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It’s the kind of storm that turns the sky a dark bluish-gray by only the fourteenth hour, the kind that fills awkward pauses in conversation by its rumbling so that neither introvert has so far yet to feel bad over not spewing meaningless small talk from their mouth.
And it works for them. They’ve gathered the data they needed to, exchanged the necessary intel to coordinate movement and assort truth from lie, spoken when they needed to. For the kind of mission this is, that’s all that matters.
They aren’t all the way out here for casual conversation, Rin tells herself, they aren’t friends.
To Izumi Uchiha, this is a run-of-the-mill (and now-complete) B-rank espionage mission: infiltrate the Hidden Sound village, disguise yourself as a Sound shinobi. Keep an ear on the Hokage lab and office, and identify any and all guarded persons entering or exiting the village. Tensions are high again, and information helps personalize the Leaf’s defenses in the case of war.
To Rin Nohara, this constitutes A-rank.
‘Dispose of the Uchiha before you return across the Fire border,’ Koharu Utatane, elder of the Leaf Village, had said in her harsh, creaking voice, ‘and the full 100,000 ryō is yours.’
As if it’s for the money. No, that’s simply a ‘bonus,’ as Homura said, ‘for completing an A-rank private bounty with the mission.’
It is neither salary nor bonus. This is a threat.
Rin scoffs, a dark shake of her head to rid herself of thoughts of the old bags behind the Hokage chair, just as the silhouette of her younger mission partner pops up in the cave mouth with a shuriken-speared rabbit in hand.
Purely by accident, she makes eye contact with the shiny eyes of the dead thing.
That will be her if she fails. A Jinchūriki is useless if she can’t kill a 16 year-old Chūnin. No, then she is only good for raising further tension with the Hidden Mist.
She tears her eyes away from her next meal to meet Izumi’s clear gaze. “That’s a big catch. Especially in this weather. Good job.”
“Thank you.” The younger shinobi’s eyes twinkle at the praise, more black in the dimness than the red Rin knows to hide behind the mask, and the sentiment reminds Rin of someone she used to know, but she can’t put her finger on it. Her gaze moves past the girl’s shoulder to the pouring rain outside. Indeed, it would be too wishful to imagine that the weather would help to diminish Fire-Style jutsu. As if defying the weather to drive home the point, a spark of doubt catches. Surely Obito would not stand for disloyalty to the Leaf the way this girl might.
And Rin doesn’t blame her, not naturally, but in the weeks since they first set out she has had to learn the feeling. Loyalty to family is easy, but it cannot be allowed easier than loyalty to the village, and when someone with the power of the Sharingan and Uchiha blood has questionable motive, they must be eliminated.
That’s all there is to it. It has to be.
Rin gives a short nod and a wave of her hand, forces what she hopes looks like an easy smile. She pats the rock ground beside her and says, “Izumi.”
She didn’t think this through.
It doesn’t matter. The sooner the better.
Izumi, albeit showing a slight confusion at the gesture, sits cross-legged where Rin indicates and sets to yanking the shuriken out of the rain-soaked rabbit. Efficient kid. “What is it?”
“We’re far enough away from the Sound Village now,” Rin says, voice strained to even, hand slipping to the her waist on the side Izumi can’t see. Her finger hooks into the open loop of a kunai. To Izumi it must look like she’s looking at the rabbit, but she’s watching Izumi’s hands. Thinking how to disable them. “As a Jōnin and mission leader, I will be writing the mission report. I won’t have the time to go over a debriefing with you before I write it when we get back, so I want to ask you to share everything you learned with me now.”
A moment passes.
It’s not until Izumi speaks a second time that Rin realizes she’s been burning holes into the girl’s now-bloody hands even after they stopped moving. She missed the question.
“Rin, are you alright?” Izumi says, leans forward in concern. “Should I repeat the question?”
Rin’s gaze snaps up. “Yes.”
“We’re still on Sound territory,” she says, a genuine question. “Wouldn’t it be better to wait until we’re across the border?”
“Follow your orders, Izumi,” Rin says, a little too quickly. The kunai slides up out of her belt. “We will not have the luxury to stop again after this.”
Izumi nods at the words, seems to take them as a reprimand as she turns her head back down at the rabbit and grasps the tail to cut it off. “I understand. I’ll start with all the people the Hokage met with, ten of which entered the lab building on Tuesday and fifteen…”
The rain does not stop nor slow, still overlaying the girl’s words as she lists every detail she deems necessary to share: and that is enough for Rin.
When Izumi is done talking, her hands are still full.
Rin lunges.
—
“You know, Rin.” Izumi’s voice cuts through the night air as they perch upon the splaying branches of an oak tree for rest, “Kakashi mentioned you were once on a team with an Uchiha.”
A hint of surprise passes under her skin before she processes the sentence and looks towards the other girl’s perch. It’s not that tactless if Rin affords her the space to wonder about her family, but it still feels that way when neither of them have slept in days. “Oh, yes, we were. His name was Obito.”
Strangely, although Izumi’s interest was only piqued due to her dead clan, after a moment of silence it’s her silhouette that dips her head in condolence. “I’m sorry.”
For the loss, or for bringing it up?
“He would have liked you, I’m sure,” she says, and knows it’s true. There is a light in the child’s eyes despite the horrors she’s seen, one that matches the light he always had.
“What was he like?”
Curious, unabashedly. Like you, it seems. Rin starts talking before she even considers where to begin.
—
Izumi has known something has been off from the moment they chose to return to the Leaf. When you’re on your third espionage mission this spring you can tell when someone is gearing to strike. When you’re an Uchiha you notice easily when people can’t look you in the eye.
It wasn’t like this on their first trip, from the Leaf. It was better.
Did she do something?
The energy coils in her legs and she springs back against the cave wall the minute Rin moves, remembers to open both hands so that both the rabbit tail and the shuriken drop. She needs her hands open. “What are you doing?” she yelps.
It has been three years since the Uchiha genocide. Why come after her now?
She doesn’t have time to think about that. Rin Nohara isn’t near-par with Kakashi Hatake for nothing. Izumi barely has the breath to slam Rin’s elbow out of the way in time and redirect the slash that otherwise might have cut her throat open.
“Killing you.” Rin doesn’t have to answer Izumi for her to know that she is trying to end the fight now, but she does. “Those are my orders.”
The older woman twists to the side, shoves the kunai to the arm that Izumi doesn’t have hold of, and Izumi has to roll to avoid the hit.
Her eyes burn as she activates her Sharingan. She backs toward the cave mouth, drops her blade and flicks through the signs like the pages of a flipbook, quick enough for the average Chūnin eye to follow but not enough to react.
“Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu,” she whispers, and the second it takes for her to utter the name gives Rin the time to move—Back, to the side behind a jutting rock formation, just so the course of the fireball will not bake her in the confined space.
By the time it fades, a Water Style: Water Avalanche is crashing towards her, so immediate that the seals must have been formed the minute she hid from the fire. An attempt to wash her outside into the forest where Rin can fight in the open space.
Efficient.
That’s how they want Izumi to die: quickly, quietly. Just like everyone else in her family died.
Doesn’t take a genius to figure why her family was massacred when she knows what the ‘coup’ intended: one sellout with a Mangekyō was all it took.
Here’s another.
It’s a risk only if both of them make it out of here alive: if Rin dies she will take the knowledge with her, and if Izumi dies it will not have mattered at all.
So when Rin leaps out from behind her hiding spot, the whirlpool-like spiral burns into Izumi’s vision for a moment before it fades, telltale ache settling into her eyeballs as is characteristic of the ability. She fixes her stare on the approaching kunai.
Mangekyō Sharingan: Suhijini.
The sign in her eyes, special to her since the day she watched her friend put a sword through her mother’s heart, reflects back to her now on the kunai. Marked.
As if no longer held by Rin but by Izumi, the kunai in Rin’s hand jerks out of her grasp and flies toward her eye. It’s the easiest way to kill, and Izumi doesn’t want to kill her but Rin will still defend it all the more.
Rin fends off the kunai in her vision with mild annoyance and advances closer anyway. Izumi picks up another weapon and sends it careening towards the older woman’s face, too, and Rin shouts, “If you survive you will be branded as a traitor anyway. Make it easier for the both of us.”
Izumi can tell from her tone that she knows it’s a futile argument. She doesn’t need a village that doesn’t need her. She’s stayed loyal so far even though she figures the death of her family was less for peace and moreso an excuse to end the race they already hated for years past. No more. She finalizes it with a short “So be it.”
Another kunai picks itself off Rin’s belt and cuts a red line clean across the purple face-paint on her cheek.
That seems to be the final straw.
Rin’s chakra turns visible, silver and spiky. The transformation is almost instantaneous/
A noisy-scratch pattern of opaque shining gray crawls open and over her skin, covers her face until it’s all a coat of chakra that the weapons bounce uselessly off of.
A spiked tail made of the same color and spiritual sheen sprouts behind her.
Her eyes darken red and squint, not a far-off color from Izumi’s own. How fucking poetic.
A spark of hope takes hold in Izumi. She can still win.
Her hands form the seals before she can complete the thought, and before the blue-red particles at Rin’s mouth can finish forming. She fixes a Suhijini mark onto Rin’s Tailed-Beast chakra itself.
Has Rin forgotten why the Uchiha came under suspicion in the first place?
The Mangekyō Sharingan can puppeteer Tailed Beasts.
—
Rin cannot move.
Izumi can hear what she’s thinking, in this space of utter blackness save for the neutral-lit clarity with which they see each other: Isobu, break my chakra flow, get me out of this. … Isobu!
“Isobu…” Izumi didn’t know Tailed Beasts have names. “The Three-Tails can’t manipulate its chakra right now.”
Rin’s brow furrows. “Yet I’m still alive.”
That’s true.
Why is she still alive?
Izumi has never killed someone from the Hidden Leaf before, let alone someone she thought was her friend for however short a time it was. “I really thought you were nice, Rin.”
You didn’t look at me different at first. That’s why I asked about your friend Obito. She doesn’t say this to Rin, but in this space Izumi is still new to using, her thoughts echo against the blackness anyway as if she had shouted it. But she continues, shapes the next words with her mouth so Rin knows that she really intended to say this, “If I were going to exact revenge on the Leaf I would have done it already. I won’t pretend I understand why they did what they did but I really wasn’t.”
You don’t understand, comes Rin’s response. She doesn’t bother with the effort of speaking even within the genjutsu. That is reason enough for me to follow my orders. I have a duty to the village. The village comes before anything.
Izumi bites her lip. Were the Uchiha not part of the village?
That’s not… my business. The reply is instantaneous, albeit hesitant in the way the words come together. I would die than be used as a tool to destroy my village.
“You’re lucky, Rin,” Izumi says after a moment, voice quiet even in this place where she doesn’t speak with her real voice, “You never grew up hearing you weren’t really part of it.”
Is that why you would kill me?
Something inside Izumi’s chest hardens to cracking open. Not an hour before, she really had imagined she’d found a friend in Rin. “I should be asking you that.”
In the back of her mind she thinks she can feel the Tailed Beast chakra retracting, being drawn back into Rin.
The body is always slower than the mind.
Rin kicks a kunai off the floor and breaks her skin, and breaks herself out of the genjutsu before Izumi’s limbs can react.
—
Izumi had asked Rin for reason, but not for her life.
There is no defeat in her eyes, only a deep resignation that she will not be understood.
But Rin is not here to understand her. She is here to move fast and strike hard, and both have been done.
Now, glancing down at the kunai buried hilt-deep in her chest and looking back up at her acting mission commander, Izumi’s gaze instead moves over Rin’s shoulders and looks into the cave mouth. With a feeble hand she reaches in the direction, mouthing something Rin isn’t sure is a word.
It’s a name.
When Izumi crumples to her knees, she glances once again at Rin. More blood spurts from her lips than sound, but she manages, “We only wanted to– be allowed–” before her voice gives way to hacking.
It takes another minute before she can say, “To be your neighbors.”
Rin steps out of the girl’s direct line of vision to let her die in peace when she keels over.
There is a deciding instant between when someone is alive, and then they are not. It cannot be measured in milliseconds or nanoseconds. It is smaller than that.
But that’s not how it looks when Izumi’s eyes fix upon the cave mouth, bloodied hand still reaching for something Rin can’t see. That doesn’t seem to be the case when the glassy, dead feeling creeps in, drawing through what feels like almost a whole minute.
Finally, she finds the words. “I’m sorry,”
There is a light that someone’s eyes have when they are alive, and it is not the same as the light that reflects the sky or the flash of lightning. She sees it more keenly now.
Rin closes the girl’s eyes first when she buries the body she made of her.
Before she continues on her path, she buries the remains of the rabbit with it.