Tobirama/Aiko hateflirt 2

The priestess laughed in delighted surprise when he obligingly picked her up. She must have been expecting him to protest.

…Had that been an option? He wondered. This was a mission. Granted, she was supposedly his peer, not his client. And nonetheless, he would never agree to be a beast of burden to a client. It was a little beneath his dignity and station.

But no one was going to tell the head priestess of their state religion that her behavior was gauche, so it seemed best to comply.

It was not entirely unpleasant. It was certainly the most extended human contact he had ever experienced in his life. It was taxing on his body, but there was still something… pleasant about feeling the pressure and heat of her skin through their clothes.

Out in their own private world of the wooded area between civilian towns, the air between them became less charged. He was able to start casual conversations without gaining her ire.

And she turned the conversations to mutual interest: academia.

“What did you base your hiraishin off of?” she asked, not sounding much more than idly curious. “There’s going to be intense debate over if it’s a local system combined with Uzumaki techniques or from a branch that’s going to go extinct in the next 50 years.”

He ignored all the troubling parts of that, because that was so far his best conversational tactic with her. “Mito-sama brought two scrolls with her as part of her dowry, and I was allowed to study them,” Tobirama explained. The faintest hint of a smug smirk tugged at his lips. “I gather that the clan elders felt the material was too ancient and too specific to the Uzumaki to be of use to an outsider.”

“Specific to the Uzumaki?” she asked.

He didn’t know for sure either. “There is an implication of some level of bloodline quirk that might be beneficial to their style of sealing, if not more generally,” Tobirama theorized. “Perhaps some adaptation.”

She let out a thoughtful hum. “...Can you set a seal without ink?”

He inclined his head. “Yes,” Tobirama answered. “I can use blood.”

There was a silence that stretched seconds. Then she snickered and ruffled his hair with her nails. He scrunched his face up in displeasure despite the simple fact that it felt quite nice. “That answers that,” she said cheerfully.

xxx

On the third day of travel, she took pity on him and his aching shoulders. She didn’t walk– she dug her thumbs into the back of his neck and the joint where it met his shoulders as he carried her in the position he had originally picked, arms under her knees and behind her back.

He hated every moment of it, he did, except that their interaction was starting to feel less hostile and more… teasing. She was a bizarre and inappropriate person, but he had never thought otherwise. At the least she was his intellectual equal. He could respect that.