[ayase saki]

The first week passed in a haze. Saki barely remembered getting on the boat that brought her to Port City, and remembered even less how she’d managed to get signed on with the merchant caravan traveling further west. How she’d gotten there, where she was going; it was all lost to the ache in the back of her head. Most nights she woke up with blood having oozed from the still-healing wound in her head to stain her pillow. At some point she’d cobbled together a fake ID, had decided on her new name, had burned her fingerprints off with a mixture of white-hot flame and corrosive cleaning fluids. She could not source the scars on her body, and the images of blood and carnage weighed heavy on her mind, but she was not Kyodai Ayaka anymore. Whoever that woman had been, Saki wanted nothing to do with her. This was her life now. Born anew. With only a couple of fights with bandits and one wolf attack punctuating the journey, Saki woke one day to find that the caravan was checking in at the gates of Kusagakure, and grimly she thought: well, it was nice while it lasted. Surely her criminal record had made it this far west already, and she would be arrested and sent back east as soon as the file of the murder she’d committed in a blood-soaked fugue state was brought to light. But on the dim, dim hope that she might have gotten lucky, that she might have gotten here just fast enough to beat the news, Saki kept her cool. The caravan was inventoried fastidiously, and each merchant and hired protector checked in by either one of the two gate guards on duty. One of the guards was a teenage girl around Saki’s size, maybe a little taller and a little thinner, with vibrant red hair and an expression that seemed kind by default. This was the girl that Saki gave her forged ID to. Her own expression was neutral, though this was less by design and more by disassociation; the raucous eruption of life that laid beyond Kusagakure’s gates was overwhelming, the heavy drumbeat of hundreds of hearts deafening against Saki’s ears. The exterior effect was that of a consummate professional, obediently acquiescing to the security demands of a shinobi village, maintaining a cool and disaffected air all the while.

Honō Saya -- 406

LAIKA OF THQ

[Honō Saya]

"Do enjoy your visit, Fujiyama-san." Saya said, handing the older woman before her her papers as she spoke, honey-yellow gaze as bright and cheerful as her voice. Behind the old woman stretched a short line that merged into a substantial crowd of people, mostly merchants and their guards, all waiting to enter Kusagakure. The caravan had been an expected hassle, one that she and the other Gate Guards had handled before, regardless of the grumbling that came from the long hours of having to actually work at their job rather than sit around reading manga or catching up on sleep.

I swear, they act like this is an awful job to have! She thought, scribbling down the woman’s name and information into her logbook as the line shuffled forward. Most of the other Guards chose to take down a visitor’s information while they were speaking with the person, but she preferred to do so after they had already passed inspection- it felt more personal that way, and allowed her to get a better read on who was entering into the village… as well as why. She’d caught more than her fair share of criminals trying to sneak into Kusa by simply talking to them more than they expected- and when she wasn’t doing that, she still got to enjoy some fairly good company.

Another shape, vaguely feminine in form, crossed Saya’s peripheral vision as she finished writing down the older woman’s information, her gaze flickering up as she spoke, voice bright and cheery in a welcoming way that, nonetheless, held a fair bit of authority behind it. "Hello there. If you could just hand me your papers…"

O-oh. The Hono girl blinked, eyes going just a hair wide as she took in the woman in front of her; roughly of a height with her and slightly heavier, with dark hair and striking golden-brown eyes, there was a presence to the woman that both captivated and set her on edge. There was nothing she could have concretely pointed to that made the woman stand out, nothing that would have put her as anything but unassumingly pretty, and yet…

"H-Hi." She said, blinking slightly as heat spiraled across her cheeks, unsettling her otherwise cheerful demeanor and infusing her voice with a degree of nervousness that made it hard for her to think. Just like with Umechika in Akazaya, her brain turned to mush, every clever and intelligent thing she could say or do slipping away as she looked down at the woman’s already offered identification, gleaning her name with a shaky smile before taking the card to better inspect it and see if she was on any list that would deny her entry.

"What… what brings you to Kusgakure today, Ayase-san?"

ayase saki

[ayase saki]

Minutes blitzed by without Saki’s awareness. Her movements were mechanical, rote, her consciousness refusing to acknowledge the gate guard’s greeting or that her identification had been taken from her hand. Without it, her hand fell back to the katana at her hip by default, resting there as casually as a bird in its nest. Her eyes were glazed over, looking somewhere just to the side and behind Saya’s right cheek while her mind indulged in decadent fantasy, the thundering staccato of heartbeats in her awareness painting the village crimson one cracked ribcage at a time. It was a full thirty seconds too long before she realized that she had been spoken to; she’d yet to form an attachment to her new name, the Aya- registering belatedly as her wandering mind slowly sank back into the meat of her brain. She blinked once—for the first time in three minutes—and smiled. "Picked up some work as part of a protection detail coming out of Port City in Hi no Kuni,” she said, utterly oblivious to the question she was answering but delivering the response she’d practiced nonetheless. "Job with them is done, so I’m hoping to pick up more work while I’m here.” Saki gave the girl a once-over. There was a pretty red flush across her cheeks, blood rising hot to the surface of her skin, and as Saki tried to reign her awareness in it resulted primarily in the quick-step of Saya’s heartbeat thudding louder in her ears. "Surprised they got a pretty girl like you stuck on guard duty like this,” she said, defaulting to the comfortable, the familiar, the flattery that would take attention away from her poor facsimile of personhood and pin it instead on her lovely victim. "What's your name?”

Honō Saya -- 406

LAIKA OF THQ

[Honō Saya]

There was a long, eerie space in between when Saya’s lips closed in on her question and when the woman in front of her responded; it took a good thirty seconds before Saki’s golden-brown gaze even seemed to register that she was there, her pretty face flat and almost devoid of emotion. Despite this, it was concern, not suspicion, that bloomed in the Hono girl’s mind, her blushing face twisting in a slightly worried frown as she looked at the foreign woman’s odd attitude. However, before she could voice her concerns the other woman spoke, her voice clipped but otherwise professional as she laid out what she was doing in Kusa… among other things.

"I-I see. That’s… very kind of you." She replied, glancing away from the older woman as she took her identification, doing her best not to look like a sputtering idiot as she looked over the paperwork, checking her picture against a list of wanted criminals who were to be detained on sight- and those who were to be let in without making a fuss. She paused for a moment near a name out of Hana no Kuni that had no picture, the description brief and lacking in details, but a quick glance was enough for her to dismiss the notion outright, her thoughts dwelling far more heavily on the unsolicited compliment than any similarity there might be between Ayase Saki and Sasaki Ayaka.

"My name is Saya and… Well, I asked for this position, actually." Saya said, her lips parting in a light smile as she folded Saki’s id closed and handed it back to her, along with a clipboard, a pen, and a single blank sheet for the black-haired woman to fill out. "It’s an easy job, and I get to meet a lot of interesting people." That she’d been transferring out of her good-for-nothing Genin team was something the other woman didn’t need to know.

"Oh! I almost forgot." She said, her blush deepening as she stood, offering her hand to Saki as she spoke, her voice regaining some of its previous brightness, even if the nervous energy from before still diffused through it. "Welcome to Kusagakure, Ayase-san."

ayase saki

[ayase saki]

There was a distant part of Saki that felt bad—Saya was clearly unused to being complimented, inexperience writ plain across her blushing face, and Saki knew objectively that manipulating people was a Bad Thing to Do. It was not, she thought, something that Ayase Saki should be doing. But it worked. Saya cross-checked her ID with whatever little list she had in hand and gave the identification back without comment or fuss, and Saki thought that a little guilt was a small price to pay for getting through the gates without issue. "Hey, it’s not a bad gig,” Saki said. She tucked her identification away into a pocket and took the clipboard in hand, glancing over the sheet to see what information she needed to fill out—name, occupation, country of origin, purpose and estimated duration of visit. All simple enough. "I’d kill for a job like this, but not a lot of villages looking to hire foreigners for their border patrol.” Her pen lingered briefly on the country of origin field without writing. What the hell had she put on her ID again? She couldn’t very well take it out to check, but she had to put down the right information— Saki’s hesitation was interrupted by Saya’s extended hand. Momentarily and unintentionally saved, Saki smiled, shifting everything over to one hand so she could shake Saya’s with the other—a firm grip, her index finger lingering over her pulse point for a few seconds too long for comfort. She turned Saya’s hand in her own to look at the back, layers of skin over tissue and sinew and bone. "Thanks, Saya,” she said. "You have nice hands. Strong knuckles. Good fingerbones.” Forest Country. Saki released her grip on Saya’s hand and wrote it down, then filled out the rest of the form. "Swordsman?” she asked. "You’ve got the callouses for it.”

Honō Saya -- 318

LAIKA OF THQ