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It was very quiet inside the shrine. She sat down at a long table in a stiff silence. The younger priest left through a door to the left and came back with a bleak-smelling tea balanced on a humble tray. She took a cup and wondered if shrines were on the list of things she was meant to be funding.

“You seem to have a particular connection to death,” the senior priest said. There were stress lines pressed into his forehead that didn’t ease up when he looked at her.  “Seeing and interacting with the dead…   You can do this?”

Aiko took a sip of her bitter tea and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “A while after I began summoning the god of death.”

The old man flinched. “Pardon?”

She repeated herself.

The priest closed his eyes. He seemed to be chewing that concept over. “Why would you summon the God of Death?”  His voice was faint.

Aiko thought about it. “It’s cool,” she said honestly. “And it was a very effective psychological tool against Orochimaru.”

“It’s ...cool,” he repeated, lost.

“I also use it to revive people who I killed by accident,” Aiko added guiltily. She squirmed on her cushion. “A lot of people in Kirigakure, actually.”

He made a sound of comprehension, as if something he’d heard years ago was finally resolved. “You are the Mizukage,” he said. He looked at her again, cataloguing her face and clothes. “I see.” He said that, but his brow furrowed even further in confusion. “How do you summon a God?”

She grimaced. “I…” Aiko tilted her head to the side, trying to find a way to describe it that didn’t sound insane. “I use my eyes. I have a set of eyes which let me do a lot of things, actually. I can use every chakra type that I know about and some really weird things that don’t truly make sense, like summoning unaffiliated animals.”

“And also a literal God?” His question came out bemused. “Why that God- as opposed to any other God, I mean. Did you worship the God of Death?”

She thought about it. “I kill a lot of people,” Aiko said fairly. “Could that be connected?”

The elderly priest looked up through the open door to the garden behind her. “No,” he said. “I do not think so.” He tapped his fingers against his tea cup. “It seems that you have somehow affiliated yourself with a God.”

“Like you?” Aiko asked. She gestured at the shrine around them. “You worship Izanami no Mikoto, right?”

He eyed her sideways. “This is a shrine to Amaterasu. There are no shrines for Izanami no Mikoto in operation these days.”

Aiko felt herself frowning. “Isn’t she the god who made everything?” she ventured. “My religious education was spotty, but I thought that was her.”

“Izanami no Mikoto and Izanagi no Mikoto created the world and most of the beings in it,” the junior priest agreed. “Izanagi no Mikoto sleeps, but he is worshipped. However, Izanami no Mikoto passed into the land of the dead in the early days of the world.”

Aiko made a sound of polite comprehension.

‘That seems like a raw deal. She’s dead but not in the way we think of it, right? She’s still a God.’

“I have to conduct diplomatic business inside of a shrine.” Aiko laid her cards out on the table. “I am...concerned about complications stemming from my… association with the God of Death and my lack of general knowledge about religion.”

“I don’t think that you should have particular trouble.” The younger priest was the one who answered yet again, while the old man looked out into the garden. “It is ..extremely unusual that you might have such a connection to a God. However, there are no wicked Gods. They are merely different.”

“So no one has any kind of grudge against the God of Death?”

The priest opened his mouth and then closed it.

“We are not spokespeople for the Gods,” the head priest said, dryly amused. “No one hears the voice of the Gods and transcribes their interpersonal grievances.”

Aiko blinked. She eyed the two men uncertainly. “I hear his voice…” She trailed off.

They were looking at her incredulously.

“He doesn’t like Orochimaru,” she added helplessly. She shrugged and then frowned as she remembered. “He didn’t like Orochimaru, rather,” Aiko corrected herself. “He’s dead now. Anyway, I think that Death doesn’t like anyone who cheats Death… I wonder if he has feelings about Hidan,” she mused.

“I think that we ought to start from the beginning,” the priest said. He gestured to his subordinate. “While I take care of our duties, please speak with the Mizukage about the Gods and the earth.”

…

Aiko left the shrine feeling unsettled. There wasn’t any known precedent for what was going on with her. Chewing over the upcoming meeting had mostly led her to more questions.

Thankfully, however, some of the questions had been productive.

She breezed into her office and sent off an officer worker for information about their contacts in foreign countries. Kirigakure had nothing like Konoha’s sophisticated spy network, but they were not totally hopeless. When she had the information in hand she chewed it over for a few hours and then wrote up 3 missions. She passed them off to the assignment desk, so that the next qualified personnel to show up for missions would get shuttled off to ask questions.

If Konoha wasn’t talking out of their ass, they would have had to have already consulted with at least two other foreign nations. Otherwise, they would have no standing to threaten that there could be serious diplomatic repercussions for annexing Wave. Aiko put her feet up on her desk and stared at the ceiling, considering different angles. Who would the Sandaime go to? She didn’t know him the way she knew Tsunade.

‘He could even make it into an opportunity to improve his international standing,’ Aiko realized. She twisted her lips into a scowl. ‘I annex one little country and suddenly I am the villain.’

‘I think that Kirigakure has long been considered the villain,’ Sanbi pointed out.  ‘No one likes us.’

She paused for a moment, touched that Sanbi considered them in the same category.

‘I misspoke,’ he deadpanned. ‘The important concept is that it is easy to dislike you.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Of course, I mean Kirigakure.’

She pouted, but accepted his point. They were an easy scapegoat.

‘I am not a goat,’ Sanbi snapped.

“It’s just a saying.” She sighed heavily and rolled her eyes.