This is an Obito chapter, I guess...?

Remember that pre-barhopping adventure, Zetsu went off to find the Shinigami mask. The point of this is that Tori wants him to copy bijuu chakra to test her seals, and there's half a Kyuubi in the Shinigami's stomach. :)

Also: I LIKE GHOSTS AND I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE

xXx

Zetsu came back a few days later with the Shinigami mask from the Uzumaki temple. The temple had been near the outskirts of Konoha, and it had taken him as much time to judge when he could slip past the Konoha patrols passing through so he could get into the temple and spend time poking around, as it had to locate the temple at all.

"There were lots of masks," he complained. "I had to spend a lot of time reading through scrolls to figure out which was which."

"But can it really summon the Shinigami?" Obito asked, examining the mask in his hands. The three of them– Tori, Obito, and Zetsu– were standing around a grassy clearing in the forest just outside the village. They were far enough away from Pein's reach that the constant rain was more of a natural drizzle that made Tori's hair frizzy.

Tori felt oddly like she'd been checked out like a library book for this meeting.

"That's what the scroll said," Zetsu answered. "Usually the Uzumaki know their stuff, don't they?"

"Here," Obito said, and then passed the mask over to Tori.

She took it without hesitation. The mask was white with gold horns, its lips drawn back in a jeer that revealed pointed gold teeth. It was lightweight and ordinary to the touch, but a shiver still ran through her as she held it in both hands. It glared up at her.

"Did you find out how to use it?" Obito asked. His eye didn't move from the mask, although he was obviously speaking to Zetsu.

"You put it on," Zetsu said, "and then the Shinigami will possess you."

There was a long pause in which the three of them stared down at the mask.

"Possess how?" Obito asked after a beat.

"Unclear," White Zetsu said, and Black Zetsu added, "This coward refused to try it out."

"Hmm," Obito replied, rolling a shoulder. "Well, I certainly can't risk dying. Tori, up and at it."

"I don't think it's going to kill you," Tori answered, wrinkling her nose at him. She couldn't even remember who'd put it on in the manga, but she was pretty sure it was a major character that had lived through the experience. Obito certainly could.

(And, if he didn't, that would just be helpful to all of humanity.)

"Then you should have nothing to worry about, Tori-chan~!" Obito replied, giving her a Tobi-style thumbs up. "Just for a few seconds, as an experiment! You love those!"

Tori flipped the mask over. The reverse side was painted black, and the shreds of two gold cords dangled from behind either ear, eaten away by time. The mask, while creepy, felt deceptively normal in her hands. She didn't feel even remotely afraid that it could hurt her. Besides, Obito or Zetsu could always just force the mask on her if she refused, and she'd rather put it on of her own accord, thanks.

She'd already pretended to be a Shinigami. She might as well become one for real this time.

The cords to tie the mask in place were long gone, but as soon as it was against her face, it suctioned onto her like a second layer of skin.

Oh, this was definitely a bad idea, Tori thought, right before she was slammed with a current of power.

Tori had never stuck anything metal in an electrical socket, but she imagined this is what it would feel like, except in her face. It hurt, crackling across her skin, and her gut instinct was to pull the mask back off, except she couldn't seem to move. Then suddenly it was like she was in two places at once: standing in place in front of Obito, and then outside her body, floating six feet in the air.

It felt like something was squeezing her lungs, making it hard to breathe and making her dizzy.

"Hey, Shinigami-sama!" Obito called, waving.

A pest, Tori thought, except the thought wasn't her own. It was louder, stronger, and it banished any of her own opinions on Obito from her mind. She couldn't breathe. Barely human. Barely even worth my collection. Where is my sacrifice?

And oh, did Tori want a human soul to tear into, to own, to possess, to tuck away into her Pure Lands forever and ever, or even better yet, to hold in her stomach-

"Eh, I don't think she can handle it," Zetsu said. "We should take it off-"

And then Tori's own thoughts were back, because if they thought she couldn't handle things, why the fuckdid they keep making her do them?

Are you my sacrifice? Tori's other mind- the stronger one, the one that belonged to the Shinigami wondered. It buried into her, and it was like cold fingers stroking through her organs and making her stomach churn. No, this can't be. What's wrong with your soul?

How do I open your stomach? Tori asked, clinging to this one idea lest the Shinigami chase away all her coherent thoughts again. With all of her will power, she managed to move one arm so a hand pressed over her belly. It felt like trying to move her arm through wet cement. Her fingers were impossibly long and boney, and her stomach emaciated.

She was so hungry, and she wanted– no, needed— a human soul–

Abruptly, Tori remembered that Orochimaru had freed the contents of the shinigami by gutting himself while possessed. It had actually killed him, except that Orochimaru could just switch bodies when he died.

The Shinigami hissed, and some horrible, awful, inhuman sound came out of Tori's mouth. Obito, who she suddenly realized was peering into her human face through the ghost of the Shinigami's form, took a step back.

You,the Shinigami accused, are not of this world. An abomination. An insult.

What? Tori wondered, desperately trying to keep her mind together, and she could feel the Shinigami's revulsion at her existence all the way in the pit of her own stomach. She wanted to vomit.

Zetsu was in her face now, his fingers curling under the skin of her face, and the Shinigami hissed again. Tori felt dizzy with its disgust.

Some creatures crawl from the dregs of the earth, and still they go to my collection in the Pure Lands, the Shinigami thought. But you belong somewhere else.

Then Tori's skin was ripped from her skull, and she screamed and tumbled back. The Shinigami ripped away too, like a tsunami sucking back all the sea from the land in one violent heave. Except it wasn't her skin, just the mask; Tori was fine and whole and sitting in the damp grass of the forest.

She was shaking. She couldn't breathe.

"Well that was interesting," Obito drawled while Tori hyperventilated. "Congratulations, you lived."

"He called me an abomination," Tori said, shakily trying to get to her feet. Her limbs were too weak and panicky and she fell back on her butt again. "I met a god and he called me a sin."

"Fascinating," Obito replied sarcastically, flipping the mask over in his hands. "Did you figure out how to get the Kyuubi chakra out?"

Tori stared up at Obito and for the first time fully comprehended the degree to which he was completely and totally unhinged. The Shinigami wasn't just a cute concept. It was a god, a being so full of ancient power it had made Tori feel impossibly small. Tori was just some random college student that Obito was using to commit crimes against nature, and Obito didn't give one single shit.

Then again, Tori was some sort of insult to the gods, apparently, so maybe she shouldn't judge.

She felt hysterical. An abomination. What did that mean?

Obito crouched in front of her and tugged gently at a strand of her hair. "Well, Tori-chan?"

Inhale, exhale. Blood pounded in Tori's ears as she forced oxygen into her lungs.

"The person being possessed should slice open their stomach, and that will open the shinigami's stomach as well," Tori said, dragging her fingers through the grass. Every inch of her was trembling. Obito looked down at her thoughtfully and Tori quickly added, "Controlling the Shinigami takes a huge amount of willpower. I wouldn't be able to do it."

Obito snorted.

"You certainly find the willpower when you need it," he sneered at her, but then rolled back on his heels and stood, passing the mask to Zetsu. "Maybe one of your clones could do it."

"They all trend toward extremely weak-willed. Hey!"

Tori continued to sit in the grass, listening to Obito and Zetsu talk logistics while she pulled up pieces of grass and willed her body to stop panicking.

The Shinigami had been disgusted with her. She'd felt it in the pit of her own stomach, churning up bile and revulsion. What did that mean? Should she be worried? Upset? Offended?

"Hey, hey," Obito interrupted her thoughts again, waving a hand in front of her face. "If we yank dear old Minato-sensei out of the Shinigami, are you set up to seal the Kyuubi?"

Tori blinked up at him. Still feeling hysterical, she said, "I thought we just wanted Zetsu to copy him. I thought the whole point was just for Zetsu to copy him!"

She wasn't ready to seal a bijuu, least of all half the Kyuubi. The whole point of this stupid plan was to set up a testable model, not just trial-by-fire the work Tori already had. What if fine-tuning her seal to human chakra made it work less well for bijuu? Was everyone okay with just risking a giant angry chakra monster getting free? Is that what they just did in canon, like juggling Molotov cocktails and hoping no one dropped one? Did no one care about scientific integrity?

"Yes, but wouldn't it be nice if we also got a free Kyuubi?" Obito continued.

Tori felt… well, she still felt like breaking down and crying, but now she also felt like screaming and throwing things at Obito. This was her work after all, and her idea, and she didn't want to experience whatever nightmare situation was "summon undead Hokage, rip bijuu out, hope barely tested fuinjutsu works" because that wasn't the point of why she'd proposed any of this in the first place.

Whatever face she made must have conveyed this, because Obito put his hands up and switched back to his Tobi voice.

"Or we can just stick sensei back in after Zetsu copies him and try again later! Say, Zetsu, do you think gods poop?"

Eventually, Obito stuck the Shinigami mask into his face to store in his kamui dimension for later. He then held a hand out to Tori, who was still sitting in the grass. She glared at him and pushed herself to her feet on her own.

"You know," Obito said as they walked back into Ame. His candor had the sort of childishness of the Tobi persona, and he waved his arms at her. "That was a really good find, Tori-chan! I've got a present for you!"

He very dramatically stuck a hand into his own face and removed an object, bowing deeply at the waist as he presented it to her. Tori was tempted to just smack it out of his hands and stomp off, but then she saw the cover.

It was an officially-backed Icha Icha fanzine. The cover bragged an exclusive interview with the writer himself about the upcoming Icha Icha Tactics.

Oh fuck, Tori thought, and then helplessly accepted the gift.

"I hope you enjoy your porn!" Tobi cried.

xXx

Tori read the entirety of the fanzine in one sitting, which felt like a very strange fever dream in which she ignored her new burgeoning mental breakdown over being possessed in favor of grading the fanart that took up about a third of the zine. This person had put Satsuki in a delicate pink kimono, which was not only counter to canon, but also obviously she would wear purple–

There were also published fan letters, some of which included short little fan stories. Icha Icha had fanfiction. Most of it wasn't very good, but… but…!

She started daydreaming about her own story to write and send in, when the looming threat of existential dread got too close. She could write about Junko accidentally sealing her bra into her shirt, and then some funny situation that could turn into…

Tori thought her little story would make a very good addition to the fanzine. She never seemed to find time to write it, however, because her work was filled with new, weirder situations to deal with.

"Why," Pein asked, staring Tori down from across his desk, "did you file forty-seven complaints against Jounin Furukawa?"

"Um," Tori said, shifting uncomfortably. There was a large stack of papers on the desk between them. She'd signed them all in fake names, but Pein obviously knew her handwriting. "I wanted to see what would happen?"

Pein's gaze drilled into her. His eyes were very intimidating.

"I honestly did not think they'd get all the way up to you," Tori explained.

"Of course they did," Pein intoned. "God sees all."

"Right," Tori agreed.

A very long silence stretched on between them. Tori made herself stop fidgeting and keep eye contact with Pein, even as he stared her down. Deidara had set a bakery on fire the day before. Forty-seven written complaints against the jounin who worked at the library making it hard for her to smuggle out research materials was honestly one of the less ridiculous Akatsuki-related problems Pein could have sitting on his desk. Fuck it, it was one of the less ridiculous Tori-generated problems he could have.

Finally, Pein slowly and deliberately pushed the pile of complaint forms towards Tori.

"Take those to Deidara," he said, "and tell him to burn them instead of my village, or I will end him."

From someone else, Tori might interpret this as a joke. With Pein, though, you did what he said, because if you were wrong about how serious he was being, you might end up squished like a bug. She gathered the papers in her arms and went to find Deidara.

It took about ninety seconds to find Deidara in the kitchen, having gathered an informal meeting around the table. Itachi and Kisame were both seated, empty plates in front of them, and Zetsu stood awkwardly off to the side, edging towards the wall like he'd be more comfortable partially submerged. Sasori stood at the foot of the table, arms crossed and scowling.

Scowling meant Sasori was really annoyed and wanted everyone to know it, because he'd gone to the trouble of rearranging his face. Tori kept her distance from him, even as she dropped the complaint forms on the table.

At the head of the table, Deidara started on whatever posturing he'd gathered everyone for, a wad of wax paper clutched in his hand.

"Who– who –" Deidara started, his eyes darted suspiciously between Sasori and Zetsu, "–put a human finger in the food freezer ?"

Deidara looked both slightly triumphant in having some new thing to call a colleague out on, and also his eyes gleamed with the prospect of chaos. With a jerk of his hand, the wax paper unfurled and the severed finger in question rolled onto the table. It had a bright yellow, acrylic nail.

Tori had completely forgotten about it.

"Oh shit," she said. "That's mine."

Kisame made a choking sound that was either laughter or disgust. Itachi inhaled very deeply through his nose.

"Why would I put a finger in the kitchen freezer?" Sasori asked Deidara testily. "It's not even a good finger. Those nails are disgusting."

Ah, so Sasori had insulted Mizukawa Asa's nails and made her decide to betray the Akatsuki. Fascinating.

"Tori," Itachi said, a touch louder than necessary. " Whose finger is that? " His voice was very tight and filled with hundreds of other, unvoiced questions. How? Why? We put our food in there? Tori imagined it was the closest anyone ever had, or ever would, come to experiencing Uchiha Itachi screaming hysterically.

Ignoring him, Zetsu stepped forward to pick up the finger and examined it. "How long has it been there?"

"A few months?" Tori offered.

Without further comment, Zetsu popped the frozen finger into his mouth. They watched in silence as he chewed and swallowed.

"Ah," he said. "Once again I do not get to experience the human condition known as brain freeze. Perhaps another time."

He melted into the floor.

"Deidara," Itachi said after a beat. "You waited until Zetsu returned to call this meeting."

"Yeah, so?" The blond huffed, crossing his arms.

"When did you find the finger?" Itachi continued to sound deeply unhappy about the situation.

"This is a waste of time," Sasori announced and stomped out of the kitchen.

It turned out Deidara had found it five days prior and, assuming there was a high probability it was Zetsu's fault, simply left the evidence in place until he could confront him. Obviously Deidara cared about human remains not getting mixed in with his food, but not that much.

"At least I didn't wait for Hidan too," Deidara said defensively. "He was my second suspect, yeah."

"Why would Hidan put a single finger in the freezer?" Kisame asked, as if it were more probable Hidan would put several fingers in the freezer. Which… yeah.

Yeah.

"Why did Tori put a finger in the freezer?" Deidara replied, and then all their attention was on her. "What is with you and carting around random body parts, yeah?"

"What else was I supposed to do with it?" she defended.

"Throw it away!" Deidara snapped back, hands twitching on the counter. "In the trash! Like a normal person, yeah."

"Normal people don't save the fingers they cut off," Itachi said.

Tori almost pointed out that normal people don't cut off fingers , but no. No. They were all beyond doing anything any normal person would even touch.

"Better yet," Deidara continued to rant, his eyes lighting up with the excitement that only ever came with fire and loud noises and utter destruction, "you could have cremated it–"

"Speaking of," Tori said, patting her pile of wasted complaint forms, "I'm supposed to tell you: next time burn these instead of the village, or else Pein will kill you." She waved her hand vaguely. "Y'know, in the unfun way, where you don't explode and make your final art or whatever."

Deidara made a face like he's swallowed a lemon.

"You should work on your death threats," Kisame teased. "Very unthreatening."

xXx

"So I may have done something stupid," Tori admitted.

Konan, seated across from her and Kakuzu at their brand new dining room table with a pot of tea, leveled Tori with a flat, unimpressed look. They were ostensibly reviewing projected missions, current spending, and if Kakuzu thought they should review their rates or not.

"This is not a very good pitch for you getting a living stipend," Konan deadpanned back.

"I think my pitch will be airtight once I run out of deodorant and you have to be in the same room as me," Tori quipped back. She slid a letter across the table to Konan. "I did what you said and gave Ghost Lady an ultimatum she'd have to turn down."

Konan's eyebrows slowly raised further and further up her forehead as she read the letter.

"Ghost Lady?" Kakuzu asked. He was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and sheets and sheets of tables of numbers spread out in front of him.

"There's a lady in Rice Country who keeps asking us to come get a ghost out of her house," Tori explained. "I kept inventing new fees to get her to turn us down, but she didn't budge. Her letters are getting more and more unhinged, too– I don't think she's well."

Kakuzu grunted. Konan pushed the letter away from her and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Tori asked for her first born child as payment," Konan said.

Kakuzu's eyebrows furrowed. "Why? You can't monetize an heir if you remove them from their inheritance."

"I didn't think she'd say yes," Tori answered, her voice hitting a high, frustrated pitch.

"Tori," Konan said darkly as Kakuzu picked up the letter to read himself. "Don't make threats you're not ready to follow through on."

Well, yes, Tori had learned this lesson several times over by now. It still hadn't occurred to her that she might have to collect this type of payment, because that was insane.

"What normal person–" Tori started.

Kakuzu suddenly sucked in air through his teeth. He went very tense. Tori cut herself off, watching him.

"We have to take this mission," he said finally. He sounded vaguely desperate. The paper crinkled under his fingers. Konan actually raised her eyebrows.

"It is a lot of money in addition to the child," Konan agreed.

"This will be the single highest paying mission Akatsuki has ever taken," Kakuzu said, rereading the paper. His hand was shaking.

"Are we just going to ignore that she offered up her first born child?" Tori asked. "Or that ghosts only exist under a very specific and convoluted set of circumstances–"

"You made this problem," Konan replied, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms. "You can fix it."

"What?" Tori said. "Hold on-"

"Tobi can go with you," Konan said. It was not a statement she was offering for debate.

"Since when do I do missions?" Tori asked.

"It does seem up your alley," Kakazu said, folding up the paper and tucking it into his cloak. "Convoluted and stupid, but with a low risk of violence. There's a ghost." After a beat he added darkly, "If you fail, I will make your risk of violence a guarantee."

"It's inconvenient to do your job when you're not here," Konan continued. "So be quick about it."

Tori didn't roll her eyes, but she made a very sour face that she was sure was equally insubordinate. Unfortunately, she knew that Akatsuki would offer no further support or advice beyond "yes, the problem is dumb, but we're getting a lot of shady money for you to make it go away." It was their raison d'etre.

Tori just didn't understand why she had to be held to the same standard as the actual trained professionals. Oh, Tori, just invent some insane sealing ritual, and then go find out god hates you, and then run this mission to exorcise a fucking ghost; they taught you all that in freshman seminar, right?

"Do we at least have room in the budget for formula if I come back with a baby?" Tori asked testily as she penned herself into the projected mission schedule. She hated everything.

"Absolutely not," was Kakuzu's answer. "Just throw it in with your experiments. Are we sure about sending Tobi with her? I can–"

Tori was glad Konan shut down Kakuzu's bid to take the mission, because Tori would have an actual breakdown if she had to convince a woman she wasn't being haunted, possibly collect an actual child as payment, and also prevent Kakuzu from breaking the client's face when he realized she was a raving lunatic. That was just too much for any one human to handle.

"So if I take missions now," Tori said as Kakuzu started to gather up his papers, "do I get a living stipend?"

"No," Kakuzu replied at the same time Konan said, "We'll see."

xXx

Obito had a very busy schedule, it turned out, so Tori penned a vague reply to Ghost Lady and then got to screw around for a week. She did a few useful things, like seal some Zetsu clones into another Zetsu clone and then rip it back out. She even tried making the Zetsu clones mimic her own DNA, to get some variation. She barely had to do any seal work– the clone babies were happy to mimic her with just some cells scraped from her skin and a pulse of chakra.

The problem was that they then… melted? Rotted? It was very strange.

"Look at this," Tori proclaimed, hefting one up to show Sasori in his workshop. "It's disgusting!"

Sasori and Deidara had come back just that morning, and Sasori was processing several new additions to his puppet collection. He looked up from carefully threading wires into a corpse's exposed jaw bone and gave Tori a very dubious look.

"Why are you showing me an ugly baby?" he asked.

The baby had grown a tuft of curly dark hair and its skin had gained pigment, but then it just… got all floppy and melty. Its face sagged and it smelled weird. There was no sign of life– no breathing or heartbeat.

"I'm trying to make a regular baby," Tori explained. She'd had to move her cloned heart into another Zetsu clone, and it was dying. What was she, an anti-Zetsu? "Can I borrow some DNA?"

She had briefly thought about just taking one of the Akatsuki's genetic material. Ninja tried to cover their tracks, but they were not actually particularly paranoid about leaving their cells and DNA all over the place, at least not in their own home. Tori had thought this was strange at first, because this was the behavior that got people caught in her world, but the only fuinjutsu she'd ever come across that relied on genetic material were Orochimaru's own work and some vague writing on making things "bloodline exclusive" that did not so much as mention genetics.

In other words, Tori was pretty sure no one was trying to stop her from stealing their DNA because the problem had not occurred to them.

Tori had had her DNA stolen and cloned by Orochimaru, though, and she had felt weirdly violated about it. Doing this to her coworkers seemed a little bit mean and also, if they felt the same way that she did, likely to get her murdered.

Sasori let her cut pieces of skin off his new puppets, although he gave her very specific directions on what she could cut or not. Sasori didn't like scars or freckles or most tattoos, but he also valued a good stretch of unblemished skin.

"I think you might be the worst person I've ever worked with," Tori told him cheerfully, transferring a skin chunk to a glass vial. "Like, on a personality level."

"I hope all your experiments fail and Leader-sama lets me skin you alive," Sasori sniffed.

The partially grown Zetsu clones did take up the random tissue sample Sasori gave her, shifting and adjusting themselves into what looked like actual human toddlers. All four samples she had worked equally well, leaving her with four very different, very well-formed and human-looking children.

This turned out to upset Tori, because even though she knew they were Zetsu, she didn't want to hurt a baby! She sat in the first floor office she'd commandeered, watching helplessly as the Zetsu clones toddled around and hoping they eventually magically turned back.

Is this why god hated her…? No, surely the Shinigami would be pleased by this.

Perversely, Tori found herself wanting to seek Hidan out for advice. But asking Hidan for anything seemed like a monumentally bad idea, and so she decided to go back to pretending nothing weird had happened.

She was trying to seal weird babies into each other, and that was fine and normal.

The babies of course didn't turn back into Zetsu on their own, and Tori had to coax one after the other to sit down by offering up her pen as a chew toy. She retried her seal with her eyes partially shut and very firmly internally denying what she was doing. It worked, but it made the clones cry and her feel bad, and afterwards she fled to the basement.

She'd read the interview with Jiraiya in her Icha Icha fanzine seven times now, and there was an entire section of responses to fan letters she still wanted to comb through again.

Oh Jesus, she thought as she hurried down the stairs. What am I going to do if I end up with an actualbaby?

She had a brief and slightly humorous vision of her attempting to raise it as her own, feeding it Itachi's horrible cooking attempts and sending it to Sasori for haircuts. It would almost certainly die. How horrible.

Deidara was in the basement dungeon, looking into the cell she'd claimed as her bedroom with a perplexed look on his face.

"You live like this?" he asked.

Tori thought she'd done quite well with the place, considering she was living in Akatsuki's literal dungeon. She'd neatly folded her clothes and arranged her other meager possessions on the narrow bench meant to be a bed, and then stacked a bunch of camping pads stolen from their storage to make a bed on the floor that was reasonably comfortable. She'd even cut some pages out of library books to pin up some pretty photos of mountains and funny looking flowers and a painting of a ghost possessing an umbrella.

It wasn't a lot, but it was hers.

"You know there's plenty of extra bedrooms," Deidara told her, looking at her like maybe she wasn't very good at making decisions.

"I thought we were playing an elaborate game," Tori said, "where I pretend to be a hapless captive and then you put me in charge of vital tasks and then we all pretend this is fine and normal."

Deidara laughed, slapping her shoulder in a way that was probably meant to be affectionate but also hurt.

"That's Akatsuki, yeah!" he declared. "I tried to kill Danna six times on my first mission and blew up our client and they still made me stay and do important shit, yeah." He paused. Thoughtfully, he added, "I blew up my last client too…"

Tori knew. They asked most people to pay in advance if the mission involved releasing Deidara into particularly artistic circumstances. It drove Kakuzu batty.

"Reassuring," Tori said sarcastically. "Did you come down here for something?"

"Heard a rumor they were making you take another mission, yeah," Deidara said, grinning cheekily at her. "Here."

Deidara produced an honest-to-god dagger. It wasn't flashy or very big, with a dark brown handle and matching sheath, and a blade length of maybe three inches. Still, it was a knife.

Deidara offered it to her, handle out.

"You should stab people before they can stab you," he said helpfully as she took it hesitantly, like this might be some sort of trap. "The pointy end goes into enemies, yeah."

"Shut up," Tori told him, not at all aggressive. "I know how a knife works."

She pulled it out of its sheath. It didn't look new, but it did look sharp. She flipped it over.

"Thanks, Deidara," she said.

"Don't die," he told her. "Also…" He turned on his heel, making a wide gesture at the cell she'd filled with fungal cultures. "What is this?"

"I call it my crucible," Tori told him.

"It looks like a museum of crazy, yeah," he replied, like this was excellent news.

And… well, okay, so Tori had been stacking up failed plates instead of throwing them away. Her collection had increased: a very bemused Pein had given her a note with special permission to collect a bunch of reusable glass petri dishes from the tiny Ame research and development department, and that hadn't solved her contamination problem because glass soaked in bleach and then boiled still wasn't the sterile plastic fresh from its packaging of a lab in her world. Especially when she was using an agar media specially meant to help fungi grow.

She'd also been collecting discarded foods from the kitchen and storing them in old bags to let them mold. This was for completely logical and sane reasons, which is that she needed more Penicillium mold.

She attempted to explain to Deidara that if things were like in her world, then some Penicillium excreted chemicals that would stop cell wall formation, which would kill bacteria, which would be an incredible medical advancement.

"I forget if that's Gram-negative or Gram-positive bacteria," she babbled. "The one that has pepto…. Pepto-glycan…? Shit."

"Uh-huh," Deidara told her. "I'm sure you can call it whatever you want."

She switched over to talking about how useful antibiotics were.

"How charitable of you, yeah," Deidara told her, very sarcastic. "You're basically a humanitarian."

"Of course," Tori continued, "if it does work, it's only a matter of time before antibiotic resistance emerges. That's one of our possible apocalypses, you know."

Deidar nodded once, very slowly. "Like the hole in the sky?"

"No, that one got better," Tori told him. "We're more worried about increasing natural disasters…"

Deidara let her ramble. When she managed to loop back around to penicillin being invented during wartime, he cut in with:

"It's this blue-green stuff, right?" He poked a bag containing the heel from a loaf of bread, completely green in its packaging. "People farm this in Earth Country, yeah."

Tori felt something in her brain shift and break. For some reason, she'd assumed no one had thought twice about one of the most common molds in a kitchen.

"Yeah," Deidara continued, smirking at her shocked expression. "A bunch of villages have their own dedicated caves for growing it. They feed it bread and fruit and stuff, and then they use it to make cheeses and preserved meats."

Tori's mind raced. She knew people used mold in food production, but… wait… was blue cheese Penicillium?!

"You can probably get someone to send you some," Deidara said, eyeing her. "That is, if Leader-sama will let you get stuff into Ame. Hey, I'll look out for it if I get sent to Earth Country, yeah."

Tori was… actually grateful. She could tell Deidara thought her project was silly, but he was still offering. He probably had some ulterior motive for wanting to be in Earth Country since he knew she had some sway over mission appointments, but still.

Now, if only there was a way to pre-screen for mold that was actively making penicillin…

"If you can," Tori told him, "ask for cultures that gave people allergic reactions."

"Wow," Deidara replied, eyes shining, "you're horrible, yeah."

She ended up spending her afternoon in his workshop, mixing clay in a bucket for him while he quizzed her on animals that could fly backwards, and then practicing sculpting dragonflies and hummingbirds while telling her a completely deranged story about how he'd become rivals with another Iwa missing-nin at age fourteen because Deidara had "accidentally" killed and eaten his summon.

"I can't believe you think I'm horrible," Tori quipped. "I wouldn't eat a talking bird."

Deidara waved his arms at her emphatically, "It was a giant chicken, yeah! What else was I supposed to do?"

Later as she was washing up in the workshop's sink, he told her, "By the way, I'm starting a betting pool for how long it takes you to stab yourself with that knife. Try to make it at least a week, yeah."

"I'm not going to stab myself," Tori replied, playing at offense.

"I don't know, I've seen you hold a kitchen knife, yeah…"

xXx

When Obito did show up, he stepped directly onto a seal Tori was actively painting on her office floor and asked if she was "ready to boogie."

"Uh," Tori said, eye twitching as she eyed her ruined work. She was still incredibly upset with him, fanzine bribe or not, she wanted to scream at him. Unfortunately, this was probably exactly the reaction he wanted.

She debated informing him that he was extremely lucky that wasn't an active seal. Instead she said, "I don't have, like… supplies?"

Obito stared down at her. Or at least, his mask face turned to her and then he didn't say anything for several moments.

"Huh," he said.

Tori had some idea of what ninja took on missions. Akatsuki had a food budget that funded basic kitchen supplies and a cabinet of preserved meats and nutrition bars people occasionally raided. She was constantly putting in orders for new kunai and weapons maintenance supplies. She'd ordered packages of unscented bar soap-and-shampoo. Deidara had once come to her extremely upset about his folding toothbrush snapping on a mission.

She was vaguely aware of some camping basics, like that you needed a sleeping pad in cold weather to put a barrier between yourself and the earth. She'd heard some wild stories from family and friends about food left out and bears. None of the ninja ever had such complaints, and she wasn't sure if ninja just had different solutions or no one had needed to ask for a new cold temperature sleeping bag or she just worked with a lot of immortal freaks.

She didn't know how any of this applied to anything she was going to be doing. She didn't even know if she was physically capable of walking as far they were meant to go. She'd been working under the assumption that ninja-y decisions would be up to Obito.

"I see," Obito said, very serious in his infuriating Tobi way. "So Tori-chan is stupid."

He proceeded to attempt to get her to pack an entire shopping bag of canned vegetables, and then to convince her to pack every single piece of her clothes, and then managed to drop and dent a water canteen. Tori felt increasingly frazzled at his complete lack of helpfulness, but at the same time, a sense of I guess this is just how it is was creeping over her.

Even if she was mad at Obito, she'd spent quite a lot of time with "Tobi" and had even had conversations with him that she didn't hate. She'd shared meals and watched bad television with him. But at the end of the day Tobi was a weird act at being intentionally useless, and she'd need to get more Obito for whatever adventure they were doing.

"If you're not going to be helpful," she said in her most measured voice that definitely wasn't hiding deep frustration, "I am going to stop being helpful."

This reasoning had worked on someone like Deidara, who was a maniac but also was rarely intentionally annoying and recognized he was better off with what little power Tori held being used to his advantage.

But Tobi was not Deidara. Behind the mask, his eye glinted.

"I am helping, Tori-chan!" he told her.

Tori felt a tick in her temple. "Yeah? Wanna help me with something else?"

Twenty minutes later, they were both trapped in a little dome of chakra on the kitchen floor. She'd told Tobi she thought they should pack up or freeze the perishables in the fridge so that they didn't go off while she was gone. Tobi had gotten an impressive amount of blood out of a discount pack of steaks, which was predictable and Tori had been counting on it. Now they knew that cow's blood worked similar to human blood for fuuinjutsu.

She just wasn't sure how she'd also gotten trapped in here…?

Tori could take apart the seal if she wanted to. Instead, she crossed her arms and glared at the dome's walls.

"Maybe Tobi can break it with a katon…?" Tobi offered.

Tori understood her mistake, and in fact, if she'd had more emotional space to think rationally before engaging Obito, she would have gone with a different strategy from the get-go. She could literally lie down on the floor and insist on being dragged again, and Tobi would find the roughest patch of gravel to drag her over. She could poison all their drinking water and he'd drink it and figure out a way to vomit it back up onto her. She could lead him into the depths of hell and he'd skip along his merry way.

If she summoned every ounce of her own stubbornness, she might win one battle. But it'd be a long, uncomfortable battle of wills, and it would inevitably end with her doing something extremely stupid.

Still, she wasn't just going to back down because Tobi threatened to set them both on fire. She needed to calm down, think, and switch tactics.

"I think it will fade on its own soon," she said, shifting in the crouch she'd been forced into. Obito sat back-to-back with her, his knees pulled up to his chest. "There can't be that much chakra in the steak-blood." She brightened. "Let me tell you about the fanzine you gave me."

Kisame walked in on them stuck in the dome in the middle of the kitchen, Tori shaking Tobi passionately. She furtively explained that in the fanzine interview, Jiraiya had hinted he was putting coded messages into his books, and that the plagiarized textbook had been part of one.

"-and the message was a ramen order!" Tori shrieked directly into his face. "Do you understand how much effort I put into decoding a ramen order?! I checked out three different cryptography books–"

"Kisame-sempai!" Tobi called, heading lolling exaggeratedly. "Help! Tori-chan is torturing me–"

"I see," Kisame said, eyeing the dome. "You're blocking the fridge."

Tori froze with Tobi's shirtfront gripped in her hands. She would not in a million years had grabbed anyone else while she was talking to them. But she'd wanted to be purposefully annoying to Obito by playing up her enthusiasm for Icha Icha, and they were already stuck in close quarters, and he hadn't stopped her, and she might have gotten herself a little bit excited…

"Did you leave raw meat on the floor?" Kisame asked, moving around the dome. "Tori, did no one teach you how to not get food poisoning?"

The dome fizzled away on its own a minute later, the lifespan of whatever chakra was left in a slab of steak fading. Kisame had picked up the meat with a mild look of disgust on his face.

"They're the shit discount ones Kakuzu gets," Tori informed Kisame, as if that justified her behavior. Kakuzu had some sort of "deal" with a butcher, and he got bulk orders of fresh meat for the Akatsuki, but Tori had cooked one once and it was… it was bad, gristly stuff. Most members preferred buying their own food.

Either way, Kiasme wasn't impressed.

"Kisame-sempai," Obito said, leaping to his feet, "Tori-chan and Tobi are going on a mission."

Kisame's ever-present smile took on a fixed quality as Obito babbled about how cool and awesome it was, and did Kisame have any tips?

Tori stretched her back while she watched this interaction. It actually wasn't clear to her how much Kisame knew about Obito's dual identity. She thought Obito had recruited Kisame himself, but she could be misremembering, and Kisame gave nothing away as he eyed Obito like he was a particularly annoying child.

"We should head out, Tobi," Tori cut in, deciding to be merciful to poor Kisame.

Kisame's eyes flickered over to her. His grin widened. "You'll be fine," he said. "Probably."

"Thanks," Tori replied, her words coming out a touch more sarcastic than she meant. She wasn't too worried about this one, actually. Compared to some other shit she'd done, it sounded easy. Fun, even, if she played her cards right and didn't get lost on the way.

Obito took the stairs down two at a time, waving his arms in excited anticipation, and she followed him through the streets of Ame and then had to take over talking to the gate guard for their exit when Obito started babbling a bunch of bullshit that didn't make sense.

He calmed as soon as they were out of sight of the village, the Tobi persona melting away.

"Do you have, like, a plan?" Tori asked, curious.

Sometimes, for very long journeys, she got tapped in to help make travel plans– looking up ferry routes or checking through official Ame reports that Pein pulled for her to see if certain roads were expected to be passable. Sometimes members would ask her to look up the answers to very specific questions related to geography or local culture or double-checking mission parameters when things got weird. But unless a client wanted to be super involved, the vast majority of mission planning was left to individual members, and she didn't find out what they wanted to do versus what they ended up doing until after the fact. She had no idea how this part of mission planning went.

Obito tilted his head at her. "Do you have a plan?" he asked.

"I have some ideas for when we get there," Tori said slowly. "I've been writing back and forth with Ghost Lady for months. I have a good idea of what makes her tick."

Most of her interactions with Obito had been in his Tobi persona, where he was actively trying to sabotage her for shit and giggles. She had no idea if he was going to keep that up on this trip or not, and to what degree he'd let her call the shots. He was, very technically, the leader of Akatsuki, after all, and this was an official Akatsuki mission.

Obito turned away from her and cracked his neck.

"Yeah, that sounds good," he decided.

"But I don't know how to get there," Tori continued, and he snorted.

"I figured."

She had to do some wheedling to get it out of him, but Obito did have a civilian-friendly plan for getting them to Rice Country. There was a large town about a four hour walk from Ame, a journey which apparently civilians made all the time. They'd spend the night, and then in the morning, take a series of passenger boats down the river into Rice Country, which would take two days if scheduling worked out in their favor. From there, they could probably walk to Ghost Lady's town within the day if the weather was good.

"Four days…" Tori repeated. "That's so long."

Tori was sure there were less time-consuming ways Obito could travel, but maybe whipping out ninja techniques to port around a civilian woman weren't worth it when there was no urgency to the situation.

They walked in an awkward silence for about twenty minutes, before Obito randomly reached over and poked Tori in the side.

"Ow," she complained.

"Hey," Obito said, "have you really never traveled before?"

"What?" Tori repeated. "Obviously I've traveled."

"Four days isn't that long," Obito continued. "Not for a civilian. Not for going across multiple countries."

"Oh," Tori repeated, blinking at him.

Months ago, she'd take this as Obito accusing her of lies or something. Instead he was just peering down at her in what felt like curiosity.

"You wouldn't believe what people can do in my world," Tori said slowly. "We have a lot of… you have trains here, right?"

She didn't quite feel up for trying to explain what a car was, or that her country revolved largely around driving them, but Obito easily accepted the idea of faster and more numerous trains, and then had a lot of follow-up questions about Tori's description of a commercial flying machine. She shared that grandparents were from another country, and visiting her extended family involved flying a further distance than the Elemental Nations were wide.

The conversation lulled when a group of travelers appeared ahead of them on the dirt road, and as they passed, Tori smiled and waved in greeting. The travelers stared back at her, confused.

"I forget people don't do that here," she mused.

"Sometimes," Obito told her, "it's really obvious you're not from here. You should get better at talking about civilian travel methods."

Well. Okay, then. Get better at blending in or get better at being a world-traveler, sure.

The road was fairly heavily traveled, and there were multiple restaurants and tea houses along the way. Obito easily slipped back into the Tobi persona as they stopped for a quick meal at one, and they got into a very intense debate over the television series they'd been watching together before they'd summoned the Shinigami and freaked Tori out.

I wonder if Obito even actually likes this show, Tori mused. This was a lot of effort to put into being very wrong about if Lord Tadashi was actually having an affair or not.

Obito paid for their meal.

("Yaki… tori!" he'd cried, pointing at her order.)

"Do we have a mission budget?" Tori asked after they'd set out again.

Kakuzu was… weird about awarding those. But it seemed like Obito should have as much access to Akatsuki funds as he wanted.

"Tori-chan did no planning at all for her very important mission," Obito accused, still in his Tobi persona. Tori felt her cheeks go hot.

"You control the budget in the end, don't you?" Tori pressed. "We could…. have some fun."

"Kakuzu-sempai would be upset," Obito replied gravely.

"So upset," Tori agreed, stepping forward to meet Obito's eye. She grinned at him, trying to project as much mischief as she could into her expression.

Obito twitched. "Ah…"

Got you, Tori thought. Obito was a maniac with an iron will, and Tobi could not be out-annoyed, but at the end of the day, he was just a troll. Tori just had to convince him that whatever she wanted to do would be really, really funny at someone else's expense.

xXx

The civilian town they stayed the night in was only interesting in that it wasn't Ame. It sprawled along the banks of a massive river, and the air smelled vaguely like rotting algae. There were three parallel streets near the river filled with little shops and boutiques, and Obito complained very performatively while Tori spent the evening on a shopping spree.

If they weren't going to give her a stipend to replace her shampoo and deodorant and the clothes she kept getting inexplicably covered in blood, she would simply manipulate her stipend out of them. It was fine. Obito obediently made a big show off pulling out his wallet and dropping it or remarking loudly that Tori was a pushy and expensive woman, but he did go along with it.

When she could feel Obito starting to lose interest in what they were doing, she turned to weirder purchases.

Fine and normal.

"I think we should pretend to be exorcists," she said, peering at a jewelry display. "So it's totally fair," she said, picking up a completely gaudy necklace with huge chunks of semi-precious stones, "if we spent our mission budget looking the part, right? And we'll need props."

Obito perked up.

"Tori-chan is so smart," he said. "What do exorcists look like?"

"If you can find me a jewel-encrusted skull…" Tori started. "Definitely we'll have to smell like incense. Oh, do you have tarot cards here?"

They ate dinner in a very expensive restaurant. Obito very purposefully got prawn shells all over the table and continued harping about Lord Tadashi conspiracy theories, but the day wasn't bad. It was good, even.

The hotel they stayed in was mediocre and the room smelled strongly of tobacco, but it was still better than a dungeon floor or camping outside. Obito leafed through ferry timetables from the front desk while Tori attempted to seal all her new purchases into a storage scroll she'd been working on. This one had a specific key so she could put her stuff away into a specific dimension she could re-access with any seal bearing the key. That way she wouldn't have to reuse the same seal over and over. Instead, she could just make a new seal if the original one got destroyed because Obito "helped" her too hard or she dropped the scroll in the river.

She wasn't exactly good at this type of seal yet, and it produced a lot of smoke. Obito didn't look up, but he made a big deal of waving smoke out of his face while he read.

Still, she thought it was very cool and sexy of her to just be able to do this now, and she remarked as much to Obito. She'd made up her own little key, which she carefully designed to look as much like a fat little spider in a web of seal script as she could.

"Why aren't all scrolls made that way?" Tori wondered out loud. "It's difficult, but it's not really an obscure technique, and you'd never risk losing all your stuff…"

Tori liked having her own stuff.

Obito did look up from the timetable. "Because it's only practical if you're making the seal yourself."

Tori squinted at him, trying to logic her way through why it was impractical. If she destroyed a storage scroll with a key, she would just make a new seal on any old surface and rescue her stuff. But she supposed if she gave her scroll to someone else in Akatsuki to use, they'd need her to step in and retrieve their lost things… And even a big ninja village probably only had a handful of people making fancy storage scrolls…

"Plus it's a security risk," Obito continued. "If you had two seals linked to the same dimension, and I stole one scroll or stole your key, I could sabotage your items or even gain access to you. Then what would you do?"

That was a good point. Tori mulled this over as she very resolutely said, "Fill my dimension with live bees."

"Wow," Obito replied.

She got ready for bed. Maybe, months ago, she'd be embarrassed to brush her teeth in front of Obito in the little sink in their room, or to adjust the buttons of her pajama shirt in front of him. At some point, however, she'd stopped caring.

"We could pass little notes through the seal," she suggested through a mouthful of toothpaste. "Or snacks."

"Very popular move during the First Shinobi War," Obito told her. He was sitting cross legged on his futon, awkwardly working his fingers under his mask to rub lotion onto his face. For the scars, maybe?

Tori rinsed her mouth. Obito didn't bring pajamas, but he'd removed the charcoal colored outer armor he wore, and this gave him an oddly vulnerable aura. He was still massaging his face.

"I know what your face looks like, you know," she said cautiously. She gestured vaguely at the right side of her face.

"Oh, thank god," Obito replied, and pulled off the mask.

He looked exactly the way she thought he should, although his bangs were longer than she'd remembered. He pushed them back, showing off the black eyepatch over his left eye, and it seemed to her that he looked much younger than she'd expected. He was younger than Pein and Konan, at least. If he was Kakashi's age, that would put him in his twenties, wouldn't it? And speaking of Kakashi…

"What?" Obito asked as she rudely stared at him.

"I was just thinking," Tori said. "Are you worried about Hatake Kakashi getting access to you through your extra special personal dimension?"

Obito stared back at her. She wasn't used to reading his face, and she wasn't completely sure what his expression meant. His body had gone tense at Kakashi's name, but overall his body language wasn't overtly annoyed or upset.

Tori held his gaze. She felt it was good to occasionally remind Akatsuki in general why they were keeping her around: she did indeed know all sorts of interesting secrets.

"Well, you see," Obito said slowly, "I keep kamui filled with live bees, and he's allergic."

This was obviously bullshit.

"I see," Tori answered, just as slowly. Don't ask about Kakashi, she decided was the message. "Did you know bees are enraged by the smell of bananas?"

They made their beds and talked about convoluted plans to trick someone into eating a banana and then shooting bees out of a storage seal at them. It felt like a perfectly normal if not slightly sedated conversation to have with Tobi, but also the most bizarre possible conversation to have with Obito.

She supposed they were the same person, after all.

xXx

END NOTES:

Tori: You are going to give me a nervous breakdown during which I will rip out all your hair and then my own.

Obito: No. Shh. I know what you like. Take this porn.

Tori: Oh fuck you're right

...

Some ~science notes~:

Penicillin works by inhibiting the cross-linking of peptidoglycan, which is a polysaccharide (sugar + protein macromolecule) that "links" together as part of bacterial cell walls. Tori's comment about Gram-positive/Gram-negative bacteria refers to Gram staining: bacteria with unprotected cell walls stain "positive" when exposed to specific dyes. Ergo, penicillin is theoretically most effective against Gram-positive bacteria… although most papers I read on this have at least one throw away sentence about how it can work against some Gram-negative bacteria. My take-away is to treat this as a general rule rather than a hard law. :P

Not all Penicillium fungi produce penicillin, and I went down a rabbit hole a year ago trying to figure out how common penicillin production is in "wild" fungi to judge how lucky Tori has to get to find one. What I found out is that apparently it's not very popular for scientists to go out and assay random fungi for antibiotic production, even though that seems like a super easy study to export to an undergraduate or even high school lab course. Alas. Anyway, I did find several papers of people assaying Penicillium used in food production (mostly for cheeses like Roquefort or Camembert, or preserved meats) for penicillin. This led me to one of my favorite scientific figures of all time, this bioassay of antibiotic production in different regions of a salami.

Also: bees and bananas! Supposedly the bee "alarm pheromone" telling other bees to go attack something dangerous smells like bananas. I managed to confirm through several beekeeping websites and some scientific papers that the pheromone does smell like bananas to humans, but I didn't dig far enough to confirm that the two scents smell similar to the bees. Any beekeepers or bee biologists feel free to chime in!