Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life. ~ Arthur Miller.

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"Sai!" I called cheerfully, quickening my steps until I reached him. "I'm so glad you could come!"

'Glad' didn't quite cover it. 'Really relieved' might have been closer. He looked… okay. Not great but he wasn't dead, wasn't injured, wasn't being kept somewhere I couldn't reach him.

"The Hokage requested me for this mission," Sai said. "I am here." It wasn't entirely factually correct but I doubted Tsunade had bothered to say I'd made the request, either. It was probably for the best.

Kiba and Shikamaru caught up to me, looking curious. I made introductions. "I think you met at Naruto's farewell dinner?" I added, a little uncertainly.

"Oh," Kiba said, in a tone of realization. "You're that guy."

Sai blinked at him.

"You helped out with that weird chameleon illusion castle thing," Kiba clarified. "Shino and Hinata told me all about it." He grinned. "Thanks for that."

I relaxed a fraction. Kiba was predisposed to be friendly, that was good. It wasn't that he wasn't friendly normally but, like Naruto, if he didn't like someone you knew about it. And that could make things awkward. "Kiba is Shino and Hinata's teammate," I explained to Sai, even if he could probably have picked that up from context. It was dubious whether that information connected for him, on why it meant Kiba was thankful.

"I was … following the orders of my team leader," Sai said, almost faintly puzzled. "Your gratitude is unwarranted."

"Whatever, man," Kiba said, and stepped past him towards the gate. "No wonder you get on great with Shikako, if you're as bad at accepting thanks as she is."

I would have grumbled at him but I was team leader so I really ought to be professional. I organized our departure with the gate guards and we took off, slowly heading towards Land of Rivers where we would meet the client.

We had plenty of time, so we didn't rush and maintained a smooth ground covering pace.

"Mum said you've been doing missions with her," Kiba said cheerfully as we moved. "I bet that was fun. You don't want to know what she's been saying about you."

"You should hear what she's been saying about you," I retorted quickly to cover the worry that that sentence caused. What was she saying, and to who and why? "How did it go… You're housetrained, know how to follow orders and good with small animals."

Kiba stopped dead in his tracks. "Mum," he whined, in a pitch perfect tone of sheer mortified child. Then he shook it off and started moving again. "Well, she says worse things about Hana. It's never going to work though, everyone is too smart to want to be related to her."

Kiba managed to keep up a conversation with me and sometimes Sai, even though Shikamaru grew tenser and snappier the further west we travelled.

I let him be until we made camp.

Truthfully, I wanted to just let it be entirely. If he wanted to have attitude, I'd let him. But this was a mission – was only the start of a mission – and I was team leader. If I had to mediate conflicts to make things go well, then I'd goddamn mediate.

"Do I ask," I said, dropping down to sit next to him, "or are you just going to tell me?"

Kiba and Sai might not have been far away, but it was the illusion of privacy. They weren't actively part of the conversation. Short of sending them to run a perimeter, it was the best we were going to get – and I didn't want to start the mission with those kinds of petty orders, either.

Shikamaru gave me a darkly sardonic look. "Yeah, well," he said, "the last time we came this way it didn't exactly end well, did it?"

I nodded, thoughtfully. So that was it. "Fair enough," I said. "We're keeping a watch tonight and we'll set up some alerts further out. If anything attacks, we'll have warning." And the chances of there being another army of pseudo-ninja running around here had to be pretty slim. Still, it wouldn't hurt any to take precautions.

Shikamaru stared at me. And then lowered his face into his hands and started to laugh. "That's not-" he managed to say. "Forget it. Just… forget it."

I stood, flustered. And maybe a little hurt. Dammit, I had listened and I had offered suggestions and I hadn't said 'you're being paranoid'. And he laughed?

Fine. I'd forget it.

"Want to draw straws for the watches?" I asked, looking over to Kiba and Sai deliberately. "We'll split them by three, and then keep rotating, so someone gets to sleep freely each night."

We got to our destination point around lunchtime the next day. It was a reasonably small town in the lower half of the country. It wasn't near enough the coast that it had been destroyed in Haido's attacks, and was still bustling and busy. Pretty, though, with a winding river through the middle of town and picturesque walkways.

We found the hotel where the client was staying. And met the team of Hidden Sand ninja that had been escorting him around Land of Wind. Technically, with the treaty in place, they could have kept on escorting him through Land of Fire and back home, but Michuri had done a full tour of the Elemental Nations – Rock and Lightning included – and that wouldn't have been so simple. Which was probably why it had almost been a relay between the villages, passing the client along, each constrained by their borders and treaties.

"How many ninja does Leaf actually have?" Kankurou asked rhetorically, as we organized the handover. "I'm starting to think you're the only ones. Every time, it's always you."

"You're just lucky," I told him. "You'd miss us if we weren't here."

He was the only one on the team I recognized and Temari wasn't there. I thought that maybe Gaara wouldn't want to send them both away at the same time, but such a high profile client would require him to send someone he trusted.

"How was the trip?" I asked.

Kankurou shrugged. "We got attacked a few times. Couldn't tell if they were aiming for him, or if it was just a target of opportunity." He made a lazy gesture at all the people that made up this group.

"There's a lot of target," I acknowledged. What did they call it, a retinue? It was nearly a small village on its own.

"Yeah," Kankurou agreed, but looked thoughtful. "Look… you notice anything missing?"

I did, in point of fact. "He didn't bring his own guards?" All these people – chefs and assistants and drivers and who knew what else… and not a single guard?

"Exactly," Kankurou agreed. "We took over from a bunch of Rock shinobi and they weren't exactly forthcoming about the situation or anything but I've been keeping my ears open. Seems like he did have guards, but they all left once they got here. Resigned and vanished."

Well. That was… interesting. "Difficult client?" I asked, because it was best to rule out the simple explanations first.

"Well, yeah," Kankurou agreed. "But not that difficult. He's doesn't scrimp the pay, the accommodations are good, the food is amazing and there are a lot of side benefits. You know, he hired Ayumi Hamasaki for a private show and I got to see her perform?"

I had… no idea who that was. "Sounds nice."

"It was amazing," he said fervently. "But no one in their right mind walks away from a job like that. Not even if it was ten times more difficult. And every guard going at the same time?" He shook his head. "It's fishy."

I sighed. "Fantastic."

"Watch your back, okay?" he said and it, wonder of wonders, actually sounded a little concerned. Then he ruined it immediately. "There's only so many maps you can rewrite before they start calling you a natural disaster, sparky."

I rolled my eyes at him and was about to retort. Then I heard the twang of a bow, the whistling of a wooden projectile in the air. No killing intent. No warning.

I spun around, drawing a kunai from my leg pouch, hand rising to throw it.

Then I aborted the motion, re-sheathing it. The projectile was a wooden arrow with a sucker attached to the end, the bow was a toy and the attacker was a child.

I plucked the arrow out of the air and stared hard at him. I breathed out, a long controlled exhale from my nose and tried not to acknowledge how that would have ended several weeks ago before Kakashi-sensei had made a habit of sneaking up on me and forcing me to think before I reacted.

The child lowered the bow. "Hmph. Well. I guess you might be a real ninja."

"I am," I said, as mildly as I could. "And 'real ninja' don't take too kindly to being attacked."

He looked mostly puzzled, rather than admonished. "It wouldn't have done any harm."

I spun the arrow around my fingers. It was light and flimsy. No, it wouldn't have done any damage to me – but I could have to him. Nearly had.

"No weapon is a toy," I said. I coated the thin wood in chakra, sharpening it to a point over the rubber sucker. Then I threw it back to him. It embedded itself in the wall, sinking an inch deep and quivering with force.

He stared at it, then at me with wide eyes.

"This is Hikaru Tsuchi," Kankurou said in the silence. "The son of Prince Michiru." Then in an undertone he added, "you better get used to that. He does it a lot."

Great. That was… just great.

"Speaking of the prince," I said. "You need to introduce us."

It was both a way to divert the topic and a way to make us look fractionally better in the eyes of the client, if we could show we had a good working relationship and trust with his current guards. I was perfectly aware that without a Jounin-sensei here to be a visible adult presence, we looked young. Even if we managed to appear older than our real ages… we wouldn't look that old.

"Sure, sure," Kankurou said. "I guess I better say goodbye to the guy. Remind him to hire us again and all of that."

I motioned the rest of the team over from where they were hanging back and we followed Kankurou inside, to a very opulent entertainment room. Hikaru followed us at a distance, peering around corners like that would hide him. I tried to memorize his chakra signature, small though it was. He was both a civilian and a child so it was to be expected. If he was going to keep it up with the sneaking and attacks, I'd better make sure I knew it was him, always.

Inside Prince Michiru was playing cards with a group of people and, judging by the stack of game pieces in front of him, probably winning.

"Ah, Kankurou!" He exclaimed happily, catching sight of us. "Have you changed your mind about playing? I'll buy you in!"

"Thanks for the offer," Kankurou said, turning it down. "But the team from Hidden Leaf has arrived to replace us, so we'll be taking our leave soon. This is Shikako Nara, Special Jounin."

"So soon?" The prince said in dismay, dropping his cards and not even appearing to care. He turned away from the game and heaved himself out of his chair. He was… a large man, to put it kindly. "No, no, you simply must stay a little longer! We were all looking forward to another one of your wonderful puppet shows."

Kankurou hesitated. "Ah, well. Our mission is officially over," he hedged.

"Then I'll extend it!" Michiru said brightly. He waved over one of the men standing nearby, who stepped forward promptly with a clipboard at the ready. "Hisakata, please pay our Sand ninja to stay and put on another show for us."

Kankurou gave me a semi-rueful look. Obviously, he didn't want to turn it down. I could see why not; in the long term it was good business sense to keep wealthy clients happy with you and in the short term, well, it was more money. More money for not a lot of extra work, even.

"We'd be delighted for you to stay a little longer," I said softly, guessing what the concern was. If they'd been a people I trusted less, I might not have really wanted them to stay around to interfere with our mission. We were here as body guards and that often meant against other villages. "I've heard that the Hidden Sand puppet shows are really something to see."

Michiru beamed and clapped his hands together. "It's true, it's true!" he said. "The other ninja were so boring and wouldn't entertain me at all. But Kankurou has been wonderful – I never knew Bunraku could be so exciting! Even Hikaru loves to watch it." His gaze drifted over us. "You wouldn't happen to perform too?"

And really, it was just good business sense to keep wealthy clients happy with you. The entire conversation had been loaded with so many hints that I would have to have been blind to not notice them.

If we had to come up with ways to be 'entertaining', we would.

"Unfortunately not," I said, softly. "Hidden Sand's Puppet Corps is unparalleled. Though we would be honored to share some of Konoha's entertainments and I do have some skill at shadow puppets."

Kankurou laughed. "Shadow puppets," he said. "You've got some nerve. Okay, I gotta see that, sparky. You versus me, tonight. And our field of battle is theatre."

Oh god, what was I getting myself into?

I nodded, solemnly. "By your leave, Michiru-sama," I said, though the prince had no objections at all. On the contrary, he looked thrilled to pieces.

We escaped outside. I was six hundred percent sure Kankurou was laughing at me. I ignored him and cleared my throat, turning to my team. "Okay, we want to scout around town and make sure it's clear and get to know the people we'll be travelling with. One person should stay here to guard the prince – and his son."

Who was still watching us, peering out behind a corner of a building. Still, it was no worse than Konohamaru, really.

We drew straws. Shikamaru ended up getting the short one and stuck on guard duty, though given that it was the easiest position that required the least movement, it was probably the one that suited him the most. He didn't appear unhappy about it.

"So, theatre," Kiba said, laugh in his voice. "How'd you talk yourself into that one?"

I neither groaned nor glared at him though the urge for both actions was there. "I'll manage," I said.

"You hate any kind of public speaking," he said. "You were the tree for our class play."

I did groan. "Yeah, I do," I said. "But the list of things I hate has dramatically rearranged itself in the last year. It doesn't even make the top ten anymore. I'll manage." Somehow. "It's not going to kill me."

Kiba snickered. "Alright. Let me know if you need a cute animal stage hand to distract them. He knows lots of tricks, don't you, Akamaru?"

Akamaru barked happily, head popping out from the neck of his jacket. He was getting almost too big for that now.

"You joke," I said. "But I might have to take you up on it."

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Nothing actually went wrong that afternoon, despite me starting to wish it would. No matter how much I tried to keep my attitude blasé, I was getting nervous.

Maybe I can quit my job and go live as a hermit for the rest of my life. Hermits don't have to perform.

It only got worse as we dined in the hotel – and yes, the food was good - and Kankurou crushed my hopes that the audience would be limited to our teams and the clients by revealing that he'd managed to book the town square for his own performance. And I would likely be expected to go directly after him, do not pass go, do not change locations.

"You… okay with that?" Shikamaru asked me, voice low. He'd said very little about the whole thing. "Do you… want me to help?"

I gave him a weak smile. "I think it should be okay. But if we have to do it again, then it's your turn."

He snorted and leant back. "I didn't agree to any of this."

"You're a ninja," I said. "I think that's all the agreement you get."

"This isn't really part of our mission, is it?" Sai asked, possibly sounding a little bit disapproving. He'd been mostly quiet so far, so I'd been wondering when he'd have his say about it. "It seems pointless."

"Well, yes and no," I said, trying to answer him seriously. "It's not word-for-word part of our mission. But we are supposed to be representing Konoha to the best of our abilities. The Land of the Moon is rich, but doesn't often have dealings with ninja. It's in our best interests to make them think of us as their best choice."

He nodded. "Yes, I understand that," he said. "But isn't it… a wasteful use of jutsu?"

"Maybe," I agreed. "But I'm not going to use enough of it to exhaust myself, so it shouldn't cause problems. And it'll be like training, in a way; levels of precision and control and unique applications that I wouldn't normally strive for in combat training."

"If you don't normally strive for them, then surely they wouldn't be useful?" Sai pointed out.

I hummed. "But if you can't do them, then you'll never think of ways you could use them," I pointed out back. "If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Conversely, if you have a lot of different tools… you might find new ways to solve problems."

Or something. Did that even make sense?

"Metaphors," Sai said with a sigh. He stared down at the plate of food that he had barely touched.

"My metaphors are great," I said obstinately. Although Sai really did seem to get the worst of them, apart from maybe Naruto who would have never complained about it.

After that, time started to slide away with an alarming speed. Kankurou dragged us out to the town square where a reasonable crowd was starting to form. It seemed like word had gotten around.

"Prepare to be amazed," he said, and unsealed two small puppets from a scroll. They weren't ones I had seen before – certainly not Karasu or Kuroari – and humanoid in an exaggerated and cartoonish way, painted bright and cheerful colours.

And then, with a showmasters ease, he captured the crowds attention and started the play. It was some old Wind Country favourite, about a pair of lovers that lived on opposite sides of the desert and had to travel across it to see each other, which was no easy task when you weren't ninja. And of course, it was all horribly tragic and they both died at the end.

It was good, though, in the way that well-worn favourites were always being retold. And it was clear that Kankurou was enjoying himself. Maybe, in some world where he wasn't a ninja, this was what he would have done.

Once the applause had died off, and Kankurou had had enough of talking to the crowd, he bowed out. "You guys need to welcome Shikako Nara to the stage. Let's see if she can match this, yeah?"

I grimaced and hopped up onto the stage beside him. It wasn't really a 'stage', just a raised stone lip on one side of the square, backed by a wall.

I was intensely, immediately uncomfortable. There were a lot of people here. More than it had seemed when I was part of the crowd too. And they were all staring at me. I focused my eyes on the small group of people I knew and tried to ignore the rest.

"Ah, well," I said to Kankurou, and tried to inject a bit of life into my voice. "We'll have to let the audience be the judge of that."

He bowed, mockingly. "The floor is all yours."

The sun was low now, setting, which wasn't exactly great. But I was prepared. I attached a handful of LED seals onto a string of ninja wire and pinned it to the front of the stage, curling the end of the wire underneath my foot. I channeled chakra into it, lighting them all up to shine brightly upon me.

It went straight into my eyes, but it also meant my shadow loomed large on the wall behind me. And that was the whole point.

"Thirteen years ago," I started, voice falling easily into the rhythm of a story I had heard so many times before. It was the official story, dramatic and only a little untrue. "A nine tailed fox suddenly appeared. Its tails lashed out, smashing mountains and sending tidal waves crashing to the shore."

Behind me, my shadow split off. No longer the shape of a human, but of nine waving tails.

I wove the story onwards, shadow moving and taking shape behind me. I couldn't see past the glare of the lights to see the reactions of the crowd, merely focused on keeping my voice even and steady. I displayed the destruction, the terror, the battle.

Carefully, carefully, I focused on a single tendril of shadow and used it to plant a small touch blast on the wall in the midst of the diorama.

But it was too much, trying to hold two jutsu, tell a story and focus well enough to plant a seal. My LED snuffed out, dropping the stage into darkness.

Shit. I burnt with humiliation at the unintended failure. I set off the seal, the tiny blast of fire roaring out and arcing up over the heads of the crowd. I used the seconds of darkness to plant a few more seals for use later, and channeled chakra back through the ninja wire to reignite my stage lights.

"But one shinobi came forward to face the nine tailed fox without fear," I went on. "And this was our Fourth Hokage. He arrived in a flash of light-" I set off one of my flash seals as I spoke, chasing my shadows off the wall before reforming them into a new shape. "- and all the ninja of the village knew that they were saved."

I drew the rest of it out, though this was the bit of the story that often differed – and was the most untrue. I said nothing of Naruto, or of Jinchuriki, though I did say that he had summoned the Shinigami.

"And it reached out it's great hand-" I said, voice sinking ominously, and for the first time of the performance switched from using two dimensional shadows to three; a giant, dark hand reaching out from the wall.

There were screams of startled surprise.

"And dragged them both down into death."

I picked myself up in the shadow hand, closing those dark ominous fingers around my torso … and then pulled it backwards to slam into the wall. A quick replacement jutsu with a small rock saw me harmlessly standing amid the crowd again and the stage blank and empty.

There were more screams.

They faded into a hushed silence, tense and expectant.

Right. I had… no actual plans for after that. Shows over. Go home.

Then Kankurou looked at me sideways and started to applaud. The sound of his clapping caught on, and the rest of the crowd started to cheer too.

"How wonderful!" Michiru gushed. "I've never seen anything like that!"

Kankurou hopped back up on the stage, avoiding going through my line of seals but otherwise looking unbothered by them. "Well," he said to the crowd, in a tone halfway between wry and conspiratorial. "I guess we might need a vote after all."

They cheered, responding easily to his direction.

"Get back up here, Nara," Kankurou directed.

I slunk out of my team, reluctantly. "I gracefully concede," I called, hopefully. "And congratulate you on your victory."

But I found myself on stage again, standing awkwardly next to Kankurou as the audience cheered. It was every bit as uncomfortable and awkward as their silent attention had been. Still, I gave it as much graceful acceptance as I could because actions had consequences and I had talked myself into this situation and now I had to deal with it.

Kankurou did let me escape eventually, and I pocketed the seals to leave the stage dark and empty. "It was an alright show for a novice," he said, damming with faint praise. "Though you'd have never got away with using cheap tricks like that in front of a ninja audience."

I shrugged. "That's me," I said, the faint echoes of something old making my lips quirk into a smile. "Cheap tricks and witty one liners."

He laughed. "I wouldn't have said you were witty."

"Get lost," I said, rolling my eyes at him. "You're supposed to be halfway back to Hidden Sand by now."

"Too right we are," he agreed, adjusting the straps holding Karasu to his back and shifting the weight of it. "Catch you next time, sparky."