Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

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It was easy enough to organize us passes out of the village from the Intel Division. Aoba even helped me with how, though it was clear he was basically dying of curiosity.

"Just to pick up a thing," I demurred, to his questions of what, exactly, we were doing. It didn't necessarily have to be secret, but it also wasn't really a thing I wanted to spread around. Not so much because of us going, but for what it would mean for Sasuke.

It would be giving up his tactics – summoning – and also the fact that the Uchiha hideouts still had valuable things in them and relatively few ways of protecting it. I didn't want to kick off some kind of treasure hunt if that got out.

"Vague," Aoba complained, adjusting his glasses. "Vague is good, though. We like vague here."

In the end, my paperwork looked very… shady. Over the top lacking in details. Client? Known. Location? Verbal directions. Objective? As per verbal agreement.

"Will this pass?" I asked, doubtfully. "Will someone really sign off on it?"

"You might need to explain the details in person," Aoba explained. "Who's the second pass for?"

"Kakashi-sensei," I said absently.

He opened his mouth. He closed his mouth. Tried again. "Does he know that?"

I blinked at him. "Well, yeah. He volunteered to come."

Aoba looked like Kakashi and 'volunteer' shouldn't have been in the same sentence. "Right," he said. "You know. A 'simple' pickup mission doesn't normally require an elite Jounin. Right?"

I kept a straight face. "I might need his Sharingan," I said. It was true. It was just that winding up Aoba was too much fun.

Aoba looked even more pained. "Are you sure this counts as 'a simple pick up mission'?" He pleaded. "Really sure? Because people are going to look at this and be suspicious. Unless you want them to be suspicious about it because it is simple and it will then mask something not-simple later on?"

That was getting into too many layers. Underneath the underneath. But it was probably not a bad idea, either. I had no idea what I would need that cover for but if I was looking into S-rank ninja in future, I could easily see situations where elite backup would come in handy.

"I just haven't done a mission with my sensei in a while," I claimed. "Is that so wrong?"

He didn't look like he bought it, but grumbled, "It's a decent excuse, anyway. I assume the Hokage knows about all this?"

I paused. "Not yet? Do you think she should be the one to sign off on it?" It was probably not that important, but it would be easier to explain to her than to anyone else. And I could say it was because she wanted to be kept up to date on Sasuke things. I nodded. "Yes, okay. I'll do that."

I couldn't get it done immediately, but in the end Tsunade signed off on it with only minimal grumbling about people who took the secrecy thing too far, and a handful of scribbled numerical codes that I couldn't interpret.

I took it down to the mission room to get the passes issued and the mission filed – with my bribery coffee pot – and was trying to corner one of the desk ninja to help me.

"Ah, excuse me?"

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

The thing was – I was sensing. And everything told me that there was no one there.

I dropped the coffee pot and spun around, pivoting on my heel. My hand came up to grab the wrist on my shoulder.

He yanked it back, rapidly, before my fingers could even touch skin.

And it … was not Kakashi-sensei.

The voice hadn't been Kakashi-sensei's voice. But still, somehow I'd expected…

There was a pause. We stared at each other warily.

I reached back and grabbed the coffee pot before it hit the floor.

"Can I help you?" I asked, taking him in. Dark messy hair. Forehead protector and happuri-style face guard that the Second Hokage had popularized. And chakra that was – if I focused to my utter best – simmering very low and concealed.

More than one person was watching him warily – had startled when I'd startled. It implied no one had seen him move up behind me. He'd snuck up on me in a room full of ninja and no one had seen.

And that wasn't polite to do in a ninja environment. It was like walking around with your weapons out. We all knew that the weapons were there, but there was an extra layer of 'threat' when they were bared.

He looked incredibly uncomfortable. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that Kakashi-senpai wanted me to give this to you?" The end of the sentence rose into a question, like he wasn't quite sure about it himself.

He held out a hand, a black pen lying in the middle of it. The same pen as the marks that still adorned my face.

Pay attention, it meant. You're supposed to be aware of threats. Not just aware of me.

I closed my eyes for a second, then forced myself to smile at him. "Thank you. Sorry to get you dragged into this."

I took the pen and tucked it into my vest pocket, with the feeling that it would probably end up in sensei's hands again before too long. Clearly this training had a lot further to go.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Ah, well, senpai is senpai," he said, a touch of resignation in his voice. More than a touch.

I was beginning to suspect that I knew who this was. Sort of.

Well, at least he hadn't recruited Gai-sensei for it. I liked the man, but that had potential to be incredibly horrifying. There would have been heart attacks involved, and they would probably have been mine.

Yamato – or, that had been a code name, hadn't it? What was his name? – gave a vague shrug and started to sidle away.

"Coffee?" I suggested suddenly, awkwardly holding out the bribery-pot with a sheepish smile. "For your trouble."

There was no particular reason for it, beyond my own curiosity. I was pretty sure the answer to most of the obvious questions like 'how do you know Kakashi-sensei' was 'Anbu', but still. We were bound to cross paths again in the future – I might as well start now.

"Ah," he said awkwardly, but stopped trying to leave. "Okay?"

He didn't have a cup, unlike basically all the office nin, but I was prepared. I twisted my wrist, focusing and pulling out the stack of paper cups I had tucked into hammerspace. That wasn't particularly polite in ninja environments either, but if you didn't feel the sealing activate, it did just look like sleight of hand.

And it was practice. Practice, practice, practice.

I pulled off one, whirled the stack of cups back into hammerspace, and filled it for him. "There you go, uh…" I trailed off.

"Tenzo," he supplied.

Score one for me.

"Tenzo," I repeated, with a bright smile. "Just give me a second to get someone to sign this, and I'll be right with you."

I turned that smile on the ninja behind me. Stunningly, someone actually scrambled to take my mission, this time. I filled their cup up as thanks, but really, apparently the way to get things done was to make a huge scene. It figured.

"So how did Kakashi-sensei sucker you into this?" I asked.

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We arranged to leave at nine, so I arrived at the gates with a notebook and took a seat, striking up off and on conversation with Izumo.

At ten past ten, Kakashi-sensei arrived. He didn't try to sneak, because I was paying absolute attention and expecting him, just sauntered up nonchalantly.

"Morning," I greeted, tucking my book away. I stood and dusted myself off.

He sighed. "You take all the fun out of it, you know." It was almost pouting.

"Good," I said. It didn't stop him from being late, but Kakashi being late was just a fact of life now. But there was nothing pressing being held up, our mission was not time critical and it was a nice day. There were worse things to contend with.

We didn't travel fast but it seemed that in order to make up for the pace Kakashi-sensei was keen to make me practice my stealth and evasion techniques.

"Your scent masking needs more…" he made a vague wiggle with his hand. "More," he decided on.

"Yes, sensei," I said instead of protesting that I was trying. Scent masking was hard because scent was basically the collection of microscopic particles that fell off of the human body as it moved and good luck trying to stop that. Obviously that was the goal, but it wasn't easy. There were higher level techniques that could erase a scent trail after it had been laid, but that was… several magnitudes more difficult.

"It doesn't really work if you don't keep it active," he pointed out.

Which meant it was another thing I had to focus on. Constantly. Multitasking, yay.

So it was almost a relief when we managed to arrive at the Uchiha outpost. Sasuke's directions had been fairly vague, because he'd likely never been here himself and had been operating from whatever records remained in his grasp.

Still, it was basically a large concrete fort. Hard to completely miss. It was slightly more dilapidated than five years of abandonment should really have caused, but I had no idea of how frequently it had been maintained after the migration to Konoha. Maybe it had been slowly falling to pieces for fifty years.

It was… eerie in a way. It felt like a ghost town, full of the knowledge that this had once been a home, full of people, and now it wasn't. Now those people weren't. It was fuller than I had expected it to be, rooms and storage spaces packed full, like they had expected to come back at any moment.

It wasn't all old stuff, either. And that, maybe, made it sadder? Had they resupplied the outposts, before the massacre? Had that been a contingency plan – to retreat here, to the other outposts, if things in Konoha didn't improve?

Had that been something that caused the warning signs to rise? That tipped Danzo off in the first place?

That just… made it sadder.

I kept my chakra sense tuned to their maximum, both to look for traps and also because there were two remaining Uchiha that I really didn't want to run into here.

Chances were low. But. I really didn't want to.

We started combing the place, looking out carefully for traps and trying to locate the summoning scroll that Sasuke wanted.

"Do you think we should bring any of the rest of it back?" I asked, uncertainly. There were general resupply items that wouldn't matter – clothes and weapons and long life food – but there was still a library's worth of information here and some of it was bound to be important. It didn't feel right to leave it behind, forgotten.

"You could," Kakashi-sensei said, without indicating in either direction which option he preferred. He riffled through a stack of scrolls, checking to see if any of them were the one we were looking for.

I considered it. "I think I will," I said. Sasuke might have wanted it. Eventually. And if it was in a storage scroll, it would be safer than leaving it here.

I went back to searching. Eventually, Kakashi-sensei found a concealed door with his Sharingan, and that was where we found what we were looking for.

"The important stuff, huh?" I asked absently, unrolling the scroll to check that it was what we wanted.

"Looks like it," Kakashi-sensei agreed, poking around. There was more stuff in here – things that the Uchiha had deemed worth the extra security. We spent some time sealing most of it away for Sasuke, leaving out only things with seals on them.

You didn't put seals inside storage scrolls. It just… didn't work out very well. They destabilized. Something about being cut off from the chakra and natural energy that made them function.

We tidied up – or I did – and reset as many of the traps as we could to protect the place. It would be bad form to leave it unguarded.

Then we headed back to Konoha.

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"So how'd it go?" Kotetsu asked, taking my passes and signing us back into the village. Kakashi-sensei accepted his back, lifted a hand in a laconic goodbye wave and left.

I shrugged. "Fine."

"That's it? Fine?" Kotetsu asked, sharing an amused look with the other Chunin on duty. "I'm sure it was more interesting than that."

I gave him a bemused look. "It was only a simple pick up mission. What could be interesting about it?"

He laughed. "Fine, be that way. I'll hear about it eventually you know."

"I don't know what you're talking about." I shook my head. "Nothing happened." It wasn't that surprising, was it? Sometimes missions could go right.

I waved them off and headed towards Sasuke's apartment to give him the scroll and actually 'complete' the mission. Technically, until that was done, I was still on the clock. Not that there was really a clock. Because we weren't getting paid. But it was the principle of the thing.

I knocked on the door. Sasuke's chakra stirred, hovered and… stayed where it was.

I knocked again.

"What?" Sasuke snapped, irritably, wrenching the door open so fast that my hand was still in the air mid-knock.

I paused.

He looked ruffled and tired and was wearing a plain set of Konoha blues that just might have doubled as pajamas. Maybe he'd been ignoring me because he'd been sleeping. I felt a little bad about it.

But that feeling was squished under a sudden surge of worry that transmuted into a flash of helpless anger.

My fist tightened, knuckles going white. Then I brought it down and punched him hard in the bicep. Right over the goddamn seal I could sense there.

Sasuke yelped in pain.

"I can't believe you," I hissed, stepping inside the apartment. He gave ground, stepping back and letting me, eyes wide and bewildered. His hand came up to hover over the spot I'd hit.

"Shikako, what-"

I kicked the door shut behind me. It slammed, with a sense of angry finality. "Anbu?" I hissed, voice low. I knew better than to shout. Especially about this. "You joined Anbu?"

His confusion shifted to exasperation. Like that explained it, like he understood but found it irrelevant. "You're not supposed to know about that," he protested halfheartedly. "How did you even find out?"

My jaw was clenched so hard I could hear my teeth grinding together. "You think I can't tell when someone's put a seal on you?"

And of course the Anbu tattoo was a seal. What else would it be, if you were going to all the effort of marking your covert corps with it?

(What did they do, though? Because if it was something that would harm him, in anyway, I was going to-)

"That… would probably do it," Sasuke acknowledged, a tad sheepishly. He rubbed the seal, like it was hurting. Good. I hoped I'd hit it hard enough. "But look, it's not that bad. I know what the rumours about it are like but they're only rumours. It's not really anything more than we were doing before – only secret."

"I don't give a damn what you're doing," I said, because he was missing the point. "Naruto told you-"

Naruto had to have told him.

He had to know how dangerous it was.

"About Sai?" Sasuke asked, putting the pieces together, like he should have all along. "And the seal?" But then he rolled his eyes. "No one has approached me and tried to stick things in my mouth."

I wanted to shake him so hard his brain rattled in his skull. He was being purposefully idiotic. "It's not that straightforward!"

"I know!" he said back, voice rising, and I wasn't the only one annoyed now. "But it has to be Anbu! It's not like I can leave the village as me."

And that was the crux of it, wasn't it?

That was why Sasuke had taken it. Because it was the only real path left to him.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The anger drained out of me. "It's not safe," I said. "They could be anyone but they're definitely involved in Anbu. And you know you're a target."

I knew it wasn't going to stop him. You'd make the same choices as me, I'd told him. 'Safe' was never going to be a convincing argument.

"It's not so bad," Sasuke said, eyes watching me warily, but hostility draining out of him too. "The Hokage is the only one who knows who I am. I get my orders straight from her. And she'll notice if I go missing or, you know, can't talk about where I've been."

Secrets like that were hard to keep. But if there was anywhere it would work, it would be Anbu.

"Just… be careful," I said. It was all I could say.

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Did you get the scroll, anyway?"

I handed it over, as well as all the extra stuff I'd packed up for him and told him why. "I figured you'd want it," I said.

He didn't seem to really know what to do with it, but also didn't say I shouldn't have. So. Success, I guessed.

"Thanks," he said. "You didn't… run into trouble?"

I shook my head. "Not even bandits," I assured him. "The most exciting thing that happened was Kakashi-sensei reading Sharingan coded graffiti off of the walls. Though I'm pretty sure he skipped all the dirty ones."

It was a weak attempt to lighten the atmosphere. But Sasuke granted it a smirk and a soft huff of amusement so that was something.

I left his apartment and ruefully reflected I really shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. All the clues had been there. Mysterious training. Not being around. It didn't necessarily mean Anbu but in hindsight, there had been signs.

Kakashi-sensei knows. I was absolutely certain of it. He'd been the one to make Sasuke's vague excuses to me, and he hadn't been worried at all. I hoped that that meant it was okay.

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I clicked the shogi piece down, completing my formation but only postponing my inevitable defeat by another three or four moves.

Dad surveyed the board. Moved a piece.

Yep. Inevitable. But I kept going, because sometimes you just had to meet the inevitable.

"Something bothering you?" he asked, offhand and casual.

I hummed, not really in agreement. "I'd like to request permission to sign one of our summoning scrolls," I said.

I probably should have made a more formal request, but I'd do it if he told me to. I was pretty sure it would be okay, though. Summoning wasn't a thing that our clan focused on, all that much. And I was a Special Jounin, which was well above the Chunin requirement for making the request.

"Which one?" Dad asked, voice idle.

"The deer," I answered. We had a couple, but the smaller contracts were conversely in much higher demand. There were the blackbirds and the bats which were both useful as small, flying messengers rather than battle summons.

And while those were all well and good, they weren't what I needed.

More tempting was the idea of taking the risk to reverse summon myself to find whatever animal type fit me. It was the idea of knowing what it would be that was the lure – like finding out your animagi form or patronus – more than the potential of the animal itself. I didn't know what it would be or how useful it was. Or how happy they would be to have a human wandering around their lands.

And that was the risk.

"The current summoner is Sembei-obaasan," he said. "You'll have to get her permission for it. But I see no reason to say no."

I nodded my thanks. I already knew that, but it was permission.

The next morning – though, not too early – I went around to the house where she lived. Sembei-baasan was, to put it impolitely, really old. Older than Konoha, old. She spent most of her days in a rocking chair on the deck at the front of her house, watching the world go by. She still lived in the clan grounds, because Konoha didn't really have rest homes, and the rest of us often went around to help her with things. Or, for the younger generation, because she was there and would listen and generally had sweets to give out.

"Bout time," she said with a dry cackle, when I got around to telling her why I was there. "I wondered if I'd be dust before that boy sent someone around to sign it."

She picked up her cane and rose stiffly to her feet.

There were still signs in her that she was a ninja, even now. Even though she was unsteady on her feet, even though she moved at about the pace of a tortoise, there was no sound of footsteps or creaking of floorboards.

I shadowed her into the house, trying not to hover too closely.

In the living room, there was a bookcase. She went to it, and plucked a scroll from an ornate holder – the kind that was more often used to display swords.

"The deer keep their scroll of summoners to themselves so that not just anyone can sign it," she explained. "But when I started getting too old to call on them myself, we made this. It's a single use summoning. If they like you, they'll let you sign it. If they don't…" She shrugged.

If they don't, you don't.

We went back outside, because summoning a deer inside a house was just a bad plan all around.

Sembei-baasan resituated herself in her rocking chair, while I moved away from the house to open space. I opened the scroll, reading the summoning sigils with interest – they were so different! – before biting my thumb with a chakra-sharp incisor and spreading blood along the center of it.

"Summoning Jutsu!" I called, forcing chakra into it and pressing it down onto the ground.

I felt the jutsu activate – a call that went through the world, not out or up or away but through, reaching to some other place. And then it doubled back, chakra rushing towards me like a train down the tracks.

I tried not to flinch back.

Chakra smoke exploded beneath my hands, obscuring the moment seal for a moment, and a deer unfolded out of it, rising taller and taller to reveal a huge towering beast, the largest I'd ever seen. I wasn't even as tall as his legs.

He tossed his head, his spiked, metal tipped antlers dragging the white chakra smoke after them in twisting trails. He was clad in what looked like Samurai armour, plates along his neck and back, and a twisted oni mask overtop his head.

"Who calls?!" He bellowed. The air shivered.

Up on the deck, Sembei-baasan cackled. "Look at you, all dressed up for war. You old showoff," she said.

His head swung around to look at her. "Sembei," he said, though much less loudly. "You look as old and frail as a mummified corpse."

Sembei-baasan tapped her cane on the deck, looking more animated than I'd ever seen her. "Come up here and say that, I dare you," she challenged.

He stepped closer, a single stride taking him over to her. I hovered, indecisive – a fight would not go well. But he only lowered his gigantic head until it was resting against her chest. She wrapped her arms around it, working fingers under the mask to scratch with her nails.

"I had not thought to see you again," he rumbled. "This is a glad meeting."

She cackled again. "The kids took some time to get their acts into gear," she admitted. "But what do you expect from Nara? Now stop acting like I'm back from the dead and go and greet your summoner."

She shoved him away. I doubted the force of her arms was enough to move him, really, but he accepted the moment, head rising and turning towards me.

I swallowed. "Uh. Hi."

I consciously didn't bow, even though I wanted to. This was a bad time for cross cultural miscommunication – deer only lowered their heads like that when they were about to charge. I didn't expect I would survive a head-to-head contact with this one.

"Greetings," he said. "I am Heijomaru, of the Sika tribe of the Deer. Do you wish to be our summoner, daughter of the forest?"

I nodded. "I do," I said. "I would very much like to work with you."

He considered me. "You are of Sembei's tribe. I have no objections to this." He tossed his head again, and stamped one forefoot down on the ground so hard I felt it shake. But I also felt the call, the summoning, and wasn't surprised when a scroll rose out of the ground as he raised his hoof back up again.

He nudged it over with his nose, so that it fell and unrolled. I could see the names of the past summoners, could see Sembei's done in a young and steady hand. There was a blank space for mine.

I paused. "Um. What are your terms?"

"Your chakra from the call is all we require," he said, dignified. "It allows us to maintain and strengthen our lands in the summon realm."

It was a topic that I wanted to know much more about. Because we gained so much from summons, that it stood to reason whatever they gained from us was worth just as much. The contract couldn't be so unequal.

But now wasn't the time.

Sembei cackled again. "Don't let him fool you," she called. "He has a soft spot for salt licks. You'll go through hundreds."

Heijomaru harrumphed and stamped a back foot. It was a natural movement of annoyance. "Silence your tongue, human," he hollered at her. Then he turned back to me. "Such things would be appreciated but they are not required. Though I would… request that you summon us near Sembei as frequently as possible for as long as it remains an option."

"Of course," I said, touched by it. The bond between them was clear even – or maybe especially – with how they chose to present it. "I will do my very best."

I wrote my name in blood and pressed my handprint onto the scroll.

"Welcome, summoner," Heijomaru said and lowered his giant head to press lightly against mine.