Disclaimer: I do not own the series Naruto or any of the characters or concepts within it. I still don't own Onimeno-sensei or any of his 'acquaintances' either; all I lay claim to are the various relatives I've stuck Sakura with.

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Now You See It

Chapter 16: Bank

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"Sakura-chan, you've somehow managed to get even prettier since the last time I saw you!" Jiraiya-sama clapped a hand on her shoulder and grinned down at her, with more warmth than smarm. She couldn't help but notice that he had lost a hand at some point. "I guess it's true what they say about sakura trees and the battlefield.

She snorted. "What, that I gain beauty and vitality from the bodies buried at my feat?" She raised her eyebrows pointedly and crossed her arms. "I think you might have managed to get even less charming since the last time I saw you, Jiraiya-sama."

He released her to clutch his chest and stagger back theatrically. Shino carefully dusted off the shoulder he had gripped, and stepped forward. "Jiraiya-sama, we were sent here because we were told you had need of us."

'Here' happened to be the veritable siege at the border of Rain, just shy of the storms ravaging the land. Kakashi had sent them onwards with about twenty other shinobi under the guise of periodic reinforcement to the much larger gathering of troops. Choujuurou had not been among the shinobi chosen then, but he would likely be in the next group. Sakura had bid him good-bye and had mustered up the resolve to hug him once, tightly, before running off to join her team. Which was totally normal and acceptable, because even if she had a crush on him, he was her friend and they were in a war. Just because he made her stomach flutter, it didn't mean that he had somehow become less of a friend, or the chance of one of them dying had magically shrunk.

Those feelings were sweet, and delicate, and still growing, and they could damn well either wither or wait. She had a job to do. Speaking of which, Jiraiya-sama seemed to finally be ready to brief them on their targets.

"I do have need of you," he said, looking serious enough to actually show his age, for once. "About a week ago, I personally identified two of the higher-ranked Akatsuki members, and managed to… figure out the discrepancy with a third. They were war orphans I personally taught for a while years ago," he took a deep breath, and looked up at them all. "I know what you three are. Tsunade-hime let me know ages ago; I'm the person who has been compiling the information you use as a basis for your missions."

"And you're about to give us another actual mission?" It was hard to say whether Kiba was disappointed or excited at the prospect of going back to their professional niche, after weeks of being upfront and in the thick of it.

Jiraiya-sama blew out a long sigh. "I am… I am going to tell you a story," he said. "And I hope, more than anything in the world, that this can be resolved without you of all people being aimed at those kids." Sakura elected to take that as a compliment. "Naruto is away in the Summon's Realm chasing down some… information we need clarified, before we can properly face one of them down."

"I see." Sakura rubbed the neck of her neck, fighting off a vicious, anticipatory smile. It was like a present, she mused. A lovely, lovely present, with an insidious ribbon promising mental torture and ruin in the near future. Akamaru's tail began to eat a happy rhythm against the floor.

"And my guilt deepens," Jiraiya-sama muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He didn't seem to be interested in changing his mind, however, and soon heaved another sigh. "Okay. I'll start with their names, I suppose. The one that first grabbed my attention was Konan, the girl, but the boys—Yahiko and Nagato—they're where you're going to get a little confused…"

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"Well," Sakura mused as they left the tent, nodding respectfully to the guards who had been posted outside. "That was enlightening." Already, her brain was kicking into overdrive, stripping off the sad and nostalgic skin of Jiraiya-sama's pieced-together tale for the real meat. It was always important to isolate the bias as much as possible while analyzing information, and then account for how much of the bias might actually have a grain of truth to it.

There was at least two decades between the children Jiraiya-sama had known and their current targets, and another decade still between the hot-blooded revolutionaries he had recently learned about and the monsters they would be facing down.

That was fine. They had made more of less in the past, and really, childhood stories were the best ammunition they could have hoped for; weaknesses developed in childhood never truly could be overcome; they were only transmuted. Some people tried to turn them into a strength, or compensate for them, but in the end those little chinks in their armor always endured into adulthood. Suppressing them more often than not, only made them grow. Like putting pressure on a crack in a cup.

A person afraid of the dark would always, in some corner of their heart, feel anxious when the lights cut out. A person who had seen somebody precious to them killed early on would never forget their fear and disgust at the sight, even if they only ordered other people to kill and kill and kill without taking up a weapon themselves; their fear and hate would be internalized. One such person, she remembered with a pang of pride, hadn't been able to deal with being forced to confront their feelings and actions, and had taken care of herself with only the tiniest of nudges.

That had been a nice, quick mission. The new leader of that province was a much better trading partner to Konoha, anyways.

In this case, however, Sakura could almost feel the pieces slotting together almost entirely by themselves. A crybaby, one of them had been. The other was likely a loving, supportive friend, underneath the veneer of something inhuman. They had lost somebody unspeakably precious to them both, in one of the worst possible ways.

That smacked of paydirt, Sakura was sure. She just had to turn it over in her head, just a little bit longer. Tweak it this way, spin it that way, ponder the consequences, the marks that death had left on them…

They had been handed their tools, thanks to Jiraya-sama. They only needed to hone them now, and make sure that those weapons found the right marks.

"Hey Shino," Kiba folded his arms behind his head, looking up speculatively. "If Sakura or I ever died, would you use our bodies as surrogate hives and puppet them around in a sick parody of a memorial?"

"I would be lying if I said the thought hadn't passed my mind once or twice." Shino admitted as they strolled onwards towards the mess hall. "However, without proper and immediate application of taxidermy I was forced to admit that such measures were likely to only be sustainable in a very short timeframe, and subsequently banished it as a possible course of action."

"…that has to be one of the sweetest, most fucked up things you've ever said to us," Sakura commented, touched and disturbed in equal measure. "It definitely makes the Top Ten, for sure."

Shino had, after all, said quite a number of well-intentioned, utterly unsettling things in the past. It was just something that she and Kiba and Kurenai had been forced to accept and be flattered by, as his nearest and dearest companions.

"Seriously." Kiba shivered. "Do we even want to know what your new contingency plan is?"

"Ideally, I settled on the idea of stripping the flesh from a section of the corpse, sharpening the bone to a point, and proceeding to stab the one who felled you to death," Shino divulged easily. "It seemed poignant."

"I should have never let you meet Hiraku-oji," Sakura reflected, after mulling over the idea for a short moment. "Really, you were scary enough before you got interested in his lectures on poetic justice." She shuddered delicately.

"He is a master of the written word," Shino protested mildly.

"He's also kind of like a drug trip," Kiba commented, eyebrows raised pointedly. "Like, majorly. And he wears a lot of scents."

"Most of my family does, when they have to go to court," she said, thinking back to conversations she had overheard as a child. "It keeps them alert, and helps them ignore perfumes and colognes that other nobles use that they don't like." And sometimes to annoy nobles that didn't like the scents they chose to wear. Politics was half ambition and half pettiness, from her experience.

"Neat." Kiba drawled, obviously rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses. "So, are we going to actually go into Rain to get these two assholes, or… or what, how are we doing this?"

"Well, everything we know points to them being able to keep track of us when we're under that spray," she gestured dismissively to the gloomy curtains of rain in the distance. "So we should probably just wait for the next time he or she decides to come out to play."

"Wait, wait, hold on a second here. We're winging it?" Kiba gaped at her. "We haven't done that since we were like, thirteen. When we were still novices!"

"We're not winging it," she huffed. "We've got the information, and we've analyzed it, and we'll analyze it more while we wait. Then, when the opportunity presents itself, we'll do our job. And in the meantime, we'll do our part as normal members of the Alliance, plain and simple."

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Chapter Word Count: 1,605

Total Word Count: 30,735

Targeted Word Count: 26,667

Say good-bye to Choujuurou for a few chapters, everybody. Team Eight has things to do.