AIC finale 1 of 2

“That’s not exactly what I meant...” Sarutobi frowned.

The head priest hummed. “As these lands have recently suffered from mismanagement by Orochimaru-san, we here have learned that perhaps it is best to carefully consider the benefits and drawbacks of all chosen affiliations and protections.”

Ouch. Being compared to Orochimaru stung with bitter unfairness. She was his slayer, not his successor.

‘If they really think so poorly of me, there’s no point in me being here.’

She had to work to keep her face and voice unaffected. She looked directly at the head priest and ignored how the Hokage seemed to be preparing to speak. Time to make everything uncomfortable for other people.

“Shinpu-sama, I recall that Orochimaru-san’s financial records indicated that his activities were overall beneficial for the economy. Does this reflect your observations?”

“Oh, yes,” he agreed genially. “The village of Sound he founded removed many brigands and other criminals, as well as funded various medical programs and incentivized international trade of rare commodities.”

‘That sounds a lot like what I’ve done,’ Aiko thought, feeling a little bit of pride swell up.

He paused, and his tone became less glowing. “I believe that he also sold a large volume of human organs, and the sale of meat across international borders incurs a particularly high tax.”

“That is disgusting,” Sanbi said.

‘It’s the only thing with a higher profit margin than drugs.’

Sanbi sighed. “I referred to the fact that the organs were taxed as meat. That implies government collaboration at some level.”

“Profitable,” Aiko repeated aloud, not letting the topic affect her. She leaned in slightly. “I’m sorry to hear that Orochimaru’s lack of planning meant that all that infrastructure collapsed when his village did.” She pursed her lips. “I, for example, would diversify the centers of commerce and distribute authority so that the loss of no one person, however tragic, might have such a detrimental impact on the economy.”

“Really,” the ancient priest said. He looked at her speculatively.

She had to think about it for a moment. How would she manage this area? It was a nice thought exercise. Should she take it over? She could do so much with it.

The Hokage cleared his throat in an obvious interruption. “Maito-kun, how is the bird?”

“Energetic!” Gai beamed around the table. “Yosuzume-san is stretching well, no doubt to prepare for future flights warning unwary travelers of their spectral escort!”

His exuberance startled the bird. It squawked and flapped, unbalancing. Its talons were still caught in his flak jacket, so it ended up half on the table. With one mighty flap, it swept all his dishes to the floor.

Aiko watched this happen blankly, entirely unaffected.

After the clatter there was a long silence.

Maito-kun silently helped the bird back to his shoulder.

She cocked her head and watched them. The bird’s wings were drooping in social mortification. She felt a little bad.

“These things happen,” she said.

The priest sighed. “I am not certain if another serving is available.”

‘I don’t really care about that. I’m not even hungry.’

Looking to smooth it over, Aiko looked down at her food. Her rice was still untouched, and only the pickled eggplant was missing from her tsukemono. “Here.” She passed over her rice bowl and tsukemono with one graceful movement.

Gai took it on reflex, putting down the small dish of tsukemono on the table and cupping the rice in one hand.

The head priest audibly gasped.

Gai beamed at her. “Thank you!”

Aiko made a non committal sound in response and drank from her soup.

Despite her lack of encouragement, Gai’s enthusiasm increased. She sighed and turned her attention to her own food. After a few minutes, Gai got her attention again.

“Are you certain that you don’t want any, Mizukage-sama?” She watched him pick up his tsukemono dish and cradle it protectively.

Hatake-kun sighed audibly.

Aiko looked between them.

‘This is mildly weird behavior for Gai. Is he going to get anxious and weird if I don’t let him return the favor?’

“I hate to take all of your rice and leave you hungry in bed! It would not be very gentlemanly.” Maito-kun was actually tearing up.

Yes. Yes, he would.

She reached out with both hands to accept the rice back. “That’s very kind, thank you. I hope you both enjoyed the food.”

In her peripheral vision, she could see that the head priest was hyper focused on how well she was making nice with Konoha. She pretended not to notice as she accepted her dishes back. It was basically a reflex to eat some rice to keep Gai from getting any weirder.

The head priest shot up out of his seat. “A wedding!” He cried. He clapped his hands. “How exciting, and how clever.”

…’what.’

“Say what?” Kakashi said, in one of the weirdest tones she’d ever heard from him.

“Uzumaki-san, come come, you can’t sit here with your betrothed.” The priest put a hand on Aiko’s shoulder.

Sanbi was shrieking in pure delighted hysteria.

‘Did you know what was happening? Aiko demanded. ‘You were real quiet then.’

He shrieked again in what had to have been a release of gradually building hilarity.

‘You’re the worst,’ she swore at him. ‘You are my ancient enemy.’

Aiko needed to be in a different room. She stood up, deeply tired of everyone and everything else. “Goodnight,” she said. It was bland.

There was a confused but polite echo of “goodnight” in return.

The Hokage’s voice was weak and dazed. She looked determinedly forward as the Head Priest walked with her to the door.

The old man glanced back. “A traditional proposal,” he said. “Sharing food! Quite romantic.”

“It is a very old custom,” Sanbi giggled.

“I am very romantic,” Aiko agreed grimly. Then the door slid shut behind them.

“This is awkward.” Sanbi didn’t even bother to hide how much fun he was having. “Will you end the engagement?”

‘Eventually.’ Aiko made a face and then hid it before the priest saw it. ‘We can talk it out tomorrow. It might actually be useful for negotiations. The priest wasn’t wrong.’

“That’s not very romantic of you.”

Aiko excused herself from the priest and slipped into her room, quietly thunderous with irritation. That cut off in an instant when she saw the woman gracefully perched in the butsudan.

She hit her knees and genuflected without a thought. There was no conscious decision. It was an instinctive human reaction to a spiritual predator.

“Well then,” said Amaterasu, disinterested in her piety and panic. “Little death god. I have a task for you. Follow my harbinger, when you hear his call.”

The only possible answer was full and immediate agreement. “Of course.” Aiko waited. And waited. When she finally dared to peek her head up, the goddess was gone.

“What just happened?” Sanbi sounded perturbed. “You went away. Or I went away? It was quiet and dark.”

…That was upsetting. Aiko very slowly got to her feet. “I think I received a visit from a goddess.”

Sanbi seemed to think that over. “How could you tell a Goddess from a ghost or demon?” he wondered. 

What a good question. Aiko paced the floor. Time seemed to pass around her. The Goddess Izanami was sort of a ghost, wasn’t she? She died in the opening of the world story and went to dwell in the dead lands, where her husband dared not touch her. But Amaterasu? Not really. 

“I think,” Aiko said grimly, “you know one when you meet one.”

There was no question of sleep. It was just absurd. Aiko put on a nicer outfit and then paced tight lines across the floor of her chambers for hours, trying and discarding tactics and strategies. She could not outsmart, avoid, or ignore. Her only option was to react to what happened.

A wolf howled somewhere in the night. 

“Is that your messenger?” Sanbi asked, reluctantly fascinated. 

Aiko pulled open the shoji door that led to the back garden and mountainside. Light caught off of two eyes about 20 meters up in the brush. “I think so.” She kept her voice quiet and pulled on her shoes before stepping down into the rock path. It would be nice if she didn’t wake the Konohan delegation, but she wasn’t too optimistic. Aiko picked her away through the darkness. The garden itself was easy to traverse in the dark, but there came a point when she was awkwardly picking her way around sharp bits of brush and clambering up rockface. When she reached the wolf, Aiko put her hands on her thighs and bowed. If it was just a regular wolf, it would probably bite her then.

She was a little disappointed to straighten to a regular position and see the wolf give her a decisive nod. It figured. The animal was an eerie, perfect white. That was the color of godly messenger animals.

Sanbi hissed out through his beak. “That’s creepy.”

The wolf bared her teeth. 

“...Does it hear me?” Sanbi was appalled.

The wolf turned with a huff. It was obvious that Aiko was meant to follow down the animal trail. It ran. She ran at its heels. The forest moved around them at a pace that her footfall could not explain. Aiko watched it for a moment in strange fascination and then it made her feel so sick that she had to watch the wolf’s tail bob in the darkness ahead. 

They were definitely off of the property. Out of the country. They traveled unimaginably far, upsettingly fast in some sort of fairy tail logic that Aiko could not track. Then they stopped at the face of a cliff. The wolf turned to regard her and then sat. She laid her tail primly against her side and then turned to stone. 

“...Sentry,” Aiko murmured when she realized. Her skin prickled. She bowed her head as she passed the statue and examined the place she had been taken to. It looked like solid stone, but it couldn’t be. There was a reason that she was here. Cautiously, she raised a hand and felt through the moss until she found a seam in the stone.

Oh. Oh, she did not like this. She shuddered involuntarily.

At the end of the creation story, Izanagi pushed a stone to block the entrance to the land of the dead to keep his wife inside. 

She really wanted this to be some other place. Her skin was crawling. She felt the crack up and down until she had a sense of how big it was. It was upsettingly large, but of course it would be. Only a god had been able to move it, not even the goddess Izanami could push it out of the way to escape.

“Are you ah, entirely certain that you should move it?” Sanbi whispered into the night. There weren’t any birds calling or insects. There wasn’t even any wind.

Aiko had a miserable certainty down to her bones that this really was the entrance to death. “I think there’s only one path forward,” she said grimly, and summoned chakra chains. “I can’t move this, so I have to break it.”

Sanbi hissed. “I am not meant to be here,” he warned. “I can’t die.”

Aiko stopped in her tracks to consider this, chains poised to strike against stone. Sanbi… might not survive the land of the dead. He wasn’t mortal, that was not the track he was on. She was living and therefore she could die, that didn’t negate her being and existence. But she had a suspicion that he was onto something. It might end him. 

She knew the math on this fuinjutsu problem. She could end the seal at any time that tied him to her. The backlash ought to kill her, it might be survived if she was lucky. It was normally an unthinkable option.

It was the only option.

“No…” Sanbi didn’t sound certain. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I’m going to immediately go to death,” Aiko pointed out. “And..” she trailed off, unsure of how to quantify and qualify the building sense of unreality and inhumanity in her being. Amaterasu had called her a ‘little death god’. She… She wasn’t really a human anymore, in the strictest sense of the meaning. 

She shook her head to shake off the glazing on her vision. 

“This is crazy. I don’t want you to die.” Sanbi shook his head. “I don’t like it, Aiko! Let’s go home.”

“I’m not going to die,” she said decisively. “And I said I would free you. I won’t risk you.” Her hands drifted to her stomach where the seal was. She touched it lightly to activate the latent pathways of power and traced the feeling of the currents of chakra that swirled and turned into gates and dead ends of traps. She bit her lower lip. She severed a line.