#consider: wars giggling and spinning around in the middle of the town street trying to make his skirt spin | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lazuliblur · 7 years

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[draft] awwyii 1

A woman cried out in the middle of the street. The noise attracted the attention of a passer-by, a man in his twenties with light combed back hair and an impeccably pressed suit in the same faded shade of blue as his glasses. Seeing a petite young woman with flowing black hair leaning against a wall and holding her foot, he put his newspaper under his arm and approached her.

“Are you all right, miss? Do you need anything?”

She looked up, dark onyx eyes set in a pale face, fixing him with unexpected intensity. For a moment, it was as though reality folded in on itself. There was something about those eyes that… fascinated him.

“I’m fine, thanks. I think I twisted my ankle.” She showed him a high-heeled shoe. Her cheeks blushed pink as she smiled. “I’m not used to wearing these… Could you help me walk over there? I don’t think I can manage on my own right now,” she said, pointing towards a bench in the shade of a maple tree across the street.

Her hair smelled like wild berries and she was biting her lip so beautifully that it sent the man’s thoughts spinning in a tight loop. At that one moment, she could have asked him anything and he would have said yes.

“Of course!”

He let her lean against his side and held her around the waist as they ambled towards the bench. Her foot must have hurt badly because she kept jostling him and throwing him off balance. As lithe and elegant as she looked, the man was surprised to discover that she, in fact, had a solid constitution. He never would have imagined her to be so heavy. Every time she bumped against him a little more roughly, though, she laid a hand over his, the picture of daintiness as she giggled and apologized for her clumsiness.

Once they reached the bench, he helped her sit down. By then, he was enchanted by her and he didn’t even think to question her motives when she grabbed his arm to keep him around for a while longer.

“My hero! Thanks for the help,” she said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“I— uh… no, not at all, miss,” he stuttered. No one in his life had ever looked at him with such tenderness in their eyes.

She reached down to rub her ankle, giving him an eyeful of cleavage in the process. He stiffened and almost averted his gaze, would have if her head had been turned in his direction. It wasn’t.

“So, are you from around here?” she asked.

“Here” being the largest port town in the Land of Hot Springs.

The man had to fight his racing thoughts to find the words with which to answer. With the ability to form full sentences out of his reach, it was all that he could do to mention that he had not been born there, but had just moved from a close-by island belonging to Water because of the new factory that was scheduled to start operating there next week.

“Shigeki Global. I’m Regional Manager there. We’re the largest company in the canned goods business out in the Land of Water and this is our first factory in the continent. It’s a big milestone.”

“Shigeki… Oh! I’ve heard of that place! Wow, you must be some kind of a big shot, huh?”

He preened under the attention, unconsciously adjusting his glasses.

“You might say that.”

“And have you ever met the big boss? He’s been all over the news lately. I wonder if any of those things they say about him are true.”

The man grunted. The stories circulating were not favorable towards his employer. They ranged from the ludicrous, about how he had made a deal with a devil, to the outrageous, like how he intended to dethrone the Water Daimyou and seize control of the nation for himself. The young manager suspected that their competition had had a hand in spreading such malicious stories.

“Taro Shigeki is a great and generous man, a corporate genius! He inherited a near bankrupt company and turned it into the most thriving enterprise in our country. When the children of Water were starving, he was the one who fed them, paying for the food out of his own pocket! He put them through school and provided them with a future! You shouldn’t pay any attention to those filthy rumors, miss.”

She leaned down to slip her shoe back into place. After a few experimental tugs, she deemed her ankle sufficiently recovered.

“Well, I hope you’re right. The world needs more good men in it,” she said as she stood. “Now, thank you for stopping to help me. I think I’m all better and it sounds like you’re a busy man, so I’d hate to keep you. Maybe we’ll see each other around, now that you’ll be working here.”

She extended a hand. He took it between his own to bid her goodbye. Her skin was cold and surprisingly coarse.

“I’d like that very much. Take care!”

As the man walked away, he looked back a few times to make sure he had not just had a complex hallucination. But no, the young woman was there and real and looking back at him too. He rounded the corner with a smile on his face, heart warmed by the thought of meeting her again in the future.

As he left her sight, the woman clasped her hands in a simple hand seal. “Release!” she said and a cloud of smoke erupted. When it dissipated, a young man stood in the woman’s place. Like the woman, his hair was jet black, but that was the extent of the similarities between them. The right side of his face bore deep scars and he wore a patch over one eye. The one that he did have, was red, now darkening to black. Sharingan.

Another man soon joined him in a second cloud of smoke. This one was light haired, just as tall but with a slighter build, but his left eye was similarly covered. Without looking his way, the first man pulled a book from his pocket and tossed it over at his partner.

“Here’s his agenda, Kakashi. You look it over...”

Obito sat down on the bench and lowered his head between his knees. Before looking at anything, Kakashi took a moment to ponder the street that Shigeki Global’s new Regional Manager had taken. His one visible eye was shining with humor as he turned back to Obito.

“You’re surprisingly good at playing that role. Is there anything you’d like to share?”

“Gods, shut up! I’ve told you before about what happens when you try to be funny. It’s creepy.” Despite his words, though, Kakashi could tell that Obito wasn’t really bothered. He knew because the glare he was given was nowhere near the Shut your mouth or I’ll punch you into next week end of the Obito spectrum.

“I think he would have said yes if you’d asked him out,” Kakashi couldn’t help but add.

“It was just genjutsu! Don’t make it weird.”

Obito jumped to his feet, physically needing to leave the topic behind. Impersonating others came so easily to him. Sometimes, he scared himself with just how easily he could slip into a role and pretend to be someone else. To leave himself behind and start over with a clean slate. It was frighteningly tempting. There was much of Obito’s past that he would like to pretend never happened.

Unaware of these thoughts, Kakashi fell into step next to him, leafing through the pages of the daily planner that had taken so much sacrifice to obtain.

“That guy was gross, anyway. Did you see the way he looked at me and how he couldn’t keep his hands off me? I don’t just paw at every strange girl that crosses my path,” Obito mumbled.

“To be fair, you were holding on to him and you don’t know any girls.”

Obito huffed a laugh. Looking over at Kakashi, who had his nose in the stolen agenda, he felt a surge of pride. Who would have thought that his once emotionally constipated teammate would ever learn sass? Better yet, who would have guessed that, after a childhood of rivalry, Obito would one day call him his best friend?

If there was one thing about his past that Obito was glad to hold on to, it was this bond. Through all the guilt and hardships, Kakashi kept him sane.

“Crane’s a girl.”

“True, but you’ve never actually met her, have you?” Kakashi pointed out.

Their current assignment required them to forego their uniforms for the sake of discretion, but the two surviving members of team Minato were actually working as Tiger and Hound, ANBU’s – and by extension the Leaf’s – top two-man team. They held the record for the longest-running string of successfully completed missions since the founding of the black ops.

Because neither of them had any knowledge of medical techniques, however, they sometimes called upon the services of Crane, a young medic who was leading an experimental program to render long-distance medical assistance to teams on the field. They had never met in person, but, as far as Obito was concerned, she was an unofficial part of team, ever since she had saved Kakashi’s life during a mission gone wrong.

“I’m sure I’d know more girls if my best friend would take a certain job.”

As easy as flipping a switch. Kakashi lifted his head and pinned a warning look on Obito. “We’re not talking about that.”

“Shit, you’d think they were asking you to sit in for torture!” Obito said. When that failed to get a response out of Kakashi, he added: “Something’s very wrong with you, you know? You were offered the best job in the world and you won’t even consider it! All you have to do is put on a damn hat.”

Kakashi hummed, determined to cast the ambient noise his friend was producing aside. “Elephant Island… Looks like Taro Shigeki goes there every other month. I wonder what’s there.”

Obito scowled at being ignored.

“You know I’d kill for that job and Lady Tsunade just gave it to you. The least you can do is show me some respect and take it!”

“We are not talking about this now.”

Obito was quickly growing sick of hearing that. Every time, it was Kakashi’s go-to phrase. Well, not any more. Head full of memories about the Fourth World War and of how easily their world could have ended – in no small part, thanks to Obito’s actions – the Uchiha planted himself in front of his best friend and forced him to stop.

“If not now, then when? It’s been like two weeks since you were asked and you still haven’t dug up your head out of the sand. This is not just going to go away! Lady Tsunade’s retiring and you need to step up and face reality. Hokage, Kakashi! Ho-ka-ge!”

They stared each other down for a small eternity, mismatched eyes fixed on each other. Even the civilian residents out for a walk sensed the tension between them and picked up their pace as they passed by.

Kakashi’s mask hid his expression and the slanted forehead protector covered an additional quarter of his face, but Obito had known him long enough to be able to guess which way the wheels were turning inside his friend’s stubborn one-track head. Kakashi was going to dismiss the subject. Again.

Except he didn’t.

“Not everyone has the same calling.”

It was the first time he had said anything on the subject. Before Obito could come up with an appropriate reply, though, before he could piece together what that comment was supposed to mean, Kakashi held up the planner, opened on the page bearing the current date.

“Found something,” he said, in a sing-song voice. “Shigeki has a meeting scheduled for tonight at the factory. It doesn’t say who else will be there, but we’d better start working on getting ourselves invited.”

Obito sighed and stepped aside to let Kakashi lead the way down to the docks, where the new Shigeki Global factory was located. The mission had to come first, as always. Sun down was only a couple of hours away so they did not have a lot of time left to scout the location.

“All right. Let’s wrap this up. But I’m not done with you,” Obito warned. “We’re totally talking about you taking this job afterwards. And by ‘talking’ I mean me beating you up until you accept it.”

“Sure. Whatever you say, crybaby.”

“How sure are we that this Shigeki’s a bad guy?” Obito – or rather, Tiger – asked. He and Kakashi were crouched on the rafters above the entrance of Shigeki Global’s new factory. A backup team was on the ground, covering the entrance of a secondary building. Now that they were off the streets, the animal masks and full ANBU uniforms were back in place to protect their identity.

Shigeki was due to arrive at any minute.

“I mean, Lady Tsunade says he’s rotten, but from the way everyone we’ve met so far talks about him, you’d think Shigeki fed every baby and pet every puppy from here to the Hidden Mist.”

“Who knows what his full story is,” Kakashi replied. “Apparently there’s reason enough to suspect him. Keep in mind that it was the Mizukage who flagged him as dangerous.”

And that was a big red note written in all capital letters on the cons side of the table, Obito had to admit. He and Kakashi had personally met the Mizukage during the Fourth Ninja World War, a woman by the name of Mei Terumii. She was a Mist ninja through and through. Like every other survivor of the sadistic practices that had been common place in that village under the previous Mizukage’s rule, she did not scare easily. It would have been out of character for her to advise the other villages in the ninja alliance to keep an eye on the business man unless she had good reason to doubt him.

“How long has it been since we’ve heard from the Hidden Mist, though? It has to have been weeks since we got an update on their investigation.”

“All the more reason to make sure of what we’re dealing with before Shigeki expands his business to Fire Country territory. No castle was ever overthrown by caution,” Kakashi said, as though quoting from a rulebook.

Obito hated it when that dead, mechanical tone made a comeback. The conversation stalled, however, as his sharingan caught the shapes of five people coming towards the factory.

Two of the individuals looked murky in the greyscale world of the Uchiha’s bloodline ability, their chakra systems underdeveloped. It was characteristic of civilians, as the flow of their vital energy naturally grew more and more impaired by age and disuse. The other three were very different. Their chakras shone in bright, sharp shades of blue. From the intensity and speed of their chakra circulation, he estimated them to be around chuunin-level ninjas.

Obito did not like it. Thanks to the new information sharing policies that had come with the establishment of the united shinobi alliance, he and Kakashi knew for a fact that none of the hidden villages were working with Shigeki. These three had to be rogues.

“Showtime,” Obito told Kakashi and the backup team through their radio transmitter, right before the bulky factory doors opened with a metallic screech.

Their friend, the Regional Manager, was the first to step inside, almost tripping over himself in his haste to hold the doors open for the others. His glasses slipped a little further down his nose every time he lowered his head in a bow.

“I beg your forgiveness, Mr. Shigeki. I was sure that I’d brought my agenda with all the security codes with me… There is no excuse for my forgetfulness!”

Another man followed, his every two steps marked by the tap of a cane on concrete. He all but ignored the Regional Manager as he walked in, pausing at the edge where the blade of amber street light coming in through the open door met darkness, chest open and chin held high. His white designer long coat with a full mink fur collar spoke of massive wealth.

Obito and Kakashi’s mission briefing scroll had only included a brief description of Taro Shigeki – tall, fit, thin brown hair and eyebrows, with a distinctive mole on the right side of his jawline – but there was no mistaking the look of pride in a man surveying his domain.

Shigeki waved the cane behind him.

“Lights! Lights! Let’s see what we have here!”

The Regional Manager hurried to flip the main switch on the state of the art circuit breaker. Row after row, the lamps hanging from the ceiling lit with a wave of resounding clangs until the full length of the open-plan factory was illuminated.

Obito and Kakashi’s position became further obscured, as they lay immediately above one such light. Their thoughts, however, were far from whether or not they would be spotted. They were confused.

The remaining three members of Shigeki’s entourage had stepped inside the factory. Mist ninjas. Their forehead protectors bore the intact symbol of their village. What was the Mizukage up to?

Taro Shigeki walked further into the room, spinning in place with his arms wide open to encompass the full scale of his newest business venture. He took a deep breath, held it in, expelled it out.

“Ahhh! Can you smell that, Tanaka?” he asked the Regional Manager, a grin brightening his features. “Brine and oil! Brine and oil! Doesn’t it fill you with excitement for all the wonderful things that will take place here once the factory starts production?”

His employer’s high spirits helped Regional Manager Tanaka overcome his initial embarrassment. He came to stand next to Shigeki, imagining that he too experienced a portion of that wonder as he glanced at the bare walls and exposed wiring of the incomplete building.

“Yes, sir. The first shipment of equipment is due to arrive in the morning. We’ll start the assembly of—”

Shigeki interrupted his carefully prepared report.

“Brine and oil, Tanaka!” He tapped his young employee’s shoulder with the crystal encrusted tip of his cane. “That’s all you need for success, or so my father used to say. The raw materials and the hard work to turn them into something that people will pay money for!”

“Yes, sir.”

Shigeki regarded the other man with an uplifted manicured brow and a benign smile. His brief sigh did not escape the Leaf ninjas’ notice. In the face of his employee’s limited vision, his speech became less extravagant.

“Well, it looks like we still have some time until our friends arrive. Why don’t you fill me in on the current state of operations here, Tanaka?”

The Regional Manager’s joy to be back on script was entirely transparent. Obito and Kakashi, though, were not as interested in listening him talk about the company’s phased hiring plans or the detailed inventory of the cargo that was due to arrive by boat at their private dock over the following days. Nothing about his speech stood out as uncommon or unexpected. Just regular business proceedings.

The three Mist ninjas were still, stationed by the door. The Leaf team began to suspect that they were there as spies to inform the Mizukage about Shigeki’s dealings.

Obito and Kakashi shared a shrug. Everything pointed to the conclusion that their mission was a bust. They hadn’t been able to find a single thing out of place. Taro Shigeki was just another business man who had gotten lucky and made a fortune off of the post-war needs of the people of the Land of Water, it seemed. The two of them were stuck in place for the moment, though, as Kakashi, the official team leader, was too thorough to cut their observation short early.

Kakashi sent one long tap over his radio transmitter, a signal to the backup team to hold their position and stay out of sight.

Obito nudged Kakashi then and whispered.

“Hey, does this remind you of Threads of Sorrow or what? That part where the Princess buries her father?”

Kakashi’s eyes moved from their targets. Leave it to Obito to start thinking about a movie at a time like this. The scene he was talking about didn’t even have anything to do with their current situation. The Princess’s love interest, at the time nothing but an enemy who had sworn to kill her, had hid behind a rock while she spoke aloud about her father and taken pity on her.

Well, with a little stretch of the imagination, there were some parallels, Kakashi supposed. Only Obito could have made such an association, though.

“You watch too much crap. Jiraya’s original books are better.”

There was an ongoing debate between them over whether the films or the books they were based on were better. Kakashi claimed to have never seen the adaptation (secretly, he had) but he said that the books were better anyway and that Obito should make himself less of an illiterate ignorant by reading them.

“Hey, don’t badmouth Rin! She’s a great actress. Besides, those books have zero taste.”

Kakashi gave Obito an exasperated look. “Like you’ve read them enough to know.”

Taro Shigeki was walking further into the building, inspecting office spaces and the few technical rooms that were already set up with electrical appliances along the way, so the two of them had to move to a better location if they hoped to continue watching him.

“Don’t need to. The words make out in the title pretty much give everything away.”

Kakashi never got a chance to reply. Both of them cringed and lifted a hand to their ears as their radios chose that moment to deliver a loud inhuman shriek directly into their eardrums.

Beneath them, Shigeki and his employee carried on their inspection, as though nothing had happened. The Mist ninjas trailed after them a short distance away, equally unfazed.

The noise had been so shrill and obnoxious that it took Obito and Kakashi a few seconds to recover and realize what it was.

A scream. Their backup was under attack.

Activating his Mangekyou Sharingan, Obito transported both himself and Kakashi to their teammates’ location.

One of the Leaf ninjas was already down by the time that the two of them arrived. Standing opposite was a full squad of Mist ninjas, decked in their customary blues and greens and bearing unmarked forehead protectors. Like the group left behind, these were not rogues either.

There was no reason, then, why they should be fighting their Leaf allies.

Obito wasted no time before throwing himself into the fight, sharingan blazing and doing his best to incapacitate rather than kill. Kakashi hung back, taking out the incautious ones with mid to long-range strikes, while he tried to make sense of what caused the confrontation. Discretion was tossed out the window.

Obito entered a state of semi consciousness. After so many years serving as an active ninja, he no longer needed to think about his moves. His muscles knew how to react on instinct. If one of the enemies struck high, he ducked and kicked them in the gut. If they struck low, he jumped and jabbed them in the throat with the metal plates on the back of his gloves. As long as they were gasping on the floor for air, there were two less enemies to worry about.

Two more attacked from the right – and Obito let them pass through him, becoming intangible so that he could catch them with an incandescent fire breath from behind.

He never completed the handseal sequence, though. A dull, rumbling roar coming from somewhere out at sea broke the quiet of the night and a chill that had nothing to do with the weather electrified Obito’s spine.

He froze. For a moment, the ground beneath him did not look like flat cement, but rather a desolate battlefield of jutting rocks. The swaying shapes cast by the ceiling lights on the wall to his left ceased to register as shadows, looking more like deadly tails and tentacles reaching skywards from white monsters with infinite chakra stores, ready to wipe out the world from existence.

Obito furiously blinked through his panic and the illusion passed as if it had never been. Were he a lesser ninja, his distraction might have cost him his life. As it was, he was able to keep his cool long enough to snap back to reality and realize that it was only the sound of a ship’s foghorn that he had heard.

He did not wait a second longer before forcing himself back into action. He phased through the enemy’s mostly blind attempts to retaliate and systematically took out those threatening his teammates’ lives. Kakashi removed the remaining enemy ninjas from the battle with well-aimed kunai throws and lightning techniques.

The battle was short lived, but it caused too great a disturbance to go unnoticed. Running footsteps approached from the direction that Shigeki and his Mist escort had been in.

“Obito?” Kakashi asked. His friend’s odd moment of hesitation had not escaped his notice.

“I’m fine,” the Uchiha said without a second thought. They were the only ones left standing. Their entire backup team was down. “I’m calling Crane for help, these guys are in bad shape!”

“You’re an interesting one.”

The foreign voice was quiet and smooth, but it came out of nowhere. It sent Obito and Kakashi whirling around to look for the speaker, only to find that the man who spoke wasn’t hiding at all. Just standing in front of the door with the Mizukage by his side.

He did not appear to be from either Leaf or Mist. Wrapped in burnt orange robes, pale skinned and with long, unkempt hair covering half of his face, he had a strange symbol tattooed on his forehead and extending down the bridge of his thin nose. Only half of it was visible, but it was reminiscent of an elephant’s head.

His eyes were fixed on Obito.

His chakra could barely be felt. Even the Uchiha’s sharingan could only discern a dull smudge where a fully formed chakra system should have been. The same thing was true for the Mizukage, even though Obito knew that her chakra burned a bright amber. If not for what their eyes undeniably told Obito and Kakashi, the two newcomers would have been invisible to their other senses.

It was hard to believe that they had been there all along, watching the fight. It was an unsettling thought, almost as unsettling as trying to decide whether the stranger was friend or foe. The Mizukage was the Leaf’s ally, yet the squad of fallen Mist ninjas at their feet told a different story.

“Lady Mizukage?” Kakashi asked, but he was cut off by the stranger, who waved a hand at the Leaf team.

“Darling Mei, would you please?”

The Mizukage started forward, a coy finger rubbing her bottom lip in preparation to use one of her deadliest techniques.

That, at least, settled a few of Kakashi and Obito’s doubts, though it brought a whole new batch of questions to the table.

“Lava Release…”

#awwyii the remake #breaking up the chapter early #arrgh

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