Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tori sat seiza, the way Matron insisted, alongside the other orphaned children. The summer was hot, and the boy sitting in front of her had sweat stains pressed into his clothes. Despite Matron’s grim demeanor, Tori was glad to be called into the shade of their building, out of the sun and away from the screams of cicadas. 

“We are only five now,” Matron told them.  

A week ago, there had been six shinobi clans in Sound Country. Matron didn’t describe what happened to the sixth one. She didn’t have to. Most of the orphans had already been sent out to see the war themselves. 

Tori picked at a thread on the hand-me-down yukata she’d been given. It was a mustard yellow that probably would have looked lovely on another child but just made her skin look gray. They hadn’t made her do anything yet but cut bamboo into sharp tips and help lug water out to the aftermath of a battle once. She was only four. 

“This is why it’s important you train hard,” Matron concluded, before dismissing them into the yard and back out into the summer heat. 

It wasn’t fair, Tori thought as she plodded along at the back of the line, that she had to be reincarnated into this stupid universe and didn’t even get to be born into a cool family. She would have liked magic eyeballs, maybe, or being taught to read minds. This clan did have a secret technique that involved sound-based genjutsu or something, but she wasn’t clan-born. It was unlikely they’d bother to teach her. 

Her first real memory in this new life was Matron explaining to her that they’d found her in the woods as a baby. The idea was almost romantic-- an ordinary, abandoned child taken in by an extraordinary family of shinobi. Maybe, if Tori had been found during a time of peace, a couple in the clan would have taken her as their own, or perhaps a wise elderly person would have made her their apprentice like in a movie. 

But the fact was that Tori was found at the height of the Third Shinobi War, and whoever her parents were were probably one of thousands displaced civilians, perhaps killed by shinobi themselves, or more likely from exposure or disease or malnutrition. Perhaps her parents had even left her on purpose, unable to support both themselves and a child. It had happened over and over, and the Utano clan took in any able-bodied orphan they found. Tori was only one of a dozen of potential cannon fodder, left over from tens of orphans collected over the years.

They did make plays at training them, at least. She was cannon fodder, but they would prefer it if she could kill some village ninja when they eventually sent her out. The problem was that they were almost a decade into the war and low on available adults to train them. 

The poor schmuck in charge of orphan training today was a teenager who didn’t seem to have any real plan in mind. He instructed them to practice hitting each other with sticks, and Tori was handed a bamboo pole and paired off with another girl, a couple years older. 

Tori didn’t want to hit anyone with a stick, much less another little girl. She’d rather be taught how to fight alongside a dog partner, and Tori didn’t even like dogs. That would at least feel like she was learning something interesting. 

The other little girl was shaking. She was new, and her parents were farmers who’d been killed in a raid by their fellow countrymen, desperate to steal food and supplies. The Matron promised them every morning that they were training to be shinobi just like everyone else in the clan, but there was a clear hierarchy both in training received and natural talent between civilian orphans and clan-born children. This girl had never had to fight anyone in her life; she’d been taught to flee and hide from ninja. It was unlikely she’d do well without proper care and training, and the clan would dismiss her as a failure when they could not deliver this to her. 

(There were barely any children over the age of eight amongst the orphans, because eight was the age they decided it was okay to start sending people out into the battlefield. Few came back.)

“You can come at me first,” Tori offered to the girl, squaring her shoulders and holding the pole in front of her the way she thought they’d told them to do it a month ago. 

It additionally wasn’t fair that Tori didn’t seem to be any more physically gifted than in her previous life. She seemed to have the exact same body as before, complete with a head of runaway curls that the Matron seemed confused by, and that meant physical activity didn’t come easily to her. One of the few advantages she really had was that an adult mind meant she understood she needed to learn and remember seemingly boring details, like how to hold a pole properly, and this was an advantage she only had over other similarly untrained children. 

The other girl hesitated a few moments, and then half-heartedly smacked her pole against Tori’s. She didn’t even aim for Tori herself. The teenager in charge of them was busily trying to hammer some bent kunai back into shape and not paying any attention to the hollow thwaps of incompetent children hitting things with bamboo poles. 

Really, really unfair, Tori thought. 

xXx

Medical supplies were perpetually low, and so the welts now across Tori’s knuckles from training would go unbandaged. They had lye soap, at least, and plenty of well water. Tori had even gotten to help an ancient kunoichi make the last batch of soap. 

Tori examined her hand as they waited in line for a lunch of plain rice porridge and fried cicadas. She must be holding the pole wrong after all, for a seven year old to accidentally hit her knuckles like that. 

(This was another advantage Tori had over the other orphans: she didn’t mind getting hurt. She preferred not to be hurt, obviously, but she’d lost a lot of the natural human fear of pain somewhere along the way in her previous life.)

They were also short on most kitchen supplies, so Tori had to share her bowl with two boys and eat with her hands. They’d just sat down on the edge of the main house’s engawa when a group of shinobi bounded into the yard in excitement. 

“We got one!” one of them cried, holding something over his head. “Where’s the Old Man? We found one!”

Whatever it was, a group was rapidly forming around the shinobi. The two boys Tori was to share with got up to go see themselves, and Tori pulled the bowl into her lap. Their loss. 

Tori ate as fast as she could while she watched the proceedings. The one good thing about summer was that cicadas were abundant, and even the civilian orphans could get their fill of protein. 

The clan leader eventually appeared from the main building in their compound, and the crowd parted for him. The shinobi knelt as he presented the leader with… some sort of kunai?

“We were scouting a battlefield of the Yellow Flash, as you commanded,” one of the shinobi reported. 

Ah, shit, Tori thought as horror dawned on her. 

“It has some sort of fuinjutsu on it,” the shinobi was saying as the Clan Leader carefully flipped the three-pronged kunai over in his hands. “If we study it, maybe we can learn one of his techniques.”

Tori set the bowl down on the engawa and hopped to her feet. 

“Excuse me,” she called, approaching the gaggle of people around the Clan Leader. “Excuse me, are you really sure that’s a good idea?”

The clan leader looked at her like she was one of the cicadas, loud and annoying and nothing more than an insect. 

“Don’t speak unless spoken to, girl,” the clan leader responded.

Tori ignored the warning. “Doesn’t the Yellow Flash, like, teleport? Do you really want to risk him teleporting here?”

The teenager who’d been in charge of them that morning was commanded to take her to a back training ground and hit her ten times with one of the bamboo poles. He only hit her seven times, all on her back. 

“The next person won’t be as nice,” he warned her. 

Tori had to lay on her belly to sleep, crammed into a room of bamboo mats with twelve other orphans. In the morning, she was excused from ninja practice and sent to help the ancient kunoichi who made soap with laundry. Tori considered this a bonus. The soap kunoichi was the only person she really liked. 

“This does need to be wrapped,” the kunoichi diagnosed her back, clicking her tongue. “Why did you speak up, you foolish child? Here, lie down and I’ll help.”

Tori laid down on her belly again, and she twitched only a little as the kunoichi pushed chakra into her back. 

“I was right,” Tori mumbled into her arms. “That kunai is dangerous.”

Namikaze Minato had been named Hokage recently, although this hadn’t kept him off the frontlines. Did this clan really want to be handling the Hokage’s seals?

The kunoichi sighed. “Always too clever for your own good, girl. Of course it’s dangerous. Trust your elders to know how to contain dangerous techniques.”

Tori craned her neck, turning her head to look at the kunoichi. “Really?” she asked. “How?”

The kunoichi clicked her tongue again. “No technique a brat like you will understand.”

“I understood the soap,” Tori countered. “Didn’t you tell Matron once, that a failure of one person to explain isn’t a failure of another person to understand—”

“Oi!” the kunochi countered, moving her hand to pinch an unblemished part of Tori’s side sharply. “The mouth on you!”

She did explain, though. The clan possessed a special chest, which was adorned with a special seal the clan had spent generations developing. It made the chest unbreakable, and so the kunai was harmless as long as it was inside. 

Tori doubted this, but she also doubted Minato would have a reason to come attack this little clan specifically. Then again, what did she know? She knew the date this war had ended in another timeline, and she knew at some point before that date the five Sound Country shinobi clans would unite as one village, but she didn’t know if she could expect things to proceed as they had before. She didn’t know what she’d changed, if anything, just by being here. 

For example, she’d been under the impression that the actual fighting should have already been starting to die down by now. They had a little over three years until the official end of the war, but the last stretch of it was just small skirmishes and a lot of debates about peace treaties and alliances. Then again, Tori wasn’t a very good student of history, and she hadn’t gone to any formal schooling in this world that would have forced its history down her throat. Perhaps what was happening to her new country would just be recorded as “small skirmishes” in the history books. 

One problem at a time, Tori decided, getting to her feet to go find some clean rags for the kunoichi to dress her wounds. 

Despite being excused from training for her injuries, once she was bandaged up, the old kunoichi set her to beating their laundry with a stick. 

xXx

Tori’s days were busier than she thought a child’s should be: filled with chores and unproductive “training.”

Both of these things involved way more bamboo than Tori could have ever imagined. They were surrounded by what felt like endless bamboo forests, but they had dedicated patches they had to maintain. Bamboo wood was used for construction, its fibers were pulled, its shoots were eaten, it was cut down into weapons, and it could be carefully dried out for burning. All of this took a tremendous amount of labor that was rapidly becoming very tedious. 

“Bamboo is nature’s gift,” Matron would tell them periodically. Her tone always made it sound like a threat. 

Today when she barked it out, Tori replied, “Did you know bamboo is technically a grass? Maybe we should unite with Grass Country.”

Today she was in a small group taking an excursion down to the river for fishing, three orphans and one clan-born kid lined up neatly between Matron and an older man. Tori was first in line behind Matron, who twisted around and cuffed her. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Matron said. “We would never join with those traitors. Besides, grass is grass, and bamboo is not grass.”

“Traitors?” the clan-born kid asked. Like many in the clan, he had rusty, almost magenta hair. 

Tori had gotten very few explanations about the war, or really anything going on outside the clan, despite her efforts to ask questions. Mostly adults just gave speeches about how they had to get strong and fight whenever someone died, which was frequently, or when extremely important events happened, like a new Hokage or the sixth clan being wiped out. Tori only had the vaguest idea of what the missions her supposed “family” went on via eavesdropping on adults: the clan was beholden to protect the villages and farms in the region in exchange for support from the surrounding civilian community, an arrangement that had lasted for tens of generations. Sound Country ninja therefore frequently clashed with the village ninja currently at war, who occupied land, stole supplies, harassed civilians, and had their own battles between each other. 

Tori had sensed distaste for both Grass and Rain from adults, but this was the first time she heard it clearly spelled out. 

“The leader of Grass allied with Kumo and Iwa,” the old man said. “They let foreign shinobi take control of their land instead of defending it themselves. This was a shameful act of cowardice.” 

Neither adult mentioned, Tori noted, that this would largely keep the Iwa-Kumo alliance out and save Grass from the violence and turmoil Sound was currently experiencing. Although, Tori might be wrong about that. She’d thought Sound hadn’t been as bad as it was. The stuff the adults worried about sounded more like what had happened to Rain Country. Who knew if she was right about Grass? 

“What about Ame?” Tori asked. 

Unlike the clan-born kid, she did not get an answer. 

When they got to the river, the old man started explaining fishing techniques to the clan-born kid while Matron passed out baskets for the orphans to collect cicadas. She promised them she would cut notches in the bamboo stalks for them to drink from if they returned with a full basket. 

“Remember,” Matron said, eyes keen, “younger ones are better.”

Tori followed the other two orphans into the bamboo, and they immediately split off without her, even though she was much better at recognizing cicada age. This was typical. Other children sensed there was something very off about her, and though they weren’t cruel, they tended to avoid her when possible. Tori had no friends in Sound, unless you counted the old soap kunoichi. 

On the one hand, the hardest thing in this new life was not having people who would converse with her. On the other hand, Tori was growing to hate being around children, who were sticky and obnoxious, all day every day. She treasured time alone. 

Collecting cicadas was fun, and it was one of the few chores she’d eagerly volunteer for. She’d enjoyed it as a kid in her previous life, and she enjoyed it now. She liked their big bodies and seeing where they hung out, and she often found other interesting things: spiders, ants, a couple of mushrooms, non-bamboo grasses…

When she went back to the fishing spot with a full basket, Matron and the old man were having an argument. 

“The whole river is rancid,” the man kept saying. “These fish can’t be eaten.”

“They’re alive, aren’t they?” the Matron snapped back. “We haven’t had proper meat in weeks.”

Tori approached the clan-born kid, who was despondently making a tower of river rocks on the shore, and asked what happened. Apparently, once they’d started fishing, they kept finding dead or dying fish, and now the adults were arguing over if the living ones were safe to eat.

“They think one of the ninja villages poisoned the river,” the kid said. Despite this, he dipped his hand into the river to pick out another rock. “Why would they do that?”

There were a lot of reasons either side might poison the river. Most of them were to cut off a water or food source for the other. This is why they burned farms they didn’t otherwise care about or cut off trade routes or burned food silos with little care of how this affected the people of Sound Country. 

It was also entirely possible another Sound ninja clan or even a Sound civilian group had done it to try and do something to the village ninja occupying the area. Tori had no idea how to explain any of this to a kid. 

“If it’s poisoned, stop sticking your hand into it,” she said instead. 

They abandoned the attempt to fish, and instead filled the fish basket up with more cicadas. 

xXx

The Yellow Flash never did show up to murder them all, and the old soap kunoichi asked for Tori to make soap again. 

“My hands aren’t what they were,” the old kunoichi told her. In Tori’s opinion, her hands seemed more deft than Tori’s clumsy child fingers. 

Tori liked making soap. It was chemistry and close to the sort of work she’d enjoyed doing before, and she liked practicing with her hands. The kunoichi watched her for a while, quizzing her on what the next steps should be, and then nodded approvingly when Tori answered correctly. 

“You work on that then,” the kunoichi told her. “I’ll be here with my own chore.”

She set out a bunch of blank sealing tags, and Tori felt herself perk up. The kunoichi snorted at her. 

“You can’t help me with this, child,” she said. “This is an adult’s task.”

She didn’t hide what she was doing though, and Tori watched her out of the corner of her eye as she melted old animal fat over a fire and then poured in the lye mixture, made from bamboo ash and water. The old kunoichi was making exploding tags, to attach to kunai. The seals she made were simple, but her brushstrokes were practiced and precise.  

“Is that like what they brought back from the Yellow Flash?” Tori asked, deciding to play dumb as she stirred the soap. 

“No, child,” the old kunoichi answered, and she explained a sympathetic supporter had sent all the Sound Country clans some extra ninja tools. This was very lucky for them, as the war had cut off many of their usual supply chains. 

“Can I learn?” Tori asked when the old kunoichi explained what the tags were for. “Seals are like that magic box you told me about, right?”

Tori tried to make a habit of practicing writing and drawing seals as much as she could in secret, tracing patterns into the underside of her blanket late at night. This place seemed relatively safe, as long as they didn’t send her out to war, but she was terrified of forgetting fuinjutsu. It was the only tool she could rely on if things were to go to shit, and with her luck, they were bound to go to shit eventually.

She would kill to have an excuse to practice openly, with a real brush. She didn’t even need the special chakra paper. Let her be this little clan’s genius who knew how to carve explosions into the bamboo that grew all around them. 

“Child, you don’t even know how to mold chakra,” the kunoichi replied. 

Tori blinked back at her. “Can you teach me that, then?” 

The kunoichi let out a loud, cackling laugh, and Tori realized she hadn’t heard anyone laugh at all since she’d gotten here. 

“I’ll teach you how to meditate while the soap is cooking,” the old kunoichi decided. “That’s the first step.”

xXx

The old soap kunoichi was the one adult Tori actually liked, and she did her best to volunteer for chores with her. A lot of the chores, like laundry and cooking, were boring, but the kunoichi actually answered Tori’s questions. 

“When I learn how to use chakra,” Tori said as they ground rice into flour, “will you teach me your healing techniques?”

The kunoichi let out a single, snort of a laugh. “Child, this is war. You should be focused on fighting technique.”

Tori wrinkled her nose. She knew from the other timeline that the war would end soon, and this knowledge dampened her motivation to learn how to fight. She of course understood that life in this world would be easier if she was good at fighting, but she’d survived perfectly well without the ability before, and she couldn’t say she cared very much putting all her time and effort into it when she had no natural talent for it. 

There was a lot she wanted to learn about chakra though. She wanted to know the mechanisms of medical ninjutsu for the sake of knowing it, and also having the ability seemed deeply useful for any type of biological work, and also for if she blew up a seal in her own face again. 

(Also, if she got caught up in a fight and was injured because she didn’t know how to fight, being able to heal seemed like a good compromise.)

These thoughts would be nonsense to the kunoichi, so Tori paraphrased something she’d heard in a documentary a lifetime ago.

“People say Tsunade-hime won the Second War for Konoha,” she said. 

The kunoichi paused, her hand on her pestle. “What?”

“Because she helped Konoha get better healing techniques than everyone else,” Tori said, blinking back at the kunoichi as childishly as she could. 

She didn’t mention that Tsunde’s efforts to amp up medical supply distribution had played a major role in Konoha just having vastly superior logistics over all. She didn’t think a kid would know what half those words even meant. 

The kunoichi gave Tori one long, perplexed look, and then turned back to grinding rice. 

“Don’t speak so positively of Konoha,” she said at length. “But if you can show me you can mold chakra, I will teach you.”

“And the exploding seals?” Tori asked. The kunoichi let out a noncommittal grunt. Tori continued, grinding away happily at the rice, “And I can help make your medicines, can’t I? It’s not so different from this--”

“Child! Don’t be so greedy!”

xXx

Tori practiced meditating whenever she had time. She didn’t get to talk to the old soap kunoichi as often as she wanted for advice, and the various training sessions they had never touched on chakra. She overheard some of the clan-born kids getting their own lectures on it, but it seemed Tori was going to have to figure out this hurdle on her own. 

She certainly knew a lot of theory about how chakra worked. She knew what shape it needed to be bent into within a seal, and that she should be able to do the same thing within her own body for the same effect. She just didn’t know what chakra felt like, or how she could mold it on her own, or how to force it outside her body to perform a proper ninjutsu instead of just ripping herself apart. 

The meditation helped. She did it diligently when she had downtime, as there wasn’t much else to do. Every once in a while, when she focused so hard on her own heartbeat she felt herself drifting off to sleep, she thought she felt it. It was a warm energy, soft and weak, sluggishly moving through her bloodstream. 

The day she managed to concentrate hard enough to consciously move her chakra, Tori decided to see if she really could explode a bamboo stick. The poles were constantly lying around in random parts of the compound, as a metal shortage meant it was the go-to weapon and everyone was training with them. 

She had a cache of two dull kunai and a kitchen knife she’d sequestered and hidden under a rock under the orphan’s building’s engawa. If she did get sent off to war, she had decided she would just leave this clan altogether. She was not a fighter, and her own survival was more important to her than this stupid war or anyone in this clan. It would be annoying to do as a tiny child with minimal survival skills and the country in chaos, but she could get far with fuinjutsu and her own wits. 

She took the knife and set off into the bamboo forest. When she was sure she had privacy, she sat down and did her best to whittle an explosion seal into the end of the pole, making adjustments for using a different substrate than chakra paper. It felt good, to exercise this part of her brain. Her first two attempts were obviously write-offs, but the third try looked alright. It didn’t exactly look very clean, and the limited surface area of the pole meant she’d had to make it a weird shape, but she didn’t really want to make a big explosion, anyway. 

Tori then held the pole by the other end and concentrated very hard on her chakra. It took a while, but she managed to push some of the chakra in her hands into the wood. 

She couldn’t get it to go up the pole, though, so she ended up carving more fuinjutsu down the pole’s side to guide the chakra up for her. 

When she tried again, the seal ripped more chakra than she meant from her little body. She yelped, toppling forward from shock even as the pole burst apart. Pop! went the exploding seal at the end, and it threw dirt up into her face as she dropped it. The rest of the pole cracked right along the line of her sealwork and then splintered apart.

The noise was loud enough that it caused Matron to come running. Tori had, fortunately, had exploded away all evidence of her experiment.

“Stupid girl,” the Matron snapped, kicking at the destroyed pole. Tori watched her, feeling dizzy from sudden chakra loss. “What silly thing have you done?”

Tori was made to go without dinner, but she felt the experiment was worth it. 

xXx

The winter came and took the old soap kunoichi with it. She went fast: it started as a sad little wheeze, and then a week later she was gone. 

She had a funeral. This was noteworthy, as most people who died recently didn’t. There was no time, and bodies often couldn’t be recovered from war. But the kunoichi had been well-liked and well-respected, and she’d had something like eighteen grandchildren. 

There were only six of the grandchildren left, huddled in a little group next to her pyre. Behind them was the Clan Leader and three visitors. The first two visitors were representatives from other ninja clans in Sound Country. The last one was Orochimaru. 

This funeral was the first one at which Tori felt genuine sadness. She might have cried, but Orochimaru’s presence was very distracting. 

Tori watched him attentively. He dressed in black like the rest of them, his hands folded in front of him in respect. He even summoned up a somber look for the funeral. She was sure it was all an act. The closest to grief he might have would be regret he couldn’t have quizzed the old kunoichi for hidden gems of knowledge before her passing. 

He stayed, along with the other two visitors, for several days after the funeral. He floated through the hallways of their compound like a ghost, and Tori kept expecting to turn around and find him hovering over her as she practiced with the bamboo pole or did chores. Working hard, Tori? Is this really worth your time? You really aren’t very good at this, are you?

He didn’t so much as look at her, of course. This Orochimaru had no idea who she was. 

Three days after the funeral, Tori was summoned to talk to the Clan Leader. The messenger girl who did it had to ask which orphan was her. 

Meeting with the leader had more pomp than Tori thought was really necessary. She was told to sit in an empty room in front of him. To his right side were his three visitors, and to his left was a young kunoichi who was today serving as his assistant. 

The room was big. Tori felt even smaller than usual in it. 

The old soap kunoichi had left Tori a gift. This was highly unusual, as individuals in the clan didn’t own much, and what they did have usually went to direct relatives. But the kunoichi had left a note with her soap molds that she wanted Tori to have at least one, and that Tori had been taught to take over the task. 

The assistant kunoichi set a mold down in front of her. It was nothing more than an oblong box made from bamboo wood, roughly the size of a loaf of bread. The kunoichi would cut the soap into smaller pieces using a bit of wire, which she had not permitted Tori to touch. 

Tori ran her fingers over the one edge of the mold, and then looked up. Her eyes automatically found Orochimaru’s. He didn’t look as bored as the other two visitors. Instead he watched her with the sort of mild curiosity one might aim at an interesting beetle on a hot summer day. 

“Thank you,” she said finally, unsure of what else she was meant to say. When the Clan Leader didn’t so much as blink in reaction, she followed it up with a platitude about how she valued the kunoichi’s mentorship. 

This wasn’t a lie. Tori had no friends or other guidance in this life. Even just learning to make soap from animal fat and lye had been fun. It’d be useful. The kunoichi had promised her, on top of her promise about medical jutsu, that if the war ever ended and pressure for all their herbs and oils to go to medicine and trading for more food and weapons eased up, she’d teach her how to scent the soaps and make them less harsh.

A nice smell is an important tool for a kunoichi, she’d said. And so is beautiful skin. 

Then Tori did tell a lie. “She also taught me how to make the exploding seals.”

“Preposterous,” the Clan Leader scoffed. “How dare you lie to me.”

He opened his mouth to dismiss her or perhaps order someone to hit her with another stick, but Orochimaru leaned forward, his yellow eyes luminous.

“If she is so sure,” he said, raspy voice like poisoned honey, “then let her demonstrate.”

“And waste supplies?” one of the other visitors wondered out loud, but if Orochimaru enjoyed anything, it was handing someone a piece of rope and seeing if they’d hang themselves with it. 

“What’s your name?” Orochimaru asked, standing smoothly. 

“Tori,” Tori replied. Orochimaru’s eyes lit up with some sort of mocking humor: this clan’s name was Utano, making her new name the stupidest possible pun. 

Orochimaru produced a blank tag from his sleeves, and Tori supposed he must be this “generous” donor of the ones the old kunoichi had used. 

“Darling,” Orochimaru said, turning to the assistant. “Lend us some ink.”

Tori waited patiently for the ink, wondering if she could figure out a way to set the tag off directly in Orochimaru’s face. He’d probably find that adorable. 

As it stood, he likely did think she was just making stuff up to sound impressive. No one in their right mind would teach an untrained little kid how to make an exploding seal. Orochimaru just wanted to see what she’d do and how far she’d push this lie, because little kids metaphorically setting themselves on fire was top tier entertainment for him. 

Tori had never infused chakra into ink herself before. 

“I haven’t practiced this part much,” Tori informed Orochimaru, looking him dead in the eyes as she stuck her finger directly into the inkwell. She did her best. There was the sound of the other shinobi shifting in impatience, but none of them said a single word against Orochimaru. It was clearly what that relationship was. 

Tori dipped the brush into the ink and drew.

Her handwriting had diminished with lack of practice. But the basic explosion seal the old kunoichi knew was easy, and what Tori produced was only a little lopsided and jittery. 

It’s probably better I didn’t make a perfect one, Tori thought, sitting back on her heels. 

“There,” she said. 

“How quaint,” Orochimaru said, eyeing it. He picked it up and tossed it into the air, and the thing released a tiny cloud of smoke into the room. 

The Clan Leader looked genuinely surprised. Orochimaru looked vaguely disappointed, which put Tori on edge. He must have really wanted her to be talking out of her ass, or else he wanted to see a proper, well-done seal. This middling option wasn't very exciting. 

“Well, it’s no matter,” the Clan Leader dismissed. “We have others to make the soap, and the exploding seals. Better trained ones.”

Tori was dismissed, and she left the room feeling frustrated. 

The two Sound Country visitors disappeared that evening, but Orochimaru continued to haunt the compound for another week. He watched training sessions, having whispered conversations with the Clan Leader as he did so. He paid the most attention to the exercises Clan-born shinobi did, but two mornings he did sit out on the engawa with some tea and watched the orphans. 

On those mornings, they put more than one ninja in charge, and there was more guidance, too. For some reason, it was important to the clan to show off for Orochimaru.  

Tori was no more impressive than any other child at their silly little sparring sessions. She got hit with the bamboo pole just as much as she managed to hit other kids. 

I wonder if I should try to be impressive, Tori thought as she barely managed to dodge being hit in the face. Eventually, Orochimaru was going to take control over all the Sound ninja, and it would be better for her if she seemed interesting and promising enough to keep around. 

Or, she could just run away before Orochimaru did whatever he did to take over. She wasn’t sure which option was better. Orochimaru was dangerous, but she knew much more how to handle his particular brand of danger than she did being a lone orphan child trapped in a country ravaged by ninja wars. 

Orochimaru left the next day. He left the clan with more presents, including a huge stack of sealing tags. 

“Tadashi has nerve damage and cannot write,” Matron told Tori grimly. “You will be doing his job instead. You cannot fail; we will not be lenient due your age. Do you understand?”

Tadashi was one of only two shinobi who knew how to make tags from scratch. He’d been bitten by a venomous snake while returning home from a mission just the other day, and while it looked like he was likely to survive, he would no longer be able to hold a brush or a kunai or perhaps even chopsticks. 

Interesting, Tori thought. 

“Yes, understood,” she said out loud.

Chapter Text

Tori enjoyed the first session of making exploding tags. She was paired with the old soap kunoichi’s daughter, who’d lost her leg in the previous war and had dedicated herself to learning non-combat shinobi tasks. Tori listened eagerly to her lectures, watching her infuse chakra into ink and then practicing herself with water. 

(Ink was, after all, a precious limited resource. Tori did not point out that human blood was self-renewing. That was a can of worms she didn’t want to open until she had to.)

Tori did not miraculously get the hang of molding chakra within the confines of the two hour session. But the kunoichi had already added her own chakra to all the ink they had for the day, and that was good enough. 

Tori was permitted a few sheets of scrap paper, and after a few practice runs was allowed to paint her own seals. These came out much better than her initial attempt in front of Orochimaru, and she felt they were at least approaching her previous standard of excellence. 

Was this what an artist felt like, getting to create for the first time in years? 

Was this what it was like, to make art for the first time in years, and be handed a coloring book for children?

(Would Sasori and Deidara hate this metaphor?)

At their next session, the kunoichi lectured her some more, and Tori began to realize that much of what the woman had to say on fuinjutsu was wrong, or else incomplete. It wasn’t that Tori didn’t think the kunoichi could paint an exploding seal or a basic storage scroll; it was that she didn’t think the kunoichi could do anything else. The woman spoke as though she now carried the terrible burden of being the clan’s last master of the craft, and this attitude combined with her clear lack of mastery grated on Tori’s nerves. 

Tori kept her mouth shut. She had just turned five. What was she supposed to know? Nothing. Keeping her mouth closed tight was an unfortunate new habit for this life. 

She did try to pay attention when the woman switched her lectures to other shinobi arts, but Tori now had a seed of doubt in her. What else could this woman be misrepresenting, about medicine and poisons and weapons maintenance? The things Tori recognized seemed to match what Sasori had to say on such topics, years ago, but who was Tori to judge the quality of someone’s poison knowledge? All she knew was that this was a woman who’d very boldly talk about at least one subject she barely knew shit about. 

Also, doing the same seal over and over was boring. There was so much Tori could do, if left alone with the pile of paper and ink. 

“Aren’t there other types of exploding seals?” Tori asked at the start of their third session. “Or maybe we can make a barrier.”

Given enough the right set of opportunities, Tori could set up a barrier around a whole town, the next time their clan got called up to defend someone from invading ninja. She didn’t even need the special paper they were treating as so precious, or ink, or even her own chakra. But she was still small and not personally invested in the war– she wasn’t going to run off and do it herself and risk her own life. It wasn’t worth the risk to show off. 

But surely this clan could do a basic barrier, or a different type of explosion…?

“Just do what you’re told,” the kunoichi told her. 

They went through all the gifted chakra paper within the week. About one in ten seals had to be discarded for poor quality. A handful of them were Tori’s, from a couple of mistakes due to lack of practice the first day, and from spilling ink another day. But the vast majority of them weren’t. In her previous life, Tori could have made these in her sleep. 

The kunoichi blamed her for every last one. Tori wasn’t given corporal punishment, but she was lectured very sternly. Apparently one in ten failures wasn’t considered that poor of a failure rate. 

She didn’t bother to argue back. She was five, and not a born-member of the clan. No one was going to listen to her. 

She had pilfered four blank tags and a brush over the course of the week, and she kept them safely tucked into her clothes, fantasizing about what she’d do with them if she ran away. Something too big and risky to try on a more volatile substrate, maybe. Or maybe she’d just keep them if she had to do something on the fly and didn’t have time to do a bunch of math to figure out how to optimize a seal on tree bark. 

The gifts from Orochimaru included training kunai and shuriken. Orochimaru said the gift was specifically to help the children learn, and after they’d been distributed to clan-born ninja in training, they started to be passed out to the orphans. This distracted Tori from her increasingly numerous fantasies about running away. 

A tag attached to a kunai, properly thrown, could be incredibly useful to her. 

She still didn’t think she’d ever be much of a fighter. But this was something she wanted to do before, in her old life, and for the first time she joined in on elbowing her way to fronts of lines to get to the weapons first. 

(She still went over fuinjutsu every night, terrified of forgetting it. She wanted to write some of it down, but this seemed more dangerous than just being caught with some hoarded kunai.)

Their shurikenjutsu lessons were only slightly more structured than their pole lessons, and included someone giving actual demonstrations and feedback. The adults still didn’t seem to know how to handle a single adult guiding a group of a dozen untrained children, but an attempt was being made this time around. 

Tori wasn’t a great shot. But someone corrected her technique and she got better. So that was new and exciting. 

“Orochimaru-sama will be visiting to check your progress in three months,” the clan leader told them very gravely. “Do not disappoint him.”

Tori was not naturally good at throwing kunai. But she was the best at actually checking she was holding her kunai correctly and paying attention to instructions. This put her solidly in the top five, and she and two other orphans were one day pulled aside by Matron. 

(This was not an accomplishment Tori was particularly proud of. She was an adult amongst actual children. It was more embarrassing that she wasn’t doing better, honestly. She hoped, if she ever ran into anyone else from Akatsuki, she never had to demonstrate any sort of ninja skill in front of them. Mortifying.

…also, even if she survived the war, maybe she shouldn't try to look anyone from Akatsuki up. If they didn’t already know her, probably they’d just try to murder her. Hmm.) 

“Orochimaru-sama is very interested in traditional techniques,” Matron told them, sounding very stressed. “We want some children to demonstrate the bamboo senbon.”

Bamboo senbon were narrow pieces of bamboo which had been cut diagonally to make them sharp. They were a very old fashioned projectile weapon that the clan had resorted to using again under the metal shortage. Tori had gotten a lot of splinters cutting them fr other people. 

The clan had attempted to teach children to use them before. They’d done it once with the orphans, when Tori was barely cognizant of who she was or what was happening and before she was expected to participate in ninja training, and she could remember two different instances of them attempting it with clan-born children. 

The bamboo senbon were harder to throw than kunai and easier to block with armor or metal weapons, which was why they’d been out of use. Plus, the main way they were supposed to be used was even more difficult than just hitting a target. The senbon, if cut and thrown correctly, made a whistling noise, and this had actually been what gave the country its name. A true master of bamboo senbon could choose when to throw a whistling one and when to throw a silent one, to confuse and disorient opponents. 

The clan had decided it was an advanced technique for older shinobi, and not worth expending limited time and energy on teaching anyone under the age of twelve. 

So while clan-born children worked on their clan’s special ninjutsu and genjutsu, which were considered the more important and impressive techniques to learn, Tori had her metal kunai taken away and was assigned to cutting up more bamboo. 

I’m really beginning to hate this plant, she thought. 

They assigned a middle aged woman to work with them, and “auntie” Tori had never really interacted with before who turned out to be deeply obnoxious. 

“Aren’t you the baby they found in the woods?” the auntie asked after a long and mean critique of how Tori cut bamboo. She squatted next to her, not offering to actually demonstrate how to cut the bamboo for her.

“Yes,” Tori agreed. 

“I remember that,” the auntie said, bobbing her head. “Didn’t they call you something dumb? Mori?”

Tori grit her teeth and went for try five hundred on cutting a whistling senbon. 

“I got Matron to change it to Tori,” she said. 

The auntie let out a loud, barking laugh. “That’s even worse, you dumb kid! Utano Tori.”

She tilted her head back and cackled. Tori gritted her teeth, determined not to talk back. She had heard much dumber name puns before. There may or may not be a pink-haired infant out there named spring cherry blossoms, okay? She didn’t see what the big deal was. 

What if she just ran away…? 

Ah, no, but there was still a lot of fighting and civilians were displaced all over the place. Unless she could figure out how to teleport herself to a more stable country, it was definitely safer and more comfortable here, even if she hated it. She could wait a little longer for the war to die down. 

The war dying down should really start happening any day now…

xXx

The demonstration for Orochimaru’s next visit didn’t go as planned. 

There was a lot of very sad, pathetic fanfare this time. Some chickens were killed for Orochimaru and the clan leadership’s dinners, and this was a very big deal, which was sort of sad. They used up the last of their sugar. Orphans were assigned rotations for the bathhouse fire so their guest could have a hot bath any time they chose. 

A very big deal was made of lugging an enormous bell out of wherever they were hiding it for safekeeping. Tori missed how it was moved into the main courtyard where they’d hold their fancy full-clan banquets, but it took the efforts of five adults and multiple pulleys to lift it onto its frame. 

They rang it to signal Orochimaru’s arrival. This had once been tradition, Matron explained, before the war. The bell was used to honor guest and announce shinobi back from successful missions and battles. She didn’t explain why it had been hidden away. Maybe the clan was afraid of loud noises attracting enemies, or maybe they were afraid of it being stolen, or maybe its lack of sound was bad for morale. 

For entertainment, instead of real fireworks, some of the adults did a genjutsu display using music, which was at least cool, even though some of the drums were just empty drawers. 

“Did you know,” Orocimaru said very conversationally over their pathetic banquet, where most of the clan had to sit on the cold ground of the courtyard, “the Giongo Clan has been able to maintain electricity this entire time?”

He said this like he was stating an interesting fact, but the jab was still there. 

“How fortunate for them,” the clan leader said tightly. 

The Utano Clan had not had electricity or running water the entire time Tori had been with them. They were fortunate that they, unlike a couple of the other clans, had been able to stay on their ancestral lands. The lightbulbs and pipes were now useless, but the compound had been built without them, and they could still function without such utilities. Someone had even dug out some pretty lanterns to hang in the courtyard. 

“Do you ever speak with other clans?” Orochimaru asked, still conversational. The entire clan sat before him in silence, listening, physically lower than him as he sat with leadership and the only table. “You could benefit from coordinating with them.”

“We stay in our lands,” the clan leader said, and Orochimaru dropped the subject and casually as he’d brought it up. 

The next morning, a group of adults were meant to do a proper bamboo senbon demonstration, to show how it could be used. This would be followed by Tori and the two other orphans, to show how much progress in learning could be made in only a few months. 

The whole clan filed into their biggest training ground, and Orochimaru was offered a chair while everyone else beside the clan leader stood or kneeled. Tori took her place, standing in a line with the other two orphans and the adults doing the demonstration. 

Had all this pomp and ceremony been normal before the war? She hated it. She wondered if she’d still hate it under circumstances where it didn’t feel like an act of self-imposed humiliation. 

Tori did not go into this demonstration particularly nervous. She couldn’t really control the sound of her senbon, but she could hit a target, and throwing a bunch of them at once made some whistle and some not, which was close enough to the intended technique. 

Of course, she should have known Orochimaru did not simply let people do things in peace. 

The two adults meant to give the demonstration were to first throw senbon one at a time at trick targets, to demonstrate aim and control over the noise. The first demonstrator, the obnoxious auntie, pulled her hand back, threw, and then Orochimaru very casually picked all of her bamboo senbon out of the air with his own set of metal senbon. 

He didn’t even get up from his chair to do it. No one moved to stop him or even how to react. The auntie stood there, humiliated and unsure what to do. Orochimaru shifted in his seat, leaning his jaw against one hand. Next to him, the clan leader’s face was unreadable. 

“Well?” Orochimaru drawled. “Go on, continue your demonstration.”

The other shinobi threw, and Orochimaru threw his own senbon. None of the bamboo senbon made their mark. The air was very tense. 

“Is that all?” Orochimaru asked. 

They moved on to other parts of the demonstration. They showed off throwing more than one at once, only to have every single senbon knocked down. Anything they tried, Orochimaru immediately destroyed. 

When it was the children’s turn, Orochimaru stood up. He approached them. The boy on Tori’s left was shaking with nerves. 

“Can you tell me what I just demonstrated?” Orochimaru asked, voice deceptively gentle. 

Oh, you dramatic dick, Tori thought. All three children remained silent. 

“Any ideas?” Orochimaru prodded again. 

He wasn’t going to let them get away with not talking. This was one of his games: he would pry and poke and prod until either someone said something interesting, or he’d broken down all three of them into crying messing. 

It was dangerous to play Orochimaru’s games. But it was even more dangerous to refuse them. 

“You’re demonstrating there’s a reason we stopped using our traditional ways,” Tori said. 

Orochimaru’s eyes immediately shot to hers, gleaming gold in the sun. He looked attentive, like what she’d said was worth hearing. 

Tori knew this was a trap. She still liked the positive attention. 

“Oh?” Orocimaru said. “So you think I wasted your time by telling you to learn this.”

God, I hate you, Tori thought as she realized she was about to have her first fulfilling conversation since the old soap kunoichi had passed away. 

“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t give us gifts and then tell us to waste our time. Traditional techniques still have merit. They’re what make us unique.”

“But your superiors were cut down so easily,” Orochimaru said. “Metal will always defeat wood.”

The feeling in the training ground turned arena was getting tenser by the second. Tori ignored it. 

“I don’t think so,” Tori replied. “But the world has changed since the technique was invented. We just need to change the technique to keep up with the world.”

She did not say the first thing that came to mind, which was: You don’t really think that. Why else would you have tried so hard to clone your first Hokage? This was too petulant for someone he didn’t have a rapport with, and also, why would she know that?

“How perceptive of you,” Orochimaru said, leaning forward to bring his face closer to hers. Hair silky black slipped over his shoulders. “Tori-chan, was it?”

Fuck, Tori thought, simultaneously elated and terrified. He remembers me. 

After all, had she not pulled the stunt with the exploding tag to get his attention? Or had her motive been to try and convince the clan to let her use fuuinjutsu equipment? She couldn’t quite remember.  

“Your new assignment,” Orochimaru said, straightening up and addressing all three children, “is to invent a new way to use your senbon so that I cannot stop you so easily. Do you understand?”

He didn’t allow them any time between giving this assignment and then demonstrating their ideas. He didn’t even go back to his seat, just stood there next to them, basically breathing down their necks. 

The other girl in their group looked like she was about to cry as she made her throws, all of which were shot down. The boy didn’t do any better. 

“Your turn, Tori-chan,” Orochimaru said. 

Tori had a lot of ideas for bamboo senbon, actually. Almost all of them involved carving seals into them. Green bamboo was still alive, still had its own chakra. She could use that chakra to do all sorts of neat things. 

She actually really, really wanted to actually do this assignment, just to test her brain. Too bad she was given zero time to carve anything. 

Well, she wasn't going to impress Orochimaru with her next idea, but she could entertain him. 

She took all but one of her senbon and threw them at the targets. Then, knowing Orochimaru would be focused on them to pick them all off, she turned on her heel and aimed her last one directly at his throat. 

“Oh ho,” Orochimaru said, catching it between two fingers. His lips curled back in a mean smile. “How vicious you are for a little songbird, Tori-chan.” 

She held his gaze and didn’t say anything. After a few beats, he turned from her to ask the clan leader to move on to the other demonstrations. 

Tori felt a wave of relief. 

Orochimaru pulled the same stunt with the other clan techniques, including easily dismissing all their sound-based genjutsu in various ways. He casually broke instruments and ignored genjutsu, then neatly sliced a bamboo pole in two with his sword. 

Every time, he told the child versions of the demonstration to try something new. Most of them, having seen his semi-positive reaction to Tori’s attempt, simply tried attacking him. He became visibly more annoyed with each try. 

Tori felt smug about this, and then disgusted by herself. 

At the end of it all, Orochimaru announced he was disappointed in their progress and would be withholding his gifts after all. 

“I will give you six months to rectify it,” he said. “Do not disappoint me next time.”

At his farewell banquet, Orochimaru paced over to Tori and handed her a storage scroll. 

“For our best student today,” he said, and then moved on to speaking with someone else.

Tori unrolled it, ignoring the orphans around her begging to see too. It was the most basic storage scroll possible, but with a modification for increased storage capacity. It was something she’d drawn hundreds of times. 

That evening after the bell rang again to signify Orochimaru was leaving, Matron confiscated the scroll for the clan’s use. Tori didn’t mind. She could make something better herself. 

xXx

Orochimaru left the clan in chaos. 

The war had no end in sight, and adults were desperate for his gifts. The orphans were essentially left to their own devices once again as the rest of the clan rushed around and had screaming arguments about ways to innovate their traditional techniques. 

Tori felt bad for them. When Matron had lectured them about the Utano Clan’s history, it had seemed like they’d developed and modified their techniques organically with time, just like any other ninja clan. But war had ruined their ecosystem: the clan as it was now was a fraction of what it was even five years ago, and everyone was paranoid and mentally and physically exhausted, and Orochimaru had only made the collective mental state worse. 

As she was now being ignored more than ever, Tori took the knife she’d been given to make her bamboo senbon and some of the metal senbon Orochimaru had left behind, and went into the bamboo forest to see what she could do. She used the metal to try carving seals into the wood. 

Exploding the bamboo was easy enough, although even with weeks of experimenting, she couldn’t get the explosion how she wanted. Green bamboo was fire resistant and that made it difficult to burn, but dried out bamboo was dead and no longer produced chakra. She spent more weeks trying to put her own chakra into the senbon, but she made little progress. She’d never done it before and had no reference or mentor to ask. 

She tried a few other types of seals. Time had corroded some of her intuition and made her forget most of her formulas to use alternate chakra source, and she couldn’t get a barrier seal to work properly enough for her idea to use the senbon as a net. But storage seals were easy enough to modify, and being able to make essentially unlimited senbon was an obvious advantage bamboo had over metal. She could make as many as she wanted. She figured out how to get one senbon to release a flood of other senbon, although triggering the release was iffy, and then the technique lacked the ability for her to aim anything like this.

She worked on the triggering mechanism rather than her aim for a full month, simply because the problem was more interesting to her. She couldn’t figure out how to activate it herself without touching the senbon, which was the obvious way most ninja would execute such a technique. But she could set it up to activate when the senbon was perturbed, either hitting a target or being struck mid-air. 

So she could make it so that deflecting a senbon made a small explosion, which by itself wouldn’t do much damage, and then also shot more senbon at you. That seemed pretty good…

She tried hitting senbon midair with her own senbon, so she could set them off when she wanted. She failed to hit things even once, although her overall aim improved… maybe.  

There was no calendar that Tori had access to, so time was difficult to track. But the clan announcements usually included the date, and so one day Tori learned that it was October 31, and also that the Hokage had ordered a bunch of camps set up worryingly near them. The clan knew that this was his explicit order, because he’d also sent a very firm notice to them that his shinobi would not attack unless the clan attacked first. 

“He wants to ‘avoid hostilities’…?” a mother who’d had an arm blown off by an Iwa demolitions expert wondered at the Hokage’s wording. “Is invasion not a hostile act?!”

The Third Hokage had never bothered to send them warnings like this before, so Tori saw this as a small improvement.However, the difference did not make their country being occupied feel any better. 

Someone else asked, “Could Orochimaru-sama defeat the Yellow Flash?”

Yelling broke out. Tori’s initial thought was, Oh, it’s Halloween. This was followed by, Wait, shouldn’t the Yellow Flash be dead by now?

She leaned her head back, glaring into the sky as she did the math over and over to be sure she was right. Tori did not have the years Hokage came and went memorized, but she knew Namikaze Minato should die the day Naruto was born, and she knew the day she was found in this life matched her birthday and year in her previous life. She knew her own age relative to Naruto’s and that his birthday was 10/10, an incredibly easy date to remember. 

So. Yes. The Yellow Flash should definitely be dead. 

Had she changed something…? What could she have possibly done?

Well, whatever it is, you’re welcome, Yellow Flash, she thought. This was followed by, Oh god, what have I done?

xXx

The bell rang again the day Orochimaru came back. He arrived flashing scrolls filled with gifts. He was more judgmental of their compound this time. He was visibly bored through all their welcoming entertainment, and he openly criticized the food and his sleeping arrangements. He called the bell a gaudy and tasteless ornament. 

Everyone was on edge. They were desperate for his support. 

Tori had not managed to perfect her technique into anything mind blowing. Anyone who knew anything about fuuinjutsu who picked up her senbon and analyzed it would be impressed, because using a non-human organism’s chakra was simply not done, and in order to work with the limited surface area, she’d combined two things into one in a way she personally felt was quite clever. But the explosions themselves were mediocre, barely worth a distraction, and Deidara would make fun of her. The cloud of senbon they then shot would also fly off at random, and she actually risked hitting herself. 

Toward the end of breakfast, Orochimaru stood and paced through their lines a bit. Most people knelt on the ground, packed into the courtyard. Orochimaru paused a few times to speak to more important clan members. 

Tori’s heart beat faster and faster as he approached the children’s section. Would he talk to her? Had she really caught his attention?

He slowed down in front of her, but he did not stop. He did not speak to her. 

Ten minutes later, Tori was being ushered off to prepare for her demonstration. 

Why didn't he acknowledge me? she wondered, feelings hurt. 

The adults were already out, practicing. Matron had her and the other two orphans line up and then fussed over trying to smooth Tori’s hair. 

Tori wanted Orochimaru to acknowledge her. She knew his attention was a dangerous, unstable thing, but it also felt good. She was sick of being ignored and kicked around. She wanted to be able to say things and be told she was clever and thoughtful, and she wanted questions answered when she asked them. 

The rest of the clan started filing around the training ground turned arena. Orochimaru took his seat. 

I can make him see how good I am, Tori decided. She just needed to get him to examine some of her senbon. She could do that. And then, when he saw the potential in what she could do, she’d have his undivided attention for the rest of her life. 

The clan leader called for the adult demonstration to start, and Orochimaru’s eyes glinted with sick amusement as he prepared to humiliate them a second time. 

Holy shit, Tori thought, her previous train of thought coming to an abrupt halt. I’m going insane. 

“I have to go to the bathroom!” she cried, and then sprinted out of the training ground before Matron had even fully processed what she’d said. 

The rest of the compound was eerily empty. Tori sprinted through the courtyard, past the bell, to her cache under the engawa. Her footsteps echoed. What a poor shinobi she was. 

If the Yellow Flash was still alive, it meant all bets were off with where this timeline was going. The war might never die down enough for her to run off safely on her own. But, it did seem likely Orochimaru was still angling to unite the clans into Otogakure. If he didn’t, he would destroy the Utano clan in his wake. That was how he operated. 

Tori needed to survive whatever was going to happen next. No, she wanted to thrive with whatever happened next. She was done with being kicked around. 

There were a lot of benefits to joining Orochimaru. Protection from the shit show the larger countries had turned Sound into. Mentorship. Encouragement to do more fun things with fuuinjutsu, if she played her cards right. Someone who understood why questions about the biological nature of chakra were interesting. A lab. 

She needed Orochimaru’s attention. She needed his acknowledgement. But his full attention had never ended well for anyone. She had to play the game, and she had to play it smart. And that meant showing him something, but never revealing her full hand. 

She didn’t want him to know she could use plants as her chakra source, or that she could fully integrate two seals into one. Not yet. But he had to know she could make a seal perfectly, and that she could execute them creatively. 

She laid her pilfered chakra paper out on the engawa and went to work. While she worked, she heard a few explosions from the training ground. So, someone else had thought to combine exploding tags with the bamboo senbon. 

The explosions wouldn’t be as good as hers. She knew this, because she’d made most of their tags. 

Tori got back to the arena as Orochimaru was chastising a bunch of full grown adults about how they should be embarrassed. Both the demonstrators, including the obnoxious auntie, were actively bleeding. Tori had no idea what had happened. 

“Tori-chan,” he greeted in his rasping voice when she stepped up to stand with the other two children. “Why don’t you come demonstrate what an innovative idea looks like?”

He smiled at her, mean and dangerous. Failure would be just as entertaining to him as success. 

Tori stepped up to her place across from the targets. She would succeed. 

Orochimaru had other ideas. He ordered the obnoxious auntie to stand across from her. 

“Let’s have a demonstration match,” he said. 

“What…” Tori asked. “Does that mean…?”

“It means a fight,” Orochimaru said, eyes alight with glee. “Your auntie will be your opponent and target. Isn’t that fun?”

“I’m not fighting a kid,” the obnoxious auntie said. “She’s not even clan-born. She’s not used to it.”

“Pity,” Orochimaru replied dryly. “I was just starting to feel the cloud of disappointment lifting. Did you train her properly or not?” 

The auntie had no counterargument. 

“We’ll make it projectiles only, then,” Orochimaru said after a beat. “If this is the only thing you train your children in.”

“It’s okay,” Tori said to the auntie reassuringly. 

The point of the demonstration was to show off projectiles, so the auntie backed away further than she would for a normal spar. This moved her towards the wall of targets, which was good for Tori. 

The crowd behind Tori shifted, moving away to avoid senbon being thrown in this direction. Orochimaru stayed in place. 

“Begin,” he said, not even bothering to raise his voice. 

Tori had never seriously fought someone like this in her life, or in her life before. She had no idea what the auntie’s actual skill level was, besides “better than a shoddily trained five year old.” But Tori had gone up against much scarier ninja before, who were actively trying to hurt to kill her, and won. 

The auntie threw faster, and a senbon was in Tori’s thigh before she’d released her own from her hand. Tori didn’t care. 

The auntie had only tossed one whistling senbon at her, which a proper genin could have probably dodged easily. But it had been too fast for Tori, even with the whistle to warn her it was coming. 

Tori had thrown five senbon. Only one was on course to actually hit the auntie, and the auntie knocked it out of the air with her own senbon while also hitting Tori in the shoulder with a second. 

Tori’s senbon exploded when the auntie hit it, sending a rain of senbon down on her. It also shot a few randomly into the audience, and Tori moved to avoid a few. 

A second later, the senbon the auntie had ignored hit the target wall and also exploded. The explosion wasn’t enough to significantly damage the wall, but the auntie yelped in surprise and had to drop to the ground to avoid the rain of senbon that followed. 

Behind her, Orochimaru let out a soft laugh. 

If her goal was to just demonstrate this, Tori could stop. But this wasn’t her goal, so she threw more senbon. 

The auntie’s face was screwed up in annoyance, and she threw her own cloud of senbon at Tori, who made an attempt to dodge. The cloud had both whistling and silent senbon. The idea here would be that Tori instinctually would dodge the whistling ones, leaving her open to be hit by the silent ones. 

Jokes on you, Tori thought and she ran left to avoid the epicenter, holding up her arms to protect herself. I’m too incompetent to dodge anything!

The auntie threw a senbon with an obvious tag attached to it in the direction Tori was running, and as she skidded to a halt and threw herself backward in a panic, Tori realized a fatal flaw in her plan. 

If she got hit in the right place, she would blow herself up. So. That would be incredibly stupid. 

The explosion, luckily, was small and weak enough that she’d dodged it. Thank god that other kunoichi hadn’t listened to her about making them bigger. 

Or maybe the explosions were small on purpose, to avoid blowing yourself up…? Tori wouldn’t know. Her only reference was Deidara. 

In either case, Tori needed to end the fight before she accidentally blew herself up. She got to her feet, ignoring a senbon whistling centimeters past her ear, and threw one of the ones in which she’d rolled up an exploding tag. The auntie dodged it easily, which was fine. 

It went to her left, so she’ll go right, Tori thought, and then aimed her second senbon. 

Her first senbon hit the target wall, and the tag inside went off. This explosion was huge, blowing the wall apart and sending pieces flying into the audience. There were yells as audience members scrambled back. 

The aunty was quick enough to leap out of the epicenter of the explosion, but she didn’t dodge it completely. Tori’s second senbon whistled right into the force of it. It was blown off course slightly, which was enough to trigger the storage seal inside. 

The bell fell out of the air, hitting the ground with a deafening clang. 

The auntie replaced herself with Orochimaru’s empty chair. She squatted there, panting and singed, staring at the bell in horror. If she hadn’t moved, it would have crushed her. 

Orochimaru laughed, quiet and rapsing. Tori turned to him. He covered his mouth with one sleeve, like a lady of the court. 

“Let’s call the match, shall we?” he said. His eyes sparkled as he looked down at her. “Good job, Tori-chan.”

“Here,” Tori said, handing over her other senbon stuffed with rolled up tags. “I don’t want them. I realized if I fell on them in battle, I’d blow myself up.”

Orochimaru accepted them, amused, and turned one over in his hands. He carefully pushed a tag out with one finger and unrolled it. 

“These types of tags are dangerous, little songbird,” he said. 

“Well, yeah,” Tori replied. “That’s why I used it.”

“Are these all explosions?” Orochimaru asked. 

“Um, the other one is senbon storage and a small explosion,” she said. There. Now he would think this was how she’d accomplished all her senbon, and they’d conveniently all exploded to hide any evidence this wasn’t the case. 

Tori willed herself to look as sheepish as possible and added, “I only got the idea for the bell right before the demonstration.”

Behind Orochimaru, the clan leader looked furious. She hadn’t fully thought through the consequences of dropping a culturally important object on someone. She was definitely getting in trouble later. 

Orochimaru looked deeply entertained by her admission. She didn’t remember him ever looking this outwardly impressed with her before. Maybe these things seemed like more of an accomplishment if you were a kid and not a confused adult. 

“Who taught you the storage seal?” he asked. 

Tori grinned. “I copied it from the one you gave me!”

Orochimaru raised his eyebrows but did not question this further. If he examined the seal she’d handed over, he would discover it was indeed the same thing. 

Orochimaru turned back to the obnoxious auntie. 

“May I have my seat back?” he asked, although he sounded more bemused than irritated. 

While they figured out how to move the bell out of the arena, Orochimaru spoke amicably with the clan leader. Tori went back to her spot with the orphans, watching him as she pulled senbon out of her. 

“How did you do that?” the other girl meant to be demonstrating asked. She would not end doing whatever she had planned. “All I did was practice throwing a bunch at once at different targets.”

“I already said,” Tori replied, eyes glued to Orochimaru. “I just copied it.”

Orochimaru watched the rest of the demonstrations in a very good mood. Some of them got criticisms, but he seemed overall pleased. 

“I think I will share my gifts,” he said at the end of it. “Make sure the little song bird gets to see the other storage scrolls, won’t you?”

“Orochimaru-sama,” the clan leader said. “We have another favor to ask of you. Konoha camps have been set up near here. They intrude on our land, and we have already noticed a decrease in game in the area. We ask for your assistance in removing them.”

Orochimaru laughed, although this time it was mocking. 

“Even if I remove them, they will only send more, and then their eyes will be on you,” he said. “This is why a single clan will never stand up to a village. Even the Uzumaki eventually fell. Don’t you understand?”

At the end of the visit, Orocimaru proposed what he’d proposed to every other clan in Sound Country: they could unite with him as leader, and then they would have the strength to survive this war. 

The Utano Clan accepted. 

“Wonderful,” Orochimaru said. “I have already selected a place for us to live. We’ll keep in touch coordinating your move.” His smile widened, showing his teeth. “You can even bring your precious bell.”

While Orochimaru was around, the clan had made sure Tori had gotten medical treatment, and they’d let all the demonstrators that Orochimaru had praised have actual meat at dinner. They didn’t punish Tori for the bell until after Orochimaru left. In fact, they punished her for even more than the bell. 

“I don’t understand,” she told the clan leader. 

“You have humiliated us,” he said. “You showed off for your own gain without any thought for the dignity of the clan.”

“But I did what you told me,” Tori said, frustrated. She didn’t care what this man thought of her, and she could endure being told off by him. She could even handle the lashings he was assigning her. But he was limiting her food and forbidding her from ever practicing fuuinjutsu again.  

Tori’s voice cracked as she pressed on, “I got him to like me. I got him to like us.”

“You speak back to your betters, because you ungratefully demand to stand out when it is not your place,” the clan leader said. “I allowed you to take our name, and now I retract this privilege. You will be a part of Orochimaru-sama’s Otogakure, but you will not be one of us.”

Tori went back to the orphan’s building, scowling the whole way. She didn’t even care about the Utano name. She’d never considered herself one of them. But also, they had never considered herself one of them, had they? They weren’t mad she’d done a good job, they were mad someone who wasn’t one of them had done a good job. 

She didn’t want their stupid name. Giving it to her had been a gesture that meant nothing. 

And what, now they were going to cut her rations for the next six months?!

“I guess you’re no longer a songbird,” Matron said dismissively when she reported back. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. You lot are to be taken by the battlefield, anyway.”

Tori went to bed fuming. She would not die on the battlefield. She would follow them to Oto, and then she would do whatever she needed to get what she wanted. 

Her name didn’t even mean “bird.” It meant victory.