Blood of the Broken, Scars of the Spiral (there are whirlpools in our veins)

Chapter Thirty

Naruto dry-heaved, feeling his stomach muscles contract violently even though there was nothing left to expel.

"I– hate– this!" he panted as Shin rubbed his back soothingly.

Inoculating himself against poisons was a miserable affair– not that this was true 'inoculation', so much as it was an exercise of proving his relative immunity to Root's sadistic medic-nin. As a jinchūriki, he had a natural resistance to poison which meant that instead of administering him with the normal, beginner dosages that all Root agents were given before slowly being built up to higher doses, Naruto had been started on the much higher levels of poisons– enough to kill several fully-grown men. It was agony, but the medic-nin had insisted that he be able to prove he could still engage in a fight after being poisoned, this being the latest in a long list of poisons, before dismissing him to ride out the effects in privacy.

At least he had Shin with him, and sometimes Koi. Gods knew that Kaeru wasn't any help.

In the wake of Haiyue's death, Naruto had been assigned a new Root agent to be his mentor– Kaeru; frog-mask. Kaeru was older then Naruto, in her early twenties, and a perfect Root agent with not an ounce of true emotion left in her, though she was able to feign it perfectly when it was necessary for a mission, able to slip into different personas with the same ease that most people slipped into clothing. Naruto had wanted to dislike her, he truly had, but more than anything he just felt pity.

Training under Kaeru was a very different experience from training under Washi and Buta. Kaeru specialised in infiltration, spying, sabotage and silent assassination, and for the first time since he'd been forcibly recruited to Root Naruto had reluctantly found himself genuinely interested in his lessons. They were interesting. And useful.

Under Kaeru's tutelage the past two years, alongside keeping up with his skills in taijutsu and kenjutsu, Naruto had been trained in various skills associated with infiltration, spying and sabotage. 

To his disgust, he was also taught how to kill– silently and efficiently, though to his relief the majority of the time he was made to practice on mud bunshin only. It was rare that he was forced to test his new skills on a prisoner.

The most useful, and his favorite lessons, were on politics. For the future, they'd be useful. When he left, he'd need to know how to run a group of people, because he's taking Chikasa, Sasuke, and the others with him. 

His proficiency, however, had a notable drawback.

"How long do you think it will be before they send you out on another mission?" Shin asked quietly when it seemed he had finished retching and Naruto couldn't help how he flinched.

Missions were excruciatingly awful. Six months into his training with Kaeru, Naruto had been assigned his first mission. It had been at a tea house. It had been a beautiful tea house; neat, clean and beautifully arranged, with a steady stream of customers all day. Kaeru had killed one of the employees to take her place using a henge and stage make-up both to disguise herself as the young woman, while Naruto played the part of the employee's younger apprentice.

His role for the mission was to gain experience outside of the confines of the Root base; he simply had to smile and be sweet and earnest as Kaeru poisoned every single man, woman and child who visited the tea house that day with a delayed-acting, deadly toxin to disguise the one single person that whoever had hired them (Naruto, of course, was not given the details) did want dead. A single assassination hidden within a massacre. He could barely keep the smile on his face as she watched a pair of young girls who couldn't be more then four years old giggle as they tried to copy the elegant way their mother sipped her tea and smiled indulgently down at her children, knowing that by the same time the following day, all three would be dead.

Difficult as it was to believe, the missions had only gotten worse from there.

"Kaeru's been talking about my mistake during our last mission," Naruto said, just as quietly as Shin.

By 'mistake', he was referring to when he had refused to kill his target when he realised the reason they'd been hired to kill the young woman who was practically still a child (she was sixteen. aiya had been sixteen.) was because some idiot noble had gotten her pregnant and had panicked when the girl refused to get an abortion; Kaeru had stepped in to kill the girl when Naruto refused and he had made the mistake of trying to stop her, pleading that they could just drug the girl to induce a miscarriage instead. Kaeru had responded to Naruto's pleas by knocking him out, completing the mission as ordered and then dragging Naruto back to the Root base where he was disciplined.

After the RTI training, discipline rarely involved physical pain as Naruto had become very good at disassociating himself from it. Instead, it involved genjutsu 'training'. It was called training because technically he was allowed to try breaking out of the genjutsu, but even with Kurama's help Naruto was appalling at doing so and the nightmarish visions of his loved ones, of Sasuke and Chikasa, and even Shin, Aiya, and Koi, all being tortured and murdered before him playing out over and over and over again were a strong deterrent against acting out of mission parameters, even when he knew the soul crushing illusions to be fake.

"And?" Shin asked, pulling him from his dark thoughts, and Naruto could see the concern on his face for him.

"And she thinks I've learned from my 'lapse in judgement' and I'm ready to start taking missions again," Naruto said quietly. "Even with the 'mistakes' I made in two out of our five most recent practices."

Shin frowned. "You didn't make them too obvious, did you?" he asked. "The mistakes have to look authentic."

"No, I did what you said," he told him.

Shin excelled at subtle sabotage. Naruto hadn't told Shin what had happened with Haiyue, he couldn't, the seal didn't let him, but the haunted look he'd given him and Haiyue's glaring absence had spoken what he could not, and Shin had been subtly sabotaging both his and Koi's training since in an effort to put off the inevitable fight to the death between them. Naruto and Shin were both aware that time was running out for the pair and he hadn't missed how Shin had started losing weight, looking thinner and more haggard. He was terrified for him, because he knew, he knew, that he would never kill Koi. He'd die first.

Which was why he had to act first. But try as he might, he still could not simultaneously shape all the necessary seals under his  skin to disable the bindings. There were eight binding seals on his skin– over-kill, Mito had called it. Naruto could counter six at once now and Mito assured him  it was extraordinary, that most seal masters couldn't manage more than four or five such complex seals at a time, but extraordinary wasn't good enough. Extraordinary wouldn't free him. Extraordinary wouldn't save Naruto and Koi, it wouldn't avenge Uzushio, and it wouldn't reunite him with Sasuke.

"You're thinking too hard," Shin murmured and Naruto leaned into him, closing his eyes and as he inhaled his scent, the comforting scent of friend... while it lasted.

(it won't last for much longer)

A/N

Who wants to see one of Naruto's missions? Also hi! How are you? It's been a while.

I hope you've been taking care of yourself.

Remember to drink water.

I love you!