Chapter Text
They keep laughing at him even after he remembers henge is a thing, which is a dangerous thing to do to someone who’s in charge of your dinner.
“You wouldn’t poison us, Mirya,” Itachi says complacently when he points that out.
“True, but —”
“You don’t have anything to poison us with.”
“Uh. Also because you’re my friend and he’s my teacher? Wow.”
“Shinobi,” Kisame shrugs, like that explains it all.
“Come on, Itachi-san, let’s give him some space to think. Unless you have any more questions, Mirya-kun?”
“Leave me the map? And I haven’t actually read the mission scroll myself, I should do that.”
Itachi produces both of those, and the scroll they were in. “Put them back when you’re done. If you need anything else, bother Kisame-san.” He makes his sleeping bag shoot out of its scroll with a gritty foomf, holding his shirt hem over his nose against the dust. Mirya misses the moment to poke his pale, skinny belly due to having full hands. Damn.
Since they don’t have anything on the real people under the disguises, Mirya almost gives the bingo book back, but then it occurs to him it might matter who the disguised shinobi thought it plausible to imitate, so he changes his mind and stuffs it in his pocket. “I’m good, Boss,” he tells Kisame. “Whoever they’ve got at the road isn’t special?”
“Well done,” Itachi says. Since he doesn’t stop fussing with his bedding, it’s hard to tell if he’s sarcastic.
“What is?”
“We didn’t mention anyone at the road, but you deduced there would be.”
“If they’re still trying to keep traffic down by playing robber, there’s gotta be, right? But it doesn’t take a shinobi to shake down a grain caravan or whatever. Just a dozen assholes with big sticks, and we’re not getting paid for ‘em — oh, but they might have bounties. Hm.”
Kisame chuckled. “You might turn out to be the only recruit who gets along with Kakuzu. All right, I’m going to do a perimeter.” He flickers away.
The Kinslayer of Konoha, burrowing in for a nap, emits adorable huffing-and-grumbling vibes somehow without actually huffing or grumbling. Like the thoughtful kouhai he is, Mirya refills their little iron kettle with good Kuzlukya Mountain spring water (effortless to summon now, at least in this kind of quantity) and puts it on the side of the fire so it’ll only take a minute to boil when someone wants tea. Then he gets to work on the lizards.
Having his hands busy makes it easier to think. He used to assume that was universal, but apparently Kisame thinks best while standing watch. As for Tachi-senpai, Mirya’s never yet seen him need to Have A Think, so it’s impossible to tell. Bit outrageous how smart he is. A guy like that, you resent or you fanboy, there’s no third option. Fanboying is more fun, so.
He gutted and skinned the lizards as soon as he caught them. (Very convenient having Itachi around to incinerate the guts before they can stink up the place!) Now they’re good and drained so the meat won’t be full of blood that gets all weird tasting when it’s cooked. He gives the cuts a rinse as he removes each from the carcass, laying them in a pan of brine; considers whether the bones would make decent soup but decides against it since the whole beast smells a bit musty; tosses the remains out onto dry sand for when Itachi gets up. Feels a bit wasteful to ditch the brains when he intends to keep the skins, but he doesn’t want soft leather, he wants stiff parchment. Brain tan is too oily.
First he needs to dry the skins. Doing it properly would take like three or four days even in this climate. He can pin them out under the sun and scrape sand over them to get the obvious moisture out, but they’re thick, and protected with scales on one side that don’t scrape off as easy as fish scales. No way they’d dry through overnight. Then the process for making them into good parchment takes — well, to do it right takes weeks, and you need lime and — he forgets what-all, that was a job he only saw other folks doing. Chalk maybe? Stuff he doesn’t have, anyhow. Tanning fish skins for tent covers during the salmon run was an everybody job, but parchment was something expert tanners did in the off season, and then. There weren’t any of those anymore. So. Yeah.
The other day he did a halfassed job in an afternoon using salt, sand, sun, and the fire he’d been roasting the rest of the fish on. That skin had been the size of his hand and thin enough to see through, though. Maybe he could use his water chakra to pull water out of the hide? That’d take care of the thickness problem, and then the rest is just down to how stiff and smooth he needs it for making a test seal, which isn’t very.
Kisame-sensei warned him that having as much chakra as they both do makes control difficult, but he gets the feeling Kisame is judging ‘difficult’ relative to something Mirya hasn’t experienced. Because compared to weaving spirit cages with song alone, barely able to sense the structure he’s building even while an angry ghost slams against its walls and picks at its joints with desperate claws and vicious whispers, moving a few spoonfuls of water through the membranes of a lizard skin to evaporate in the desert air is… actually kinda trivial. No harder than peeling a pie crust off a cutting board without ripping it.
Unfortunately, it seems drying this fast is bad for the hide. There’s an upsetting little skrrch noise, and the hide falls to scraps.
“Fuckdammit,” Mirya sighs.
From the midnight blue caterpillar that is Itachi-in-sleeping-bag comes a muffled, “What’n thworld r’ou doon?”
“Ruining lizard skins. No big deal. Go back to sleep.”
“Clean up y’r mess.”
“Kay. You got like two hours before dinner.”
The caterpillar scrunches the other direction and goes still again.
The meat’s well-brined by now, at least, so it’s lost the musty smell and ought to taste like lean fowl. Too lean to roast without toughening up, which is where the paper comes in. Storage seals mean you can have fresh veg and seasonings while traveling, great invention, one of many things he wishes he could send home. Onions, carrots, ginger, splash of oil, generous drizzle of soy sauce (perfect substance, so many uses), and fold it all up in scrap paper to protect it from the clay mud he plasters over that.
When the fillets each look like a fat orangey dirt potato, he nestles them in the coals to bake. That gives him an hour or so free before he needs to start rice.
His thoughts about the attack on the mining camp have been bubbling away like stew at the back of his mental stove. He spreads out the map to study while he pulls them forward and gives them a stir. Sometimes he surprises himself with whole thoughts he didn’t know he could think, doing this, but alas, this time he gets the more common result: his ideas are a little better developed, but there’s nothing in the stew he didn’t consciously put in it.
Murder is the broth. Folks are gonna die, and he’s gonna do some of the killing. He’s a little nervy about it, but not too bad. More not sure he’ll do it right than upset about the fact of it. Okay. The meat of the matter is showing his sensei and senpai he’s not an idiot about planning an operation. And then the… what, dumplings? This analogy is getting a little silly… would be letting Kisame duel the spear princess. The plan-stew would work without it, but it’s that extra touch that makes it a feast.
The broth and meat are pretty much handled. It’s a straightforward situation. Take out the lookouts at the road first, then march straight in, because Kisame and Itachi are internationally known as fucking terrifying. No random miner is gonna throw a pick at them just for walking.
Dumplings, then… he thinks about the image Itachi showed him of the enemy’s leader. Her muscular arms, the confident set of her jaw. The way even the crows noticed everyone else keeping one eye on her, ready to jump to her command. She’s young, but she’s definitely in charge, and it’s authority earned, not an accident of birth. Can’t assume she’ll agree to duel for pride’s sake. If she thinks it’d be against her party’s interests she won’t do it. So they need some leverage. He wonders how Kisame feels about bullshitting. Supposedly, shinobi are decievers by trade, and he’s confident Itachi won’t blink, but Kisame… not sure yet. Have to ask.
He glances at the angle of the sun. Rice time!
After putting the rice on to cook, he has a look at the bingo book. Cactus Head is a puppeteer. All Mirya knows about those is that it’s a Suna thing, and they use wooden puppets as a weapons delivery system, controlling them with ‘chakra threads’, a thing that hasn’t yet been properly explained in any of the texts he’s gotten hold of. It sounds pointlessly complicated to Mirya, but what does he know? He’s a ‘genin’ who doesn’t yet know the ‘academy jutsu’. As for Goggles, she’s apparently A-ranked in kenjutsu even though they’re both B-ranked overall. Not good for Mirya to fight, he’d get chopped to itty bits! Of course, this is all only true for the people they’re pretending to be. Most likely, they’re capable of enough puppeting and swording to pass as the people they look like, but their actual specialties are quite different. And there’s no telling why they’ve chosen to work in disguise. Might be politics, might be to hide their real abilities… might be as simple as throwing off bounty hunters who don’t keep old bingo books on hand.
The Bosses let Mirya look at a current bingo book once. Kisame seemed to take pride in his bounty and ranking; Itachi pretended not to notice the whole conversation. Mirya doesn’t understand everything the listings said, but he know by now that ’S-Rank’ isn’t just one notch above ‘A-Rank’. It means ‘special’ rank; it means their strength can’t be accurately evaluated by the system. Like if a system for ranking wolves had to rank a bear. It doesn’t mean the wolves couldn’t fight the bear, but it means they couldn’t fight it like they’d fight a wolf.
He has a vague secret goal of staying out of the books until he can blow onto the scene so big and weird they have to mark him ‘special’ in his first entry. Then nobody’ll know how to fight him.
In conclusion, he doesn’t have to know exactly what pseudo-Cactus and pseudo-Goggles can do, he just has to know they wouldn’t be working for a small-timer like Bandit-hime if they could step to his bosses. They’re a job for Itachi, problem solved.
Crap, the sun’s gone behind the hills. Is the rice done or not? It is a mystery! If he checks it too soon it’ll get all weird.
He throws his awareness out like a swinging rope, making a quick sweep for Kisame. He’s half a mile out maybe, sitting still and giving off a sense of calm. Probably meditating. Better to have the rice get a little burnt on the bottom than disturb Shark Boss’s rare moments of peace. Besides, Itachi is absolutely out of it, and he needs his sleep. Plus his chakra is kind of sloshing gently instead of boiling and slamming around like it tends to when he sleeps, so waking him up would be a Bad Friend Move.
Unlike when there was a lull like this back home, Mirya feels secure in the knowlege that he will not die of boredom. He has so many things to read! Itachi left his scroll full of books and papers out (hehe, scroll scroll) for him to put the stuff away when he’s done, and he didn’t specifically say not to, for instance, dig out that history with his great-grandpa’s picture and read all about why he’s so important…
Oh, but first, before putting the mission scroll away, he should actually read it, huh? It’ll only take a second.
Um.
Well, crap.
When were they going to mention that part of the mission is to close the damn mines up? How is Mirya supposed to plan for that? Maybe they just wanted to see him flail about it. They’re such trolls sometimes.
He’s still not enough of a dick to wake up Itachi when the guy’s finally getting the good sleep, but he can move the rice off the fire and go bother Kisame. “You can meditate after you teach me the mine closing jutsu, meanie head,” he grumbles under his breath as he starts across the dunes, cementing the sand under his feet with ice so it’s less of a bitch to walk on.