, right next to him.

And now it’s her turn to be holding the decapitated head of a prissy teenage girl and there’s—. Oh. Wow. She can see what’s making this a laughing matter. The head is so light. It’s like there’s not even a brain in there. This girl must be dumber than rocks.

“Well,” she says, holding the two-kilo head. “This’ll make my job easier.”

Koigakubo Maruko, aka a Henge disguised Akabane Kagura, because Dog says her henge-jutsu is good enough to trick experienced ninja (which is easily the best thing he’s ever said about her), arrives in Grass country’s capital in time for Megumi of Grass’ lordship ceremony. Which, in noble terms, is a sign that he’s ready to be married off and his daimyo father is openly looking for potential partnerships now.

The mission, an A-rank of all things, is to convince him to marry Chinami of Fire. And this mission will only work through brute forcing his hard-earned personality profile into a box of misfortune. The only thing saving this fiasco is the fact that after Kagura’s fake death as Anzu, Megumi now has a saviour complex towards all precious victims, and Chinami’s willing to play along with this bullsh*t plan, only to get Chinatsu that stupid ass throne.

In the ceremony, which is more of a fancy gala party than anything, Kagura goes around making rounds, hurting her legs from contorting them awkwardly into the shape of a shorter girl (because Henge has some f*cking limits) , chatting up the other snooty ladies and Chinami, until she naturally reaches the timing wherein Megumi of Grass comes out from behind the curtain.

Time to pull out the eternally suffering rich teenage daughter mood.

Kagura discretely rolls her eyes and pretends to pay attention. Then she yawns, cutting off whatever Chinami was about to say to Maruko, and fakes a smile. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she says, in the flat, vaguely monotonous voice that many girls of the upper echelon society use. “I just like, I think someone’s calling me. I, like, have to go.”

Then she wanders off without bowing, and finds a larger group of young women from the business guilds. She titters and flirts around, finding a middling voice in the crowd of socialites before moving on and chatting with foreign nobles. The noblewomen are trained to be more socially perceptive, and Kagura has to really try to tone down the annoying rich girl act whilst simultaneously creating a dumb enough image for them to brush her off as a semi-helpful potential lackey. Her voice is fraying at the end of it, and she sighs obnoxiously loudly upon her turn to greet Megumi of Grass just to clear out her throat.

“My lady,” Megumi says politely, with a short bow.

Kagura smiles sweetly and bats her eyelashes. “You’re too kind to me, my lord.”

It’s been a good while since she’s seen him. He’s grown up quite a bit, taller and broader, into a handsome teenage boy with a wide, pretty face. The black hair and eyes against moon-pale skin create a striking effect, and she can see why all these girls are clamouring over him, if not for his status. But he’s as sharp as ever, high-class and educated as he is, and she can tell he already doesn’t like her. He must’ve been observing all the socialising ladies in the room.

“So what do you think of tonight, Lady Koigakubo?”

Well. A business conglomerate’s daughter isn’t a lady, but Megumi is trained enough to make polite exceptions like this. And the real Maruko would probably demand honorifics anyway.

“It’s simply marvellous,” Kagura cheers, stretching out the last word, clasping her hands together and looking down coyly. “I can’t believe that you’re like, actually a real life person, considering just like, everything that you are. And I like, love, the gold trim on your kimono. My dad is also, like, the biggest fan of the Grass Daimyo’s… charity! And the charity works.”

Megumi closes his eyes for a few seconds. “Indeed.”

Before he can dismiss her, Kagura starts to work on the masterplan. She continues nattering on without a second thought, brainless as the actual girl. “And oh my god, the guest list? I’m friends with soooo many of the girls here tonight. I think we’re all like, super similar! Well, I mean,” and then Kagura looks to the side momentarily, as if to calm herself, “except for, you know, but she just doesn’t count. The guildsman and Lightning nobles, we all have such strong bonds, my lord. And we’re just–.”

In a rare moment of rudeness from Megumi tonight (and he’d been such a rude little upstart back at the academy!), he raises his hand for her to stop. “What do you mean, Lady Koigakubo?” He asks. “I do not know of this other person you speak of.”

Kagura gives a very fake, strained smile, and releases a high-pitched giggle. “Oh, don’t you worry about it. All the girls here will take care of you, my lord.”

“I verily insist,” Megumi says. He’s beginning to sound mad.

My old friend, she thinks wistfully, recognising the signs of his anger in the way he purses his lips in that specific way and taps his foot. Maybe you haven’t changed too much, after all.

Kagura looks up demurely through her lashes, half-disguised disgust twitching at the corners of her painted lips. She takes a second to space out, then breathes out a nearly improper deep exhale. “It’s just that…” She turns her gaze to the side, looking at Chinami for a second of burning jealousy, then back to Megumi. “The Fire Daimyo’s second daughter.”

He turns his head to look at her.

Chinami, to her credit, is standing proud and regal in her corner, with her fancy kimono of crimson blaze and iconic phoenix imagery. She appears as a beacon of light, standing out among the other women in their appropriate spring-time colours – hidden fashion faux pas that a boy like Megumi wouldn’t understand, and would only approve of the prettiest thing he can see.

“She’s just…” Kagura makes a noise in the back of her throat and sighs again. “She just thinks she’s better than everyone else because she’s just so kind. All that peasant work? Who does she think she's fooling? It's obvious that my friends and I just.... It’s common sense that that sort of behaviour can’t survive in our cutthroat world, my lord – as we all well know, of course. And she wouldn’t make a good wife for my lord at all, oh no.” She sighs again, and she’s getting sick of sighing all the time for this stupid character. “With these kinds of respectable events, proper ladies should be wearing make-up, yet Lady Chinami dares to enter my lord’s most handsomest presence with her bare face.”

Which is a lie. Chinami is wearing so much f*cking makeup that her pores are begging for sweet mercy, but Megumi’s too much of a male dunderhead to recognise that.

And she rolls her eyes again discreetly, with Megumi turning around to catch her at the last movement. Disapproval rolls off of him in waves.

“Thank you for your time,” he says scathingly. “You are dismissed.”

Kagura watches Megumi head towards Chinami’s side of the room, and internally congratulates herself on the success. She finds a disguised Dog, going as just Hatake Kakashi, guarding the Fire Daimyo's daughter, in the crowd, twitches her left ear for the signal cue, and the captain seamlessly reappears near the Fire entourage with an apricot in his hand, casually, with a bite taken out of it. And she hears him say excuse me, sorry, as Hatake deliberately passes by Megumi, right in front of Chinami’s smouldering beauty, tossing the fruit in the air. Up, down. Up, down.

The pendulum meets the eye.

It’s a form of brainwashing. Or, better explained as psychological pressure. Pavlov’s apricot, would’ve been an excellent example, if Pavlov was a thing in this world and psychology was expanded on beyond Yamanakas doing their best to invent Lobotomy-no-jutsu.

Anzu, after all, means ‘apricot.’

By the end of the week, when Team Ro is safely returned to Konoha’s walls, the Third Hokage receives a letter of noble decree, announcing the engagement of Megumi of Grass to Chinami of Fire.

Kagura discovers the news via gossip mill bulletin board posters and the ten ryo newspaper in the local shops announcing upcoming cheaper rice and wheat prices. The commodity market turning around in Fire Country is all thanks to the newly open trade law, with tariffs and quotas completely slashed to make way for a new economy. And Kagura thinks that she should’ve been paid an S-rank cheque instead of A-rank for this agriculture deal, all thanks to her, and is thinking about going to the bossman himself to complain about her salary bonuses.

That is, until he calls her up to centre stage himself.

A messenger knocks on her door to tell her to come to the Hokage’s office with urgency. She’d been lounging about on her free day in her flat, somewhere in between remembering all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody and checking out her thick thighs in the bathroom mirror. It’s an ANBU summon, not a chuunin one, so she assumes the identity of Agent Swan and heads out in full regalia.

There’s General Bear waiting already in the office, and Dog arrives shortly after Swan. And then Leopard appears, then Frog, and she’s beginning to suspect this may be a serious meeting.

The Hokage is an old, strong man, of myth and legend. At least, that’s what Kagura is supposed to think about her national military ninja dictator, but all she’s picking up here is how old and frail he looks – like someone’s funky Yoda kind of grandpa instead of a world leader. Was there seriously nobody else younger that could’ve taken up the Yondaime’s mantle after the Kyuubi attack? There’s at least one Sannin left, right?

Geriatric support in this country is more sad than terrifying, honestly.

“A commendable agent you are, Swan,” The Hokage says, breaking the silence of the ANBU kneeling.

Oh my god, he even talks like Yoda, Kagura thinks.

“The seduction unit is the most difficult unit to train for,” The Hokage continues, and pulls out a pipe from his sleeves, because, y’know, f*ck old people lungs. He probably wants to die from lung cancer at this stage of whatever palliative treatment he’s on. “And the General and all of your captains tell me of your prowess in this unit. Is that right?”

Leopard and Dog raise their heads, look at each other, and nod briskly.

“As it were, there’s an opening in Seduction fit for a fine agent like you. Frog happens to be retiring within the year, and has named Worm as interim, and Swan as successor.”

Then the Hokage rambles on about more gibberish regarding the succession and her expected training times and testimonies from Genma and Dog, which she listens to with her heart in her head. Because, her? Leading the seduction unit? That would make her Commander Swan, as a thirteen year old chuunin with maybe five total jutsu under her belt. Technically, there’s no barrier to be a Commander, but it’s also a status usually granted towards experienced captains in the field. She’d outrank Dog, but he’d still be leading her? Which isn’t supposed to happen. It’s just not.

Well. Well, well, well. Frog stands up to deliver her official line of reasoning, which is that Agent Swan is one of the only agents capable of on-demand public encounters with high-risk individuals, with the bare minimum amount of fighting skills necessary for such scenarios. The other ninja with that kind of experience tend to be civilian-raised career Genin, or flat-out civilian contractors.

The meeting ends with a befuddled and disgruntled Kagura and her impending end-of-year promotion.

Chapter 8

Chapter Text

The party starts out just like any poorly planned corporate event – a table of cold food, high-ranking staff standing ominously in the corner, and a pathetic amount of decor.

It gets worse from there.

There’s a large sign at the front of the underground hall that says Congratulations Swan in messy kanji, written on someone’s old crinkled sealing scroll, with the faint glow of chakra making the paper stick to the cement wall. There aren’t any windows, and ventilation is wish-wash this far underground with this many people, so the entire room smells of egg mayo sandwiches that have been sitting out for too long. So, all in all, newly fourteen year old Akabane Kagura wishes she were anywhere else except for her promotion to Commander Sexy.

Which is, of course, the nickname the funny military types give to whoever’s in charge of the ANBU Seduction Unit. Little do most of the people in the room know that they’d probably try to neuter themselves out of shame if they found out her actual age.

“Man, this party sucks ass,” Oyster says, holding his third plate of egg mayo sandwiches and sardine tarts. “Wanna dip?”

Dog, hovering behind them, makes a strained noise. “There’s a speech. We can’t leave yet.”

Indeed, there’s supposed to be a speech from the General soon. And these sorts of parties don’t happen often, because commanders tend to stick to being commander – they’re promoted because they’re the best of the best in their unit, unlikely to perish on-duty. So it’s all the more special occasion to have this event, with food and drinks and ANBU agents mingling about. Or, more of a miracle that so many high-calibre and politically important ninjas agreed to be stuck in a confined space for such a long time.

“You heard the captain,” Kagura says goodnaturedly.

She kind of wants to die inside, but there are kudos given to the organisers for effort. The crazy types in the ANBU force are definitely the kind of people who enjoy these weird ass parties. Seriously – who thought sardine tarts were a good idea? And why are they so popular?

By the refreshments, Cat is hanging out with Dragon and Gecko. She hadn’t been aware that Cat was capable of having friends that didn’t bully him horrendously. He gives off such strong victim energy.

“My old teammates are over there – I think I’ll say hello,” Kagura says, mostly to Dog because he’s the only friendless bitch here. Oyster is most definitely an Uchiha, so he’s got other clan members to bother at the function. Dog is… a lone wolf. She thinks it’s due to his god awful personality (in another life, Hatake would be the kind of person to blast Evanescence at six in the morning for a daily cry), but it might also have something to do with the political stigma attached to his name.

Oh well. Not her problem.

Kagura wanders off to greet Leopard and Rooster, and Oyster finds Worm in the middling crowd. She’s had suspicions for a while now, but she’s almost positive that Worm was the Sharingan user in the restaurant during the Grass mission – a very shady, quiet Uchiha lady with possible screws loose. No wonder Oyster cosies up to her so quickly.

“Swan,” Leopard says, holding up a hand. “This party is… truly something. Congrats, though.”

Rooster waves awkwardly.

“Don’t be shy, you can say the quiet part out loud,” she says, returning his high-five. “The entire room smells of mayonnaise. The only reason why nobody’s left yet is because of the speech.”

Leopard’s shoulders slump down. “... the speech.”

There’s a certain bitterness in his words that she doesn’t want to poke at. But she understands. It’s highly unusual for the General to be late like this, especially for an important event. Everyone’s starting to get antsy down here in the bomb shelter levels, and too socially awkward to make up an excuse to leave early. If this were anyone else’s party, Kagura could’ve made up some lie by now to weasel her way out of it, but alas, this is the one time that she can’t escape.

Of the two hundred members of the Konohagakure ANBU, only about a fourth made it to the function. Half of the people here are agents that Kagura knows, and the other half are the curious crowd wondering who the hell’s the newest unit commander.

The hierarchy goes: General Bear, in charge of the entire ANBU military, who reports directly to the Hokage. And then under him are the five unit commanders, for Stealth, Tracking, Assassination, Bodyguarding, and Seduction. The acronym is STABS, which Kagura finds hilarious. And in each unit, there are several different subspecialties, unrelated (or related) to the unit. Commander Boar of Assassination is supposedly a master trapmaker. Most agents in Bodyguarding have to learn the basics of healing. Such and such. And there’s a lot of layover with the village’s T&I – Tactics and Intelligence, but infamously nicknamed asTorture and Interrogation to make it sound cooler – military branch. The General and the current head of T&I are powerful decision makers in Konoha politics, and men not to be messed with.

Kagura is doing her best to resist the urge to flip the bird, however, when the General finally saunters in, twenty minutes late.

The tall, impressive man squares up at the podium. No one knows his identity. There are rumours that he’s been in the village since the Shodaime’s era, and is blessed with strength from the gods to continue being a pillar of support for the country. Nobody knows how old Bear is, but he’s certainly older than everyone here, because no one remembers a time that he wasn’t the General. She tries to imagine what he might look like. Salt and pepper hair? Scruffy goatee? A traditional samurai look? Bear is Bear; he can’t be any random schmuck on the street. He probably doesn’t even have a face. Maybe the porcelain bear drawing is his face, and the entire ANBU uniform was based around it. And his village ranking – what is it? Has he been cosplaying as a career genin this entire time, throwing off his scent? Or is he a highly celebrated jounin in the forces? Nobody’s ever really seen him fight, either, because he mainly deals with mission tactics and training camps.

Everyone holds their breath to hear the speech.

“Congratulations, Swan,” The General says, and then leaves.

The afterparty is better.

The whor* and the Kunai makes a valiant return to Kagura’s life, a whole three years later. Leopard and Rooster, the only adults here who know Kagura’s age, don’t even try to kick her out or warn her about raucous adult activities, so fourteen must be old enough by their standards to enter a bar and get wasted via belly button shots. Or maybe they’ve given up on treating her like a child now that she outranks them. And her other legal supervisor, Dog, doesn’t even show up, so hell if he cares.

Cat, Dragon, Gecko, and Lynx are sitting in a booth in the back with pretty co*cktails and Kagura wants to join them. Dragon is Kurenai, and Gecko greatly resembles Hayate, so she’s assuming that’s the teenager table, because Cat is a vaguely muddy age of fourteen or so and Lynx is giving off noughties Hilary Duff.

But she’s prevented from peer socialisation by an unfortunate Uchiha.

“Yo, birdie,” Oyster calls out, and deftly swings around to get right in her face. “Congrats, Big S. You’re amazing! This is great! I love you, Commander Sexy.”

Kagura tilts her head down at the sloshing glass in his hand. “Someone’s having a good time.”

He’s a little shorter than her, but she thinks they’re also around the same age. Team Ro is a highly skilled, but young, team (judging by how immature the group conversations are). They’ve all got their reasons to be a part of the squad, and Oyster’s is the most mysterious by far. He’s a combat specialist like Dog and Cat, but he’s also more than that, relying more on subterfuge and genjutsu than any front-line fighter she’s seen. Someone of that slender, pretty boy body type shouldn’t be a heavy hitter, yet here he is.

Similar questions can be asked of her, though. She’ll be in Team Ro for another year to gain more experience to her title, but it’s still an odd situation that now someone like her is in a typical assassination squad.

“Not really,” Oyster says, and bobs his head. “Worm’s being weird, as usual. She likes to bother me. It’s kinda like how I mess with Cat. Anyway! I hope you don’t end up weird like Commander Fox – that guy gives me the creeps, eugh. Bad juju, bad vibes. Or Commander Slug, ‘cuz he’s a f*cking c*nt.”

“I’ll still be me, Oyster,” she says, and reaches out to steady him before he falls on her.

She tries to remember who those commanders are. Fox is in charge of Stealth, and Slug is Bodyguarding. She’s never encountered them before and they didn’t show up to either party, so she can’t say she can form an opinion of them yet… but there’s something about Oyster’s words that’s causing bells to ring in her head. A drunken, hazy character warning. He wouldn’t be deceitful, not like this. There’s too much alcohol radiating off him for him to be able to deliberately form up complicated falsehoods.

The bar is loud and sweaty. The air feels yellow. Oyster wobbles again with a signature maniac giggle, and teeters into Kagura, who grabs his shoulders and sighs.

“I know you know my clan name,” Oyster whispers. Kagura shows no tells of surprise, and keeps him rocking in her collar like the drunken bastard he’s emulating. There are quite a few oddball drunks doing the same to their teammates here. “Uchiha. You can call me by my name, y’know. Shisui.”

Kagura lets go of one shoulder to pat his back. “You’re gonna have to deal with the sh*ttiest hangover ever during training tomorrow.”

But it’s just busy distractions, to get him to trust her more. He’s trying to get somewhere with this.

“Worm doesn’t like Commander Fox either. He’s not the kinda guy you want to be left alone with. I hope you avoid him, so you don’t become like him,” Oyster, or Shisui, continues, basically whispering into her chest, the world far away, ears ringing. “I’m not that drunk. There’s – there’s patterns. Worm knows. Cat was in Stealth.”

That’s why I don’t like him, goes unsaid.

Except Cat is the opposite of whatever is being described of Fox. Or, is he? Maybe?

Kagura gently shakes Oyster off and familiarly pats the dust off his head, shoulders, and arms. “Oh, come on Oyster, stop ogling my chest. What do you expect to see with the breast plate, you twerp.”

And she gives another look at his drink and heads back to the teens table.

When she sits down next to Gecko, Oyster is with Worm and a few other ANBU agents with full head coverings on the other side of the bar, which is quickly becoming more and more of an unhinged no man’s land with every drink. Getting a bunch of insane super-powered individuals in one space and providing copious alcohol and salty peanuts is a recipe for disaster – the charred and pockmarked walls didn’t come from nowhere.

She spends a socially acceptable amount of time with her friends, leading the conversations naturally and sneaking quick sips with a straw under the ANBU mask. The orange blossom and pomegranate lemonade is one of the best things she’s ever tasted, but it’s hard to enjoy it with the Uchiha warnings taking over her entire consciousness. Worm. A highly intelligent Seduction agent, mainly working with information off the field. An Uchiha. Two Uchihas, actually. That’s basically the entire clan. And the clan is trying to tell her something. The fact that Shisui would trust her with a character warning for someone so high-rank is touching yet concerning, because she didn’t know he liked her that much, nevermind trust her.

Damn. Kagura must be making hella impressions with the right people.

Now it’s up to her to decipher the code, and get to the bottom of this mystery that Oyster himself doesn’t seem to fully realise.

Another day, another horror, she thinks miserably, and socialises the rest of the night away.