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#while telling naruto that they're expendable
tozettastone · 25 days
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5/the soulmate phenomenon (is ruining my life)? mostly just curious about the path the fic would have taken! ❤️
Number 5 is "#5 is a free space in which your gentle readers can ask you about whether or not you're going to update this fic and/or what was going to happen before you put it down to go lie down in perpetuity. (They have 24 hours. Let's not go crazy.)"
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This ask is talking about this fic.
I've worked on that one in the course of the past year at least and I do actually have hopes of updating it one day. Anyone who is a longtime reader of my fics knows I took seven years to finish one fic and ten years to finish another... so it would not be wise to assume it's abandoned. xD
But, okay, here's the summary version. This is a dot point explanation of where the fic goes from where it left off.
This contains literally all of the spoilers for the whole fic. :)
Read beneath the cut at your own risk, etc.
Having defeated Ino, Sakura draws Sasuke for her first fight in the final of the chuunin exams. Kakashi sets Naruto up with Ebisu to work on his basics, elects to train Sasuke himself and tells Sakura that she can make inroads on her conditioning over the course of a month if she's smart. He gets Gai-sensei to look in on her every few days, but it's faaairly obvious nobody thinks a genin who won her preliminary on the strength of her genjutsu is going to beat Sasuke. Sakura knows this is practical but it feels cruel.
Her mother doesn't really notice the exams. She doesn't bring it up.
While Naruto is off training with Jiraiya instead of Ebisu, Sakura is bonding with Orochimaru, her soulmate. He drifts by her second storey window ever day or so like a miasma and comes in to see her in the evenings. He does her hair and tells her how pretty she'll be when she grows into her face. He brings her little trinkets (he starts with an ornamental comb but quickly moves on to rare poisons and old scrolls). He tells her she's so clever, it's little wonder she's all his.
Orochimaru seems very glamorous and competent and beautiful and he is absurdly gentle with her. He is already a magnet for wayward kids and teenagers, and this effect is amplified with his soulmate. Sakura occasionally wonders what he's doing in Konoha but she struggles to think clearly because of the whole soulmate phenomenon.
This cuts both ways, though. Orochimaru risks kind of a lot to keep coming to the same location in a village full of ninja just to see his soulmate every day. He helps her come up with a genjutsu that has no visual component, which can therefore¹ affect Sasuke without being vulnerable to the sharingan.
In the final tournament, Sasuke tries to get Sakura to give up by being absurdly mean to her at the beginning of their fight. Sakura would previously have wilted and not even tried to fight him, but she has a secret weapon, and it's imagining that Orochimaru expended all his time and expertise on plain little her and realising she straight-up cannot handle the humiliation and shame of giving up. She would prefer that Sasuke stab her than that she disappoint her soulmate, actually.
She does not beat Sasuke in the chuunin exam. Nobody is surprised that she loses, but they're extremely surprised by the amount of trouble she gives him first.
Gaara's first fight isn't with Sasuke, it's with Naruto. Naruto is also his soulmate (hinted at in an earlier chapter!) which makes his complete meltdown more severe. He freaks out totally and Orochimaru (disguised as the Kazekage) gives the signal to invade early because of it.
The Hiruzen-Orochimaru fight goes very similarly to how it does in canon, but, after Hiruzen seals his arms and dies, Sakura uses her genjutsu skills to try to help cover Orochimaru's retreat. He takes advantage of this and fucks right off, although I'm sure he feels real bad about it. His bad feelings aren't much comfort to Sakura in prison.
She's taken into custody. She has one conversation with a baffled Inoichi, but she's very low risk, so she's left in remand to cool her heels while sixty other invasion-related problems take precedence. She tries to write to Orochimaru, and she tries doing it with blood, but he can't answer. Hiruzen sealed up his arms. It occurs to Sakura that she's mega fucked it up, but she's kind of insulated from the scope of how much trouble she's in because her bond makes her feel like it was very righteous and everyone here is against her, rather than like she's done something awful herself.
Orochimaru has no arms but he and Kabuto can raise a boatload of cash at need. He goes on his canonical search for Tsunade, but he also sends a message to someone he knows who'll do pretty much anything if there's enough money involved. You may see where this is going!
Sakura knows nothing of this. She's alone, disregarded, and waiting in prison while people ignore her to try to fix the massive infrastructural damage of an attempted invasion. She's the POV character so we get a few conversations with Inoichi, Kakashi, and Naruto, and we don't hear anything about Orochimaru from her until Kakuzu, Itachi and Hidan show up to break her out. (Kakuzu and Hidan are there for her. Itachi travels with them to be a menace on behalf of his brother, as in canon; they are his companions and not Kisame just because all three are travelling to Leaf.)
This is when Sakura learns that her soulmate hasn't forgotten about her: he's hired these absolutely bonkers missing-nin. Itachi and Hidan are a massive distraction while Kakuzu kicks down the doors and tosses her over his shoulder. They hoof it out of the village. As you do. Itachi splits from them at one point, but it's unclear if he's off on his canonical confrontation with Naruto, Sasuke and Jiraiya.
IDK if I was ever going to manage to make this actual text, but: Hidan says he has no need for an earthly thing like a soulmate, but when he uses his One Weird Trick, Jashin writes on his body in huge, hostile characters, and who pretty much only writes in synonyms of suffering. Does he have a soulmate? You decide.
Sakura is cut loose, a freshly made missing-nin, out in River somewhere. She asks Kakuzu what she's meant to do and he says he wasn't paid to tell her anything. Thanks, Kakuzu. He and Hidan continue on their dysfunctional way.
Sakura has a steep learning curve where she does odd jobs as a missing-nin for months and months in a kind of existential limbo. Eventually she receives a job that is to kill a guy she feels is a very, very bad person and she realises that assassinations pay really well, can feel really good, and are really easy for a genjutsu type. Other things that are really easy for her: spying, stealing information. Unlike in canon, she never learns her taijutsu, medical or crazy strength skills, so she sucks at 1:1 fair combat and ends up doing way more traditional "kunoichi" work.
This is her life now.
Orochimaru does not write for ages. He has no arms. The Tsunade thing backfires (as you know).
She's a couple years older and injured badly in Moon Country, where she was off assassinating a useless prince who doesn't regard his own people at all, the first time he finally writes again.
It's to tell her he's been keeping tabs and she's doing wonderfully. He's recovered. He has a new body. He's looking forward to seeing her.
Sakura comes back to the mainland to recover, and takes up temporary work doing information exchange and bounty drops (she doesn't have the sprawling highly resourced network of a village behind her anymore—she can't just get a room somewhere and lie down for two months) in a dingy bar/teahouse, where she gets to practice her customer service skills with a twitching murderous smile every night. How fun.
While she's been gone, Akatsuki has run amok. Changes to canon events for the curious: Sasori and Deidara killed Gaara, and Sasori killed Chiyo and Shikamaru, whose shadows weren't capable of stopping everything Sasori threw at him all at once. He also killed Kankuro with his poison. This all has flow-on effects, like how Hidan and Kakuzu are still alive. A lot more Leaf-nin are dead.
She sees Kakuzu in the bar/teahouse. He comes to drop off a body. It's Asuma's. He does not buy a drink, and he rudely counts his cash at the bar. This man has no manners.
The story ends when she's finally reunited with Orochimaru. He comes to visit her at the bar (he does buy a drink).
He's using Sasuke's body, which is all his now.
I find the sharingan kind of broken and I like to headcanon that you could get around the "makes an entire branch of skills irrelevant" issue by having good enough chakra control and being really creative with non-visual genjutsu. It's not a perfect solution because humans are extremely visual creatures, but it's better than just going "oh well, guess I'll die then." (I also want to slide this idea into my OC: Red 'verse eventually.)
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panharmonium · 2 years
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i am losing my MIND.  
the laser-focused intensity in this scene - LOOK at this!  naruto is throwing a fit in the background and neither kakashi nor sasuke so much as BLINKS in his direction.
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neither of them acknowledge any of naruto’s outraged interjections.  they never respond to any of his questions.  it’s like they can’t even hear him.  kakashi is talking to sasuke - only to sasuke - and he’s saying more than what naruto and sakura are able to hear.
what i mean by that:
the above exchange, along with the one before it (“sasuke, what is your current dream?”/“if you don’t want to tell us what you’re thinking right now, sasuke, that’s fine”), as well as the moment when sasuke and kakashi first encounter each other (“sasuke, i’m sorry for appearing so suddenly.  i promise we’ll talk more later”), are all scenes where kakashi extends a shocking degree of grace without asking sasuke to explain himself or defend his actions or justify the apparent trust kakashi is placing in him, and the most crucial thing to recognize about these moments is that kakashi knows sasuke isn’t “on their side” right now.  from the moment sakura mentions that sasuke wants to become hokage, kakashi recognizes what sasuke is planning to do.  you can see it clicking for him - immediately after sakura asks “what’s the meaning behind saying you’ll be hokage,” kakashi realizes just how sasuke plans to achieve that dream:
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but even given this - even suspecting that a post-battle sasuke is planning to drop their temporary alliance and go right for naruto’s throat - kakashi decides to keep telling sasuke the same thing he tells all the kids: i believe in you.  “it’s okay if you don’t want to share what you’re thinking right now,” he says, even though he’s pretty sure that what sasuke is thinking about is killing naruto and taking the hokage’s seat by force.  “i promise we’ll talk more later,” he says, as if there’s no doubt in his mind that sasuke’s future includes a “later” where they can sit down together and have a conversation.  “you should be the one leading team 7′s four-man squad,” he says, even though he and sasuke both know that sasuke is planning to turn on at least one of them as soon as this battle is over. 
kakashi gives sasuke team 7, even though he knows that sasuke no longer considers himself to be a member of the squad.  he does it in front of everyone, over naruto’s vocal objections, his eyes never leaving sasuke’s for a second.  he’s trying to tell sasuke something that the other two can’t hear, and while we won’t know for a while whether sasuke really absorbs the message or not, i respect kakashi SO MUCH for choosing to deliver it, especially since it’s done at his own risk and in defiance of any and all common sense.  
no other adult in the hidden leaf would have recommended that kakashi take this route.  everyone outside team 7 has already written sasuke off (”this guy has no future”), and even though kakashi knows perfectly well that sasuke has plans that aren’t necessarily “we all make up and become friends again,” kakashi still chooses to step into a trust fall that no one in their right mind would have advised as a safe or smart course of action.  he doesn’t do it foolishly or naively or out of an abundance of rose-tinted optimism.  he does it with his eyes wide open and his heart steeped in acceptance of the risk he knows he’s taking.
the following is just my own impression, but the sense i get from all of kakashi’s interactions with sasuke in this arc (and of course these are just my current thoughts from where i’m at right now; things may change as the story progresses) is that kakashi has reached some kind of settled internal decision about how to handle sasuke’s reappearance (and what sasuke might be planning to do now that he’s back).  i don’t know if it’s because of everything else that’s happened in the last few hours, or because of all the other times today where kakashi has been painfully confronted with the hard-to-accept knowledge that he isn’t responsible for other people’s choices and can only honor his ideals and take care of the people around him as best he can, but whatever the contributing factors are, in the end, when it comes to sasuke, kakashi decides to take a leap of faith and believe in the student he helped raise.  he’s not going to interrogate him about his intentions, and he’s not going to confront him about his plans.  he’s not going to abandon him, certainly - the things he says to sasuke in this arc are still lessons, last reminders (there’s a “later” for you with us, if you want it - it’s okay if you don’t want to share with us, but “that we were all once members of team 7 is an incontrovertible fact, isn’t it?”) - but he’s not going to counsel sasuke to change his mind, and he’s not going to exhort sasuke to turn back.  kakashi is choosing to trust sasuke to walk that last mile of broken road himself, to find his way home on his own.
kakashi has spent his whole life fighting to save the people around him from everything under the sun, but this time, for perhaps the first time, he decides that what he and his students have already done for sasuke is going to have to be enough for sasuke to save himself.  it’s not a decision that comes out of nowhere - from the very beginning, kakashi has always been the one who’s known that sasuke would have to make the decision to come back on his own, and this is just an extension of that understanding.  all of team 7′s members know, deep down, that sasuke is planning to turn on them.  all of them understand, on some level, that sasuke isn’t really on their side yet.  but kakashi still chooses to hand sasuke the reins to team 7 regardless, willingly ceding control of a group that sasuke doesn’t even consider himself to be a part of anymore, all to communicate the message “i trust you to lead us, even when you say you aren’t one of us.  i have faith that you won’t hurt us, despite your explicitly expressed desire to kill us.  i (still) believe in you.”
i’ll have to keep watching to find out whether his choice here is justified, but even though i’m pretty sure it (eventually) will be, i don’t think kakashi will regret making it even if it turns out to be wrong.  he chooses this knowing full well that it’s a risk.  he knows sasuke has already tried to kill him once, and there’s absolutely no reason for him to think sasuke won’t just leave him for dead somewhere on the battlefield that they’re about to enter.  but if that’s where they’re headed...well, then, i think kakashi feels like that’s just where they’re headed.  he’s accepted it.  risks or not, this is the only choice he can make.  he tried to make a different one the last time he and sasuke confronted each other, and even though he did it for all the right reasons and in the service of protecting innocent people, i suspect that somewhere in between then and now he’s come to the realization that treading that path again just isn’t something he’s willing or able to do.  he’d rather take this unlikely gamble and put his life in sasuke’s hands and maybe end up killed for his misplaced trust than harden his heart and drive his hand into another young person’s chest.  
accepting this risk is the only road kakashi can take that doesn’t feel like a betrayal of everything he stands for.  it’s the only choice he can make right now.  i don’t know how things will play out from here, or how the situation might change later, but in this particular moment, this is what kakashi thinks is right, and this is what he has to do.  no matter how ill-advised his choice might sound to an outsider, kakashi has known for a long time that doing the right thing doesn’t come with guarantees, that the mark of true conviction isn’t just doing what’s right when you know your choices will be validated, but rather doing what’s right when you know they probably won’t be, when you know you might suffer for it, when you know you might die for it.  true conviction means doing the right thing even when you can’t be sure that you won’t pay for it later, and for kakashi, in this moment, the right thing for him to do is believe.  he has to believe that sasuke will be able to sort his own heart out in time.  he has to trust that he has done everything he can for this kid, and that sasuke possesses everything he needs in order to break free from his chains and become who he’s meant to be.  kakashi has to give his lost student one last chance. 
whether this choice pans out or not, i don’t think it’s a decision that kakashi will regret.  he may have spent the past thirty years unfairly second-guessing and blaming himself for every other decision he’s made in his life, but the choice to take a leap of faith on a child he cares about is a decision about which his conscience will always be clear.
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mixelation · 2 years
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if you've been here a while you may remember my Tobirama/OC thing (bulletpoint outline, excerpt). you may also remember me whining about how it's hard to develop an OC who's just as interesting as the other main characters (who in this fic would be Tobirama, Tsunade, maybe Jiraiya) but also seems like an organic product of the setting. anyway under the cut is some discussion of the OC and possible story so I don't fucking forget.
Okay, so to review: I originally thought of this as wanting to write an SI soulmate fic. The OC, Ren, is an SI in the sense that it's a character designed with some aspects of myself in mind, but I don't think this fits with the way the Naruto fandom current uses "SI." She's not a real world person reborn or anything like that; she's a tokubetsu jounin who works in R&D in Ame. Soulmates in this AU have the "first thing your soulmate says to you" written on you. Ren has been assigned to a project that involves trying to move people around in a hiraishin-style jutsu, and through that she accidentally summons Tobirama (her soulmate) from the middle of his fight with the Kinkaku Squad or whatever they're called.
I wanted to justify why she has this deep knowledge of hiraishin-adjacent jutsu and ended up with a fairly complicated background. I think I'll have to be pretty careful about how I present it in writing to not turn readers off? So it will go a little like this:
The first thing Tobirama asks her, after he's demanded to know where he is and stitches himself up, is how the fuck did you do that. She shows him the jutsu formula and he's like: oh so she's a little bit of a maniac.
Tobirama cannot go outside so he's stuck in her lab. He often gets left alone while she goes around and pretends she didn't break time with her research and they both try to figure out how to smuggle him out of the village once he's healed enough to travel safely. As far as Tobirama can tell, Ren's research is mostly agricultural? Like she has bays of plants under different treatments growing. He recognizes her surname (Kaentake) as an old ninja clan whose Thing was mushroom cultivation, so it makes sense to him that she went plant-fungi symbiosis (which is a lot of the research) -> general agriculture (GM crops, etc). However he doesn't get why she also knows time-space jutsu?!
When he asks her about it, Ren is like: WELL, this isn't really a secret, I guess. So she tells him that when she was a kid and the Third Shinobi War broke out, her genin team was captured by Iwa. Iwa cut off some of their fingers so they couldn't perform handsigns for ninjutsu but could still do manual labor. Then, once Iwa realized the Yellow Flash was going to be a Problem, they started using their prisoners (who were expendable) to try and counter act him. They tried stealing hiraishin seals, and then they started trying to send prisoners in as a vanguard to physically fuck up hiraishin seals. None of this worked particularly well, but Ren was stuck in the thick of this for years and has an intimate knowledge of how the hiraishin works.
(But, also, note: even if you know all the ins and outs of the jutsu, it's stupid hard to actually execute, which is why no one has successfully reverse-engineered it from the seals left behind.)
Tobirama senses there's a lot Ren isn't telling him-- like how she ended up back in Ame, or how she even survived doing that for so many years-- but he doesn't press for more details.
One of the things we see when Ren is away from the lab is her going to meet with Konan about a request she put in to honor a specific person (currently named Ayaka but this could change) by adding her name to some sort of war memorial. Konan is basically like, "No, I understand you were friends but she wasn't an Ame-nin, why did you even request this?" and Ren is like, "Well, I thought it wouldn't hurt to try..." We also see that Ren doesn't have many social connections but is very dedicated to a shrine for Ayaka.
We also see that Ren getting into an argument with the head of R&D because he's like "why are you modifying rice to make more vitamin A if you could be working on making us a new bloodline limit like everyone else?" and she goes back into lab and rants at Tobirama about how vitamin deficiencies are one of the leading causes of childhood mortalities in several prefectures, and we could be solving THAT, but everyone is like "WHAT IF WE POISONED ALL THE RICE INSTEAD?"
Tobirama agrees with her that Vitamin Rice Would Be Good but is also like: no civilian farmer in their right mind would trust the product of some ninja's crazy science experiment to eat? How are you going to scale production up just in your little lab's greenhouse bay? You'd have to work with the Daimyo or local nobility to coordinate directly with farmers, not a ninja village, and Ren is very >8C
Anyway the point is that even though Tobirama is grumpy and critical, he's critical in a way that helps Ren's goals, so when they start to work out how to get him out of Ame, Ren asks what would happen if she went with him to Konoha.
In the morning, she shoos Tobirama away from remaking expired reagents and into her office.
“What…” she says slowly, unsure of how to even suggest her new plan for getting him out. “Hypothetically speaking… what would happen… if I came with you?”
She watches Tobirama’s face closely, expecting to see surprise or excitement or maybe even disgust at the idea of taking her with him back to Konoha. Instead he just looks thoughtful for a few seconds and replies:
“We’d get married.”
“What the fuck!” Ren hears herself cry, throwing her hands in the air.
“What?” Tobirama asks, helpfully scooting himself into a corner of the office so Ren can pace anxiously. “We’re soulmates.”
“It doesn’t follow that we’d get married,” Ren hisses back. This is… this isn’t at all what she was expecting. She doesn’t have a plan going forward for this option.
Tobirama’s eyes narrow-- a move which looks deeply intimidating and like he’s debating how to slice you open, but which Ren is fairly sure just means he’s thinking-- and he tilts his head slightly to the side.
“It would have been expected in my time,” Tobirama says slowly, “for different-sex soulmates to marry and produce children. Is this not still true?”
Ren pauses in her pacing, staring and her old-fashioned soulmate. Oh gods, she thinks, he’s being completely serious about marrying me.
“No,” she snaps immediately. “Well, maybe for big clans, but--”
She cuts herself off. Tobirama just raises an eyebrow at her.
Oh gods, Ren thinks, feeling hysterical, he’s being completely serious about making me wife of the Senju clan head.
Ren’s face must look suitably horrified, because Tobirama says, “Marriage is an option we can explore at a later time. As a former Hokage, I would guarantee your safety in Konoha.”
He also seems deadly serious about this, and yet Ren doesn’t feel calmed at all.
“And what does that mean?” she asks, waving her arms and going back to pacing. “Like, chuck me in a holding cell until I spill all of Ame’s secrets but hey! You’re still alive! safe, or-- I don’t know-- end up permanently possessed by Nakayama, or-- what the fuck could an Uchiha do to me--”
Tobirama looks… vaguely startled, and that makes him hesitate a moment before he spins Ren around and places both hands on her shoulders. They’re big and heavy, and Ren glares at his clavicle.
“Safe,” he says, “as in physically and mentally unharmed, and able to live freely.”
Ren shrugs off his hands and takes a step back so she can glare at his face.
“Live freely as in your custody, live freely as in be watched by ANBU, or actually live freely?”
Tobirama’s face twitches, and it almost looks like he’s fighting back a smile.
“I’m not a demon trying to trick you with misleading promises,” he says.
“Then answer the question,” Ren answers, narrowing her own eyes.
Tobirama’s ultimate promise is: he’s confident in his ability to sway (command) Hiruzen to let Ren live under her soulmate’s custody, and that Tobirama has no intention of controlling what she does as long as she’s not actively sabotaging Konoha. With badgering he also promises the possibility of her leaving Konoha altogether if she wants to.
“And what if,” Ren asks very slowly, when she’s done badgering Tobirama for details, “you can’t sway Sarutobi, because he’s old and you’re supposed to be dead?”
Tobirama leans into her, replacing his hands on her shoulders. “If Hiruzen cannot accept you after you’ve risked your life to help me,” he says, very firmly, “then I have no problem reclaiming my status as Hokage.”
“Oh,” Ren says quietly. “Okay, then.”
The way they get out involves some bullshit with Ren's soulmate summoning seal, which I haven't ironed out the details of yet. The main blocks to getting out is that Pein can sense anyone moving around in the village (so Tobirama needs to be super covert unless he wants to fight a whole village); Ren is not actually allowed out of the village because she spent so long working for an enemy village, even if it was under duress; I am going to let Tobirama figure out Hiraishin but not at this time because it would make fleeing a ninja village to easy. :P
...also, very important, Ren has a cat with anxiety she makes Tobirama help her smuggle out too.
“Miyuki is a cat?” Tobirama asks, confused, while Ren runs to catch her.
“What did you think she was?” Ren asks, bemused, as she dumps Miyuki into Tobirama’s arms. The cat lets out an unhappy yowl, which Tobirama ignores.
“A child,” Tobirama says accusingly, as if Ren has deprived him of a human baby.
Anyway! They have a roadtrip to Konoha and Hiruzen is like What the FUCK but Tobirama checks out as being a bonafide 100% real Tobirama, and they call in Jiraiya to verify Ren's jutsu. (Which, several people note, has to potential to change they very nature of war?! And Ren is like, "uuuh I would rather it.... not?") Also at some point this happens:
“Yeah, well,” Ren says, nodding. Here’s the awkward part. “You know how I said I couldn’t use any ninjutsu?”
Instead of looking annoyed or angry, Tobirama just laughs. It’s a full, loud laugh that takes years off his face and makes Ren jump.
“You lied. Of course you lied,” he says when he’s gotten control of himself. “You’re going to make presenting you as harmless to Hiruzen either very easy or very tricky.”
“Just you wait,” Ren says dryly, collapsing onto her loveseat. “This one I learned in Iwa.”
(Living as a prisoner in Iwa was a dangerous dance between "get good enough to survive" and "not so good Iwa perceives you as a threat," and part of her safety in Ame is that even though she spent a decade working for an enemy, she's one of them and not even that dangerous)
They move into the ancient Senju household Hashirama built. Ren sets up Ayaka's shrine, and Tobirama gets some fo the story of Ayaka out of her: Ayaka was another kidnapped genin, from Kusa, Ren's "best friend" (read: girlfriend) during the war. Toward the end of the war, more effort was put into recapturing prisoners, and a mixed group from some of the smaller villages (Ame, Kusa, Taki. etc) freed their prison group and distributed the prisoners, some of whom didn't remember where they were from, sort of haphazardly between the villages. Ren and Ayaka ended up in a group shuffled back to Ame, where they sat in prison for a while while Ame tried to figure out what to do with them. Ren was eventually shown to be a Ame-born and raised kunoichi and allowed to re-integrate. Ayaka was not, and was eventually executed.
Anyway! One of the first things Tobirama wants to do, finding his clan nearly extinct, is hunt down Tsunade and drag her back home. Idk how the details of this would go yet, but at some point they all get kind of drunk and are comparing battle scars and Ren is like "YEAH THE YELLOW FLASH TOTALLY STABBED ME. missed my vitals tho" and Jiraiya is like "Minato wouldn't miss" and Tsunade is like "no, no, you can clearly see in the scarring pattern it was one of his stupid kunai" and eventually someone goes, "hold on, are you going to be okay with his giant stone face staring down at you for the rest of your life?!" But Ren is very adamant that even though she does low-key have nightmares about Minato (she doesn't say this part outloud to Jiraiya/Tsunade, but she might confess to Tobirama), she's not like. Bitter? And up until now Tobirama has gotten the impression that Ren deeply hated Iwa so he doesn't really question this answer.
I kind of want Tobirama to get pulled into Uchiha Coup shenanigans in a way that prevents the massacre but idk how exactly it'd go. Kind of want him to take Shisui on as an apprentice as a show of good faith? And probably he tried to bully either Tsunade or Jiraiya into being Hokage (I'm leaning towards Hokage!Jiraiya so Tsunade has free time to do other things)
Anyway, since Jiraiya is in-village now, he's going through old shit and discovers Minato had drafted a pardon for a random Kusa-nin for some reason, and he recognizes the attached photo as the same photo as the one in Ren's shrine. So he goes to Tobirama and is like: YO WHAT THE FUCK? Tobirama shows the photo to Ren and she has a pretty emotional reaction but refuses to explain; this ends up their first real argument.
Later, Tobirama decides to fill Ren in on whatever the fuck he's doing with the Uchiha as a show of trust, and eventually she tell him her Full Dramatic Backstory: she'd basically been sabotaging Iwa's moves against the Yellow Flash by memorizing the countermeasures they had in development for the Hiraishin and telling him about it. In exchange, she'd begged him to spare Ayaka's life (and only Ayaka's). Minato had never reported this to anyone to prevent Konoha going over his head to makes moves against his informant, and he had severely but non-fatally injured Ren a few times to prevent suspicion on Iwa's end. Ren was planning to take this secret to her grave.
Ren is actually devastated to find out Ayaka would have been safe if Konoha had picked them up. Ren is the one who'd had them go to Ame, and it'd gotten Ayaka killed, even though the only real difference between them was were they happened to be born.
Thematically, I like the idea that One Small Action from an unimportant person could change the tide of war, and I want to sort of... figure out a way to tie it into how the Uchiha are being treated? Like: You cannot mistreat people in your community and expect it to not destroy you. Idk. It's being workshopped.
What I ultimately want the Senjuu household (Tobirama, Ren, Tsunade, Shizune) working towards is what Ren wanted to aim her research at all along. Like, improved agriculture and public health and medicine to help communities that were devastated after war, even outside of Fire Country. I want it to be rocky and filled with a lot of mistrust of ninja. I want Minato's hiraishin seals left all over the continent (which conveniently map almost perfectly to the most effected places, bc war) to be hijacked as a way to move supplies around.
...and I guess if it's a "soulmate" fic then more soulmate shenanigans should be happening, so we'll make Kakashi and Obito be soulmates as a plot point? Idk.
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