Interlude: Heartbreaker
Mariko skipped home, her exhausted uncle following somewhere way behind. There were no guests at the Open Hearth today, and Uncle Kazuhiro had persuaded Mum to hold the fort while he and Mariko went out to play. Of course, Mariko had to make the most of an opportunity like that, even if it meant leaving Uncle Kazuhiro panting and out of breath and looking like he was about to collapse. But playtime with her uncle always left her starving, and tonight Mum had promised to make her very best vegetable stew. It would have taken a girl with far more willpower than her to slow down and let him catch up.
Mariko stopped as she reached the inn. There was someone talking to Mum, and it wasn't just any guest. He was tall, and lean, and had that metal thing on his forehead that only ninja had, and he wasn't talking the way guests booking a room usually did.
Mariko decided to sneak up to the door and eavesdrop. She was good at eavesdropping, and besides, grown-ups never paid attention to little girls. Why should a ninja be any different?
"D-rank at most, relative to her age. She's not going to be the next Mizukage with chakra reserves like that, but she's still in a whole other world than civilians—no offence—and she has the potential to be a fine ninja."
"But being a ninja must be very dangerous," Mum said warily. The ninja probably thought she was being suspicious, but Mum's tone of voice told Mariko she just wanted to be persuaded.
"Life is dangerous, ma'am," the ninja's voice was completely matter-of-fact. "But nobody in Hidden Mist dies in bandit raids, or gets savaged by wild animals, or starves to death or gets killed by diseases that our medic-nin could cure with a snap of their fingers. Being a ninja means she'd have the skills to defend herself, a whole villageful of other ninja to help her succeed, and the opportunity to command her own destiny."
Mariko could hear the objections lining up in Mum's head, hoping to be knocked down. She was so easy to read.
"What about the rest of us? Surely you can't ask a young girl to go live on her own in a strange village?"
The ninja sounded amused. "The Mizukage's Office provides a relocation stipend to families capable of producing high-chakra children. You already have a trade, so I doubt you'll have any trouble getting back on your feet in Mist.
"Now, all you have to do is sign this contract here, and in a week or so there'll be a genin team down to help you move your belongings."
Mariko's mind was boggling. A week? One measly week to leave everything behind? The inn which her great-grandfather had built hundreds and hundreds of years ago? All her friends? She wasn't even going to get started on the idea that she, Inoue Mariko, could become a ninja, and learn how to break boulders in half with her bare hands and call down lightning on people she didn't like. It simply didn't feel real.
"If you'll wait, sir, my brother Kazuhiro will be back any minute now. He knows how to read and write."
And just like that, Mariko the innkeeper-in-training joined the ranks of the people who ruled the world.
-o-
It had been a tiring day, with double chakra control lessons, and Mari was drained and hungry as she staggered home to the Open Heart (the end of the sign had fallen off long ago, and somehow they'd never got round to fixing it). She needed that vegetable stew more than she needed air.
"Welcome home, Mariko!" Uncle Kazuhiro beamed as he looked up from his ledger. "How was ninja training today?"
"I told you, Uncle, it's 'Mari' now," Mari gave him a semi-serious glare for as long as she could, but finally failed to hold it in the face of his wry expression.
"And what, pray tell," Uncle Kazuhiro demanded, waving his hands in the air in mock exasperation, "is wrong with the name that your father, may his spirit drift on warm currents forever, gave you out of the goodness of his heart?"
"It's girly," Mari said in much the same tone as she might have said "it's filled with slimy, writhing maggots".
"Half the boys make fun of me because I'm the smallest in my year," she went on, "and the other half keep asking me out just because I'm pretty. Nobody's taking me seriously! I'm not a little girl anymore, and 'Mari' is a much more adult name."
Uncle Kazuhiro gave a thoughtful nod. "You're a beautiful girl, Mariko, and I think you'll only grow more beautiful over time. And the trouble is, people rarely do tend to take beautiful girls seriously. It's like they think if you're beautiful, it means that's all there is to you, and you don't have to be strong or clever."
"That's stupid," Mari said with all the finality of a judge's verdict. "I'm as good as anybody in my class, girl or boy, and I'd still be as good as them if I shaved all my hair off tomorrow."
"Yes, it is. But it means you have to get used to proving yourself if you want people to see past your good looks and realise there's actually a pretty badass young woman under there."
Mari couldn't help it. She preened a little.
"My advice to you is to find something you can do that nobody can overlook, and get very good at it. You're good at lots of things, aren't you, Mariko? There's that ninja fighting of yours, and all the stuff with the chakra, and I saw how good you were with shuriken before Granny Mimura across the road stopped you using her fence for practice. Pick something like that, and show everybody how skilled you are."
-o-
Mari took Uncle Kazuhiro's advice seriously. She considered her options, and finally settled on taijutsu. It wasn't easy—the gap in reach between her and the taller students was awful, and gradually getting bigger—but if there was one thing people wouldn't be able to ignore, it was taking the beatdown of their lives while everybody else watched.
Of course, if it was that easy, Mari would already be doing it. So she pondered, and observed, and talked to people, until finally she had a plan.
"Excuse me, Miss Sonozaki?" she called out to the older girl as the children poured out of the Academy.
"Huh?"
"Um, I was wondering…" Mari assumed a posture with just the right balance of submissiveness and self-esteem, having established that Sonozaki Kaori fancied herself a big sister to the other kunoichi, but didn't actually want the responsibility that this entailed.
"I know you're amazing at taijutsu, and we're sort of the same height, and there's a bunch of boys like Urahara Shinji and Kawashima Ryōsuke who keep beating me in sparring because they're bigger than me. Do you think you could give me a few pointers?"
Actually, there was nothing special about Shinji and Ryōsuke—at least apart from the fact that they asked Sonozaki out on a near-daily basis, something Mari had learned through dedicated research (i.e. identifying and interrogating the Academy's more informed rumour-mongers).
"You know," Sonozaki told her with a scary glint in her eye, "I think I might just be able to spare a few hours."
-o-
Mum had never slapped her before.
"How could you even say something like that?!" she demanded, her voice trembling with fury. "Kazuhiro wouldn't hurt a fly, never mind do something like… that! He's been like a father to you, Mariko, like a father. He's been nothing but kind to you, he's worked harder than anybody to keep running this inn and put food on the table, and now you start making up these vile… lies about him?"
Gradually, Mum's ranting faded off as she saw Mari's tears.
"I know maybe I haven't been paying enough attention to you lately, Mariko," she said in what was probably meant to be a reconciliatory tone. "But that doesn't mean you should start inventing such horrible things. Now I'll do my best to be there for you from now on, but I don't ever want to hear you saying anything like that again."
-o-
It had been a horrible week. Not just for all the usual reasons, but on Monday she'd been told that Ishimura-sensei hadn't come back from his solo mission. She'd never been close to the gratingly loud, slightly manic old man, but he hadn't been a bad person either, and Mari was sorry they'd never train together again.
But that was merely sad. What was infuriating was that instead of being assigned to another taijutsu expert, she, Bonebreaker Mari, was now being instructed by Usami-sensei, whose specialisations were about as much help to her as a shark in a lifeboat.
"I can't believe you were being wasted on taijutsu," she heard Usami-sensei say as she tuned back in. "When I saw your chakra control and social skills scores… well, I'd like a quiet word in a private place with the man who made that call, is all I'm saying."
Mari just glowered.
Usami-sensei sighed. "Well, I suppose we'd better get started with the initial assessment. Stand still, girl, let me look at you."
Stand still. Let me look at you.
Mari couldn't move, every muscle tense with a fight/flight/freeze response that always chose the worst of the options. Suddenly, she was back there, back with him. He spoke to her, and every time, she stopped being a ninja who could kill him with a single blow, and became a little girl who…
Eventually, she came out of the spiral to become aware of Usami-sensei watching her, an unreadable expression on his face.
"Someone's hurt you," he said quietly.
As the paralysis began to wear off, Mari very slightly shook her head.
To her immense relief, Usami-sensei honoured her unspoken request, and changed the subject.
"A lot of people look down on genjutsu and infiltration as 'soft' disciplines, hard to use in combat and lacking the hundred percent reliability of a fireball or a kick. Let me tell you why they're wrong.
"A master of either of these skills, never mind both, isn't crude enough to merely defeat his enemies. He tells them what to think. He can turn them into allies, or pawns, or broken pieces of what was once a human being, at a whim and without having to wade into battle if he doesn't want to. Learn what I have to teach you, Inoue Mari, and you won't need raw power. What you will have is… control."
As Mari's higher cognitive functions started up again, and began to take in this information, Usami-sensei said something else.
"I don't think you're in the best state to start training right now. Go get some rest. And while I make a policy of not fighting other people's battles for them—unless those other people are paying me and wearing a very impressive hat—I do have some words of wisdom for you that my master passed on to me.
"A ninja does not have enemies. All they have are bodies that haven't been disposed of yet.'"
-o-
Mari's thoughts wandered as she watched Noriko's ample chest slowly rise and fall in the bed beside her. She'd have to find something nice to do for Usami-sensei when they got back to Mist for being so considerate. The original mission plan had been for the infiltrator to seduce Lord Uesugi, but when Mari accepted that role, Usami-sensei had accommodated her needs and made the necessary adjustments to target the head maid instead. The outcome was the same—Noriko knew every inch of the house, and had known exactly where the scrolls would be hidden—but the preparatory steps had been harder, and left the support team with considerably more to do. And Usami-sensei hadn't even complained.
Mari silently reached beneath the bed for her kunai.
Standard procedure for eliminating witnesses after a seduction such as this was strangulation—it left no blood to clean up, if done correctly the victim wouldn't be able to struggle out of it, and bedsheets meant no need to smuggle in a weapon.
Mari couldn't do it. Noriko had been her first, and a kind woman besides. The thought of looking into those trusting dark eyes as the life slowly faded from them sent a wave of visceral horror through her. No, this was something that had to be done in one motion. Past the ribs, through the heart. She wouldn't be awake for more than an instant.
-o-
"Nice work, Mari," Usami-sensei ruffled her hair, knowing full well how long it would take to brush afterwards. "I remember my first time taking point on a seduction mission. It's always harder than you expect."
Mari decided not to think about it. "Will you recommend me for the Chūnin Exam now, Usami-sensei?" she asked instead. "You know I'm ready."
But Usami-sensei shook his head. "You've got the talent, Mari. No one's questioning that. There aren't many people without a Bloodline Limit who can successfully specialise in both genjutsu and infiltration. But you still lack resolve.
"I've told you this before. When you're on a mission, you're a ninja, not a human being. You kill all your feelings, and feel only what the mission needs you to feel. Until you can do that, you'll never be ready to play in the big leagues."
-o-
Mari didn't go home much anymore. Fortunately, there was plenty to do in Hidden Mist after dark, as long as you knew where to go. Alcohol, fights of various levels of legality, and other entertainments both mundane and exotic were easily available to a beautiful woman with a silver tongue and a knack for making the right (or perhaps the wrong) kind of friends.
Tonight, though, she was coming home.
She'd taken a month to prepare. The planning was the easiest part. Creating herself a safety net was harder. She'd pushed her social skills to the limit to assemble a sufficient combination of allies, real and of convenience, people who owed her favours, and people who did not want certain secrets getting out. Still, it had been worth it. In Hidden Mist, a person who had those sorts of connections could get away with murder.
Normally, it wouldn't have mattered. Civilians were civilians. But the Mizukage, an orphan as far back as anyone knew, had very specific feelings about the sin of patricide.
Still, all that was trivial next to the actual execution of the plan, which was a thing out of her nightmares.
"Hi, Uncle Kazuhiro," Mari smiled as she walked into the otherwise empty inn.
"Mariko! Where have you been?" Uncle Kazuhiro exclaimed, eyebrows rising in a voluntary motion of exaggerated surprise, pupils dilating and a slight relaxation around the outer edges of his eye sockets indicating the opening up of his peripheral vision to take in more of her body. "Sachiko and I have been worried sick!"
There was nothing to fear, she told herself. Uncle Kazuhiro wasn't her enemy. A ninja had no enemies.
"Oh, out and about," she deflected, exercising the most careful muscular control to keep her stance open and relaxed. "Actually, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about."
"What's that?"
"Well," Mari began, "it's been forever since we had one of our 'playtimes', and I really miss them." She felt the physical impulse to vomit as she said it. She clamped down on it, hard, and kept her expression warm and trusting.
Kill all your feelings. Feel only what the mission needs you to feel.
Uncle Kazuhiro's lower lip rose a little. The corners of his eyes tensed again. Eager, but suspicious. As predicted.
"The other boys in the village just aren't the same. They don't know what they're doing." She shuffled her feet, innocent, vulnerable.
Uncle Kazuhiro smirked, the doting uncle gradually giving way to the beast within. It didn't take infiltration training to read him anymore. "Kids like to think they can get things done on pure enthusiasm, but you and I both know that there's nothing like an older, experienced man."
Yes. There was nothing like Uncle Kazuhiro.
Mari moved in for the kill, the predator for the first time. She leaned forward in a gesture of eagerness, allowing the motion to bring her low-cut top into the optimal angle.
"Actually… there's this perfect place I've found, with plenty of privacy… just for us. Do you want to go there tonight?"
-o-
As the priest droned on, Mari idly wondered how many people knew there were no ashes in the urn. It was for the best that no body was ever found, of course, even putting criminal investigation aside. She didn't know if Mum's heart could have taken seeing what was left of Uncle Kazuhiro once she was done with him.
She'd spent hours playing. Yes, she had to admit, that was the word for it. Hours of playtime. Hours using every technique that Usami-sensei had applied in illusionary form to build the team's willpower and pain tolerance. Hours drawing on all the T&I know-how she'd gained from acquaintances made for that purpose.
Infiltration training to read mental states and body language. Seduction training to know the intimate details of pleasure and pain. Genjutsu training to dominate the mind on the subtlest levels. All the control she had been promised and more, merciless and intoxicating.
And then there was the genjutsu technique she'd made just for him, for when she was done with everything else. Everything he'd made her feel, experienced as a single perfect mindspike. Was it any wonder his heart had given out?
There was a part of her that had been screaming in horror at what she was doing, crossing so many lines that could not be uncrossed, all at once. She killed those feelings too. She took pleasure in what she was doing, because that was what the mission demanded. If she'd let herself give in to compassion or regret, at the end of the night there would have been two corpses instead of one.
She'd spent an irrationally long time washing her hands afterwards, Mari reflected as she joined the queue to make an offering to Uncle Kazuhiro's spirit. Why had she bothered? They'd only get stained again during the next mission.
