337I realized I hadn't posted this here yet. Oops.
xXx
Obito made them catch a ferry that left just after sunrise, and Tori found herself standing beary-eyed in a line down the dock. The river sloshed against its manmade banks, its waters almost black in the weak light of dawn. The river was wide here, and the morning mist hovering over it obfuscated the trees on the opposite bank almost entirely.
The boat, broad and flat, was bigger than Tori expected. The part meant for passengers was rows of wooden benches under an open air canopy to protect them from the morning drizzle, with a little kiosk offering snacks and hot beverages. Tori went to it immediately to buy coffee, and then ordered a black tea sweetened with honey when there was no coffee for sale.
Obito picked a bench in the back corner of the boat. Tori sat next to him and watched as families dragged trunks and suitcases into an area marked for luggage. A man rushed forward to help an elderly woman with her bag, but other than that people stuck together in the groups they boarded with. Rain Country people helped each other, but they were wary of socializing with strangers.
Obito hadn't trotted out his Tobi personality yet that day, even using normal polite speech to purchase their tickets. Now he sat back sedately and people-watched with Tori. The benches only ended up half-full, and passengers naturally spread out to give each other space. No one else sat on their bench.
The boat finally pushed off, and there was no announcement about life preservers or what to do in case of emergency. The sun was properly in the sky by now, and Tori pulled out her fanzine to comb through for the hundredth time. Someone calling themselves Eggplanted had written into the previous issue with something about color theory that many people had replied to in this issue with shockingly wrong ideas about Satsuki's color palette. Tori was currently attempting to recreate the original comment from the replies.
Obito leaned into her and in a whisper that was at least half Tobi asked, "Reading porn in public, Tori-chan?"
He teased her relentlessly over it, and Tori eventually gave up and shoved the fanzine back in her backpack. A six hour boat ride, and she wasn't allowed to read. She wondered what other Akatsuki members did during their long travels.
She pondered drafting a letter to the fanzine. She could eviscerate Eggplanted with facts and logic, or she could write her mini-fic about Junko accidentally sealing her bra into her shirt, or she could ask after if anyone else had found coded and possibly useless messages. Sending mail from outside Rain Country seemed more likely to reach the fanzine's publisher, and also safer in terms of hiding her identity. But all her writing materials were sealed away, and she wasn't about to go performing fuuinjutsu in front of a bunch of random civilians.
Instead, she pulled out a pair of boots from their prior shopping spree. Tori had no idea what an exorcist was meant to look like in this world, but she'd gone for a definite aesthetic, which also happened to match up with the type of impractical clothes she went for on days when she was feeling particularly goth. The boots were pretty, ridiculous things: black with decorative purple leather roses, a lone pair found in the back of a shop that otherwise stocked frilly pastel accessories. They were a size too big, and Tori had shoved some napkins into the toe to make them fit.
They also had a sizable heel, and Tori had never been good at walking in heels. She needed to practice.
Obito remained silent as she switched out her shoes, and then when she stood uncertainly, his shoulder gave a little twitch which Tori had come to recognize as Obito spotting the beginnings of a truly hilariously situation.
"Did you buy shoes you can't walk in, Tori-chan?" he asked with all the restraint of a man barely holding back mean laughter. "How are you going to pretend to be an expert if you can't walk?"
"I've got like three days," Tori told him, and then very unsteadily paced down the bench and then headed up the center aisle toward the front of the boat.
There were a handful of passengers at the front, leaning against the rails and watching the scenery. The water was too muddy to make anything out below, but the banks were lined with thick trees and ferns, and the breeze felt nice. Tori very carefully paced the perimeter of the boat, her fingers brushing the rail for whenever the boat lurched and she needed to steady herself.
The ferry line had four stops before it dead-ended at the Rain-Rice border, and at the second one, vendors came on board to sell hot meals. Obito leapt up to buy them onigiri, and when he presented them to Tori, he announced that one and only one was the vendor's "extra special super spicy challenge flavor."
"Ah, but…" He stared at the little bamboo container they'd been packed into. "I forget which…"
"Russian roulette," Tori stated sagely, and then found herself having to describe what Russian roulette was.
The filling of the first onigiri she bit into was incredibly spicy. She did her best to pretend it was totally normal, even as her sinuses started to run. The second onigiri was also spicy.
"I seem to have made a mistake," Obito said, and then made an exaggerated noise of sucking snot back up into his nose.
"Why do you keep doing this?" Tori asked. "You know I like spicy food. It's not going to work."
She was, actually, in tears. She shoved another bite into her face. She wanted to go buy more tea, but that would be admitting defeat.
"That's why I keep doing it. Eventually it will work," Obito replied, and he was close enough to her that she could see the rims of his eyes were red. "Russian roulette isn't a fun game."
"Well, you're playing it wrong."
The ferry route ended at the Rain Country border. The border was marked by a random little building at the river's bank, and by the two bored-looking Ame ninja standing in the middle of the river. Further down, more squarely into Rice Country, Tori could just make out dots of little boats.
International travel was not common across Rain Country's border, and only three other passengers besides themselves remained. They were all herded across a shaky pier by the ninja pair and directly into the little customs building. It was already crowded on the inside with a family of six looking to board the ferry going the other way. They stood around while an ancient looking kunoichi studiously read every word of their travel documents.
The family had three children under the age of ten. They were amusing themselves by playing a game where they climbed onto the one guest chair in the room, then jumping off and screaming as loud as they could when they landed. Tori eyed them. What if she ended up with a kid like that? She hoped Ghost Lady's first born was quieter.
For whatever reason, it took a very long time for the kunoichi to process the family. She grilled the parents and their oldest kid, who couldn't be more than nine, about what they were doing in Rain Country and how long they'd be there and when they were leaving. She got up and went through all of their things. The whole process took over an hour, during which Tori started tapping her foot impatiently. This woman was way more anal than the guy Tori had talked to when she'd wandered into Rain Country.
When the family was finally let go, the kunoichi settled back behind her desk.
"Who's next?" she asked, and Tori elbowed her way past the other three passengers with her and Obito's travel documents already in hand. She was the one carrying the documents, because she was the one who'd taken the liberty of fishing them out of Pein's desk and stamping them.
(He'd sent her to do something similar once, to get Sasori access to R&D facilities. She basically had permission.)
The kunoichi's eyebrows rose slowly as she skimmed the papers. Then her eyes slowly scanned Tori up and down, and Tori smiled brightly back at her. She knew she didn't look like the type of person one would expect to have special travel permissions to leave the country, directly from Pein. She wasn't a ninja, and she wasn't a fancy important noble person, and she was walking in a sad little waddle from her new shoes.
"Is there a problem?" Tori asked sweetly when the kunoichi didn't stop staring. Obito leaned over her shoulder. He wasn't particularly intimidating, but any ninja would recognize him as one of their own.
"None," the kunoichi said at length, and then they were let go without further questioning.
Rice Country did not have their own border control, to screen and monitor both the people coming in and leaving the country. This was generally uncommon, as far as Tori understood. Rain was just weird.
There was a little dirt path along the river, and she and Obito only walked a couple minutes before an older civilian man waved them down and offered to take them to the next ferry station on his boat. He made them wait another an hour while the other passengers were processed through border control, determined to squeeze as many coins out of as many passengers as possible.
At this rate, they weren't going to make the evening ferry that day.
"What's taking so long?" Tori wondered out loud, and the boatman gave her an odd look that signaled to her she had yet again asked a weird question.
"How'd you get through so fast?" the man asked, frowning at her.
"Don't tell anyone," Obito whispered at him conspiratorially, "but Tori-chan is a genius forger who made special fake travel passes."
The man rolled his eyes at the obvious lie, but didn't pry further. Tori excused herself from further conversation by tottering up and down the grassy bank of the river, very carefully practicing walking.
When they all finally piled into the man's little row boat, one of the other passengers had to grab Tori's arm to prevent her from falling over.
"Why are you wearing those?" he asked, eyeing her shoes.
"If I can walk in them here," Tori explained, "I'll be able to walk in them on flat land later and look like I didn't just learn today."
"Ah, I see," Obito said sagely. "Intense training. Why don't you walk in the boat?"
"No," the boatman objected, because his boat is barely big enough for the six of them and clearly not one meant to be walked around in.
Somehow, to the chagrin of everyone but Obito himself, Obito prevailed in having Tori pace up and down the center of the boat, a practice which took about three steps in each direction and inconvenienced literally everyone.
More than once she had to set her hand on someone's head to not fall over, each time making the whole boat lurch. The boatman looked extremely stressed. So do the other three passengers. She imagined Obito was grinning under his mask.
"Where, exactly, are you going?" asked the only other woman. She was traveling with a man Tori assumed was a husband or boyfriend.
Obito answered, giving the actual name of the town.
"Ah," the boatman said, eyes glimmering with recognition. "The village of spirits."
"The village of what?" Tori repeated, turning on her heels and setting her hand on Obito's head to steady herself.
"You haven't heard?" the boatman said, a smile cracking over his face. "It's a famous story…"
A long time ago, during the Warring Clans period, a group of shinobi had attacked the then tiny village. All the women and children and elderly had fled into a cave to hide while the men fought to protect their village. The fight had been long and brutal, lasting through the night. The ninja ransacked the village and took what they wanted, and most of the men were killed. The next day, when the ninja had left the semi-destroyed village, the surviving men climbed down into the cave to tell the rest that the coast was clear.
"Every single person in the cave was collapsed," the boatman said, watching Tori's face with the studious intent of a man trying to frighten a young woman for his own amusement. "Not a mark on them, either. Like they'd all gone to sleep, but none could be woken. The men went around checking pulses, and all but one woman were dead. They carried the woman back to her home, and she slept for two days before waking. She had no memory of what happened."
"Ninja have all sorts of terrible techniques," the third passenger offered up. "They must have done something."
"Ah, maybe," the boatman agreed. "The men decided they couldn't stay there, and abandoned the village. It was only resettled about twenty years ago by the Fujiwara Group."
"And these spirits?" Tori asked curiously.
The village was, naturally, said to be terribly haunted. A few years after the village was first abandoned, family members of the deceased had gone in to remove their remains from the cave and erected the only shrine specifically dedicated to the Shinigami in Rice Country. It was still maintained there to this day, even with the village resettled.
Tori did find herself stiffening at the mention of the Shinigami, and the boatman's grin broadened at her expression.
"It's said the people of the village still see the spirits of the dead sometimes," the boatman said. "Did you not know? Hope your business doesn't keep you there too long."
"Oh, don't scare her," the woman chided. "Here, sit down."
The woman scooted over, pushing her partner along with her to make room.
The boat ride only took about half an hour, leaving them at a tiny port unconnected to any town. There was a closed restaurant and supply shop, with a hand-painted sign on its door saying the last ferry had left for the day.
"Boo," Tori said. "Must've just missed it."
"Ah," Obito said, leaning over her shoulder to peer performatively at the sign. "Bad luck all around!"
The woman eyed them up and down. "You two have food for tonight, right?" she said slowly. "Or will you walk into town?"
She looked doubtful of Tori's ability to walk. To be fair, Tori had not been doing a very good job of it.
The port serviced three separate villages, which meant its location was equally inconvenient to all of them. It would be annoying to walk into town tonight and then walk back in the morning. They did have food, but it was disappointing ninja rations.
The woman was eyeing Tori with evident worry. Tori, of course, being the young woman too unused to travel to wear proper shoes, was a good target for worrying strangers. There was a huge pack on the woman's back, and her partner had an even bigger one. These two must surely have come even more prepared.
Obito twitched, and for the first time Tori felt like they were on the same page.
Tori let her eyes widen and worry cross her face. "Oh no!" she exclaimed. "No, we thought we'd make it…"
She did her best to look alarmed by the prospect of going the night with no food. Obito carefully patted her back.
"It's okay," he said, voice as comforting as she'd ever heard from a ninja. "We have one onigiri left. You can have it! I'm not even hungry."
The port had an adjacent campground, with bamboo awnings to sleep under and a handful of fire pits. The couple offered to share their dinner, and Tori sat primly on a low bench being completely useless while the couple cooked and Obito "helped" by spilling a bucket of water directly on their fire.
"Oopsie daisy!" he cried. If any of the passengers had suspected him of being a ninja, they certainly wouldn't anymore.
The fifth and final passenger, an older man who took out a pipe the second they were on dry land, was also invited to dinner.
"I'm from Rice originally," the old man explained of himself. "Ended up in a refugee camp in Rain during the war. They let me stay, but my brother is still here in Rice. I'm going to visit his new grandson."
"How cute!" the woman said. "We're both jewelry makers. We go up to Earth Country at least once a year for supplies. There's better tax breaks for buying local, but for some things…"
When they all turned expectantly to Tori and Obito, Tori smiled demurely and blatantly lied. Obito nodded along, adding little details. She introduced them as cousins, the only able-bodied people left to go to oversee the funeral of some distant relative neither of them had ever actually met. Obito picked a town for them to be from and then a very long story about how their parents had all injured themselves in the same freak wheelbarrow accident.
Obito had tilted his mask to the side enough to reveal his mouth to eat, which must have prevented anyone from asking any questions about the mask. The scars were obvious.
"But I didn't know the whole village was haunted," Tori hedged. "Do you think that will affect things? With it being a funeral and all."
The old man shook his head. "The village was resettled after I left Rice. But visiting a Shinigami shrine is good for funerals, I think. People pilgrimage to the shrine there. My aunt got a vision, going there after Grandpa died."
"A vision?" Tori squawked.
Usually she'd dismiss such a story as nonsense. But the Shinigami was demonstrably a real god, and the only thing up for debate in Tori's mind at this point was how likely he was to fuck with the living. Maybe the aunt had some sort of hallucination borne of religious devotion, or maybe the shinigami had talked to her.
(Tori wasn't sure if she wanted the Shinigami to have talked to the aunt or not. Were there other people out there, who thought about the Shinigami's gaunt stomach?)
"We went through there last year," the woman's partner interrupted Tori's thoughts. "No ghosts. But be careful of that Fujiwara group. The whole family is a piece of work."
Ghost Lady also happened to be the wife of the Fujiwara patriarch. .
"Eh? Really?" Obito asked the man.
The man nodded. "You know how it is, when one person thinks they own a town."
Tori blinked very slowly to indicate that actually, she had no idea.
"Maybe you're too young to remember," the old man with the pipe said. "Rain would be the same, if God hadn't taken over."
The old man went into a very passionate speech about how good God was for the country, preventing petty gangs or foreign invaders from taking over where the noble elite had bailed or been eliminated. It took Tori almost a full minute to realize that by God, he meant Pein.
What the fuck, she thought. Then she opened her mouth and did her best to redirect the conversation to talking about the town, and the Fujiwara, and the shinigami shrine.
There was still a lot of content about how good Rain's God was and how Tori should send a prayer. The Fujiwara had resettled the town in order to set up a rice processing plant, and then used underhanded tactics– like hiring ninja to harass local farmers– to force everyone in the region to sell to them and them alone. This would never happen in Rain Country, the man promised her, because God wouldn't let some random wealthy family hire foreign ninja to bully the common folk.
(He would let a random nobleperson hire foreign ninja and torture random other citizens because being noble gave you that right or something, Tori knew, but she didn't say that outloud.)
The man also divulged the rest of his aunt's story: she'd gone into the cave, started hearing voices at the shrine that told her the chicken coop needed fixing up, and then gone back to her hotel and vomited twice. When she finally went home, a fox had gotten into their coop and killed all their chickens.
"God warned her," the man said, chewing furious on his pipe, "just like our God warned us–"
Tori wanted to ask if the aunt had gone into the cave already knowing her chicken coop needed repairs and the fox attack was a completely predictable outcome. But Tori had gotten told off for asking questions about people's religious devotions before, back in her own world where some people thought questions were the same as criticism, and so she held her tongue.
When the man took a break from his rambling to pack more tobacco into his pipe, Obito stood up and loudly announced he would sing a song for them all as their evening entertainment. He then tipped his head back, and Tori had to work very hard to keep her face straight as he belted out a love ballad.
She'd heard this song before, a few times on the radio. Obito's voice wasn't bad, but she was pretty sure most of the lyrics were wrong. The strained looks on everyone else's faces when he started singing about a fish falling in love with an octopus were, admittedly, pretty hilarious.
When Obito was done, everyone moved to start cleaning up for the night, and Tori finally got off her ass to help the woman wash out her pot and bowls. There was a big utility sink behind the supply shop, with a sign indicating the water was potable but discouraging bathing in the basin.
"Is your cousin, um…" the woman shuffled uncomfortably. Around the corner, there was another shriek from Tobi and he inevitably got himself tangled in his own sleeping bag.
"They put me in charge of him, yes," Tori replied.
The woman sighed sympathetically.
"You seem close," the woman continued. "That's good. It's dangerous for a young woman to travel alone. You can mind each other."
She beamed at Tori, and Tori did her best to smile back.
xXx
Their little group didn't talk more, after they'd packed up for the night. The God-obsessed old man went to stand at the river and smoke some more, and Tori unrolled her camping mat next to Obito's under the canopy farthest away from the couple's own camp. When she took off her boots, her feet were bloody from new blisters.
"Interesting placement," Tori said, examining her foot and flexing her toes. She had blisters on the bottoms of her feet. That had never happened before.
"Gross, Tori-chan," Obito told her, shaking his head in performative disappointment.
The character Tori was crafting in her head– the hyper-competent semi-mysterious exorcist she was going to pretend to be to oust a ghost– was going to need to completely command the show, directing and managing their client's expectations. Such a woman wouldn't get blisters, and she wouldn't totter around with a limp from the blisters, and she wouldn't be wearing the ninja sandals that were Tori's only other piece of footwear. Tori could definitely suck it up and ignore the pain for a while, but…
"How long do you think this will take?" Tori wondered out loud. She'd been imagining maybe a weekend, but it was already going to take at least four days to get there.
"You wanted to be the mastermind," Obito told her, a distinctively non-Tobi meanness bleeding into his tone. "You tell me."
He did, however, offer her a roll of athletic tape. She carefully covered her blisters, and the places that were rubbed red but weren't quite blisters yet.
"You did a good job," Obito said at length, watching her fold up pieces of tissues to cushion the blisters under the tape. "It's hard to get people to open up that much, especially Rain Country people. We got a lot of info and they don't even know it."
Tori frowned as she bit off another piece of tape.
"I think it's totally normal for people to open up like that," she said.
It was normal, in her experience, for strangers stuck together by circumstance to tell little unimportant details of their lives. The only thing she'd really done was provide an excuse for everyone to share a meal, and the rest had just happened. Maybe ninja were more paranoid about it, but even Akatsuki members would share random things if you sat around and engaged them when they yelled about art or god or whatever they were into.
Obito tilted his head at her, like he had no idea what she was talking about. Maybe to him, and to watever fucked up circumstances he'd had to live through as a teenager, completely normal socialization was trickery and manipulation.
"It was just a normal conversation," Tori said.
"If it was a normal conversation, you would have started talking about ergotism again," Obito countered. "That's your normal. This wasn't. You'd be a more effective manipulator if you recognized when you were doing it."
"I'm not–" Tori started. "When was I talking about ergotism?"
Obito made a vague gesture with his hands. "Something about witches and mass hysteria. You had a lot of convoluted questions about mass hallucinations and fungal rot."
Tori frowned. She still had no memory of this, but it definitely sounded like something she'd say. Had she really spent so much time with him that she'd started forgetting conversations?
"I believe it was after you lit a piece of bread on fire," Obito said sagely.
"You did that!" Tori countered, remembering the incident. She'd wanted to try yeast in fuuinjutsu. Obito had been… very Tobi about it.
"I think it's totally normal for bread to catch fire like that," Obito replied in a very bad imitation of her, and Tori pulled her thermal blanket out of her backpack and tossed it over her head.
xXx
They didn't chat with the other Rain Country travelers much more in the morning. The supply shop opened early, and so they bought breakfast and packed lunches instead of sharing food again. The Rice Country ferry setup was similar to the Rain Country one, and Tori spent the day on the ferry reading, practicing walking, and then playing a game where she and Obito made up backstories for the rice paddy workers dotting the banks of the river.
Incidentally, they decided roughly 70% of rice farmers were undercover ninja and government agents. Tori watched a group of women walking along the riverbanks with babies on their backs and toddlers at their heels, and wondered out loud if she could just leave a baby with a nice family.
"Release it into the wild," Obito said. "I see, I see. Well, why not?"
They spent the night at a riverside hotel so isolated that it didn't have electricity. Their room was lit by gas lamps, and Tori arranged them around the cracked full length mirror leaning against one wall as she practiced her walk. She stuck her hips out and forward the way Mizusawa Asa had, trying to mimic her confident walk.
As she did this, she attempted to explain her plan to Obito.
"Here's how all the good paranormal investigation TV shows are set up," she said. Paranormal shows were not a thing in this world, which was a shame, because they were Tori's ideal mindless entertainment. "When there's two people, it's a medium who's sensitive to seeing ghosts, and then the person who actually does stuff."
There was always a mundane explanation for weird house noises or cold spots or whatever, of course, but that wasn't what the point of paranormal shows and it wasn't why she and Obito were hired. It almost always worked better, Tori had come to realize, if she just gave people what they wanted, and this lady wanted her delusions of being haunted validated and then excised. It was exactly what Orochimaru had done to manipulate and charm so many people, and Tori didn't see any reason to mess with a winning strategy.
The point of the TV medium was to hype up the audience, to convince them the paranormal was real. This, Tori reasoned, was the way to give their client exactly what she wanted: they'd take control over the ghost narrative and then give her an ending to blow her socks off.
Tori's plan, then, was that one of them should pretend to sense ghosts and be very dramatic about it, convince the Ghost Lady they were possessed by her house's ghost, and then the other person could pretend to exorcize them, the more dramatically, the better. They might also have to figure out why the woman thought she was being haunted and address it to prevent relapses and preserve their credibility, but how hard could that be? Probably there was just a raccoon in her attic or something.
Tori paused briefly, staring at herself in the cracked mirror. That guy in the bar had said monks had exorcized Dead Water Fever from his cousin's town with a dramatic light show. Was that their game for making people think they were managing disease? But he'd said it worked…
Tori shoved these thoughts aside. She could ponder lies of the state later.
"I think the format is based on a real husband-wife paranormal investigator team," Tori said. This format was probably also why the medium was always the woman of the pair, but she didn't need to tell Obito that. "It's a pretty compelling combo. Can you pretend to be possessed?"
Obito had seemed perfectly happy to let Tori take the lead on this part of the mission, and so she was going to do all the talking and be the exorcist. Obito was, however, also excellent at being the most dramatic person in the room.
He hopped to his feet and made a big deal of tapping his chin and asking Tori what she thought being possessed by a ghost might look like. He'd taken off his mask to eat, and his Tobi voice extended into him widening his eye at her in childlike curiosity.
"It doesn't really matter," she said. "Just be convincing. Bonus points if you do something no normal human can. She'll love talking about that, later."
She had expected maybe, like, some wallwalking. Instead, Obito made a big deal of clasping at his face in evident pain, then his face turned an inhumane shade of gray and started bubbling. A centipede emerged from his check, and then a cockroach came from his neck, and then a spider. He let out one long, agonizing scream, and bent over backwards into a perfect backbend before collapsing. Various bugs and spiders scattered across the floor.
Genjutsu, Tori realized. How useful.
"Yeah, like that," she said when he was done.
"You sound excited," Obito observed from the floor, his voice pouty. "I wanted to be scary."
Obito's little horrorshow wasn't nearly as bad as watching a person grow an entire second skeleton in Oto, but Tori wasn't going to tell him that. Instead, she clenched her fist and declared her undying love for ghosts.
Obito hopped back to his feet and leaned over her, posture inquisitive. "Are there ghosts in your porn books?"
Tori paused. The cogs in her head slammed shut and then rapidly started turning the other way. She groped for the notebook and pen she'd tossed aside earlier.
"No, but that's a great fanfic idea," she said, turning to a new page in the notebook. "Sexy ghosts. I love it."
"Hmm," Obito said, flopping back down on the floor beside her. "Your hobbies are weird, Tori-chan."
xXx
Because they'd been unlucky with the ferries, they were stuck on yet another passenger boat for the next morning. Tori did her best to explain a famous haunted Raggedy Ann doll the husband-wife exorcist pair notoriously had to lock up in a special museum it was so evil.
"I even had a Raggedy Ann," Tori concluded. "I think that's what makes the story extra spooky– a lot of people had them. She was, like, a cloth doll with a frilly white apron and bright red hair."
"Are you aware," Obito said slowly, "that 'haunted redheaded doll' just describes Sasori?"
Tori burst into laughter, leaning forward to clutch the rail of the boat.
"Would a haunted doll go into your sexy ghost story?" Obito asked, patiently waiting for her to get ahold of herself again.
"What? No… Well, unless you think people would be into it…?"
They walked the rest of the day, down an unshaded dirt road that wound through more rice paddies. Tori switched out her shoes for the walk– she was pretty confident she could walk in her boots now, and she'd almost definitely get blisters even with athletic tape wrapped all around her feet.
Even though the weather was cool, Tori felt herself working up a sweat under the sun. When they stopped near a little creek for dinner, she stuck her feet in it.
"Are we camping?" Tori asked, offering Obito a bag of dried plums she had on her that she was pretty sure she'd technically stolen from Kisame. He sat next to her on the rocky bank of the creek, dropping his mask between them and taking the bag.
"We could," Obito replied, shoving a plum into his mouth. "Or I could run us the rest of the way and we'd be there in an hour."
Tori eyed him. From anyone else, she'd just accept this offer. From Obito, it seemed like there was a decent chance of him… running her right into a cliff or something.
Or, unlike anyone else in Akatsuki, he was actually giving her a choice. This option seemed even less likely.
"I'd rather sleep in a bed," Tori said finally.
He let her climb onto his back, which was awkward and a half. "Hold on tight, Tori-chan!" he cried and then shot off with such sudden speed that Tori was almost thrown back. The only thing stopping her from falling off completely was Obito's firm grip on her legs and her iron grip on the back of his shirt.
She let out a handful of infuriated yelps as he ran along, which he either didn't hear or ignored. That this area was unforested was lucky, because if Obito had been doing anything but running straight over a flat surface, Tori would have surely lost her grip. As it were, her abdominals were already cramped from trying to stay upright.
By the time they reached the end of the stretch of rice paddies, Tori had managed to pull herself up and wrap her arms around Obito's shoulders. At the edge of the farmland, the road suddenly dipped down, and Obito stopped abruptly. Tori smashed her face into the back of his head.
"Ow!" she yelled. "Tobi, what the fuck is your problem–"
Obito wolf-whistled, and Tori peered over his shoulder at the view. They stood at the edge of a plateau, and it sloped down sharply into a series of narrow, terraced rice paddies. Beyond that was a valley of trees. The village they were traveling to was nestled among them, a cluster of buildings with orange-red roofs. A little beyond that was another clearing of long, tin-roofed buildings. The rice processing plant, Tori decided.
Rather than taking the dirt path that zigzagged between the terraces, Obito hopped down them like a large set of stairs. Tori grit her teeth and did her best not to bite her tongue at the jostling.
He dropped her just outside of the village proper.
"Your hair got so big," he observed, reaching forward to pull at a curl.
Well, Tori's hair had frizzed out and mostly lost individual curls. It probably looked more like a cloud than anything.
"It's fine," Tori told him. "All exorcists tease their hair."
"Uh-huh," Obito replied.
"Turn around so I can change," she told him. "We should get into character."
"I'm always in character," Obito assured her, even as he turned his back on her.
They walked into town looking completely ridiculous. Obito had not found her a jewel-encrusted skull, but he had found himself a ridiculous hooded cloak with a wildly impractical beaded pattern across the whole thing that was definitely just going to pop off with any extended wear. Combined with the mask and a cheap but large pendant of… some type of bird, he looked ridiculous.
Tori had made attempts to grab items she thought she could wear as part of a more normal outfit in the future, since she seemed to have a shockingly high rate of ruining clothes by getting them completely soaked in blood. She'd found an eccentric wrap-around dress with an asymmetrical skirt that matched her boots, which would probably look cute just on its own. She'd then accessorized it with, just, a truly absurd number of scarves. She'd also bought a tube of dark purple lipstick, which the concerned shop clerk had warned her would make her look like a gangster, so… perfect.
Also, Obito had kept shoving rings at her. Why had she agreed to all these rings? They were all completely mismatched, but she dutifully added them to her fingers.
"Am I cool and mysterious?" Obito asked, pulling up his cloak to cover the bottom half of his mask.
"Let me check my inner eye," Tori replied, pressing two fingers to either temple. "Nope, absolutely rancid vibes."
"I'm the one with an inner eye," Obito corrected, wagging his finger at her. "Keep it straight."
Ghost Lady's real name was Lady Fujiwara Etsuko, and she lived in an old mansion at the edge of town. It was surrounded by a stone wall and a garden that didn't look particularly well maintained– there were stone paths with clumps of weeds peeking out, as well as some half-dead bushes scattered around. The only thing that looked like it was actively being cared for was a bank of bright red flowers which lined the entire front of the house and looked as if they wrapped around the sides as well.
They took maybe two steps into the garden before Obito dropped to one knee.
"The dark energies….!" he cried, gripping his head. "Aaaargh!"
At least he's having fun, Tori thought. Obito was very happy to go along with anyone's stupid plan if it was annoying enough.
She, of course, intended to have fun too.
"What do you sense, cousin?" Tori asked, kneeling in front of him and placing her hands over his at the sides of his face.
A woman had come out to the front porch and then paused. Obito made a show of narrating the evil energies surrounding the house for her, taking big rasping breaths as he went. Tori watched the woman out of the corner of her eyes as she nodded seriously along, patting Obito on the back in an act of comfort. A young boy appeared behind the woman and ran off, only to return with a middle aged woman and man.
Lady Etsuko, Tori identified the woman. She was draped in a fancy-looking kimono, patterned in bright colors, but her eyes were filled with paranoia and anxiety, and her face had turned wide and desperate as she watched them. This show was for her.
"Calm yourself," Tori told Tobi, pitching her voice deep and trying to inject as much cool authority as she could into it. "Close your inner eye. Do not let it wander."
Obito let out a long groan and did a full-body shudder, but then he visibly calmed down. Tori passed him another dry plum and loudly identified it as being fortifying to the soul.
Lady Etsuko stepped hesitantly into the garden. In her barely coherent letters to Akatsuki, she'd bemoaned her lack of sleep and appetite, and under her fancy clothes and perfectly coiffed hair, Tori could see her figure was slight and she had deep bags under her eyes.
"Akatsuki-san?" Lady Etsuko asked, voice hopeful. It struck Tori as absolutely wild that anyone would be hopeful to meet any member of Akatsuki, even whatever the hell Tori's role was.
Tori stood, pulling herself to her full height. Tori was a short woman, but with the boots she was several inches taller than normal, and it made her feel more imposing than she'd ever been. She was still shorter than Lady Etsuko, but the amount of confidence she exuded definitely made Lady Etsuko perk up.
"My name is Reina, from the Hechizada family of spiritual specialists," Tori introduced. "I'll be your exorcist."
xXx
The first thing Tori did was make Lady Etsuko serve her dinner.
"Please tell me about your spiritual afflictions as we eat," Tori instructed.
It turned out listening to someone's unhinged ramblings while she ate delicious home cooked food was incredibly difficult. Whatever food Tori got at the Akatsuki headquarters was fine, but she hadn't had something that was even remotely approaching gourmet since she'd gotten to this world. Did this family have a private cook? Could Akatsuki hire one of those? Or… kidnap one, maybe?
Tori did not follow Lady Etsuko very well, in part because she was busy focusing on not just shoveling an entire plate into her mouth, and also in part because Lady Etsuko was not in a state to be telling a coherent story.
"There is a rattling," Lady Etsuko started. "And a dreadful feeling. Sometimes I can't breathe. My mother used to count brushstrokes…"
These all lined up with complaints in her letters, although it was unclear to Tori what Lady Etsuko's mother had to do with anything. Then Lady Etsuko became distracted by describing how her husband was always wearing red, which was a bad, unlucky color according to… something. He was born with a bad name, Lady Etsuko said. A fourth child; never good; all his brothers dead, dead, dead. Then she suddenly became fixated on the false name Tori had given Obito.
"Pesao, Pesao," Lady Etsuko murmured over and over. "What a unique name. Pesao… Is it common in your family?"
Tori had to work very hard to keep a straight face. "Yes," she said finally. "He comes from a long line of Pesaos."
When they were done eating, Tori asked for tea and for the lights to be dimmed. She went out of her way to hide her face in the billows of steam from her cup.
"My cousin could sense something, when we arrive," Tori said, as authoritatively as she could. "He's a very sensitive medium."
As if to demonstrate, Obito rolled his head back and did another full-body shudder, exhaling loudly as he did so.
Tori listed signs of the haunting Lady Etsuko had described in her letter as things "Pesao" had reported to her: the feeling of a hand around your neck, light-headedness, the ground slipping beneath you, exhaustion, an overwhelming sense of doom. Lady Etsuko's eyes widened and widened.
"Yes, yes," Lady Etsuko agreed, looking to Obito with wonder. "Yes, that's exactly what it's like. So you felt it too!"
"I was barely able to resist succumbing," Obito said, dead serious, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead.
"No one else believes me," Lady Etsuko said, hands clenching on her tea cup. They'd been bitten ragged. "They say they do, but I can see they don't. Their eyes wander. Rattles, jitters…"
"Some people are more open to the spirit world than others," Tori said, reaching forward and wrapping her hands around Lady Etsuko's. "It's difficult for the uninitiated to understand."
The woman sniffed, eyes watering and desperate for validation.
This is almost too easy, Tori thought.
"I am a very spiritual person," Lady Etsuko said, voice cracking. "I go to the shrine every morning, to pray. It's the only thing keeping me together."
"That's good," Tori said. "Keep yourself strong." Then she said, "I want to meet your household next."
Lady Etsuko sent a maid off to gather people. They lined up obediently in the living room, except for the middle aged man who leaned against the wall and looked incredibly judgemental.
"My husband is away on a business trip," Lady Etsuko started. "He's a very busy man. I miss him dearly, you know. I can barely keep my wits about me without him. The only thing keeping me going is prayer."
The middle-aged man cleared his throat, and Lady Etsuko cut herself off, although she looked unphased. She gestured at him and finished, "This is my husband's trading partner, Satoshi. We've been hosting him."
"How old are you, girl?" Satoshi asked, eyeing Tori up and down. His gaze put her right on edge, like he was assessing a piece of meat. It was both deeply condescending and borderline sexual.
Tori abruptly remembered she'd turned twenty at some point. How sad, that she hadn't been able to celebrate. In hindsight, she almost certainly would have been able to get someone to party with her, if not just for the excuse to have a beer and some cake.
Oh well, Tori thought. She could just pick a new birthday and make someone buy her dinner.
As it were, she didn't like this Satoshi guy. His very gaze felt slimy. She leveled him with her best unimpressed look.
"The spiritual world cares not about physical age," she replied coolly.
Satoshi didn't look convinced at all, and neither did any of the wait staff, but Lady Etsuko nodded very seriously. She was the only one Tori really needed to convince of anything, and so Tori judged this situation handled.
The waitstaff was four people including the little boy, who was the older maid's child. Lady Etsuko additionally had three children of her own: two boys aged twelve and fourteen, and then a twenty-three year old daughter.
Oh shit, Tori thought as Lady Etsuko very brightly explained she was so happy Tori was going to take Erin off her hands.
"She was married, of course," Lady Etsuko said blithely, "but it didn't work out. Honestly, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with her. She won't even come to the shrine with me. If only my dear husband were here…"
Fujiwara Erin had spent the entire time staring demurely at her feet. Her hair was braided and pinned up in a beautiful bun, so Tori could see her full face. She made no reaction as her mother complained about her failed marriage.
What the fuck am I going to do with this? Tori wondered, then opened her mouth and demanded Lady Etsuko show her the full house. Lady Etsuko nodded and turned to the older woman on her wait staff, starting on a series of instructions.
"No," Tori interrupted. "It is of upmost importance to assessing the spiritual afflictions of the house that you do it, Lady Etsuko."
Lady Etsuko hesitated for only a moment before deferring.
Tori made her go through every inch of the house, including waitstaff's personal rooms and a basement pantry area that Lady Etsuko had clearly never accessed herself, tottering uncertainly down the rickety wooden stairs. She made Lady Etsuko narrate where she'd seen evidence of hauntings: hallways where she saw strange shadows, how she'd had dizzy spells in the threshold to her home and in her bed first thing in the morning, where she heard strange noises at night. Tori made her open random things– every kitchen cabinet, a hallway closet, the servant boy's personal chest of clothes. She made her kneel on the floor and look under the study desk in her son's room. She made her pull the sheets off her own bed and open every skin care product in her bathroom. She made her peer into a decorative vase in the living room and then, just for kicks, stand in the middle of the back garden and scream.
Lady Etsuko was hesitant at first, but Tori tossed back her hair and promised it was all very spiritually necessary. Lady Etsuko stopped questioning her by the time she told her that she needed to stand in her own bathtub and knock on the walls, listening for a responding knock.
Obito plodded along behind them, occasionally pressing his hand to his forehand and announcing bad energies. He vibrated with something that probably seemed like nervous energy to onlookers, but which Tori privately guessed was sadistic glee. When she made Lady Etsuko scream, he joined in, like a wolf joining the yipping howls of a lapdog.
The effect of making Lady Etsuko articulate her problems and bossing her around was that she wound herself into a deep fluster, her eyes widening in paranoid fear and her hands getting shakier and shakier. She bit at her fingernails until they bled. Tori was sure she could get the woman to do anything at this point.
It was both a tempting and disgusting feeling. Tori wasn't used to having power over people, and so the idea of commanding someone to do something just for the sake of doing it was appealing. At the same time…
This feels bad, Tori thought, watching as Lady Etsuko threw herself on the floor and begged for help.
Tori kneeled next to her. She placed both hands firmly on the woman's shoulders.
"Don't worry," she said. "We're here for you. Now about our conditions…"
When she'd been trying to get Lady Etsuko to back down from hiring Akasuki, Tori had listed a bunch of increasingly bizarre conditions for Akatsuki's help on top of continually raising the mission costs. Lady Etsuko nodded eagerly and summoned the younger maid to show them to their room.
Holy shit, Tori thought, when the maid opened the bedroom's door to reveal the taxidermy bear statue Tori and demanded for no reason. Just as she'd requested, its paws held a bowl of a very specific brand of candy.
"Aah, perfect," Obito said behind her. He reached forward and grabbed a handful of candy.
"I'll bring your breakfast to you in the morning," the maid said, and then disappeared.
A table in the room had a pile of high-end teas Tori had copied from catalogs Itachi kept, as well as a kit of gold watchmaker's tools and several beetles preserved in amber she'd listed as "important ninja exorcist tools" after seeing a nature documentary.
"Tori, you going mad with power is… interesting," Obito said, unwrapping a candy. Tori had picked that brand because it was the only one she knew off the top of her head, because Obito liked them.
He could only get them in a specific part of Fire Country. He'd complained about it a lot as Tobi. She'd thought it'd be hard for Lady Etsuko to get, or at least that the demand would make Akatsuki seem too unhinged to work with. But no, now Obito just had his favorite candy.
"Can't wait to see what you're going to do with the first born," Obito said brightly.
Tori groaned and sank into a chair. She remembered diagramming a very specific furniture configuration for the room, right under an insane monetary quote for "potential emotional damages relating to ghosts," because this woman wasn't supposed to hire them.
There was an attached bathroom, and after they'd both gotten ready for bed, Tori bemoaned that people weren't supposed to agree to give away their children. Obito, going through his routine of moisturizing his scar tissue, made the observation that Tori had a very cruel mind to even come up with such an ultimatum. Tori attempted to justify her thought process by explaining it was a common trope in her culture. She retold fairy tales, Rumplestiltskin and Rapunzel.
"Tori," Obito said very slowly. "In both of those stories, the parents agreed to it."
Tori stared down at her futon, dumbfounded. She hadn't considered that.
"Still," she said.
"Maybe we can just leave her in the woods," Obito told her, Tobi-esque fake sympathy lacing his words. "I'm sure that as a rich, spoiled lady who's probably never set foot in a forest, she'll be fine."
"Do you think we can still leave her with a nice farmer family?" Tori wondered.
She pulled her bag to herself, unpacking and rearranging things as she and Obito brainstormed increasingly unhinged ways to get rid of Erin. (Perhaps she could be in charge of the kamui bees?) Tori was also concerned that there wasn't an obvious, direct cause of the supposed haunting, besides Lady Etsuko maybe being very mentally unwell. It seemed like the two of them would indeed end up there for more than a few days after all. At least there would be good food?
In the side pocket of her backpack, Tori discovered a small glass vial with a rubber stopper. Wrapped around it was a note from Sasori, with instructions on how to dose herself with poison. This made Tori completely forget about fake ghosts or the Erin situation.
"Are you kidding me?" she said, holding up the vial for Obito to see. "What is wrong with him? He didn't even give me gloves or anything to measure it with!"
xXx
Tori did not add poison to her morning tea, as Sasori had suggested. Instead, she left the vial in her bag and ate leisurely, then wandered out of the room in search of her employer.
Erin was sitting in the hallways outside the room.
"Um," Tori said.
"Good morning," Erin replied, eyes on the floor. "I'm meant to tell you that my mother is indisposed."
Lady Etsuko had gone to the shrine at dawn, then came back and had a "fit of nerves" which now left her bedridden.
"To clarify," Tori said slowly, "this shrine is the Shinigami shrine?"
"Yes," Erin said, gaze still fixed on the patch of floor in front of her. "My mother has become very devoted since my father went on his business trip."
"And how long has this trip been?" Tori asked.
"Six months."
"Are his trips usually this long?"
Erin hesitated. "No."
Well. Okay then. Who knew what that meant.
Inside their room, there was a sudden burst of screams. Tori pursed her lips and pushed the door open to reveal Obito on the ground, failing and screaming with about seven different voices, chorusing all at once as part of his genjutsu. Erin let out a gasp of horror.
Show off, Tori thought, feeling almost affectionate.
Obito kept up his act of making inhuman and horrible noises for only a few minutes, but it was enough to attract the maid who'd brought them breakfast and then Satoshi. The maid was clearly frightened, and even when Obito had stopped and then rolled over and pretended to be asleep, she begged Tori to gather their breakfast things herself so the maid didn't have to enter the room.
"Don't be lazy," Satoshi told the maid. "Go on."
Tori almost intervened, but it felt wrong for Reina to be doing her own chores, so she stood awkwardly in the hallway as the maid visibly held back tears as she entered the room. Obito let out a loud snore that made her jump. Well, at least other people in the house would believe he was possessed.
Satoshi looked Tori up and down. She very consciously attempted to ignore his gaze.
"So you're a kunoichi?" he asked.
What the hell? Tori thought. That this mistake could be made was… kind of funny.
It abruptly became very not funny at all, as Satoshi stepped directly into her personal space, breathing the scent of tobacco into her face. "I heard kunoichi can be paid to do all sorts of things, for the right price. Especially with men."
His voice was heavy with innuendo, and Tori felt her stomach twist with disgust. Seriously? Seriously?
"REINA," Obito called, suddenly on his feet. The maid dropped the tray on which she'd gathered their dishes from breakfast. Satoshi stepped away from her. "Didn't you say you wanted to see the shrine?"
They left the house. The property was on the edge of town, and they had to pass through it to get to the shrine. The town itself was cute; the residential sections were mostly blocks of small apartments, all built uniformly, but the center was a cluster of shops and cafes that Tori would loosely describe as charming. They asked directions to the shrine and were pointed to a wide and well-maintained dirt path that led into the surrounding woods.
The entrance to the cave was underwhelming, a hole in the ground no larger than a sewage manhole, with a sign labeling it as the way to the Shinigami shrine. A stone bench held a small collection of rusty, dinged up metal lanterns, only three of which appeared to have a candle inside, and a lockbox where they could donate to shrine maintenance. Foliage around the hole had been cut away, and someone had built a narrow, ladderlike metal staircase down into the earth.
Tori spread her fingers over her stomach, remembering how starved the Shinigami had felt, then the way its stomach had rolled in disgust at the thought of her. The hole in the ground looked innocuous, but so had the mask…
Obito lit two lanterns and passed one to Tori.
"Okay," he said, leaning over the entrance and staring down into it. "Kind of weird, but not weird enough to make you completely lose your marbles."
Tori was sure Obito knew all about completely losing your marbles in a cave, although she held her tongue on the matter.
"Are there many shrines like this?" Tori wondered. People on TV and in books were always going to shrines for various deities, but it seemed like usually that involved going up into a mountain or something.
"I think Earth Country has cave shrines," Obito said, stepping onto the top rung of the staircase with more hesitancy than Tori would have anticipated from him. "But, you know, they just have a lot of things in caves."
Tori followed Obito down, lantern in hand. The staircase was short, dropping them onto a steep path that spiraled downwards and downwards. Although the path was clearly manmade, it wasn't exactly smooth, and there was no rail to prevent visitors from sliding off the side and into the dark abyss of the cave.
There was an ancient rope installed into the wall of the cave, strung through iron loops. Tori clung to it as best she could with her other hand dedicated to holding her light. In front of her, Obito walked with the confidence of a ninja with no fear of falling, although his shoulders were surprisingly tense.
Tori waited for the feeling of dread to come as they descended, the attention of a god who did not like her. It never happened. The cave was silent.
The path eventually leveled out, snaking off into a low-roofed tunnel. It deadended in a decent sized cavern, where an altar was carved directly into the back wall itself.
Obito paused at the entrance of the cavern, and Tori nearly bumped into him.
"What's up?" she asked.
"Ugh, it's creepy," Obito whined, then marched over to the altar with an air of determination in the face of great hardship. This place did not feel like the Shinigami at all; Tori felt perfectly safe.
Oh my god, Tori thought as Obito lit the wall torches on either side of the perfectly non-creepy altar. Is he afraid of caves?
The altar had about what Tori would have expected: shelves carved out of the earth where people had left offerings and photos of loved ones, a scroll laid out where you could write names and prayers, dusty looking cushions to kneel on arranged in front of it. It also had a feature that seemed bizarre to her: rather than depictions of deities or associated symbology, someone had carved lines and lines of seal script into the wall above the altar proper. They went all the way up to the ceiling of the cavern, organized into dozens of columns.
"This doesn't say 'he who reads this will have hallucinations of ghosts,' does it?" Obito asked, pointing at the script.
Tori squinted up at it. "Seal script" as it existed in this world sometimes referred to an ancient way to write real words and sentences, and sometimes it referred to the specialized symbols used in fuinjutsu. Tori couldn't read the former, but this example seemed to contain mostly the latter.
Seemed, Tori emphasized to Obito, because a lot of it was stuff she'd never seen before.
"But it's not arranged to do anything," Tori said. "It's just… a list?"
She fumbled with the many scarves tied around her skirt. She'd shoved a notebook and pen into one.
"Right," Obito said when she started scribbling copies of the symbols. "Well, looks like you don't need me here."
He left. Tori sat on one of the cushions. She didn't see how the seal script could be at all related to Lady Etsuko's delusions– it wasn't like it held a trapped a soul, or caused hallucinations– but they could be a useful aesthetic touch to their eventual and very dramatic fake exorcism. Besides, she wanted to look these up once she got the chance. Were there maybe monks or something that she could ask?
Would Hidan know? She wondered absently. She didn't think he knew shit about fuinjutsu, but he was definitely an expert on all things religion.
It was difficult to make out the symbols toward the ceiling of the cavern, as the light from the wall torches didn't quite reach. Tori stood to squint harder at them.
She nearly fell over, suddenly lightheaded. She stumbled forward, hand grasping for the shelves of the altar to steady herself. There was a moment of panic, but no– this feeling was fundamentally different from meeting the Shinigami.
Huh, she thought, watching the ground spin beneath her. It eventually slowed and then stopped, and Tori craned her head back, eyes following the seal script upwards like it might tell her what was happening. The script definitely isn't doinganything, though.
The dizziness faded, and Tori set her notebook on the top of the altar to continue writing. When she tilted her head back again to look up at the script, the dizziness returned.
What am I thinking? She decided, putting the notebook away. I can't write like this…
She was genuinely torn about leaving, but also maybe whatever was driving Lady Etsuko insane was the same thing making her dizzy? It would be the more logical move to retreat before she got so lightheaded she might fall off the path back up.
She found Obito outside, sitting on the little bench with the lantern and chewing more of his candies.
"I don't like that," he said when she explained what happened. "I'm supposed to be the one who gets possessed."
She had a hard time walking straight as they went back into town, so they stopped at a cafe.
"Maybe we should go to a doctor," Tori suggested. "Run some tests."
"Maybe it's…" Obito leaned for conspiratorially. "The ghost."
Tori rolled her eyes. There was, as far as she could tell and even with several revelations about gods and souls, no evidence of a ghost. Still. If the cave was somehow the cause, that meant they could make Lady Etsuko's symptoms stop by simply preventing her from going down there. All they had to do was prove causality… or, since that was difficult, at least a very compelling correlation.
"Did you grow up here?" Tori asked the girl behind the counter. She put on her best, friendliest smile. "We were passing through and heard about the shrine."
The girl, who was about Tori's age, had indeed grown up in the surrounding area. Her family was rice farmers, but she worked in-town most of the year to support them monetarily.
"People only really go down there when someone dies," she said of the shrine. "The Fujiwara family hires people to go clean it sometimes, I guess. They're the main patrons."
"We saw Fujiwara Etsuko down there this morning," Tori prompted.
"Oh…" The girl's eyes drifted away from Tori, focusing instead on a stack of menus on the coffee counter. "I guess I heard the rumor that… well, they didn't used to go more than anyone else. It's just that they own most of the town, so they have to at least pretend to take care of it."
"Pretend?" Tori repeated, but the girl changed the subject to retelling the legend of the shrine. It was the same story the boatman had told them, although the girl rejected the theory of a ninja's jutsu killing the town.
"Fujiwara hires ninja all the time," she said. "So I know a lot about how jutsu works. It can't go underground like that."
"Really?" Obito asked in false fascination. "Can you tell us more about ninjutsu? How exciting!"
So, they didn't learn anything else about the shrine specifically, but apparently Lady Etsuko's husband had been very aggressive about taking over the harvest and sale of all the rice in the area, forcing farmers into tight contracts and then using ninja to enforce them, often violently. The girl was not exactly explicit about this, but it wasn't difficult to read between the lines.
I wonder if that's why she's working at a cafe instead of with her family, Tori thought as the girl described a fascinatingly incorrect analysis of how a genjutsu worked. They can't actually make enough money off the rice like this.
When they started on the walk back to the mansion, Tori was no longer dizzy, but she was now in a bad mood.
"I can't believe you can just hire a ninja to genjutsu someone into signing away their land," Tori said, kicking a rock.
"Yeah, way worse than the murder and torture you already knew about," Obito replied.
Which, like, yeah, Tori had been aware Akatsuki would do any horrible thing if you could pay enough for it. But surely actual villages had– had rules or standards or something!
She did not muddle through these thoughts and feelings further, because Obito's wording made her remember Satoshi's earlier comment.
"Also, what the fuck is with this Satoshi guy?" she said. "He's the creepiest thing we've seen so far."
"Good thing you're a kunoichi," Obito told her slyly. "Perfectly capable of self-defense."
"Oh, fuck you," Tori replied, although she wasn't particularly worried. What was anyone going to do to her with Obito around? He might "accidentally" set a few fires, but they were in this together. "Okay, also, why is their garden only those weird flowers?"
When they got to the property, instead of going straight inside, Tori walked directly over to the bank of red flowers. The flowers themselves were quite wide, with thin, spindly petals.
"They're very pretty," Tori decided. "But didn't Lady Etsuko say red is bad luck?"
Obito cocked his head to the side. "You don't know what they are?"
Tori stared at him, then down at the flowers. "No?"
"They're spider lilies," he told her. "They grow on graves."
xXx
Lady Etsuko managed to make her way out of bed for lunch. She bemoaned her state to Tori with surprising vigor while swearing she could consume nothing but a thin broth.
Erin sat with them at lunch, positioning herself next to Tori. She then followed Tori around the mansion while Tori painted "protective seals" on random walls, like her own version of a sad little ghost. Obito disappeared into their room.
"Do you… want something from me?" Tori ventured, addressing Erin.
Erin only blinked at her. She had big, beautiful eyes, like a cow.
Tori also disappeared into their room.
"I don't think I can handle having an adult child," she announced.
"Hmm, suck for you," Obito said. "Also, I'm leaving this evening."
"What?" Tori asked.
Zetsu had contacted Obito about something urgent that he would not explain to Tori. Obito would be abandoning Tori to run this mission solo for twelve days, at which point he expected her to be done so he could escort her back to Ame and continue doing his mysterious unnamed Obito things.
"Twelve days?" she repeated. No way did she want to be here that long, and alone? How was she supposed to accomplish their plan alone? "You can't just leave the plan! You're a part of the plan!"
"I believe in you," Obito said, sounding very much like he did not believe in her, and that her new course towards failure would be hilarious. "Don't worry. I'll leave you with something good."
Just before dinner, Obito walked into the kitchen and started to wail with the voices of tens of demons. Everything became inexplicably hot, and his clothes suddenly caught fire.
"Stay back!" Tori yelled, ushering Erin and the staff present into one horrified group in the corner of the kitchen.
"What's happening?" Satoshi yelled, bursting into the room and brandishing, for some reason, an actual sword. Lady Etsuko was hot on his heels, hair and clothes disheveled and face in a panic.
Suddenly, the doors to the basement pantry burst open. Red flames shot forward. A gruesome, clawed hand grabbed Obito by the ankle and jerked.
"NO!" Obito yelled, falling to the floor and thrashing. "REINA, HELP!"
Tori reached forward, offering her hand. She knew the fire was fake, but it both looked real and felt hot, she couldn't quite convince her brain to get too close to it. Her fingers brushed the tips of Obito's uselessly.
"Pesao…!" she screamed over the roar of the flames.
"AAAH!" Obito yelled, and was dragged down into the basement.
The flames died. The room went cold and was very quiet. Satoshi approached the door cautiously, sword in front of him.
"He's gone," he said after a few moments, voice filled with awe. "He's completely gone!"
Lady Etsuko fainted. The kitchen erupted into chaos.
Obito, you asshole, Tori thought, joining Satoshi to stare down into the basement and Erin kneeled to fan her mother. Satoshi was, thankfully, too busy trying to regulate his breathing to make a pass at her. Why would you do this to me?
xXx
The good news was that everyone in the house was now convinced ghosts were real, and in a way that positioned Tori as an expert on it. She gave a speech about how "Pesao" was taken by unhappy spirits as he'd been attempting to protect them from said spirits, and how this would be their fate if they didn't all listen to her.
"Don't let his sacrifice be in vain," she said, voice quivering with barely repressed emotion. It was barely even acting; she genuinely wanted to scream.
Then they all listened to her when she said to fill their mouths with salt water and walk backwards to their bedrooms, where they had to stay for the rest of the night so matter what they heard or saw or smelled. She couldn't believe that worked.
(Dinner was half-made, so she fixed a plate for herself and ate it in her room.)
Now she just had to convince them she got rid of the ghost, ideally in an equally dramatic way to match the expectation Obito had set. Oh, and she had to remove whatever was making Lady Etsuko think she was being haunted, which seemed to go way beyond raccoons in the attic. How the hell was she going to do that? She could come up with a reason for Lady Etsuko to not go into the cave shrine, which might clear up some of her symptoms, but that certainly wouldn't be enough of a show for the mess she'd made.
She stayed up late reading Icha Icha Paradise. This one chronicled Satsuki's dramatic redemption arc and subsequent betrayal, and she had been busily annotating it. She wanted to write into the fanzine and correct some idiot's analysis of the "realistic" take on ninja conflicts when Icha Icha had a blatant fixation on the "heroic shinobi always finding a way" in the face of impossible conflict–
You're going down, reader Eggplanted, Tori thought, scribbling away. You and your stupid headcanon about Satsuki favoring pink when she's clearly a purple.
She woke up in the morning with ink on her face. Ugh.
As an afterthought before she left her room to tell the rest of the house it was safe to come out and make her breakfast, Tori folded the knife from Deidara into her skirt. She hadn't liked the way Satosih looked at her, and now she had no ninja ally hanging around. Hopefully this was nothing but an overabundance of precaution.
Lady Etsuko reported herself too "affected" to go to the Shinigami shrine, and she actually shed tears as she explained from her bed she couldn't go to pray for poor Pesao.
"It's okay," Tori soothed. She hadn't blinked for a very long time, to make eyes wet with unshed tears. "Drink ginger and tumeric tea to calm your soul. I will go pray for my cousin. I desire privacy to mourn him."
She requested a watch from Lady Etsuko, who directed her to dig a pocket watch on a silver chain out of a jewelry box. Tori didn't want to spend very long in the cave, especially without Obito to come fish her out if something happened. She checked the time before she descended once again.
The outside of the cave looked exactly the same as it had the day before. Tori's goal was to copy more seal script, time how long she could stay down there symptom-free, and then maybe go back to Lady Etsuko and tell her some excuse for why she shouldn't go down everyday anymore.
It did not occur to Tori that the cave could contain something far worse that would completely derail her mission. She went in without fear.
Tori took the climb down slower than the day before, now that she didn't have a ninja to grab her if she slipped and fell. Even so, the descent felt faster this time, now that she knew where she was going.
She saw the light before she saw a person. There was a harsh fluorescent glow from the opening of the shrine's cavern, from someone's electric lamp. Tori approached without fear: even if people only ever came down to mourn the dead, people died all the time, especially if your local rice mill monopoly wanted to sic ninja goons on you. She was sure the shrine got a decent number of visitors, and she wasn't expecting anyone dangerous or remarkable.
She was wrong. She stepped boldly into the cave, recognized the person inside, and actually let out a scream.
It wasn't a terribly dramatic scream– a yelp of shock rather than horror. Still, she stepped right back out of the cavern and considered running. Her heartbeat had already gone from normal to a sprint.
"Tori?" Sasuke asked, staring at her in open surprise.
Except, no. This wasn't Sasuke. It was his face and body, but something was horribly wrong.
His hair had grown out several inches and was tied at the nape of his neck, fanning out and not succeeding at all at making him look like his brother. He'd grown several inches since she last saw him, and he turned toward her and stepped forward with a sort of predatorial slink that she'd never seen on Sasuke. He was dressed in a dark purple yukata, and had applied both eyeliner and purple eyeshadow to his face.
No way, Tori though. Oh, fuck.
"O-orochimaru?" Tori asked.
Sasuke's mouth peeled back into such an indulgent, evil smile that it answered her question for her.
"Fancy meeting you here," Orochimaru basically purred.
xXx
CHAPTER NOTES:
Tori's fake names are all Spanish words.
Reina - a Japanese given name; also "queen" in Spanish Hechizada - bewitched; spelled. Would not be read the same if read as a Japanese word vs a Spanish word, but I kept the Spanish spelling to make the joke more obvious. Pesa'o (from "pesado") - an annoying person (literally, "heavy")
Seal script is a real type of ancient writing. I decided the term made sense as a way to describe "script meant for seals," although I doubt Japanese would use the same word for "seal" for both. Don't think about language too much in this fic, shh.
Red spider lilies are associated with death in Japan. I didn't do a deep dive researching this, but what I read indicated they're commonly (intentionally) planted around graves. Obito likes spooky wording. :)