Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Karin stared at the cat in front of the drop point.

The drop point had once been a roadside tea shop and was still marked as such, but Karin would be surprised if there was a single tea leaf left in the place. The paint on the shopfront was chipped but still legible, the neglected dirt road in front of it still passable by foot but not by cart. The shop boasted a “restaurant,” which was just a window counter under an awning, with a handful of collapsed and rotting wooden tables in the shade of the huge beech trees that lined the road. The cat was perched on one of the tables.

It was an especially ugly cat– hairless and wrinkled and huge with awkward rolls of fat. Its green eyes narrowed into slits as it eyed Karin right back.

With an irritated huff, Karin turned on her heel, ignoring the stupid cat and banging on the little bell on the counter.

“Ex cuse me,” she yelled into the window, curiously left open despite the rain that had only just stopped. “I’ve been waiting here twenty minutes–”

At her feet and propped against the bottom of the counter, the missing-nin she’d dragged all the way over from a hovel in the Land of Waves let out a low groan. Karin banged on the wood with her fist.

“EXCUSE ME,” she hollered.

The missing-nin’s eyes fluttered as his body fought for consciousness. Karin swore under her breath and squatted down to dig through her pack for more paralytics. She was never taking someone in alive again.

The stupid cat was still watching her, its tail twitching behind it. Even though it was disgustingly huge for a hairless cat, its skin looked like it was a full dress size too large for it. Distracting. Also, there was something terribly wrong with its chakra, which was even more distracting.

Two hours later, Karin was still having a glaring contest with the cat, and an extremely frazzled looking woman staggered out of the forest into the tea shop’s clearing.

“Bunny-san?” Karin asked, wrestling her eyes away from the weird cat. The more she stared at it, the more flesh-colored scars she noticed lining its flabby skin. Gross.

“Ah, yes,” replied the woman, who looked more like a Confused Bird-san. “Are you– uh– dropping off?”

The woman disappeared into the shop, but when she reappeared at the counter some minutes later, she seemed much more collected.

“So sorry about that,” she said, dropping a heavy ledger on the counter between them. “We had a, hmm, an incident with one of our drop-offs.”

“Uh-huh,” Karin answered.

“Who did you say this was?” Bunny-san asked, leaning over the counter to get a good look.

Karin’s captive was a man who’d fled Iwa during the Second Shinobi War. He’d been an infiltration specialist who’d flown under the radar, living a nondescript and untrackable life for decades. That was, of course, until Karin had decided to find him.

Bunny-san had to go deep into her records to find him.

“And you did this by yourself?” she asked, eyebrows raised at Karin.

“Does it matter?” Karin snapped. “I’d like to get out of here, and you’re already running late.”

Bunny-san, who had undoubtedly dealt with ruder customers than Karin, shrugged it off easily. It did not, in fact, matter who’d found and incapacitated the man and dragged him here, as long as Karin was there to collect on the bounty. Bunny-san had Karin haul the man’s unconscious body onto the counter, examined him, and then passed over Karin’s money.

“Mrrroooow,” the ugly cat complained while Karin counted her payment. The cat leapt off the table and landed heavily in the grass, wet from recent rain. It prowled over to Karin and glared up at her. “Mrrr,” it insisted.

“Shoo,” Karin commanded, then went back to her money.

The missing-nin had originally been an A-rank for the value of the state secrets he knew, but he’d dropped down to a low-B as time made his knowledge less dangerous. Had anyone had any idea where he’d gone, he’d probably be ranked even lower.

That was Karin’s comfort zone: bounties ranked for the difficulty of finding, not the difficulty of capturing. Once she’d found him, it had been frankly embarrassing how little coaxing it had taken him to ingest the homemade snacks she’d offered to him at his favorite fishing spot.

In any case, Karin was not currently living a particularly glamorous lifestyle, and the pay was enough to get her through the rest of the month.

“Your summons gives me the creeps,” Karin said as she tucked her money away.

“Hmm?” Bunny-san said, looking up from hog-tying the missing-nin. “Oh, the cat? He’s not ours.”

Karin glowered at the cat some more, and it glowered back at her. The ugly thing was… well, beyond being the most hideous animal she’d ever seen, it also did not feel like a cat to her sixth sense. A summon’s chakra still felt like an animal, just with a sense of sentience to it, and usually in much higher quantities. This thing’s chakra felt almost…

Well. Almost human.

It was very upsetting and also very not Karin’s business.

“If that’s all,” she said stiffly to Bunny-san, and then sauntered down to the road to be on her way.

The cat followed her.

“Shoo,” she snapped at it, and sent a half-hearted kick its way. It dodged and hissed angrily at her.

Two men crashed out of the forest, a third man held between them. Karin, who had become quite an expert in current bounties this past year, recognized the first two men as working at the drop point, and the unconscious man between them as an A-rank missing nin from Suna. He was beaten and battered in a way that she did not think the drop point ninja were capable of. Was this Bunny-san’s “incident”?

“I don’t know where Customer-san went,” she heard Bunny-san saying to her colleagues.

“I guess we’ll get the commission fee and the bounty then,” one of the ninja said, and then the cat went berserk.

It hurled itself back across the clearing to the tea shop, tackling the man with enough force to make him stumble. It sank both its teeth and its claws into the man, who screamed like a child finding a spider in his bathtub.

Karin rolled her eyes and continued on her way. She was over a day’s trek from home, and it was already late. She’d have to camp somewhere for the night. Annoying.

xXx

It had been raining on and off all day, so rather than sleep in the mud, Karin crawled into a tree and stuck herself to a sturdy branch for the night. When she’d first left Grass Country, which was mostly open plains, learning to sleep with her chakra gluing her to a tree had been difficult, but. Well. She’d had lots of time it practice.

She got roughly three hours of sleep before her sixth sense woke her up. The cat was back. She could feel it, all weird and almost-human and way too big for a cat, right on the periphery of her usual sensing range. There was another, equally weird chakra with it. Had it found a friend?

Karin stood silently on the tree and took a minute to stretch. The cat was coming her way, and she had sworn off getting involved in any more fucked-up jutsu.

She didn’t know what the cat was, exactly, but it definitely went into the category of “fucked-up jutsu,” and she was leaving.

The cat was weird and a little scary in its weirdness, but it was still a cat limited by cat anatomy, and Karin outran it easily. Whatever the second weird chakra was, it stuck with the cat.

Karin arrived home at dawn and immediately flopped down on her bed to nap. This turned out to be a technical error, because when she woke, the cat and its friend were somewhere outside. More precisely, they’d just arrived at the outskirts the picturesque coastal town Karin was currently residing in.

Groaning, Karin kicked off her blankets and pulled on her glasses. It would be better to go deal with them outside than let them find her home. The neighbors already thought she’d murdered her grandfather for the house– no need to make them more suspicious.

(The old man hadn’t actually been her grandfather, but she hadn’t killed him. She’d just… picked out a chakra signature she knew was fading and then faked some tears at his bedside and told some lies to inherit his cute cottage.)

She found them sniffing around among the scraggly bushes outside of town. The second weird chakra turned out to belong to another, much prettier cat. This one had sleek, pure white fur, pink eyes, and was currently bleeding from its shoulder. Both cats froze when they noticed her.

“Well?” she asked, sniffing and crossing her arms.

Predictably, being cats, neither of them answered. The hideous hairless one flattened both its ears to the back of its head and hissed.

“Did you come all this way just to yell at me?” Karin asked.

Maybe she had insulted it somehow. Maybe it hated hunter-nin. Maybe part of its fucked-up jutsu made it imprint on her. Maybe–

The white one attacked her.

“Mother fucker–” Karin screamed. She kicked it hard enough to send it crashing through the nearest bush, but not before it had managed to sink its claws into her exposed tight.

The ugly one seemed to agree with her, because it turned and pounced on its friend, yowling and hissing. Karin swore at them, and then started to stomp back to the town.

Halfway down mainstreet, she felt the cats disentangle themselves and hurry into the village. She rolled her eyes and ducked into an empty restaurant. Her server, a teenaged boy, set her cake and a kettle of boiling water down in front of her.

“W–we’re out of your tea,” he stammered, “but I can go get more!”

He ran out before Karin could tell him to take the water away, then, which was the type of service you got when there were wild rumors of you being a murderer.

He left in such a hurry, he didn’t notice the two cats dart in as he left, leaving the door swinging behind him. The white one was now practically pink, bleeding in multiple places. Karin watched them approach with eyebrows raised.

The hairless one hoped onto her table and batted her cake off the table. Karin made no move to intervene as the plate broke on the floor, the frosting splattering everywhere. The white cat sniffed at it.

“...uh-huh,” Karin said, unimpressed. The ugly cat sat in front of her, ears flat and eyes slit, watching her expectantly. Its face wrinkled impressively.

When the cat failed to make any other sort of move, Karin laced some honey into her voice and asked mockingly, “Can I help you? Do you want someone to pet your ugly face?”

The cat let out a singular hiss. The white one was licking cake crumbs off the floor.

“Then I guess we’re out an impasse,” Karin said, flipping her hair over her shoulder leaning back into her chair.

“Mrrow,” the cat said, its tail twitching. If it couldn’t explain to Karin what it wanted, then she wasn’t sure why it had been so insistent on following her. She wished she had tea and not just a pot of hot water, so she could pour and drink it all casual-like, to show off to the cat that she really, really couldn’t be bothered with it.

The white cat hopped onto the table, cake in its whiskers. It rubbed against the hairless cat, who smacked it away with just as must force and vitriol as it had Karin’s cake. The white cat stumbled into the teapot and knocked it over. Karin back her chair away to avoid the scalding water, which was a good thing, because suddenly there was a naked man on her table.

“What!” Karin squawked, jumping out of her chair.

“SHIT–” the man yelled, and Karin had to admit, she’d definitely had this exact fantasy before. The man was handsome and fit, with mussed silver hair and eyes as red as hers. He was completely without clothes, posed for her on the table.

The ugly cat sort of hissed at it, ears so flat they could barely be seen, and then it jumped off the table and rolled in the steaming puddle leaking from the tea pot.

Right before her very eyes, the cat transformed into a man. His chakra twisted and bloomed, now fully human and even bigger. This was, incidentally, another fantasy of Karin’s, except in her fantasies the magic transforming naked man was much sexier.

Also in her fantasies, the sexy naked man almost never attacked her.

“Get her,” the new naked man grunted, and lunged at her. He was giant and muscled and covered in poorly-stitched scars, with inky black hair, and he moved much faster than Karin would have anticipated.

Still, for the unexpected speed, he must not have fully adjusted to being human yet, because his grab was sloppy and Karin managed to slip through his arms and run up the wall to kneel on the ceiling. Below her, the silver-haired man stood and cracked his neck, blinking and slightly dazed. He squinted up at Karin.

“Why’re we after this bitch, Kakuzu?” he asked, and Karin realized they weren’t completely naked– they both wore matching rings.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Karin snapped down at them. She could probably make it to a door or a window and escape, but if she didn’t know their motives, she couldn’t anticipate if they would follow her and how far they’d go to pursue her.

The big one, Kakuzu, narrowed his acid green eyes at her, completely unabashed in his nakedness.

“She’s a tracker,” he said.

“Eh?” the silver haired one answered, pulling an elbow back to stretch his shoulders, also completely unashamed of his nakedness. This was something Karin could support in attractive people, except that she didn’t like being attacked. “But we broke the jutsu just now, didn’t we?”

Kakuzu just sort of… growled. Then his forearm detached from his body and shot at Karin.

She had been doing so well at her vow against fucked-up jutsu, too.

Karin rolled to avoid it, and it broke through the ceiling. The hand was supported by several creepy black tendrils, and one whipped around and stabbed at her. She dodged and accidentally hit one of the fire sprinklers mounted on the ceiling. It broke off, clattering to the floor below, and water sprayed.

The sprinklers, she thought, must not be up to code, because the water they released was brown. Still, it hit Kakuzu full force.

He turned back into an ugly cat.

“What the f–” the silver-haired one managed to get out before he too turned into a cat.

Cautiously, Karin dropped down onto the table. On the floor, the cats were spitting and hissing, circling each other aggressively. Their chakra had condensed down and taken on an animalistic feel to it, but the chakra was still recognizable as belonging to the two men.

Both cats were drenched and miserable looking.

Karin had heard of Kakuzu. He was infamous in bounty hunter circles. You didn’t get in his way, and if he wanted the mark you were after, you let him have it. He had been around as long as anyone could remember, a nightmare and a legend and a myth.

And… a cat, apparently.

Karin could get away from him in cat-form. But if he turned back– and he’d just proven he could– she was probably screwed. She couldn’t run from the world’s most dangerous bounty hunter forever.

“Hey,” she called down to them. Both of them tensed and looked up at her. “You need me to track someone down?”

Kakuzu-cat mewled. His partner sat and started licking dry blood from his fur.

“I think we can make a deal,” Karin said slowly. “Why don’t we go back to my place and talk it over?”

Kakuzu-cat did some sort of weird bob with his head that she interpreted as agreement, and both cats followed Karin out of the restaurant. She nearly bumped into the waiter boy, holding paper bag and panting from his rush.

“There was an accident,” Karin said blandly. “You should maintain the building better.”

“What–” the boy started to say, and she brushed past him.

The road to Karin’s house took her up a cliff, which overlooked the sea. The main bulk of the town, nestled at the foot of the steep slope and adjacent to a white-sand beach, was geared at tourism, but historically the town had been a fishing village. As she headed up the cliff, the houses got less and less modern. At the top of the cliff, half the little homes lining it were abandoned.

Karin liked her current residence, despite it not even having electricity, because it was simultaneously remote and right next to a modern town with shopping and amenities. Not to mention, as the path wound along the cliff, the view was beautiful.

Both cats plodded along behind her. When Karin paused to take in the sea stretched out before her, a greyish blue under the overcast sky, the cats stopped with her. The breeze from the sea was cool and salty, and it blew her red hair back over her shoulders.

“Mrrow,” the white cat complained after a minute of her staring. Karin hadn’t recognized him from any bingo books, and she concluded he wasn’t as dangerous as Kakuzu.

Sighing deeply, Karin stared down at the cats. Cutting a deal with Kakuzu was better than being hunted down and murdered, but it still wasn’t an ideal solution.

Without a single sign of warning to the hideous cat, Karin punted it over the edge of the cliff.

The ideal solution, really, was to just eliminate the threat all together.

Kakuzu screamed as he went sailing, flailing his limbs in comic outrage. But he was just a cat, and he wasn’t going to survive the fall or the rough water below. The white cat also screamed, clawing at her and spitting and biting, all its hair on edge.

It was mean, but it was still a cat. It only took a minute for Karin to wrestle it from where it was destroying her shirt and hurl it over the cliff as well.

“Good riddance,” she murmured, leaning over the cliff to make sure they were gone.

The white cat had clawed her in several places, but Karin healed quick. She was more annoyed that he’d ruined one of her favorite shirts.

She’d probably done the world a favor, getting rid of those two.

xXx

Four days later, Karin was chopping wood outside her ill-begotten cottage, and she felt Kakuzu and his friend approaching at rapid speed. They were human again, their chakra huge and furious and deadly.

“For god’s sake,” she muttered to herself. How the hell were they still alive?

She dropped her axe, thought better of it, and scooped it back up. Her pursuers were far off, but they were fast, and there wasn’t really any time to flee or prepare something. She had spent the last few nights reviewing their encounter, though, and she had some guesses about what sort of predicament Kakuzu and his friend were in. Karin ran down the side of the cliff and very carefully walked out over the water.

Salt water was easier than fresh to balance on, but the rolling waves and the currents that formed here made the task precarious. Karin could stand still easy enough, but she wouldn’t be able to defend herself without risking falling in. She hoped her guess about the cats was correct.

She squinted upwards as she watched Kakuzu and the silver-haired man descend the cliff. They stopped several meters from the water, clinging to the cliff face with their very human chakra. They were clothed now, although the silver-haired one had neglected to find himself a shirt.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Karin called, adjusting her grip on her ax.

“What the FUCK, lady,” the silver-haired man yelled.

“Get over here,” Kakuzu growled. He’d found some sort of hood and pulled it over most of his face, but his eyes were still vibrant and dangerous. “Or I will rip your limbs off.”

“Hmm,” said Karin, popping a hip and hoisting the ax over her shoulder. “Why don’t you come out here and make me?”

Neither of them made a move.

“What’s wrong?” Karin asked, voice dripping with fake innocence. “Cat got your tongue?”

The silver-haired man howled in fury and leapt down to the water. Karin watched him adjust the chakra of his feet perfectly to match the shifting of the sea. Then he turned into a cat.

“MRROW!!” he screamed, breaking through the water with a tiny splash.

“Hidan,” Kakzu bit out through gritted teeth.

The cat– Hidan?– screamed and flailed in the water as it rolled him over and yanked him out to sea. Karin walked over to him and held the ax out helpfully. Hidan-cat grabbed on to it with one sad paw, and the force of the current pinned him to the flat side of the blade.

“I’m still open to making a deal,” Karin called to Kakuzu, smiling sweetly.

Kakuzu narrowed his eyes at her, exactly the way Kakuzu-cat had done. Karin shifted slightly so Hidan-cat continued to half-drown at the end of her ax instead of being sucked out to sea.

“Fine,” Kakuzu said finally.

Karin flicked the ax and grabbed Hidan-cat by a back leg. She held him up at arms length, and he hissed and made several futile attempts to claw her.

The ideal solution was to eliminate the threat, but given the threat had just come back in murderous vengeance, Karin would take an unideal solution.

So much for avoiding fucked-up jutsu.

Chapter Text

Once they were back on top of the cliff, Hidan-cat– drenched and shivering and furious about it– went to claw her ankles. Kakuzu held him back by casually stepping on his tail. The cat screamed.

Karin very purposefully turned her back on them to lead them into her house. They could interpret it as a sign of trust, or a sign that Karin was just a little bit stupid, or a reminder that she knew they could be defeated by a single splash of water. She could work with any of these assumptions, but the truth was that Karin didn’t need to watch people to know where they were.

Karin’s cottage was a grand total of two rooms, not including the shed and outhouse. Karin had done some work redecorating the bedroom, but had so far mostly left the kitchen-dining room alone.

“Make yourself at home,” she said, gesturing at the table with uneven legs that she was sure her “grandfather” had built himself.

Kakuzu sat, and he looked comically large in the cramped room, his head just inches from the exposed rafters. Hidan-cat clawed his way up to Kakuzu’s shoulder. A giant man with a little white cat was kind of… well, kind of cute. How unfortunate.

Karin crossed to her small stretch of a kitchen bench and poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher.

“So, you change back with hot water, or...?” she asked conversationally, leaning against the counter, pitcher of water in grabbing range.

“Yes,” Kakuzu confirmed, and very conspicuously did not ask for hot water for his partner, now gnawing on his ear.

“Huh,” Karin said, absently swirling her glass. It wasn’t meant to look like a threat, but it was, in fact, absolutely a threat. “How’d you end up like that?”

There was a pause before Kakuzu answered. “We don’t know.”

Welp.

They were screwed.

“We lost contact with the rest of our group,” Kakuzu continued. “You’re going to find them.”

“Uh-huh,” Karin said, watching Hidan-cat attempt to climb up Kakuzu’s hood, only to have it fall away. Hidan-cat screeched tumbled to the ground. Kakuzu didn’t even blink, his eyes still fixated on Karin. “And what do I get out of it?”

“Your life,” Kakuzu said darkly. Karin rolled her eyes and picked up her pitcher, topping off her glass of water that didn’t need topping off. It overflowed, and water dripped down over her fingers.

“And what do you bargain with,” Karin asked, “when you can’t just force your way?”

Hidan-cat paused as he reascended Kakuzu’s arm, and Kakuzu narrowed his eyes at her. He looked even more intimidating without the hood, his hair wild and unbrushed, his scars on full display.

Karin raised her eyebrows expectantly. She wasn’t afraid of scars.

“My organization has access to many resources,” Kakuzu said finally. “They will compensate you.”

“Monetary compensation?” Karin asked.

“Absolutely not,” Kakuzu growled, slamming his hands on the table. It made an ominous cracking noise but stayed standing.

“...right, okay,” Karin said. “Non-monetary compensation– some sort of favor?”

Kakuzu grunted.

“I can work with that,” Karin said, setting her pitcher back down. “Who am I finding?”

“Have you heard of a group called Akatsuki?” Kakuzu asked, and Karin instantly regretted agreeing to this.

xXx

“Do we really have to?” Karin whined as Kakuzu pulled her tea kettle off her gas stove.

“I’m not carrying him all the way to Lightning,” Kakuzu said, and poured the hot water over Hidan-cat.

Half a second later, Hidan was standing naked and beautiful in her kitchen.

“About time, Kakuzu!” Hidan bellowed, immediately ruining Karin’s fantasy of coming home from a long day to a pretty naked man in an apron. White hair and loud wasn’t her type, anyway.

“It’s your own fault you got stuck as a cat,” Kakuzu drawled, and Hidan threw a punch at him.

“Hey, hey!” Karin yelped. “Take it outside!”

They did not, and the table finally broke. Karin grabbed her pitcher of water and waved it threateningly at them. Kakuzu snarled and pushed Hidan outside. Karin clicked her tongue in annoyance and went into the bedroom to see if she had any clothes for Hidan.

She briefly thought about giving him a pair of her hotpants and giggled to herself at the imagery. No, as nice as that would look, he was unlikely to go for it.

She’d thrown out most of her “Grandfather’s” old clothes, but she’d kept some of the nicer pieces. The winter coats were something she might need in the future, but probably were not appropriate to travel in early June. The old man had had one pair of dark grey dress pants, which she’d thought she could sell or maybe have in the off-chance she could entice a gentleman caller who mysteriously lost his pants…

Well, that was almost what happened.

She dug out a flannel shirt she’d actually kept for herself. Then she shoved a couple of changes of underwear into her pack– pre-packed for a long trip, like a proper renegade ninja– and went outside to find Hidan yelling at one of her neighbors.

“So you can back off, hag,” Hidan was bellowing, completely in the old lady’s face and still very, overwhelmingly naked, “because I can do whatever the fuck I want–”

“Katsuki-san!” the old lady who lived across the street yelped, running over to Karin. “Your visitors are worse than normal!”

“Ah,” Karin hedged. “He’s just tired from travelling.”

“Where are his clothes?” the woman asked, scandalized.

“There was an accident,” Karin said hollowly.

The woman frowned, shot a worrying look at Hidan and whispered, “Katsuki-san, a nice young lady like you should really think twice about the type of company she keeps.”

“Sure,” Karin agreed, then spun the old lady around and pointed her towards her own house. “We were just heading out, anyway.”

The woman left obediently, and Hidan dressed in the clothes Karin brought him, uncaring that the neighbor was now watching them from the crack in her curtains.

“These clothes don’t even match, and they’re too hot,” Hidan complained, ripping the sleeves off the flannel. He did not button the shirt or acknowledge the full-body twitch of Karin’s barely contained rage. “Don’t you have shoes?”

Karin took a deep breath. Her temper wasn’t that bad; it’s just that some people were incredibly good at pinpointing her buttons and then playing a fucking concierto on them. But– Hidan wasn’t Suigetsu, and it would be stupid to pick a fight with him. Karin rained in the temptation to hit him and only just managed to keep herself from pointing out that he would still have his own clothes, if only he hadn’t lost them in the ocean.

The left the town at a walk, following the edge of the cliff. Once they’d passed the last house, though, Karin broke into a run. Their target wasn’t too far away, and she wanted this done as quickly as possible.

“How do you even know where we’re going?” Hidan asked loudly.

Karin gritted her teeth. “I just do,” she answered.

“And why can you only track fucking Uchiha?” Hidan asked.

“I just can,” Karin snapped.

Hidan was quiet for a few minutes, then he asked, “How’s that? You run into him before and stick a jutsu on him?”

“No,” Karin muttered.

With some elbow grease and more information, she could probably track down any of them. Uchiha Itachi, though, had conveniently similar chakra to someone else she knew very well. After some meditation, she’d found him a country away in less than an hour. Karin really didn’t want to ever have to come face to face with Uchiha Itachi, but also she wanted to make the violent cat-men someone else’s problem as soon as possible.

She wondered if Itachi was as handsome as his brother. She imagined an older Sasuke, surrounded by cats and... oh… oh no....

“Is it scent?” Hidan asked. “Do you tack by scent, like a real bitch–”

“No!” Karin screamed, turning to glare at him. He smirked back at her. “Kakuzu-san,” she said sweetly, keeping her glare on Hidan. “Can we turn him back into a cat?”

Kakuzu dropped back to punch his partner, who teetered off course and only just avoided collision with a tree. Karin felt validated.

Hidan turned his incredibly loud attention on Kakuzu then, and they made it to Lightning Country by nightfall. If she were traveling alone, Karin would probably push on for about an hour more– just far enough to be unlikely to run into border patrol– and set up camp. She wasn’t alone, though, and well-rested enough to feel safe travelling on through the night.

Hidan complained he was hungry, though, so they stopped for dinner. Karin pulled out her own rations, and suddenly Hidan was hovering over her.

“Well?” he said expectantly, nodding down at the salted fish in her hands.

“I only brought enough for me,” Karin said flatly, jamming the rest of it into her mouth. Through a wad of too-dry fish, she added, “Aren’t you a big scary missing-nin? Go catch a rabbit or something.”

Hidan looked slightly taken aback, and he mumbled something like, “I’ll be a big scary missing-nin at you,” before wandering over to complain to Kakuzu about their complete lack of supplies.

They’d lost them all when they’d turned into cats, including a scythe or something that Hidan wanted, right now, in order to maim Karin. She rolled her eyes.

“It was custom-made,” Hidan whined, but eventually disappeared into the woods.

Karin finished eating in silence, squatting under a tree and enjoying how the air cooled as the sky went from the dark purple of post-sunset to black. Kakuzu stood as silent and still as a statue a little ways away, neck inclined as he studied the stars.

Hidan was still running around in the forest. Karin could feel him in the back of her mind, his chakra dark and chaotic. There was a sort of disturbing, inhuman quality to it that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and that she didn’t really want to investigate further.

Kakuzu’s chakra was strange in a different way. It was huge and steady and tightly coiled, the way you’d expect from someone with his reputation, but something about it was… well, it was almost like he was made of different people’s chakras, all braided together.

Hidan had gone still in the forest. His chakra rolled and burst in ecstasy.

Right. Karin did not want to probe further into any of this, on account of how she’d fled the realm of fucked-up jutsu, and these two seemed to be made of fucked-upness. She leaned back against the tree, zoned both of them out, and took a light nap.

She woke several hours later when Hidan’s chakra moved. He stomped out of the trees, covered in blood and dragging a deer carcass behind him.

“What the hell–” Karin yelped, hopping to her feet.

“You took longer than usual,” Kakuzu accused.

Hidan’s hair was mussed and pink with blood. His eyes were glazed over like some sort of drunkard.

“I haven’t had a sacrifice in so long,” Hidan slurred. “I wanted to take my time…”

What the fuck.

The doe’s neck was snapped, one eye missing, and her belly looked like it had been clawed apart. Hidan’s hands were so drenched in blood they were almost black. Had he… had he been the one to claw…?

He hadn’t had any weapons, after all.

Oh, gross.

“Next time I’ll loan you a kunai,” Karin said as Kakuzu kneeled and ripped off the thing’s  hindleg, flash-frying it with a fire jutsu.

“You’re not really supposed to eat the sacrifices,” Hidan said, but accepted the hunk of deer meat Kakuzu passed him anyway.

“You’re supposed to sacrifice humans,” Kakuzu said.

“Ah, well…” Hidan said, tearing away a piece of flesh with a gross, wet sound. “Next best thing. There wasn’t really anyone around...”

Hidan turned to look at Karin. First the first time, Karin felt just a little bit scared of him.

“The nearest town is that way,” she said, pointing. Then she pointed in the opposite direction and said, “And Uchiha is that way. I’d rather not take any detours.”

Hidan sort of shrugged and after several more bites of meat asked, “Do you know about the will of our Lord Jashin?”

Behind him, Kakuzu pinched the bridge of his nose.

Karin already knew Hidan had a few screws loose, but she had yet to fully understand the scope of how loose. He rambled to her for a half hour straight about the god of pain and suffering, and about the bliss of mutual suffering with fellow man. He only stopped when Kakuzu abruptly told him to shut up and punched him in the head.

Karin did her best to tune the ensuing argument out as she concentrated on confirming the location of Uchiha Itachi’s chakra. The sooner she got them there, the sooner human sacrifices to Jashin could be his problem instead.

Itachi hadn’t moved at all, which was good. He was with another giant chakra, which Karin assumed was his partner, Hoshigaki Kisame. Now that she was closer, she could get a better idea of the nuances of their chakras, and they seemed…

“Shit,” Karin swore. Hidan and Kakuzu both turned to her. “Shit.”

“What?” Hidan barked.

“You’re not the only ones cursed,” Karin said, scooping up her pack. “Let’s get going, now.”

Karin was not very physically intimidating, but she had worked as a warden for two years, and with that had come a certain air of authority. Kakuzu buried the deer carcass in ten second flat with an earth jutsu, and they both followed her into the night without question.

Of course, Hidan’s Jashin-given talent for being the most obnoxious person around could not be cowed for long, and after an hour of running, he sidled up next to her and asked, “So is Uchiha a cat now?”

“No,” Karin answered, biting her lip. “I don’t know. That Hoshigaki guy is like you, though.”

“A cat?”

“An animal,” Karin retorted, and elbowed him in the side. She put on a burst of speed to get ahead of him.

“Maybe he’s just always like that,” Hidan called after her. “He is a shark.”

Karin didn’t know what that meant. She kept running.

The forest shrank away, giving way to tall grasses. Karin ploughed forward– she was originally from Grass, after all, and the lack of cover and the added resistance of the vegetation around her legs didn’t bother her. She’d seen ninja from other villages balk at a flat run through an open field, but neither Kakuzu nor Hidan showed the slightest bit of concern.

Around sunrise, they were almost to Itachi, and Kakuzu and Hidan turned back into cats mid-run. Both cats stumbled and fell, rolling over themselves and making enraged cat noises. 

“Are you kidding me?” Karin yelled, skidding to a halt.

“Mrr,” Kakuzu-cat said, picking his ugly hairless body up.

Hidan-cat mewled pathetically, backtracking to the bundle of clothes he’d done an impressive somersault out of.

“But what– there’s no water–” Karin glared around them. Was it a puddle? She was going to kill the puddle.

Karin grabbed a handful of grass, tearing it right from the ground. They sky was a light blue with the morning sun, and the grass had dared to produce dew drops.

“You insidious bastards,” Karin hissed at the grass.

“Meow,” Kakuzu-cat complained at her feet.

Karin flung her handful of grass as hard as she could. It did not travel very far, fluttering in the cool morning air.

“There’s no point changing you back until we’re out of the field,” Karin said matter-of-factly to Kakuzu-cat. “I guess we’ll just… walk. He’s not far.”

Hidan-cat squeaked at her and pawed at his clothes. He was so small and adorable in his cat form, she almost felt sorry for him.

Karin gathered up Kakuzu’s clothes first, carefully folding them and shoving them into her pack. She flipped Hidan’s clothes over with a foot and proclaimed them too dirty to keep.

“If you liked them,” she told the mewling little cat, “you shouldn’t have rolled in deer blood.”

Hidan-cat pouted. Karin was so enraged by how cute it looked, she almost kicked him again.

Both cats followed at her heels, Hidan-cat occasionally wandering off to chase a butterfly or grasshopper. Karin wondered if human Hidan would also go chasing random animals, or if being a cat affected his personality. If only it would make him less of a nuisance, maybe she’d keep him.

Itachi was currently camped out at an abandoned farmhouse, and Karin and the cats approached it through an overgrown orchard. The cherry trees must have looked stunning a few months ago, but now they were without flowers, and the ground was littered with rotting fruit. Insects buzzed at their feet, and Kakuzu-cat made several annoyed noises and swatted at them.

The farmhouse had a collapsed roof, but the porch was still in order. Uchiha Itachi sat in a white wicker chair, obviously waiting for them. The biggest, fluffiest cat Karin had ever seen was curled up in his lap. It was so big it barely even fit between the arms of the chair.

Itachi did not greet her, or say anything, or even change facial expression. He simply looked at her, looked at each cat in turn, and stood.

The giant cat leapt off his lap, making an audible thud as it landed. Hidan-cat darted up the stairs of the porch, meowing and sniffing at the cat. It was a bluish gray color, and so fluffy Karin was already imagining what it would be like to bury her face in it.

“Hello,” Karin said stiffly. “I brought you your colleagues. Have fun.”

She turned to leave. She could look them up later to collect her favor, whenever they had gotten out of… whatever this was.

“Wait,” Itachi said. His voice was soft, but it was definitely a command.

He was behind her suddenly, and Karin glanced over her shoulder at him. His eyes were red.

“What?” she snapped. “Just pour hot water on them, and they’ll go back, and you can all have a party.”

“Hot water…” Itachi murmured, turning to peer at the cats and wrapping a hand around Karin forearm in one motion.

“Ex- cuse me,” Karin said, yanking her arm away. “I made a deal with your friends to get them here. They’re here, I’ve done my part, and now I’m leaving.”

Itachi stared her down, looking for all the world like he hadn’t heard her, or if he had, he simply hadn’t cared. “How did you find us?” he asked.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, Karin thought. “I can guarantee you no one else could duplicate it,” she said. “And I’m certainly never looking you up again, so don’t worry about it.”

“What did Kakuzu offer you?” Itachi asked. His face still hadn’t changed, but suddenly his voice was much more intense. His chakra boiled and curled under his skin. “I’ll double it.”

What? WHAT?

“Umm,” was all Karin managed to get out. Itachi was leaning over her now, and she could feel his body heat on her. She felt her face go red.

“Could you track someone else for us?” he asked.

“Um– I mean– yes,” Karin agreed. It absolutely wasn’t fair that he was so pretty. “I mean, yes, I can do that for you, for um… for double.”

Itachi took a step back, and Karin wished she’d tried to haggle with him, just to keep him near. “Good,” he said. “We’ve lost our leader.”

Karin didn’t really know what that meant, but she followed Itachi as he power-walked around to the back of the house.

There was a bathhouse around back, with a big tub one could light a fire under. Itachi pointed Karin toward a water pump, before heading over to an ancient pile of half-rotted logs.

Karin thought Itachi was pretty, and she wouldn’t mind him getting back into her personal space, but she also didn’t like being ordered around. If she worked with him, it was going to be a mutual partnership. She didn’t like his assumption that she would just roll with whatever he thought best. With a reward as nebulous as “a favor,” she was basically helping them out of the goodness of her heart, after all.

Karin filled a bucket with water while Itachi picked out useable logs and kindling. She stood by the water pump and watched as he lit the fight with a puff of flames from his mouth.

“Itachi-san,” she called sweetly. “Can you help me? I think there’s a problem with the pump.”

Itachi approached her, and when he was in range, she said, “I got some water, but I think it’s broken. Look.”

She pulled and pressed down on the pump to demonstrate. It was, of course, in perfect working order, and she shoved a hand under it to redirect the water upwards. Itachi stepped back, but not fast enough. A second later, his cloak was a heap on the ground, and a black cat was shaking itself free.

“Oopsies,” Karin said, voice still sweet as honey. “I guess you’re cursed too, huh?”

The cat was… long. Long was the word. It had long gangly limbs, a long face, and ears like kites. It was very cute in an ugly sort of way, and it gave Karin a very unimpressed look.

“I don’t really like being ordered around like a genin on her first D-rank,” Karin said, picking up her bucket of water. Itachi-cat meowed and followed at her heels as she lugged the water to the bath.

The tub was actually a lot cleaner than Karin expected, and very spacious. She had to use the public baths back at her seaside town, and she missed privacy….

“Actually,” Karin said, stomping out the fire under the tub. Itachi-cat mewed and batted at her foot, but did not use his claws or teeth like certain other cats. What a gentleman. “I think we’re going to do this in a different order.”

She filled the tub with water, and Itachi followed her every step, meowing in annoyance. When the tub was full, Karin picked him up and set him down outside the bathhouse.

“I’ll get to you when I’m done,” she said, and closed the bathhouse door and pulled the latch.

Karin relit the fire under the tub and scrubbed off with cold water from the bucket while she waited for the bathwater to warm. By the time she was lowering herself into the piping hot bath, there was a chorus of howling, pissed off cats outside.

Karin didn’t mind the noise at all. She deserved a nice long bath after all this, didn’t she?

Chapter Text

Karin took her time after her bath, wandering around the bathhouse as she air-dried. There were some dusty shelves, containing a dirty washcloth and an extra brittle sponge she would never dream of using, and an empty box labelled a generic brand soap.

The windows to the bathhouse were glassless, slatted wood, lining the building just below the roof. Karin had seen little white paws waving in the window twice, and once the tips of some ears, but either the cats couldn’t climb the outside wall very well or they wouldn’t.

When she was sufficiently dry, she pulled on her clothes. She picked up the now empty water bucket and flung open the door.

“Your turn, boys,” she announced, but before she’d even finished, Hidan-cat was biting her calf.

Shrieking, Karin slammed the bucket down over him and trapped him. His claws raked the inside of the bucket and he shrieked right back. She had expected him to attack, which is why she’d grabbed the bucket, but it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised for once!

“I. Don’t. Like. Biting,” she seethed at the bucket.

Completely unperturbed by the scene, Kakuzu-cat hopped into the bathtub, and Kakuzu emerged, water glistening on his skin and clinging to his stitches.

Karin sat on the bucket, crossing her legs at the knee. She watched shamelessly as Kakuzu climbed out of the tub.

“Where are my clothes?” he asked. Karin pointed at where she’d left her pack against the wall.

The giant fluffy one– Kisame-cat, she guessed– eyed the water for only a few moments before he belly flopped in. Itachi-cat had stopped in front of Karin and the bucket, its eyes darting between them in concern.

Kisame stood in the tub, and Karin realize why Hidan had said he was basically a shark: the man had gills. He was also a sort of light blue color, with dark blue hair, and his size could rival Kakuzu’s. He grinned at Karin with pointed teeth.

His chakra was bigger than anyone else she’d met but did not, Karin noted, feel at all animalistic.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “My name is Hoshigaki Kisame.”

He bowed politely. Karin watched his abs move with the motion. Hmm.

“Charmed,” Karin answered, dipping her head but not moving from the bucket. “I’m Karin.”

“Itachi-san, I’ll get our clothes,” Kisame said to the cat, and walked out of the bathhouse, leaving a trail of puddles behind him. He’d have to be careful to avoid them when he came back.

“Well?” Karin said, turning her attention to Itachi-cat. “It’s your turn.”

Itachi-cat trotted over to the tub, swaying on his long limbs like some sort of miniature gazelle. He paused at the stepstool into the tub, turned, and meowed at Karin.

“Don’t tell me you’re shy,” Karin cooed. Inside the bucket, Hidan-cat body slammed the wall, causing the bucket to lurch slightly forward. Karin straightened her glasses and did not look away.

“Karin.” Kakuzu had walked around the other side of the tub, and Karin had been so focused on the bath she’d missed how he’d come to be looming over her. “He’s not going to be happy.”

Kakuzu could only mean Hidan-cat, yowling away under the bucket. Karin did not for a second think he was defending Itachi’s modesty.

“The idea isn’t to make him happy,” Karin said, inclining her head to meet Kakuzu’s eyes. “It’s to teach him manners.”

“A lost cause,” Kakuzu said, and behind him Kisame passed a pair of pants over to Itachi. She’d missed it! No!

“I’ll deal with it,” Kakuzu asserted, and that was the only warning she got before he kicked the bucket out from under her. Karin squawked and managed to get an arm down to catch herself from falling completely on her ass. Kakuzu grabbed a spitting Hidan-cat by the neck and stalked over to the tub.

Kakuzu dunked Hidan-cat in, and then suddenly Hidan was half in the tub, half leaning over the side, now in a headlock courtesy of Kakuzu.

“We are going to have a civilized discussion about the situation,” Kakuzu stated as Hidan turned purple in his grip. “And then you can settle your differences.”

“Fucker,” Hidan choked out, but stopped struggling.

They gathered back out on the porch, in the shade of what was left of the roof and the surrounding trees. No one had spare clothes for Hidan, who shrugged on Itachi’s cloak and then did not fasten it. It somehow made the whole situation worse.

An important thing to note about the cat-curse-jutsu, Karin thought, was that it did not magic away the rings all four Akatsuki wore, but it had broken Itachi’s hair tie at some point during the transformation. His hair now hung around his shoulders, sticking to his neck with sweat in the humidity.

“Have you managed to contact anyone?” Kakuzu asked.

Itachi shook his head. “I tried several times after Kisame transformed. I couldn’t even get through the first step of the jutsu.”

“When did you two transform?” Kisame asked.

Hidan and Kakuzu had been cursed for five days now. Kisame had only been stuck as a cat for two. Once he’d realized the problem, Itachi had avoided all the water on the farm, and then tried to call for help.

Since men were, you know, like that, this prompted the other three Akatsuki to try their communication jutsu themselves. It involved meditating and focusing chakra on those rings, after which absolutely nothing happened.

“Huh,” Hidan said, pulling at his ring. “They’re broken.”

“Surely you have another way to contact each other,” Karin said.

“Not really,” Kisame answered. “We don’t even know where the other groups are based.”

Ah. Well. That explained what Itachi meant by “lost our leader.”

“Leader-sama may find another way to reach out to us,” Kakuzu said, “if he can’t use the rings to contact us either.”

Hidan sat up straight, a brief look of worry crossing his face. “He wouldn’t send Konan, would he?”

Karin didn’t know what a Konan was, but she hoped it made Hidan wet his pants.

“It is possible,” Itachi said, slowly and severely, “that if all four of us are affected, the rest may be as well.”

A solemn silence fell over the group. Karin eyed Itachi, sitting with perfect posture, and then Kisame, whose ever present grin had faded. Even Hidan’s brow had furrowed a bit.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Karin said. “You four were countries apart. What kind of jutsu has that sort of range? It must have happened last time you were together, and then something triggered it.”

The four of them exchanged thoughtful glances. The Akatsuki, it turned out, never all got together, and only rarely did pairs meet.

“We ran into each other last August,” Itachi said slowly. “In Water Country.”

“Nothing suspicious happened,” Kakuzu said.

“Yeah,” Hidan said, “unless you count Uchiha losing his shochu virginity.”

Itachi’s expression did not change, but his ears turned a delicate pink. Karin needed to know more of this story, immediately. To her dismay, for the first time since she’d met him, Hidan failed to continue talking.

“Do you know where Deidara and Sasori are?” Kisame asked. “Or Zetsu? They may still be able to contact Leader-sama.”

“No,” Kakuzu said, and then gestured at Karin. “That’s why we hired a tracker.”

Karin sat up straight and adjusted her glasses. “I can find you whoever you like,” she said. “But if you want me to do it quickly, you’ll have to give me more information.”

“Like what?” Itachi asked.

“General location, if you know it,” she said. “Even just a country will help. And…”

She paused. As a general rule, a shinobi did not explain their techniques to anyone but the closest of allies. It was unlikely explaining her chakra sensing would change anything for the Akatsuki, but it still felt like showing them a vulnerability.

“And anything you know about their chakra,” she finished. “What type of release, for example, or if they have an unusual amount.”

Karin would assume all S-rank missing-nin would have high chakra reserves, but Itachi seemed pretty average. You know, for an adult ninja.

“You track chakra?” Itachi asked, peering at her face. Karin felt her cheeks to go red.

“Y-yes, of course,” she said, reaching up to push her glasses up her nose.

“No one can can sense chakra that far away,” Hidan drawled, leaning back in the wicker couch he was currently dominating. His bare legs were wide open for the world to see, pale skin outlined by the black cloak.

“I can,” Karin snapped, scowling at him. “You watched me do it–”

“Nah,” Hidan said, smirking lazily at her. “I think you’re making shit up to make yourself sound like a badass–”

Karin felt every last thread of her patience snap. She lunged at him.

Kakuzu grabbed her right out of the air. “It doesn’t matter how she does it,” he said, and Karin elbowed him in the mouth. It felt like hitting a solid rock, and Kakuzu kept speaking, completely unphased. “As long as she can do it.”

“If you need a unique chakra signature,” Itachi calmly addressed her, as if she were not currently making grabby hands to rip off Hidan’s face, “Deidara has a bloodline limit.”

It took longer than Karin would like to admit to get her rage under control, listening to Itachi describe this Deidara person. When Kakuzu finally put her down, she briefly considered trying to jump Hidan again, now that everyone’s guard was down. Why did she always have to take the high road?

In the end, though, she announced she needed to go meditate in a clear area, and she climbed one of the trees bordering the porch.

“And don’t you fucking interrupt me!” she yelled down at them when she was halfway up.

She was mostly directing this at Hidan, but it was always possible one of the others could reveal some new and terrible personality quirk.

At the top of the tree, she made the traditional meditation hand sign, and tried to clear her mind. Karin had the best range of any sensor she’d ever even heard of, but it required time and quiet and concentration.

“Are you sure she’s not jerking us around?” Kisame asked down below.

“She found you,” Kakuzu said. “And she found a mark I tried hunting for years.”

“SHUT UP!” Karin screamed. They went silent, and she went back to work.

The four chakra signatures of the Akatsuki came into vivid focus in her mind. Itachi’s chakra, like the smoldering of ash still red hot from a fire, felt insultingly normal next to the roar of Kisame’s vast chakra, or the weirdness of Kakuzu and Hidan’s. There was a fifth chakra a little bit further away from the house, which she’d previously assumed was an animal. Now that she was focusing on it, it was definitely something else– pure chakra freed from any animal or person. The remnants of a jutsu? She’d investigate later.

She focused on the smaller sources of chakra next: animals and plants, the gentle sing of the orchard. The humans faded from her attention, and then she pushed her senses further and further out, until she had a map of the whole country held in her mind, and then she pushed it even further and further until she could see all but the most distant corners of the shinobi nations.

It was nigh impossible to pick out an individual person like this, although she could feel the buzz of people flocked together in cities. Karin felt a headache coming on as she struggled to keep such a wide area in focus.

Deidara had something called “explosion release,” which Itachi had seemed confident would feel obviously different from everyone else. Karin hoped he was right, because the migraines she’d gotten from tasks like “search out all the wind release users in Fire Country” were fairly debilitating.

Karin did her search in a spiral, starting at the very edges of her map and circling inward. It was slow and tedious work, and she could feel the heat of the sun moving across her face as the hours passed. Then, somewhere almost due west of them, she felt it.

If Itachi’s fire release was like embers, this guy’s was like if you set a fireworks factory on fire. It spun and burst and for fuck’s sake, he was also a cat. Now that she’d felt the transformation of few times, she was certain of it– Deidara was a goddamn cat.

Since Akatsuki worked in pairs, she checked around him for someone else, and yes, there was a second cat-person with him. This person had much more mundane chakra, except that it was weirdly concentrated, like he’d wound it all into a tight ball for some reason.

Did Akatsuki only recruit users of fucked-up jutsu?

Karin’s limbs were shaking from exertion as she climbed down from the tree, and her temples were pounding. At least now that she knew what he felt like, Deidara would be easy to refind.

She blinked a few times at the men left on the porch, black spots at the corners of her vision. Hidan had reclined across the couch and was snoring lightly. Kakuzu had wandered off, and Itachi was a cat again. Kisame was kneeling over him, carefully administering water out of a canteen.

That was… cute. That was stupid cute. Help.

“Deidara is two days west and also a cat,” Karin reported, doing her best to minimize swaying as her vision doubled. She gestured at the cat. “What happened to him?”

“We can’t even drink without transforming, it turns out,” Kisame answered, looking up at her. “Itachi-san has been avoiding water, so he’s dehydrated. How do you know Deidara is a cat?”

“I just do,” Karin said dully.

Kisame tilted his head. “Is that so?”

“She knew you were a cat too,” Hidan said, one arm thrown over his face to block the sun from his eyes. “Could you two shut up? I’m sleeping.”

Karin ignored him. “There’s a weird jutsu over that way,” she said, waving vaguely towards a barn.

“What…” Kisame said, standing. Itachi-cat meowed at him. “Ah, you must have felt Samehada.”

Karin paused. “The sword?”

“You’ve heard of it?”

Karin had talked to Suigetsu for more than thirty seconds, so yes, she’d had all the Seven Swordsmen’s swords described to her in detail. Not that she remembered most of the details, since she generally tried to tune Suigetsu out.

“It’s famous,” she said vaguely.

“I guess we should confirm that’s your ‘weird jutsu,’” Kisame said, motioning for her to follow him off the porch. He did not comment when she missed the last step and stumbled.

Itachi and Kisame had been camping in the barn, and Karin eyed the single bedroll laid out on the packed-dirt floor. Kisame must not have needed a bedroll when he was cat. Karin’s traitorous mind conjured an image of Itachi sleeping for her, dark hair spread out, arms wrapped around a giant, fluffy cat…

“Karin,” Kisame called, and she jumped.

Samehada was a completely impractical sword, as it was possibly even bigger than Karin. Kisame had it wrapped up, leaning against a wall.

“Yeah, that’s definitely it,” Karin said peering down at it. It felt like if you dumped a bunch of paint buckets together and then didn’t really bother to mix them, different pieces of chakra swirling around each other. “Is this the one that eats chakra? It feels creepy.”

Kisame laughed good naturedly, although Karin didn’t really see what was funny about that. Samehada was creepy, and she wasn’t looking forward to hanging out with it.

xXx

Karin spent the next few hours sitting in the dark in the corner of the barn with her head between her knees. She stumbled back out at dusk, when Kakuzu came back with take-out food and clothes for Hidan.

“Did you just pull these off a laundry line?” Hidan said, holding up the shirt and wrinkling his nose at it. It was obviously several sizes too big and a bright chartreuse. The shorts Kakuzu brought were also too big and hung dangerously low around his hips.

Karin tried to keep her staring as subtle as possible. It absolutely wasn’t fair that Hidan was allowed to be so obnoxious and have perfect pelvic bones at the same time.

“A man paid me to take them off his hands,” Kakuzu said. The smile on Kisame’s face took on a sort of fixed quality, like: ah yes, I forgot you were like this.

Karin wondered if Kakuzu had knocked on the door of someone’s house to demand clothes, or there was now some poor man wandering around the countryside in his underwear.

Kakuzu had used his earnings to buy them the greasiest food Karin had ever eaten. It was cold. He’d gotten the early bird special.

“Why’d you take so long getting back, then?” Kisame asked through a mouthful of noodles.

“Lawn sprinklers,” Kakuzu said vaguely, and then refused to elaborate.

Hidan tried tucking in his shirt (which looked ridiculous), untucked it, and then undid all but two of the buttons. “Here,” he said, and dropped Itachi’s cloak– which he’d been lounging around in buttnaked– next to Itachi where he sat.

“...thank you,” Itachi said and made no move to touch the cloak. Then he said, “I have several dietary restrictions.”

“Why?” Hidan asked.

“I got you steamed vegetables,” Kakuzu said, and Itachi didn’t really looked displeased with the answer, but he also did not look thrilled.

Karin watched Itachi prepare a sad dinner of plain rice and soggy vegetables, and something in her brain decided this was the most beautifully tragic thing she had ever seen.

“What kind of dietary restrictions?” Karin asked, scooting closer to him. She tried to lace honey into her voice. “I have some extra food supplies, if you want…”

“How come you’ll share with him?” Hidan demanded.

“Because he’s not a mannerless piles of dicks,” Karin yelled back, and the volume of her own voice somehow made her headache worse.

Itachi declined her offer, and they made plans to head out at daybreak.

“When can we go get my scythe back, or my prayer beads?” Hidan whined. “Kakuzu, I know you hate losing all your expensive supplies.”

Kakuzu bristled. “No.”

“There’s really no reason for all of us to go to Deidara and Sasori,” Itachi said diplomatically.

“It’s impossible to travel that far without running into water,” Kakuzu said, and Karin wondered what exactly had happened with the lawn sprinklers.

“So?” Hidan said. “We’ll just go find a hot spring.”

“This isn’t Hot Water Country,” Kakuzu growled. “You can’t just expect to fall into one every ten steps.”

“But you could find a bath,” Karin pointed out. Getting rid of Hidan and Kakuzu to go on a roadtrip with Itachi and Kisame was, from any angle she looked at it, the ideal situation. “Just plan your route to take you near towns.”

“Yeah, Kakuzu,” Hidan said, poking him in the side with a foot. “How much did you say you paid for your kunai?”

“Fine,” Kakuzu muttered.

Itachi set down his empty container, took two steps back, and set his cloak on fire.

“Konan is going to kill you,” Hidan observed.

xXx

Karin slept curled up in the corner of the barn. In an incident that she missed, Hidan somehow ended up a cat again, and he slept curled up at the small of Kakuzu’s back. Kisame, disappointingly, did not turn into a giant ball of fluff, and Itachi did not not snuggle with him.

Actually, Karin wouldn’t mind snuggling with a big fluffy cat herself.

In the morning, her headache was down to a dull and ignorable throb. Someone boiled a pot of water for Hidan-cat, and the five of them packed their things in silence. Hidan and Kakuzu headed out first.

“Watch out for dew,” Hidan called as he followed Kakuzu out of the barn.

Kisame forlornly sealed Samehada in a storage scroll. Apparently if he turned into a cat and someone else tried to carry it for him, the sword would stab them or something.

“Creepy,” Karin murmured, eyeing the scroll suspiciously.

“When will you need time to meditate again?” Itachi asked as they left the farm.

“Now that I know where I’m looking, I shouldn’t need to again,” Karin said. “Unless they manage to move really far, really quickly.”

Kisame quirked an eyebrow at her. “Where did you say you’re from, again?”

“Well, you know…” Karin answered, and pulled ahead to take the lead.

Being a missing-nin, Kisame did know, and he didn’t pry. Village affiliation could reveal a lot about a person, and ninja were secretive people. If Karin wasn’t wearing a hitai-ate, she had a reason for it.

By noon they were back in a forest, this one all pines and huge, lichen-covered rocks. They stopped at the banks of river.

“You don’t suppose there’s a bridge nearby…?” Kisame wondered.

The river was wide but slow moving and shallow. For a normal ninja in normal circumstances, marching across it would be a breeze, but unfortunately these were anything but normal circumstances. Karin walked out over the water and scoped the area for a more civilian way to cross. No luck.

“You’re just going to have to deal with it,” she said. “Can you water-walk as cats?”

“I’m not sure,” Itachi said, and neither of the men made any move toward the water.

“Let’s have lunch,” Kisame suggested.

“You’re both being babies,” Karin said, putting her hands on her hips. “I’ll turn you back as soon as we’re across.”

“Hmm,” Itachi said, and Karin suddenly regretted tricking him and tormenting Hidan in front of him. Such things did not build trust, and willingly turning yourself into a cat in front of a strange kunoichi took a lot of trust.

Regret quickly morphed into frustration, though, and Karin kicked a rock into the river. There was a fine line between winning trust and keeping yourself from being pushed around, and Karin knew what side of the line she’d rather be on. Still, it would be nice to not be stopped by an obstacle as passable as a river.

“Fine,” she muttered, dropping her pack to the ground. “Lunch, and then we’re crossing.”

Chapter Text

Itachi and Kisame, having chosen to sit still when one mysteriously turned into a cat, were more well-supplied than Hidan and Kakuzu. Kisame produced an array of cooking supplies from a storage scroll: a dented pot and its lid, a flat wooden serving spoon, and two sets of plastic chopsticks. It was more than Karin ever bothered to carry for herself, but she supposed she’d always had a home to return to, no matter how shitty. The Akatsuki seemed to live as extremely dangerous hobos. 

Their food supplies were more diminished. They had a plastic bag of an unlabeled spice, a tiny bottle of oil, a half-full bag of dessicated mushrooms, and a portion and a half of rice. 

Karin was more apt to share her own supplies with Kisame and Itachi than with Hidan and Kakuzu— Kisame because he was friendlier and Itachi because he was prettier— but she didn’t have enough to feed three people. 

“We should…” Kisame started, shooting a longing glance toward the river. “Well, Karin should go fishing.” 

He wrinkled his nose at the idea. Karin was unsure if he was disgusted by the idea of her fishing, or his own condition. 

Karin could catch fish as well as the next kunoichi, thank you very much, and she wasn’t opposed to the idea, but there was no point not using leverage when you got it. 

“I can do that,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose. Then she put on her sweetest voice and added, “If Itachi-san cooks for me.”

“That seems like a reasonable distribution of tasks,” Itachi said mildly. Kisame shot Karin an odd look that she wasn’t sure how to interpret, like he knew something she didn’t. 

Karin had seen Suigetsu literally jump into a body of water and come back up with a fish in his mouth, like some sort of wild animal child. She wondered if this was common for Mist ninja. Was Kisame yearning to hurl himself into the river and catch fish in his pointy teeth?

When Karin came back with several boney river fish skewered by her kunai, Kisame had embraced his animal instincts in another way. 

“Why,” Karin demanded of Itachi, who was building a fire as a giant cat circled him. A pile of clothing sat next to him. 

Kisame-cat turned to her and meowed. 

“He tried fishing from the shore,” Itachi said. “You were taking a while.”

Men were… stupid. Stupid was the word. 

“Fill this with water, please,” Itachi said, handing her the cooking pot. He said it politely, but he watched her like a hawk as soon as she was within reaching distance of water. 

Karin kept a sharp comment to herself as she did as instructed. Perhaps Itachi’s pretty face wasn’t worth the long list of things wrong with his personality. 

But then… having a handsome face always turned to her, always watching her… Hmm...

Karin made a show of bending over in the most ridiculous way possible, keeping her back perfectly straight and flipping her hair over her shoulder so it showed off her face and gave Itachi an uninterrupted view of her ass and legs. Itachi turned to pet Kisame-cat. Of all the nerve–!

Karin carefully set the water over the fire and pouted at Itachi as they both waited for it to heat. 

Once he was human and clothed again, Kisame retreated to stare forlornly across the water. It was oddly compelling to watch a giant man stand on a rock and look yearningly across a river, but not nearly as compelling as watching Itachi set up to cook. 

He gutted the fish with practiced efficiency, feeding the entrails to the fire as he went. Then he carefully arranged the fish on a rock and set it in the fire. That was… well, maybe that would be okay…?

Itachi dumped the rice and the dried mushrooms into the remaining water he hadn’t poured on Kisame, tossed in a pinch of the unknown spice, and Karin realized she’d made a tactical error. 

Back when she was associated with a village, Karin had run a lot of escort missions for wealthy people. Unless the client had a specific hit on them from someone really dangerous, they tended to be cushy jobs– all Karin had to do was warn them if any suspicious chakras were nearby, and she could take advantage of rich people doing things like stopping at real hotels and hiring people to cook on the road.

So, even though Karin wasn’t a great chef herself, she knew for a fact people could make gourmet meals over campfires. Hell, she’d had pretty good food served to her off of hot rocks. 

Itachi, stirring rice into way too much boiling water, did not seem to know this was a possibility.  

The rice might have still be saved as a soup or a porridge, if only he’d added actual flavoring to it. Instead, the meal they ended up with was incredibly dry fish, scraped off a rock, and flavorless rice-sludge, the bottom of which was burnt. 

He’d burnt the rice and it still tasted like nothing. 

“How’d’you like it?” Kisame asked, grinning mockingly at her over his own serving. 

“It’s fine,” Karin lied, and went about eating as quickly as possible, to cut down on time spent tasting it. 

“We should get salt on our next supply run,” Itachi said, calmly eating his portion with careful, small bites, as if it weren’t close to inedible. “It will bring out more flavors.”

“That’s a good idea,” Kisame said, and flashed Karin another mean grin. 

Karin grimaced into her rice-sludge. She’d literally run a prison of missing-nin in Sound, and even their mass-produced, shoe-string budget food was better. She couldn’t even pretend to compliment Itachi’s cooking at this point, and she liked stroking the egos of pretty men. 

They finished eating and cleaned up, Karin carrying the pot over the water to rinse it out as best she could without soap or sponge. Itachi made her dry it out with a spare shirt before he let her come back on shore, and once everything was packed away, he continued to be an asshole about how they were going to cross the river. 

“But I can just carry you both as cats,” Karin said for the fourth time. 

Itachi wanted her to carry them as people, one at a time, on her back across the river. Kisame was doing absolutely nothing to contradict this insane plan, and even at one point assured Karin that he wasn’t as heavy as he looked. 

Men. Seriously!

Eventually, they hit a compromise: Karin would carry them one by one, as cats, and turn them back as soon as they were on the opposite shore. 

“How are you going to stop me from doing something in the middle of the river?” Karin drawled, rolling her eyes out how tense both of them were about this plan.

“I have very good aim,” Itachi said, eyes narrowing slightly. 

That was a very good answer, and Karin shut her mouth. Kisame turned slightly, and hid a snicker behind one giant hand. 

Karin went across alone first, strutting easily across the slow-moving slow moving water and hoping Kisame and Itachi were watching her with envy. On the other side, she built a fire and boiled water over it. She did it all in plain view of the two men watching her from across the river. 

“Are you happy now?” she yelled at them, her voice echoing across the river. If anyone were out there hunting for vulnerable missing-nin, they were basically screwed. 

Kisame waved at her, which she guessed was an “okay,” and she stomped back across the river. Kisame reluctantly started stripping his clothes. 

Well… well… okay, Karin was fine with this part of the plan. 

Kisame shoved his clothes into his travel pack, and then made a vague attempt at folding his Akatsuki cloak in half and tossed it carelessly to the ground. 

“Let’s do this,” he said, grinning cheekily at where Karin was openly staring from the shore of the river. Behind him, Itachi sighed and bent to fold the cloak properly. 

Karin watched closely as Kisame’s huge form approached her, watching defined muscles move beneath skin. Kisame had an absurd amount of chakra, as deep and vast as an ocean, and Karin had to fight back a shiver thinking about. Kisame stuck exactly one toe into the river and turned into a cat, that huge chakra compressing and transforming. 

Karin gathered Kisame’s stuff and then picked up Kisame-cat. It was like picking up a giant, fluffy pillow. Kisame purred, and his whole body vibrated. 

Oh my god, Karin thought as she pulled him closer to her chest. He was warm and soft and the excess fluff spilled over her arms. When this was all over, she needed to get a giant fluffy cat. She needed more of this in her life. 

Once they had crossed and Kisame was human again, pulling on his pants, he said to her, “Itachi wanted me to warn you my water jutsu is scarier than his aim.” He grinned at her, showing off pointy teeth, as he shook out his shirt. “But I don’t think you’re very interested in doing anything to Itachi as a cat.”

Karin’s cheeks went hot. She wasn’t exactly sure if that was supposed to be sexual innuendo, but–

“Sh-shut up!” she yelled at him. “Your idiot partner is making all this way more complicated than it needs to be!”

She turned and started back across the river, Kisame’s laughter echoing after her. 

Itachi had already stripped and neatly packed away his clothes, and Karin shoved aside traitorous thoughts about being disappointed she didn’t get to see a stripshow. 

“As you can see,” Karin drawled, adjusting her glasses, “I’m not some lunatic who cuts a deal with someone and then drowns them.”

She wondered if Hidan or Kakuzu had mentioned her chucking them off a cliff into the sea. Hmm. 

“I never said you were,” Itachi said, and then stepped into the river. 

Itachi-cat was lanky and boney and squirmed more than Kisame-cat, giving Karin frequent accusatory honks as she walked, and was overall a much less pleasant creature than Kisame-cat. Was Itachi-cat criticizing her ability to hold a cat? Was he not being safely transported across a body of water otherwise impassable for him.

Kisame was wrong. As a cat, Karin was far more likely to remember how obnoxious Itachi was and punt him into the sunset, deal or no deal. 

Once Itachi was human again, he pulled on his clothes and did not so much as thank her. Karin took a deep breath to calm her nerves, then closed her eyes and focused on searching for Deidara’s chakra. It hadn’t moved at all, which was good, because Karin was still having on-again off-again headaches from finding it. Or possibly from having infuriating travel partners. Hard to tell. 

“Now that we’ve solved that incredibly stupid non-problem,” Karin announced, “your friends are this way.”

xXx

When they were finally getting close to this Deidara person, it started to become obvious that it was going to rain.

“We should make camp,” Karin suggested. 

“Kisame,” Itachi said, “how long do you think we have?”

Kisame made a big show of scanning the skies and sniffing the air. “Three hours, at least.”

“How long will it take to reach Deidara and Sasori?” Itachi asked Karin. 

Karin made a face. She knew where this was going, and it was a dumb idea. 

“Three hours, at least,” she said, pitching her voice in a mocking impression of Kisame. 

“So we can just speed up then,” Kisame said, grinning at her. 

“I really don’t think–” Karin started, and then Kisame swept her up into his giant arms and broke into a run. Karin yelped and swatted at him, but he ignored it. 

To make up for time lost to stupid inconveniences like rivers, they had been traveling at a much faster run than Karin would normally set for herself. However, even though Karin wasn’t a very strong or a very fast ninja, she had inherited decent stamina from her Uzumaki mother, and she had been working as a bounty hunter for the past months. She’d been able to keep up without much obvious strain. 

The speed at which Kisame set off into the trees with her in his arms was not one that Karin could maintain for more than a few minutes without tiring herself. She could maybe do it for an extended period if she were literally fleeing for her life. Kisame could just do it casually, for several hours, while holding a whole other person, and not even wind himself. Itachi followed them, not a hint of strain on his face either. 

When Kisame started to veer off-course, Karin slapped his bicep to get his attention and yelled directions. His huge arm was hard with warm muscle under her fingers, and she elected not to move her hand. Hmm, nice. 

They found Deidara-cat in much less time than three hours. He and his partner had just stopped in the middle of the woods for some reason, rather than take shelter. The only landmarks were an abandoned pile of clothes and some sort of… very weird… statue…?

“Is that a man?” Karin asked, squinting at it. It had a face like a very scary old man, and someone had draped an Akatsuki cloak over it. A butterscotch-yellow cat was curled up on its hunched back. When Karin spoke, the cat rolled over and crouched defensively. It had an adorable squashed face, giving it a sort of grumpy appearance that made Karin giggle. The cat turned its grumpy face to her to look even grumpier, then took one look at Itachi and started hissing. 

“Ah, Deidara,” Itachi said, and then held out his hand as if offering it for an actual cat to smell, not as if he were greeting a human man. 

Karin took a couple paces around the statue. It wasn’t a real man, because it had no chakra, but the other cat-person chakra was hanging out…. Somewhere inside it…? Had infamous missing-nin Sasori of the Red Sand taken shelter inside of a weird statue?

“Is Sasori okay?” Kisame said, tilting his head and ignoring as Deidara-cat trying to claw Itachi. “He’s not moving. I thought you said he was a cat, Karin?”

“What?” Karin asked, because those sentences didn’t make sense together. 

Itachi picked up Deidara-cat, who screamed and flailed his paws, claws out and dangerous. Itachi looked vaguely bemused. 

“The cat is inside,” Karin said, gesturing at the creepy old man statute. 

“Perhaps the jutsu only affected the part of Sasori that’s alive,” Itachi said over Deidara-cat’s screams, completely unbothered by Deidara-cat’s attempts to relieve him of his skin. 

“Ah, I see,” Karin said. The creepy old man statue was actually part of a fucked-up jutsu. Of course it was. This was just how Akatsuki functioned. 

Karin helped Kisame pull the cloak off the fucked-up jutsu, to reveal some sort of… crouched… battle puppet…? Sasori had pioneered the Sand battle puppet army, right?

The puppet had modifications that were obviously weapons, which Karin carefully did not touch as she examined the thing. There was a giant demon’s face on the back, and a metal tail snaked from its mouth. It looked like design overkill to Karin. 

Plus, it reminded her of her old boss, which was gross. 

“The chakra is moving around inside,” Karin observed, and to confirm her statement, there was a thud from inside the puppet. 

Deidara-cat paused in his futile attack on Itachi’s arm to wiggle an ear in the direction of the battle puppet. Itachi took the opening to firmly pull Deidara-cat to his chest, tucking Deidara-cat’s legs in to avoid resistance, and start petting. Deidara-cat’s ears went flat against his head, and he let out a very annoyed sounding cat noise. 

Apparently, if Itachi saw a cute cat, he petted it, even if it were an S-class missing-nin. Interesting. 

“We’ll have to open it,” Karin concluded. 

“Okay,” said Kisame slowly. “How do we do that?”

“Be careful of poison,” Itachi said, his hand buried in Deidara-cat’s fur. “And senbon. And traps. And fire.”

“Maybe his partner will know how to open it safely,” Karin said, interrupting Itachi’s list of the ways that messing with the battle puppet might kill them. 

Itachi was forced to drop Deidara-cat, who bit at Itachi’s ankles and was ignored. Itachi heated Deidara’s abandoned water flask with a fire jutsu, and nimbly caught Deidara-cat by the back of the neck and poured the water over him. 

“WHAT THE FUCK, UCHIHA,” Deidara yelled the second that he was human again. 

Deidara was young– probably close to Karin’s own age– and had startling blue eyes and a mass of blonde hair that went all the way down his back. He wasn’t particularly tall, but was stockily built and had the remnants of what was probably yet another fucked-up jutsu stitched across his chest. 

He was new to the scene, Karin thought, and racked her brain for any memory of his photo in bingo books. He was from Rock, maybe…? 

Deidara continued to yell about WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS as he pulled on his clothes, and after he’d fastened his pants but before he pulled on a shirt, he pointed at Karin and yelled, “AND WHO THE FUCK IS THIS?”

“That’s Karin,” Itachi said, very calm in the face of Deidara’s rage.

“Yo,” Karin greeted with a tiny wave. 

“And who the fuck is Karin?” Deidara asked, gesturing violently at her. Were those… mouths, in his hands?

“We hired her as a tracker,” Kisame said, his ever-present grin still in place. “Since we all seem to be experiencing setbacks.”

“What setbacks–” Deidara snapped, and then his eyes went wide. “You turned into animals too?”

Deidara and Sasori had spontaneously turned into cats passing through morning mist three days ago. The being the rest of the Akatsuki knew as Sasori was actually a puppet Sasori hid his real self inside of, and so now Sasori-cat was trapped inside of it. Deidara had stayed nearby, at a loss of what else to do as a cat. 

“That’s not Sasori’s real body?” Kisame asked, surprised. 

“No, of course it’s not,” Karin answered. “Haven’t you seen the bingo books?”

The photos of Sasori were out of date but he was, like, pretty. Karin paid attention to these things, okay?

“Danna will probably be mad I told you,” Deidara said, “but you’re going to find out anyway, yeah.”

Sasori had not shown Deidara how his puppet worked, nor had he ever actually come out of it in front of Deidara, but they’d been partners long enough that Deidara was familiar with what parts of the puppet could be touched without injuring one’s self. Deidara also seemed to have absolutely no fear of accidentally hurting himself, and did not so much as blink when the puppet spat fire at him. 

“It’s going to rain,” Karin reminded them, tapping her foot impatiently as Deidara attempted to jamb a kunai into a seam in the puppet. 

“We can’t just leave Danna, yeah,” Deidara answered. 

Kisame, leaning against a tree and performing maintenance on his creepy sword, caught Karin’s eye and shrugged at her. “It’ll be fine.”

There was a loud crack, a whoop of triumph from Deidara, and then the weirdest cat Karin had ever seen crawled out of the puppet, spitting and hissing. It was lanky and red, but upon closer inspection, the fur was obviously synthetic hair. The joints had metal bolts through them, and the cat appeared to have cheap glass eyes. 

Itachi, Karin noted, made no move to pet it. 

“Oh, Danna,” Deidara said, squatting over the cat. “This is not a good look for you.”

Sasori-cat opened his mouth and let out a sound like gears grinding. 

“Why is he like that?” Kisame asked, peering over Deidara, and Sasori-cat made the weird mechanical noise at him too. “Everyone else is just a normal cat.”

“He’s a puppet, yeah,” Deidara answered defensively

Itachi re-heated what was left of Deidara’s water and poured it over Sasori-cat. Sasori-the-man was also a puppet, with a weird core of chakra burning in his chest that Karin wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Still, he was a much better constructed puppet than Sasori-cat, with a pretty, realistic face and more natural looking joints. His hair looked like actual hair, not like a cheap toy. Karin might not have immediately noticed something was wrong with his appearance, if he were wearing clothes. Since he was completely naked, she noted he had a metal coil in his abdomen, presumably to rival Deidara’s mouth-hands for fucked-upness of jutsu.

“What,” Sasori hissed, reaching into the compartment of his battle puppet to pull out clothes, “happened?”

Itachi gave a very short run down of the situation, and then introduced Karin. 

“Do you have any alternative ways to contact Leader-sama?” Kisame asked. “The rings aren’t working.”

Both Deidara and Sasori immediately went through the hand signs for their communication jutsu. Nothing happened. 

“Oh fuck,” Deidara said, blinking down at his ring.

“This shouldn’t be possible,” Sasori said, eyeing the ring on his hand like it were a particularly disgusting bug. “What caused this?”

“Obviously it’s possible, because it’s happening,” Karin said, crossing her arms and tapping her foot on the ground some more. “We need to get moving. Now. ”

She turned to start walking. No one followed her. 

“How did she find us so quickly?” Sasori demanded. 

“Some type of chakra sensing,” Kisame said. 

“No one has that kind of range, yeah.”

For fuck’s sake!!

“If you turn back into cats,” Karin threatened, “I’m leaving all of you behind.”

As if in reply to her, there was a loud crack of thunder. Karin watched with immense satisfaction as a look of panicked realization hit each of the men at once. Yes, she was right, and they were all morons who should be listening to her.

Then it started to rain, and they all turned into cats. Karin stomped her foot, and screamed in frustration. 

Chapter Text

In the span of about two minutes, Karin found herself with several problems. 

Problem 1: The rain shifted immediately from “a few drops” to “complete deluge,” and now she was wet and miserable. 

Problem 2: Her idiot partners in crime were idiots and had all turned into idiot cats in the middle of a forest with no cover, like a group of idiots.  

Problem 3a: Her idiot cat partner known as “Sasori” had left her with a giant battle puppet, which Karin refused to touch because it might stab and poison her.

Problem 3b: Her idiot cat partner known as “Kisame” had been transformed in the middle of messing with his creepy sword, which Karin refused to touch because it might stab her and take her chakra. 

At her feet, Itachi-cat meowed at her. Karin pinched the bridge of her nose and focused on not having a temper tantrum like a child.  

She seriously considered just abandoning them to the metaphorical wolves. No favor was worth this shit. 

Except that Karin was in the unique position of having abandoned two ninja villages, and she had a skillset that ninja had proven time and time again that they’d do all sorts of awful things to get their hands on. Having a whole organization of incredibly dangerous ninja at her back in an emergency would be so, so nice. 

No, Karin was in this for the long-haul, even if they all seemed to be in bitter competition to be the most obnoxious person in her life. At least most of them were nice to look at.

Karin took a deep breath and said, “Okay. You’re all going to have to trust me. I’m going to get help.”

She turned and walked away. Itachi-cat followed her immediately, although the rest stayed put. That was fine. If they wanted to guard their precious belongings in the horrid rain, they could. 

Itachi-cat yelled at her a few times in sad cat honks, but Karin did her best to ignore him. He could get explanations for her plans when he showed the intent to actually follow them. 

There was a drop-point for bounties nearby. Karin had never been to this one herself, but she knew the general location, and there were three chakra signatures that obviously belonged to ninja humming around where the building should be. It wasn’t uncommon for ninja to use drop-points as shelter for short periods of time. 

This drop-point turned out to be a low-walled concrete building, constructed rather randomly in the middle of the woods and far from any civilian path. Karin would bet it was a leftover lookout point from a previous war, although it might have been built just for the sake of bounty hunters. 

Karin knocked loudly on the door before entering. The inside was a large and rather bare room, with a kitchenette along one wall. Two ninja sat at a fold-out table, cups of instant noodles in front of them. 

“Hello?” Karin greeted, pitching her voice as high and girlish as she could make it and still sound natural. “Is this Tanuki-san’s drop-point?”

The ninja at the table look unimpressed with her. They were a man and a woman, both with Cloud hitae-ate. A black scroll– the kind used for body storage– sat ominously between them on the table. 

“It should be,” the woman drawled. She slouched back in her chair, although the sword on her back doubtlessly made it uncomfortable. “As you can see, the bastard is nowhere to be found.”

Itachi-cat rubbed against Karin’s ankles. She had no idea what this was meant to convey. She ignored him and put on her best concerned face. 

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I’ll look around.”

The man raised his eyebrows incredulously at her, as if he couldn’t believe she was this stupid. Both ninja seemed to believe she really was that stupid, though, because they let her poke around the building without paying her much attention. 

The third ninja– who was invisible or hiding or some bullshit, his half-eaten cup noodles left out like any competent ninja wouldn’t notice– didn’t follow her either. Karin searched around a six-bed dorm (subdivided by bars into currently unoccupied holding cells) and what looked like a captain's bedroom suite turned office. The suite had a small room with a working desk, a bathroom, and a door covered in nasty looking seals that Karin wasn’t going to touch, presumably leading to wherever important documentation and payout money was kept. It wasn’t unusual for drop-points to be unstaffed for days at a time– they had to have some secure storage. 

Plan A was to find a large tent or something to shelter her stupid missing-nin partners so they could pack up their sword and/or battle puppet while in human form. At the very least a tarp would allow them to wait out the rain semi-comfortably while guarding their precious cargo. Karin had been doubtful this would work, and she didn’t find anything useful. 

She thought about going back to the kitchenette and heating up some water– the three Cloud-nin would hardly be a problem once Itachi was human– and seeing if he had any ideas. But then… 

Fuck Itachi, Karin thought, glancing over at where he was examining a decorative glass ball on the desk with great interest. Karin assumed it had come off a bounty, because why else would you have something like that here?

Itachi-cat’s tail twitched, and he swatted it off the desk. It shattered on the floor. 

“Are you kidding me?” Karin asked him. He just stared back at her, shameless. 

Disappointed, Karin returned to the main room to initiate the much trickier Plan B. Mysterious third ninja was still there, chakra buzzing away, but still unseen. Cloud didn’t have a lot of bloodline limits, but there was a pretty infamous one that could bend light or something. She continued to pretend to be oblivious to the phenomenon. 

“Umm,” Karin said loudly, fidgeting and tugging at the hem of her shirt nervously. She chewed her lip. The Cloud-nin continued to look unimpressed with her. 

“What?” the woman finally snapped. 

“W-well, the thing is…” Karin started. “I need some help with my bounty.”

It wasn’t uncommon for ninja to work together on bounties. However, village-associated ninja tended not to work with those outside their village unless specifically arranged. 

Karin put on her best I-am-just-a-poor-teenaged-girl face and lied through her teeth. She was from a clan that had no pacts or allegiances with any villages. She had lucked out and found abandoned ninja weaponry she was sure were famous. She was okay with splitting the reward with them. 

“Samehada?” the woman blinked at her. “The sword? Are you sure?”

Karin nodded vigorously, and then explained what it looked like. Anyone with access to a bingo book from a major village could look up what one of the most famous swords in the Elemental Nations looked like, of course, but neither of the Cloud-nin seemed to doubt her story she was a dumb country bumpkin ninja. 

Judging by the way the third one’s chakra sparked and buzzed as steady as before, the hidden asshole didn’t suspect anything either. 

The two ninja exchanged looks, and then signed some things at each other that Karin did not recognize. Eventually, and man turned to Karin and said:

“Show us the way.”

Karin led them back into the rain, which didn’t look like it was letting up any time soon. The third chakra followed along behind them lazily. Karin wondered if having an invisible teammate gave the Cloud-nin a sense of security.

“My summons are guarding it,” Karin said as she broke into a slow run, scooping up Itachi-cat. He mewed back at her. 

“Yeah, because a housecat could prevent someone from stealing a sword,” the woman muttered. 

She had a point. 

The Cloud-nin seemed genuinely shocked when Karin actually led them to Samehada. They ignored the cacophony of pissed off and confused cats screaming as they investigated. The man actually kicked Sasori-cat out of the way. 

“What the hell is this?” he asked, gesturing at the battle puppet. Sasori-cat made to pounce at him, and Karin grabbed him out of the air. It wouldn’t do for the man to investigate Sasori further and realize he wasn’t just a weird looking cat, but rather… whatever Sasori-cat was. 

Sasori-cat bit her instead. Karin wrapped her hand around his neck while blinking as innocently as possible at the two Cloud-nin. 

“It’s a battle puppet, isn’t it?” she said. “Like the ones Sasori of the Red Sand uses.”

Karin didn’t think she could sell the lie that a country bumpkin kunoichi knew Kisame and Sasori were affiliated with the same group. Still, she could try. 

“Sand’s got more than one puppet user, kid,” the man said, leaning forward and squinting at the puppet. It was partially open, from whatever Deidara had done to get Sasori out. 

(Deidara-cat, after a valiant attempt to maul the Cloud kunoichi, was currently being sat on by Kisame-cat, looking hilariously grumpy with his squashed face.)

“Still, I’m sure Raikage-sama will be interested to hear about it,” the woman said, her voice laced with meaning that Karin pretended went right over her head. 

Karin was sure they were planning to cart the sword and puppet back to Cloud; however, she was also confident they’d help her move it back to the drop-point first. Transporting the sword and puppet wouldn’t be easy, and they’d call for help from their village. A defendable shelter out of the elements would be the best place for them to wait, and as long as they played nice with Karin, they had an extra pair of hands to help. 

Meanwhile, all Karin had to do was dump some hot water on just one of the Akatsuki cats while they were in the nice, dry drop-point building, and then all their problems were solved. 

Hell, Mysterious Invisible Ninja was probably worth something that Karin could cash in on. Most people with bloodline limits were worth at least some money.

“Why are there clothes all over, though?” the woman wondered. 

Karin just shrugged. “Don’t Mist-nin turn into water when it rains?” she asked. 

Both Cloud-ninja looked at her like she was deeply stupid. So did, regrettably, all of the cats. 

“It could happen,” she insisted, pouting childishly. 

The woman ended up dragging Samehada back to the drop point by herself, hissing and swearing as the sword leeched her chakra and did its best to stab her with spikes.

Freaky, Karin thought, eyeing her even as she helped the man push Sasori’s puppet forward. He, too, was swearing, as the puppet had burnt off one of his sleeves. Sasori-cat himself sat on Karin’s shoulder, mewling a continuous stream of what she was sure were insults to her person. He had sunk his nasty little claws into her arm twice when she’d gone to touch his puppet, and Karin was going to give him that he’d been alerting her to boobytraps, and not just stabbing her for no reason. 

She didn’t get set on fire, at least. 

The whole process took hours. It poured harder and harder the whole time, the wind picking up as they went, and the three of them sloshed into the drop-point covered in mud. 

Mysterious Invisible Ninja, who had done nothing but shadow them and Karin had concluded was an unhelpful asshole, left wet footprints on the concrete floor that Karin pretended not to notice. 

“God,” the male Cloud-nin said, collapsing into one of the folding chairs. “Fuck.”

“We better get increased pay for this,” the woman said, pulling bandages out of her pack. Her hands were bleeding. 

“Is there tea?” Karin asked sweetly, heading straight for the kitchenette. It consisted of a plastic-top counter with a hot plate, an electric kettle, and a work sink. There was also a random assortment of dishes and cutlery, all made from warped plastic. There were two unwashed pans and a pot in the sink. 

All four cats followed her, like a flock of ducklings after their mother. 

“Good fucking luck with that,” the man said as Karin filled the electric kettle from the sink. “All the sockets here are shit. I had to use a jutsu for our noodles.”

Well that was… not good. Deidara-cat stood on his hind legs, sank his claws into her shin-guards, and yowled. She couldn’t even kick him without breaking character. 

“Could you…?” Karin started, gesturing at the kettle in her hand. 

“Absolutely not,” the man said, waving his burnt arm right back at her. 

“Be nice,” the woman chided, but there was little bite to her words. 

Well, Karin could just… make a fire… indoors… Hmm… 

“Be nice,” the man sneered mockingly back at his partner. She kicked him under the table, scowling, and he laughed and stood up.

Next thing Karin knew, the man was looming over her, smirk on his face. 

“Know any medical jutsu, girlie?” he asked. “We could trade.”

“S-sorry,” Karin teetered out, backing away from him. He moved forward into her space again. Neither of his teammates made any move to intervene. 

Why! Karin thought. Why this!

“It’s been bugging me,” the man said, reaching forward for her hair. Karin snapped her free hand around his wrist, digging her nails into his pulse. He just grinned wider. “Is this color natural?”

“Does it matter?” Karin asked, stepping away yet again. She set the kettle– filled with regrettably room temperature water– back down on the counter. 

“Yeah,” the man said, and casually kicked Kisame-cat aside as he bit at his ankle. “I was thinking– ninja with no village, screaming red hair. What clan could that be?”

Behind him, the Cloud kunoichi perked up with interest. Invisible Asshole moved closer. 

Well, thought Karin, fuck. 

What Karin did next was perhaps a bit irrational. The man might not have known who she was at all. He might not have been interested in trying to capture her. But Karin had spent her whole life being taken advantage of, and she was not taking any chances. 

Karin was not a great combat ninja, but she was an excellent kunoichi. She had a kunai in the man’s neck before he figured out she wasn’t a shaking, nervous girl. 

The Cloud kunoichi screamed. Unfortunately for Karin, this woman was a great combat ninja, and across the room before Karin had fully put together that she was moving. The only reason Karin’s head wasn’t immediately chopped off was that Kisame-cat bowled into the kunoichi’s legs, making her swing go wild. 

Karin managed to palm another kunai and parry the next swing of the sword, but it was a close call. Invisible Asshole still hadn’t revealed himself, but he was circling the fight, presumably to prevent her from running. 

The cats were screaming, but they were just housecats and not particularly useful as the kunoichi ignored their teeth and claws. Karin twisted and blocked and took a deep cut to her forearm, but then–

There, Karin thought, and dropped to the floor. Invisible Asshole finally made an appearance, his partner slashing deep into his shoulder as Karin dodged her assault. He flickered into existence, letting out of bellow of outrage.

On the ground, Karin rolled away, and the woman didn’t immediately pursue her, presumably pausing in horror at stabbing her own teammate. Karin grabbed senbon as she went, hurling them wildly behind her. 

Karin made a beeline for Sasori’s puppet. Surely that had something useful in it. 

The woman beat her there, appearing in front of Karin halfway across the room and ramming her sword right into Karin’s stomach. Her face was furious, her eyes wide. 

“You fucking bitch,” she hissed, twisting the sword. Karin irrationally grabbed at the blade in her abdomen, her vision filling with dark spots. The only thing she could make out was that woman had a senbon sticking out the side of her thigh. “I’m going to make you eat your own entrails–”

The woman hesitated, suddenly uncertain. She let go of the sword’s hilt, stumbling back and grabbing at her own stomach. 

Karin coated all her senbon in poison. 

The woman doubled over, vomiting blood, and Invisible Asshole grabbed Karin from behind. A strong arm wrapped tightly around her neck. 

“If you want to live,” he said into her ear, his breath hot, “tell me you have an antidote.”

Bitch, I have a sword through my belly, and you think you’re the lethal threat? Karin wanted to say back. The sword through the belly, however, made sassy comebacks incredibly difficult. 

Still, Karin had the world’s best natural healing abilities. If the sword hadn’t killed her already, she’d probably be fine. Eventually. A little more couldn’t hurt. 

She gripped the sword’s hilt and jammed the blade the rest of the way through her body and into Invisible Asshole. The man yelled and fell back, Karin dropped, and flaming oil shot over her head from Sasori’s puppet. 

Sasori-cat’s stupid artifical-red ears poked out from the open hull of his puppet. Behind Karin, there was a lot of general screaming from Invisible Asshole. In front of her, the woman was curled up in a sad little ball of delirium, shaking and sweating profusely.

“Are you okay?” Itachi’s voice asked. 

“No,” Karin managed to rasp from her pool of blood on the floor. She now had a sword all the way through her torso. What the fuck kind of question is that?

With great effort, Karin rolled onto her back. Itachi, gloriously naked, was kneeling over her with a look of concern on his face. Why did her dreams finally coming true involve so much pain?

“I’ll be fine,” she said, wincing. “Can you pull the sword out?”

Itachi ignored her, turning to the cats to tell them he’d left hot water running in the bathroom sink. God, why hadn’t Karin thought of that before she’d stabbed that creep in the neck?

Karin pulled the sword out herself. 

“What are you doing?” Itachi demanded, kneeling over her again. He looked more annoyed now.

“I’ll be fine,” Karin promised. She folded her shirt over itself to cover the wound and applied as much pressure as she could. Based on previous “experiments,” she was confident she’d heal before she bled out, but better safe than sorry. 

Itachi took over, putting something that might have been an actual bandage over her stomach and pressing down. 

“Sasori knows some medical jutsu,” Itachi said. Then he added, “That was stupid of you.”

“Extremely stupid,” another voice snapped, and then Sasori was kneeling over her too, also naked. 

My fantasies, Karin thought. The dark spots in her vision were censoring some things, but that was fine–

“Are you sure you want her fixed?” Sasori asked. “She’d make a beautiful puppet, even with the scars.”

What, Karin thought, fantasies screaming to a halt, the hell?

“We’re never going to find a sensor as good as her,” Itachi replied. 

“It doesn’t matter if she starts fights she can’t finish,” Sasori answered snippily, even as he pushed chakra into her abdomen. 

(The screaming of Invisible Asshole had stopped abruptly, and Kisame appeared to drag the woman’s body away.)

“This isn’t medical jutsu,” Karin complained. This was… weird freaky knitting muscle fibers jutsu. 

“Close enough,” Sasori told her. 

Satisfied, Itachi left, much to Karin’s disappointment.  

After a few minutes, Sasori stopped pushing chakra into her. “You don’t need this,” he said, peering down at her in curiosity. “You’re healing as fast as I can fix you.”

“Well,” Karin said, blinking more spots from her eyes. “There’s a reason my gut instinct is to start a fight I can’t finish.”

“Hmm,” Sasori said, sitting back on his heels. “Healing abilities don’t translate well into puppets. A shame.”

He said this as if it were a personal failing of Karin’s, and not like it was the most insane thing she’d heard all day. 

“How can none of these assholes have spare clothes?” Deidara asked loudly from across the room. 

Thank god, Karin thought as she relaxed back onto the floor. The rain was still pounded away at the building’s roof, the pain was slowly but steadily fading from her stomach, and she was surrounded by beautiful naked men. She was in heaven. 

Chapter Text

No one thought to move Karin from the floor, despite the holding cells one room over having moth-eaten cots. She laid there, eyes half-closed, listening to her comrades yell at each other. No one seemed angry or surprised she’d started a fight, stabbed herself all the way through the torso, and turned out to be self-healing; this was just par for Akatsuki’s course. She started working on some hot new fantasies to entertain herself with. 

“Just genjutsu her and make her bring us our stuff, yeah,” Deidara was demanding of Itachi. He sounded pissy, and although she couldn’t see his face, Karin imagined him flushed in anger. “You love manipulating people.”

The “her” here referred to the Cloud kunoichi, currently incapacitated from poison but not quite dead. A lot of Karin’s bounties paid more for live captures, and so she rarely dealt in lethal poisons. 

“It’s too risky,” Itachi explained for the third time, his voice laced with the same vague annoyance he’d used when Karin had ripped a sword out of her stomach against all medical common sense. “If she manages to break it while out of our range, she could call for reinforcements.”

Deidara snarled. Karin imagined his face all red and contorted with emotion, contrasted perfectly with Itachi’s permanently apathetic face. There was a tension there, between them, and Karin imagined Deidara snapping and tackling Itachi to the ground, the two of them wrestling naked across the concrete floor.

Was she into that? Yeah, she was definitely into that. Deidara and Itachi should definitely get into a naked fist fight for her. Ideally over competition for Karin’s own affections–

Karin’s brain went wild at the thought, and she missed the rest of whatever dumb discussion they were having about what to do with the Cloud-nin’s bodies. 

It was still raining heavily outside when Karin finally managed to roll over and stand shakily, some hours later. She staggered over to an open chair and collapsed into it. Kisame was sitting across the table, and he pushed a chipped ceramic cup towards her. 

“Tea?” he offered. 

Karin took it. It was cold. She didn’t care; there was a very well-muscled naked man sitting across from her and she was going to sit here and watch. 

Itachi and Deidara had both disappeared off into other rooms at some point. Sasori was in one corner with his freaky puppet, tinkering with it with a determined scowl in his face. He, too, was naked, because they’d lost all their supplies. Karin had to fight back a mean quip about how if only they’d listened to her, maybe they’d still have clothes. 

Instead she said, “Did you find their bingo books?”

Her voice was hoarse from a dry throat. She took another sip of cold tea. 

“No wonder Kakuzu likes you,” Kisame said jovially. He leaned over to point to one side of the room, and Karin unapologetically watched how the muscles of his abdomen moved with the motion. “We pulled all the Cloud-nin’s stuff and tried to sort it.”

The three Cloud-nin were left in one pile of bodies, and next to them was a smaller pile of random stuff. 

“That doesn’t look sorted,” Karin observed. 

“I did say ‘tried,’” Kisame replied. “There were disagreements.”

Karin rolled her eyes as hard as she could, because of course there was an argument. Kisame laughed good-naturedly. 

Karin– who had not lost her own supplies– pulled out a ration bar and her own bingo books, snacking while leafing through the pages to see if she could get a reward for any of the Cloud-nin. Three villages were willing to pay for anyone with the Cloud bloodline limit (although, unfortunately, the payout dropped substantial for a dead body versus a live one), and Mist had a decent bounty on the woman for stealing a sword from one of their various sword-making clans. This bounty also paid more for a live capture. 

Despite dumping her body on the other two shinobi, no one had actually bothered to kill the Cloud kunoichi. Karin could feel her chakra flickering like a dying flame. 

“We should keep the woman alive,” Karin said, tapping the page in her bingo book. “Do we have anything to restrain her if I give her an antidote?”

She would probably live without an antidote… but maybe not. Better safe than sorry. 

“I thought you were a bounty hunter,” Kisame said, grinning at her. 

Karin rolled her eyes, finished the last of her tea, and then stumbled across the room to drag the woman off the pile. Karin had brought a set of ties, because she was a bounty hunter, but she hadn’t bothered with any heavy-duty restraints. She hadn’t actually been planning on doing any bounty hunting on this excursion. There might be some chakra restraints sitting around the building somewhere, but she didn’t remember seeing any before… 

Oh, right, these guys are bounty hunters too, Karin thought, and then turned to the random pile of stuff. 

A bleary-eyed Deidara stumbled into the room, a hole-riddled blanket wrapped around his shoulders. 

“Enjoy your nap?” Kisame asked, standing. 

“Fuck off, yeah,” Deidara snapped. He frowned comically at Kisame as he passed, presumably to take his own nap. It was likely past midnight at this point, although Karin’s sense of time had gotten skewed due to the whole ‘nearly died’ thing. Whatever. 

“Hey,” Deidara said, squatting down next to Karin. “Redhead–”

“Karin,” Karin stressed, glaring at him. Through her glare, she decided to check him out, since she had only briefly gotten a good look before, and he’d mostly been screaming. 

Deidara was very pretty when his face wasn’t screwed up in anger, and those were definitely mouths in his hands. This was simultaneously good news for Karin’s favorite hobby of ‘lurid fantasies,’ and bad news for every other aspect of her life. 

“Karin,” Deidara corrected himself. “Is there a hairbrush in there?”

Deidara’s long hair had, over the course of the night, gotten very tangled and gained some haystack-like properties. Karin was sure her own hair was equally tangled.

“Help me go through this and maybe you’ll find one,” Karin said. 

Deidara was surprisingly friendly to non-Itachi humans, Karin discovered. He nodded along when she told him she wanted their bounty hunting supplies, and he gave his own list of things he wanted (hair products, toothpaste, anything approaching spare clothes). Neither of them said anything that indicated they’d given a single thought to the rest of the group, and Karin was glad Deidara was on the same page as her. 

“You could wear this,” Karin said, holding up a set of women’s underwear. It was practical and black, with no lace or bows. 

Deidara looked offended for about half a second, but then his face relaxed into a smirk. “You want me to?” he asked.

Oh shit, Karin thought, immediately imagining it, and felt her face go hot. Deidara’s smirk widened, and Karin tossed the panties into the reject pile.

“You do!” he crowed, and Karin mentally began planning her revenge. 

“Fuck you,” she muttered, face still hot. “I hope you don’t find a brush.”

They didn’t find a hairbrush, but Deidara got his toothpaste and Karin got two new bingo books and a stack of chakra suppressing seals. Seals from Cloud always looked funny to her– too rigid and structured– but like most things from Cloud, they worked reliably. 

Karin also opened the Cloud team’s black scroll, which contained the bodies of two missing-nin that Karin matched to the bingo book as a pair of recently defected siblings from Cloud. Karin re-sealed the corpses and pocketed the scroll to turn in herself. 

Deidara helped Karin restrain the Cloud kunoichi for the excuse of patting her down for supplies again. 

“She’s got waist-length hair, yeah,” Deidara complained, pulling the kunoichi’s pockets inside out while Karin massaged antidote down her throat. The kunoichi’s body was sweaty and gross, and Karin wrinkled her nose as she tried to avoid touching the dried vomit caking the front of her shirt. “She’s gotta at least have a comb.”

“She probably just leaves it in the braid the whole mission,” Karin said, pushing her glasses up her nose with the back of her hand to avoid touching her face with her contaminated fingertips. “Lots of combat kunoichi do that.”

Karin double-checked the restraints one more time and then stood, grimacing as her stomach wound lurched in pain. She limped over to the sink to wash her hands, then back over to her chair. Catching Deidara’s eye, she stuck a hand into her travel pack and pulled out her own hairbrush. 

“Hey–” Deidara started, scowling at her. Karin crossed her legs, pulling the brush through her hair as dramatically as possible. “Let me borrow that, yeah.”

Karin stuck up her nose, making sure the overhead light caught her glasses just right. 

“Beg me,” she said. 

Deidara screamed something very rude at her, and Sasori looked up to tell him off for being loud. 

Revenge complete!

Karin got halfway through tying her now silky-smooth and detangled hair back in a cute braid– not breaking eye contact with Deidara the whole time– before Deidara finally broke. He grabbed the Cloud kunoichi’s underwear from where Karin had tossed them aside and shimmied into them. 

The grin he shot Karin, even as he did his best sexy pose, was practically manic. 

Karin allowed herself one long, self-indulgent look before she had to excuse herself to the other room. Deidara hummed smugly as she passed, although Karin was unsure who’d actually won that. 

Kisame was asleep on one of the cots in the holding cell room, an even more holey blanket than Deidara’s tossed over his giant form. His eyes flickered slightly when Karin walked in. 

Karin picked out a cot that put Kisame between her and the doorway, then collapsed into it. She was tired and achy, and she wanted Itachi to quit whatever he was doing in the office to come sit by her bed and stroke her hair and tell her how marvelous and brave and clever she was. 

Actually, she’d accept any beautiful man providing this service for her. Except maybe Deidara, because she might get a nosebleed if she looked at him again. 

Karin rolled over onto her side, but the movement made her insides shift in a decidedly painful way. She flopped back onto her back, throwing an arm over her eyes and mashing her glasses frame into her face. Usually, Karin slept light so her chakra sensing could warn her of approaching danger. With the present company, however, it seemed pointless: one of them might kill her, but no outside threat was getting through. 

She slept like the dead. 

xXx

“What the hell happened here?” the drop-point manager, Tanuki-san, asked when she finally arrived. The rain had stopped right before sunrise, and Karin was praying the sun would burn off the remaining dampness quickly so they could travel again without any feline problems. 

“Had a disagreement,” Kisame said with a wide grin. “Don’t worry; we didn’t break anything.”

This did nothing to explain why everyone but Karin was butt naked, but Tanuki-san just shrugged. She was a kunoichi in her fifties and had likely seen worse. She paid out the bounties to Karin with no further questions asked. 

“You should avoid mentioning that to Kakuzu if you want to keep your money,” Sasori commented to Karin. He was eyeing her hair in a way that put Karin on edge, although she was unsure if his motives were realizing her family secrets or thinking she’d make a pretty murder victim. 

Either way: creepy. 

“I did get that impression,” Karin dryly. Kakuzu seemed like the type to claim he should get a cut on Akatsuki’s behalf, since the labor was partly theirs. 

None of the present members seemed to care much (except for Deidara, who sneered something at her about buying him a spa visit), so Karin pocketed her cash. 

“You should head out soon,” Tanuki-san advised. “Mist moves fast to pick up their bounties.”

She leveled Kisame with a meaningful look, and he grinned back at her. 

“Still too wet,” Itachi said from the doorway. He sounded annoyed. Karin put on her best poker face while she admired what a beautiful figure he cut, standing naked and looking forlornly off into the distance.

“I’m bored,” Deidara whined, hopping up from his chair. “Let’s risk it, yeah.”

Karin pointedly did not look at him, as he was still wearing the kunoichi’s panties and insisting on posing whenever he caught her looking his way, showing off all three of his tongues for her. She’d get acclimated to it eventually; Deidara just needed to… get less cute, or something. 

“Don’t risk it here,” Sasori snapped, yanking Deidara back down into his chair by his hair. 

Sasori probably meant Deidara shouldn’t risk turning into a cat in front of Tanuki-san, who might gossip to enemy shinobi about it. Tanuki-san, for her part, just waved lazily and disappeared back into her office. 

“Let’s play a game, yeah,” Deidara decided, resting elbows on the table and leaning forward. “Karin, where are you from?”

“That’s not a game,” Karin complained. 

“C’mon,” Deidara goaded. “We’ll all answer one question, yeah?”

He looked around the room. Sasori scoffed and went back to his puppet, but Kisame shrugged and agreed. Deidara’s face swiveled back to Karin. 

“So,” he prompted. “Village?”

“I’m not the one who agreed to this,” Karin countered, and she had to struggle to keep herself from shouting. 

“You know where we’re all from, yeah,” Deidara said, nudging Karin’s shin with his foot under the table. She kicked him back. “Don’t we deserve to know one thing about you?”

Karin took a couple seconds to collect herself so she wouldn’t reopen her stomach wound leaping across the table to bash Deidara’s face in. 

“Guess,” she said flatly. 

“Sand,” Deidara said immediately. 

“Wrong,” Karin answered smugly. 

“Sand?” Sasori sneered, turning back towards their conversation. “No one from Sand is like her.”

“No one else has redheads,” Deidara said, very authoritatively. “Not like that.”

“Leaf had some,” Itachi said, turning away from the door. “Historically, at least.”

“Whatever!” Deidara said, throwing his hands up. A tongue poked out of one palm and Karin eyed it, mentally batting back ideas Deidara was giving her. “Where are you from, then?”

“Too late,” Karin said. “You guessed wrong.”

Deidara spluttered and Kisame burst into laughter. 

“My turn, then,” Kisame said. “Deidara, what was the last mission you failed and how?”

The conversation mostly turned to Deidara and Kisame teasing each other while Karin unsubtley stared at them, until sometime around noon when Itachi deemed the outdoors safe to traverse carefully. 

“Thank the gods,” Deidara muttered, tapping his foot impatiently as Sasori climbed into his battle puppet. “I had a pack of jerky in my cloak, and I’m starving.”

The first thing they did was troupe back to where they’d abandoned all their clothes and supplies in the woods when they’d been caught in the rain. This was like a scene from one of Karin’s best fantasies: her and a group of beautiful naked men, running casually through a picture-esque forest. 

(Except for Sasori, who’s gone and dressed his pretty face up in the ugliest puppet Karin had ever seen.)

When they got to their destination, though, all their supplies were missing. Their footprints and one of Karin bright red hairs were there, so it must be the correct spot, but someone had run off with their things. 

“Fuck,” Deidara swore. “These things are giving me a wedgie.”

He pulled at the back of his underwear, and it was such an unsexy move it instantly cured Karin of her dirty thoughts about them. 

“Can you track our supplies down?” Sasori asked. 

“It doesn’t work like that,” Karin said. “I track living things only, and whoever took them is long gone.”

“We can’t travel all the way back to your village naked,” Itachi said, turning to Karin. 

“Why not?” Karin asked. She would like to see that.

“What village?” Deidara barked. “Where are you from–”

“They explained where we’re going,” Sasori interrupted. His ugly puppet made his voice gravelly and extra annoyed. “She’s currently at a house in a civilian village; you just weren’t paying attention. She’s obviously from Grass, anyway.”

It didn’t really matter that they knew Karin was from Grass, in the long run. Still, her kneejerk reaction was to be secretive, because village affiliation could tell you something about a person, and she didn’t like Sasori just assuming he knew things about her. Especially when she was already grouchy from being stabbed and barely sleeping or eating. 

“Wrong,” she said, crossing her arms. 

“I’m not,” Sasori hissed at her. 

“You are,” Karin lied, sticking her nose in the air. Without thinking about much besides fuck you, asshole, she added, “I’m from Sound, dipshit.”

This turned out to be the exact wrong combination of words, because Sasori picked her up and hurled her into a tree before anyone could react properly. 

“Danna, what the fuck,” Deidara said, putting himself between Karin and Sasori. Karin, leaning on the tree for support as she stood, decided to let him borrow her hairbrush. 

In terms of injuries a ninja might suffer, getting tossed violently against a tree trunk wasn’t that bad, nor was it anywhere close to the worst Sasori could dish out. Unless you were Karin and you were still recovering from a gut wound, in which case you discreetly leaned over and vomited. 

“We can’t trust anyone associated with him,” Sasori growled. 

Karin had no idea what Sasori’s history with Orochimaru was, but there was no way he was talking about anyone else. 

“I’m fine with just fucking off then,” Karin wheezed. “Although it’d be helpful if you evicted Hidan and Kakuzu from my house first.”

“If she were loyal to Sound, she wouldn’t be working as a bounty hunter,” Itachi reasoned, also stepping between Sasori and Karin. “Those loyal to Orochimaru tend to serve until their deaths.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Karin mumbled. 

There was some back and forth about Orochimaru being twisted enough to have Karin working as a broke bounty hunter for almost a year in order to infiltrate them, but that was discarded as too convoluted even for him, especially given that the catalyst was the cat-curse-jutsu thing. 

“Unless…” Kisame said, shifting uncomfortably. “He did do a lot of experimental jutsu…”

“If it were Orochimaru’s jutsu, you’d be snakes,” Karin said, rubbing her temples. “He’s too much of a dramatic bitch for it not to be snakes.”

For some reason, this statement made Sasori agree to keep her on. 

Goodie, Karin thought. 

xXx

They went to the nearest town, where they walked into a store and Itachi genjutsu’d the clerk into thinking they paid for clothes. He did not bother to genjutsu her to think they were not naked. 

“Umm,” the young woman said, gripping an illusionary wad of cash and staring openly at the men as they dispersed among clothing racks. 

“Freak accident,” Karin said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Then she went to stop Itachi from buying ugly clothes, because if he was going to cover up his lovely backside, she wanted it to be with clothes that flattered it. 

“This is too tight,” Itachi said of the shirt he’d tried on. Karin had picked it out, and it clung to the contours of his chest. It also had a very low V-neck, showing off Itachi’s clavicles. 

“I think it’s fine,” Karin said, eyeing the dip of his collar bone and imagining running her fingers over it. 

Itachi switched it out for the same shirt two sizes larger, so at least he kept the ridiculously low collar. 

Neither Deidara or Kisame needed Karin’s supervision to buy flattering clothes. Kisame did like shirts that were slightly too small and showed off his burly chest and arms, and Deidara went for a ridiculous crop top. Good. Excellent. Karin approved. 

“You should change too,” Sasori told her, and then held out a dark green dress. It was made out of a heavy, velvety fabric and wasn’t completely hideous, but it was sleeveless with a long skirt. 

“Not my style,” Karin said, although he did have a point. Her shirt-- covered in mud and blood and with a hole right through it-- was hardly salvageable. 

She scanned the store for the women’s section, and to her annoyance, Sasori followed her. 

“The lavender washed out your complexion,” he told her as Karin started going through racks. Karin twitched with annoyance. 

“I looked fine,” she said through gritted teeth. 

A few minutes later, Sasori took a black turtleneck out of her hands and replaced it with a pastel green blouse. 

“What the fuck is your problem?” Karin asked, tossing the blouse aside. “I can dress myself, asshole.”

Sasori watched her, silent, while she tested the fabric of a navy blue shirt between her thumb and forefinger. She wanted something that covered her arms, but was lightweight enough she didn’t get all sweaty in the summer heat. 

“I should have recognized Orochimaru’s work in the poison you used,” Sasori said finally. 

“It’s a modified recipe,” Karin grunted, putting the shirt back. “Hard to get some of the ingredients outside of Fire Country.”

“Hm,” said Sasori. “Are you sure you don’t want a dress?”

Karin resisted the urge to bang her head against the pole of the clothing rack.

“Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

xXx

Karin stepped out of the clothing store to find Deidara doing his hair in the reflection of the shop’s window, Karin’s hairbrush in his hand. It was sunnier in the wide streets of this town than in the forest, and Deidara’s hair shone brassy-gold.

“Kisame and Itachi went to get more supplies, yeah,” Deidara said, then paused when he actually got a look at Karin. “Did Danna demand to play dress up with you?”

Karin had been firm about certain aspects of her style she wouldn’t compromise on, but she was wearing a teal wrap-around dress Sasori had picked out. The fabric was light, the sleeves were long, and the skirt was loose and short enough she could move freely (with a pair of shorts underneath), and she’d refused to replace her thigh-high ninja sandals. It still wasn’t anything Karin would ever pick for herself, and Deidara was eyeing her up and down dubiously. 

“Is that a thing for him, treating people like dolls?” Karin asked. 

“Oh yeah,” Deidara answered, smirking at her. “Means he likes you enough that he wants you for his collection, yeah.”

He winked, and Karin rolled her eyes. 

“He’ll be out in a few minutes,” Karin said as Deidara went back to examining his own reflection. “He has to find a shirt after he packs his puppet away.”

“What?” Deidara asked, and then Sasori walked out of the shop in his own body. “Danna!” Deidara yelped. 

Sasori was in the process of attaching a scroll to one of the many at his back. He’d added a button-down shirt over his grey pants, which was a weird choice for a ninja, but Karin supposed that it might allow better access to the spiked cable in his abdomen. 

“You all know about this body now, anyway,” Sasori said to Deidara by way of explanation. “You know, you wouldn’t waste so much time on your hair if you let me cut it--”

Karin felt a sly grin crack over her face, eyes fixed on Sasori’s gorgeous face as he badgered Deidara. Making a deal to improve her view was definitely worth the ugly dress. 

Karin took a few seconds to parse out where Itachi and Kisame went off to, then led them off in that direction. Sasori was at her elbow immediately. 

“I have some ideas for better local substitutions,” he said.

“What?” Karin asked. 

“For your poison recipe you couldn’t get ingredients for,” Sasori pressed. “If you wanted to make it faster acting…”

Karin zoned out as Sasori proceeded to criticize her own poison to her. God, he was so lucky he was pretty.