AIC Warring And Peacetime (hereby referred to as WAP)

Ok I got sick of trying to write the practical things that are glue for a story and I am just skipping to the good parts, the fun parts I have been wanting to write. I remembered that AIC was never supposed to be a big serious story with serious expectations of coherency and I have actually found the serotonin I was looking for. I hope you like it.

Chapter 1

Madara first heard about the woman who would ruin his life from his terrible little brother, of all the sources.

"A priestess," Izuna yawned. He flicked a kunai at the ceiling with one hand and deflected it with a shuriken from the other. He caught both and then idly tossed them again.

"Stop that," Madara hissed. Peeved, he elbowed his brother. "And focus. You claim that you couldn't finish your mission because of a priestess?" His tone clearly illustrated what he thought of that concept.

Izuna made a rude noise. "I finished my mission," he said. He shoved Madara with his shoulder. "The mission didn't achieve the desired goal, but that doesn't mean I messed up." He raised his eyebrows at Madara. "I am certainly not responsible for ensuring that mission intelligence is accurate and up to date."

Madara scowled. "Are you blaming me?"

His terrible little brother shrugged as he got up from the zabuton. "Obviously? You thought that was a sad little village with no Shinobi affiliation that would provide us with rice for protection. They're clearly under new management."

"They are a desolate hamlet with no clan connections," Madara hissed. They should have been excited by the offer of patronage. And then he should have been able to mark off one concern regarding the upcoming winters. Five babies born, just that month! If things continued at that rate, they'd need much more food.

Izuna didn't look back. "Well, they think they don't need us because God will protect them from the evils of humanity and ravages of nature, so they won't give us rice. Better find another farming community to talk to, or start a field yourself."

An extremely unwanted vision of life as a farmer-clan head floated across Madara's mind. "I cannot balance two full time careers!" He roared, furious at the thought of working out a budget out loud to someone taking notes while he splashed in a rice field with water up to his shins.

"Better convince the priestess that her wide spot in the road needs our protection, then," Izuna said practically. "I didn't see her, the locals were cagey about a man with a sword meeting their holy woman and I didn't want to provoke them unnecessarily. But if you authorize a diplomatic mission, I'll go find her."

He was sorely tempted to go find this airhead personally and shake some sense into her about how safe, exactly, the gods would keep her from an even mildly annoyed Shinobi.

That flash of temper was why he took a deep breath and nodded. He wasn't going to lead through fear and brutality. It only begat more hatred. "Yes. Go back, find her, and convince her that we would keep her village safe."

When his brother had gone, Madara let out a deep breath. 'Temper,' he reminded himself. 'My anger does not rule me.'

That statement would have been news to Izuna, who sighed openly as he slouched his way back to the gate house. "What a pain," he mused, rubbing at the back of his neck. "It doesn't make much sense. There wasn't a shrine there last year, much less one so important that it would deter aggression."

Maybe the people were just delusional. Maybe something else was going on and their confidence had teeth behind it.

No matter what was going on, he'd need a gift to offer. Something nice, too. He stopped by his grandmother's house on the way out of the compound.

Several months prior:

Aiko found herself walking down a mountain path into what was clearly some type of farming community. A few family houses were scattered between glittering fields. Short stalks of rice swayed hopefully above water that rippled in a morning breeze.

She tried to match it to one of the modern-day villages. Tanzaku? The village where she had her first courier mission?

She had to give that up. There really wasn't anything in the geography to particularly identify the area, and all the landmarks that she knew didn't exist yet. She pursed her lips and looked down at the village, wondering if one village was really as good as any other for her purpose.

Probably.

In the distance, she heard someone calling good morning. She pinpointed them and waved back, smiling ruefully. It wasn't fraud because she had literally and specifically been sent here by an actual goddess. But she still felt extremely scummy as she made her way down the mountain path wearing the traditional red and white clothes of a priestess.

The outfit went a long way towards smoothing her entrance into the village, so she couldn't regret it. The first three men that she was introduced to were named Ichirou, aka someone's first son.

She was starting to get a really weird vibe from that. The first time someone was introduced with a personal name, she thought that it was just a polite attempt to match her introduction as only Aiko. But 3 in a row? It meant something else.

"I am Jiro," said a balding man in a leaf-patterned yukata. "It is a pleasure to meet you."

Ah. A third son this time. That probably said something about the population replacement rate.

"The pleasure is mine," said Aiko, who had literally just remembered that peasants did not have family names at this point in time. She blinked quickly, assimilating that once-read fact into her worldview. It was probably very good that she hadn't introduced herself as an Uzumaki. It would have alienated her. They had been confused enough by her introduction as a devoté of Izanami no Mikoto, the goddess from the creation story who had no shrines at all.

Speaking of. "Is there a shrine?"

The men exchanged glances. "Nothing that is staffed," Ichirou the wholly bald said apologetically. "I'll show you. It's over here."

They chatted as they went on, crossing narrow raised paths along rice paddies and working their way over a stream and to a mountain incline. Aiko clicked her tongue and looked at what she had to work with, tilting her head as she imagined what she could do with it. There was a very modest clearing, a large rock with a weathered talisman rope around it, and a tiny stone shrine with aged offerings. A few yellow flowers appeared to have been planted deliberately.

Poppies? Poppies, she decided. If she reached back into her vague memory of school, she thought they symbolized success. That was positive, at least.

"You can stay with my family until you move on," Jiro said cheerfully. "We would love to have you."

Aiko hummed and graced him with a non-committal smile. "I'd like to help with the work today," she said, side stepping the invitation. "What needs doing?"

She spent a day picking weeds and gradually inserting herself into the community. A young woman named Hana became her guide. Aiko let the pleasant chatter wash over her and tried to put together the words she didn't know from context. Was that an archaic verb for pulling, or was it just a specific farming term that she'd never learned?

Come afternoon, most of the fields gradually emptied as the sun became oppressively hot. Aiko got the feeling that Hana was deliberately lingering. Her suspicions were confirmed the instant they were alone. "Priestess, I'd like a blessing before you go," Hana said. Her big dark eyes darted towards the closest house.

'Fraud intensifies.'

"For luck?" Aiko asked mildly. "For love, for travel?"

Hana flushed. It traveled down her face and into the collar of her yukata. "Fertility," she near-whispered. "We haven't- not yet-"

Aiko cut her off when it was obvious the other woman was struggling for words. "A very appropriate blessing to ask of Izanami no Mikoto," she said, keeping her tone blandly pleasant. "Tomorrow morning, early. Meet me at the shrine before your work begins."

'Izanami-sama will help with that one, if she can.' Aiko thought it over, wondering how much worship Izanami needed to put her hand into human affairs. Prayer during the blessing itself might be enough, but with how weakened Izanami was by death, a miracle might help.

The most reasonable solution was to make a miracle.

She ate dinner with Jiro's family, which consisted of two sets of grandparents, a cousin and her husband, Jiro's wife Chiyo, and their 4 children whose names Aiko instantly forgot. Aiko visually tallied the economic resources in the house -fur, salt, stored rice- against the gorgeous meal served and silently realized that her hosts were extremely generous with their limited resources.

"I will prepare your futon after dinner," Chiyo said, flashing Aiko a stunning smile that showed she had blackened her teeth with charcoal.

'I totally forgot that was a beauty standard. Do they think my teeth are gauche?'

Amused, Aiko bowed in thanks. "That won't be necessary. I plan to spend the night in meditation at the shrine. I need to commune with Izanami-sama."

There was an extremely awkward silence.

No one was comfortable enough to outright argue with her across the social divide of the status her clothes implied. 

So at dusk, she headed out across the fields and over the river. She pretended not to hear that her hosts were frantically discussing how long it had been since a bear came down into town.

Aiko shrank down into a pious seated position, bowing her head and pretending to pray until the sunlight was gone. She was well-aware that people were poking their heads out of their doors to look at her and gossip.

When she finally stood, it was with a wobble. Her legs had gone to sleep and were full of pins and needles. She pushed past that and moved towards the trees she remembered from the daylight hours. When she laid a hand on one, she closed her eyes out of habit to focus, even though it was already dark.

She breathed in deeply, feeling her way into the tree with gentle chakra. She hadn't done anything with Mokuton for months so she was cautious as she began spidering barkless branches out from the tree to form the frame of a building. It was extremely slow going, given that she was trying not to wake anyone up.

"Don't be ugly," Aiko muttered, willing the wood to come out smoothly and to meet in elegant curves. "I am not a witch in the woods. I am an elegant and mysterious lady starting a cult to revive a dead Goddess. So you cannot be a shack. I will get fired if I make people think Izanami gives scary cannibalism shacks to her devotees."

She made a simple building- one room, an entry, and a slightly lowered walkway that ran around 3 sides of the new shrine. It was extremely difficult not to laugh whenever she remembered how impossible this would seem to the farmers, who definitely would have no understanding of chakra, much less its utility in the field of construction for literally 3 people in human history, two of whom (including herself)  were not born yet.

The shrine took about an hour to build inch by excruciating inch, by which time she had a tension headache. She laid down on the wood floor and closed her eyes for a bit, willing away the human indignity.

"I'm a minor goddess," she muttered rebelliously. She kicked her heels against the floor. "Why do I have headaches?"

It was bullshit, but it was apparently her lot in life. When she was finished sulking she went back outside and flicked on her Rinnegan again to build a stone wall around her shrine. She was careful to include the historical shrine in the boundaries. She finished it with two tall edifices to hint at a gate, though there was nothing at all to block the path inside.

On a whim, she felt around for the yellow flowers she'd seen during the day. Once she found one she focused on it so hard she bit her tongue in her concentration. Once it was memorized, she dropped her hand to the dirt and made a thick carpet of flowers surrounding her little shrine.

Flowers, she hoped, would make things look more dreamy and less demonic.

The night stretched on a very long time. She walked around the village by moonlight, wondering what else she should do. Would it be helpful to accelerate the growth of the rice plants, or terrible? She didn't know, so she left it alone.

It was almost a relief to bleed off some of her energy into mokuton's hungry demand, so she indulged herself by feeding flowers wherever she found them. It got easier with each type that she memorized.

Her eyes were getting very tired and she felt like she could sleep for a week. It was impossible to know how far away dawn was. She made her way back to the old shrine and knelt into seiza exactly where she had been at night, when the villagers had last seen her.

It was excruciating to wait like that. Hard-won discipline and her love of drama were the only things that helped Aiko get through the pain of sitting in seiza for hours.

It paid off. She was sitting there with her hands demurely on her lap when the sun rose and the first villagers ventured out of their homes. She didn't look, but she heard the excited chattering.

Those sounds got closer and doors slammed across the village as the news spread. Aiko remained seated just as she was, with her eyes closed, until she felt the susurrus of whispers was close enough.

She opened her eyes. "I will stay here for a time," Aiko said calmly. She stood. It took every ounce of discipline in her body to make the movement smooth despite the way her limbs had locked through inaction. "Hana-san, would you come inside with me? I'd like to give you a blessing."

She was only worried for a moment at the moment of truth as the crowd gawked and moved away from her. Aiko was professional enough to keep her nerves hidden as she glided into the new shrine.

Hana stumbled in her excitement and then followed at Aiko's heels.

A warm feeling rose inside Aiko's chest. Instinctively she knew it was Izanami's power, given strength by a sudden upswell in religious fervor.

And just like that, Aiko knew these people would believe she was heaven-sent.