"...and Isshin finished it off as the fourth vote for Kannagi," Inoue said. "There was some more chatting and then everyone broke for lunch."

She looked around the circle; the light that made it in through the open archway of their tiny fort left the inside gloomy at best, but it was still bright enough to clearly show five serious faces looking back at her. Kagome met her gaze for only a moment before pulling one of the storage scrolls out of his backpack and bringing forth a bag containing several hundred seal blanks. He set them in a pile in front of him, face down, then started infusing them one by one and setting them aside. Three neat but unequal piles started growing next to him.

Inoue eyed that nervously for a moment, then wisely decided not to interfere with Kagome's equivalent of cuddling a security blanket.

"Anyway," she said, "the thing I'm edgy about in the immediate future is the fallout from the trial. This morning Gasai was the head of one of the most prominent families in the village and the thirteenth Gasai in a row to be on the village council. Now she's been stripped of her seat on the council, her seat has been given to someone that these people have no regard for, and she was even forced to step down as clan head. Her family loses face along with her, and a lot of them are going to blame us for it."

Kagome snorted but didn't look up from what he was doing. The mumbled words "...stinking stinkers...show them...boom, squash..." might have been heard. Inoue eyed this rather more nervously than before, but still forbore to say anything; a nervous but occupied Kagome was much better than a Kagome with nothing to do but focus on his nervousness.

"Just to make sure I have this right," Noburi said. "Kannagi isn't going to break the betrothal?"

Inoue rocked her hand in a so-so motion. "He might or might not," she said. "He'll do whatever he judges best. He certainly made it clear how much advantage there would be to not breaking it, though."

"So..." Hazō said. "Yoshida tried to manipulate us and get us under her thumb, and then her grandson tried to kill Akane, twice. Kannagi is actively betraying us. Takahashi practically extorted Keiko into that deal. I've got an idea. How about we burn this place to the ground, grab the scroll, and run?"

"No," Keiko said. "I must complete my training in order for the scroll to be of any use. Besides, Takahashi-sensei has been good to us. He has dealt honestly throughout, and destroying his village would be poor repayment."

"Are you kidding?!" Noburi demanded. "He dragged you into his den like a spider grabs a fly, threatened you, extorted you, and then mousetrapped you into this ridiculous agreement that—"

"It is not ridiculous," Keiko snapped. "Yes, he negotiated very aggressively. You did the the same when the Yakuza ninja attacked us, remember? How is that any different?" She shrugged one shoulder. "Besides, he has not used the information against me, or us. He needed it in order to be sure that I could safely learn what he was offering. Since then he has been supportive, encouraging...stern, yes, but always fair. He has taught me what he promised he would teach, and he is willing to teach at my pace. The instructors at the Mist Academy wouldn't do that; if I mastered a lesson too quickly they would insist that I keep practicing until the planned amount of time was spent. Takahashi-sensei will teach me as fast as I can learn the material, and praises me for going so quickly. He says it usually takes twice as long to get to where I am."

"Where's he get it from?" Kagome said, pausing in his infusion. Below the receding hairline, his eyes were fever-bright with worry and calculation. "The summoning training. No one here's a summoner, so where'd it come from? I knew eight separate stinkers who started their own school of seal theory based on moonbeams and bad dreams instead of actual applied research." He used his right forefinger to tick off his left thumb. "First one blew himself up." Left index finger. "Second one dissolved all the bones below his rib cage, had to drag himself around on a cart with his legs coiled up behind him." Left middle finger. "Third one blew himself up." Ring finger. "Fourth one had spiders climb out of his eyesockets and then his brain melted." He paused, thinking. "Maybe the other way around. Anyway." Pinky finger. "Fifth one—"

"We get it, Kagome," Inoue said. "Making up your own theory with nothing to base it on is bad." She turned to Keiko. "Well? It's a good question. Where is he getting all this from?"

Keiko hesitated, clearly deciding how much she could tell. "The information has come down from the founding of the village," she said at last. "The Founder had the summoning scroll and a variety of ancillary materials that discussed the theory. Those scrolls have been handed down from generation to generation, carefully re-copied whenever the material became too old, until storage scrolls became available to preserve them when not in use."

Kagome snorted, a satisfied expression spreading across his thin face. "Ancient scrolls of forgotten wisdom, carefully preserved except when they were copied over and over by people generations apart who had no familiarity with the subject matter. Always good source material, as long as you enjoy having the universe crack open and pull you through a million finger-sized holes into non-space like an orange being shoved through a cheesegrater. Stinker's gonna get you killed, Mori. Might be accidental because he's an under-educated idiot, might be deliberate because he's a stinking liar who only cares about his stinking village."

"No he's not!" Keiko said, face going red with fury. "Takahashi-sensei is a brilliant man, and his materials are excellent! I've checked them for internal coherence and they makes perfect sense! There's—"

"Aaaand, we're breathing," Inoue said, raising her hands. "We are exhaling stress and fear, inhaling calm and relaxation." Both Kagome and Keiko looked mutinous; Inoue gave them each a raised eyebrow until they grumpily followed along. "And exhaling. And inhaling. And exhaling. And inhaling. Okay, good."

She watched them for another moment, waiting to see that there weren't any outbursts pending. "Now, Keiko, Kagome raises some good points. Not as tactfully as I might have liked"—she shot the demolitionist a reproving glare—"but still good points. Takahashi might be the best guy around, but his loyalty is to his village first. That's as it should be, but it's something that we need to keep in mind. He's not helping us out of the goodness of his heart, he's helping us because it fulfills some value that he holds as important. What value is that? What's driving him to teach you?"

"He wants to teach," Keiko said quickly. "He wants to pass on the knowledge that his family has safeguarded for gen...." She trailed off, recognizing the foolishness of the words even as she spoke them. "No," she said heavily. "I believe he enjoys teaching, but you're right. He's not teaching me just for the sake of teaching. He's teaching because he feels that me having the contract will be good for the village."

Inoue nodded. "Right. From what he so-carefully didn't say during our conversation, I think he wants us to get the contract and get it out of town so that they can stop being a village of sacred guardians and start being a village."

Hazō started to say something, but Inoue cut him off. "Yes, I know," she said. "He's a liar and we can't trust him and so on and so on. I get it, but that's part of his job. He's a ninja, and a clan elder, and a politician. No one in that job can afford to be completely truthful, and so far he seems to have played it reasonably straight."

"So what do we do?" Noburi asked.

Inoue blew out her cheeks and leaned back on her hands. "For now, nothing," she said. "We don't have immediate time pressure. Keiko's right that she needs the training, and she said it should only be another few weeks. There's no date set for Noburi's wedding, and if they try to set one we can delay it—say that our culture requires being married during a certain season or whatever. I'm not too worried about physical threats either. Kannagi and Takahashi need us in one piece, Yoshida would like to get us on side, and after the trial I told Gasai that if any of her family attacks one of us I'm going to literally rip their head off and throw their body in the well."

Keiko started. "What? But our agreement with Takahashi-sensei says that we must not use lethal force!"

Inoue shrugged. "I don't care," she said. "There's too much politicking going on, too many different agendas and undercurrents, and I'm having trouble getting a handle on it. It's pretty much impossible to infiltrate a village this small quickly, especially with no prep, and it's making me jumpy." She shook her head. "I'm not ready to go with the Armaggedon Initiative proposed by our two mad bombers over there, but I definitely want us to be careful. Gasai has already demonstrated that she has inadequate control over her family members and a poor understanding of how they'll react. She should have known that Kouta couldn't be trusted and put the fear of the hells in him so that he stayed in line."

"Sensei..." Keiko said. "Sensei, I do not want to break faith with Takahashi-sensei. He has been very good to me. He will give us the scroll if we stay true to him, and harming his village would be poor repayment for his kindness."

Inoue nodded, but her smile was sad. "I'd like it if things worked out well," she said. "If you finished your training, and got the scroll, and we never had any more problems with the villagers. That's just...not the way I'd bet in this situation. We're too much of a disruption to their way of life, and when Takahashi gives us our shot at the scroll it's going to get worse. If he sneaks us in then we're stealing the holy of holies. If he proposes it to the village and tries to get us permission then it's going to be the same as punching a hornet's nest. I'm willing to give him the chance, see if there's some way to make it work, but I'm not willing to have any of us get hurt. I hope you can accept that."

Keiko bowed her head. "Yes, sensei," she said quietly.

Inoue leaned forward so she could set two fingers under Keiko's chin and tip the girl's head up. "I promise we won't start anything," Inoue said gently. "I'll do everything I can to work with Takahashi, to make this all go smoothly." She sighed and settled back. "It's funny, you know? We left Mist with the goal of founding a hidden village, and here we are in a hidden village. In theory we could settle down and assimilate. We could even form our own clan, perhaps. We could give the villagers modern medicine, ninjutsu, taijutsu, hundreds of years of advancement in seal theory...so much. They could give us a home, a safe place to shelter. In time, maybe friends or lovers."

Her eyes were miles away and her voice wavered as she said, "It could be nice, I just don't think it's going to happen."

"Why not?" Hazō asked. "You said they were talking about assimilating us."

Inoue sighed and blinked back to the current moment. "Yes," she said. "But that's just it—they were talking about assimilating us, not welcoming us. The discussion was more military than social. Look at the language they used: Kannagi talked repeatedly about binding us, subordinating our virtues to theirs, making our power their power. He didn't talk about binding us and the village together, he didn't talk about our virtues blending. It was all in terms of dominance and submission, and he made it clear that he expected to be the dominant." Her lip twitched, just for a moment, but she didn't speak the thought that had clearly flashed across her mind.

"Ganta was even worse," she continued. "He explicitly said he wanted to assimilate us, not ally with us. He made it clear that if we didn't accept their welcome then he'd poison us.

"Then there's the whole village hierarchy. Ganta made a point about how Kannagi's bloodline only came to prominence a century ago. I've seen that attitude in small villages before; unless your ancestors were there when the village was founded, you're from 'away'. If we did stay we would always be second-class citizens. Our great-grandchildren would still be second-class citizens. I'm not going to take that from a bunch of hicks who thought that med-nin were a myth."

Silence fell as everyone digested that.

"Kid's right, you know," Kagome said, not looking up from the seal blank that he was infusing. "It'd be easier just to blow the place up and steal the scroll. Let Jiraiya finish her training."

"Yes," Inoue said. "It would be easier. I think, though, that for once I'd like to do something right instead of something easy."

o-o-o-o

Everyone was quiet after the intensity of the discussion. Inoue had gone outside to sit on the roof and look at the stars. Kagome had wandered out a few minutes later, shuffling through his scrolls as he went and mumbling to himself. Meanwhile, the genin started getting dinner together.

Hazō waited for an opportune moment, then ducked outside and hopped up on the roof. "May I join you, sensei?" he asked quietly. Noburi, Keiko, and Akane were busy chopping vegetables for dinner, and this was the best chance he was going to get for privacy.

Inoue waved indolently at the roof next to her. "Help yourself," she said. She was stretched out on the eastern side of the slanted A-frame roof, legs crossed at the ankle and arms behind her head.

Hazō lay down next to her. The roof was steep enough that he had to treewalk to hold himself in place, but by now that required no attention at all.

"What's on your mind?" Inoue asked quietly, not looking away from the stately whirl of the stars above.

"I'm worried about Keiko," Hazō said, taking care to keep his voice down. "I asked her about her training with Takahashi and she said that she 'could not discuss it with outsiders'."

"Outsiders, huh?" Inoue said. "That's not good."

Hazō nodded. "I followed up, and she clarified that she meant people who weren't summoners or learning to summon." He licked his lips, replaying the exact words in her mind. "She reminded me that some of the worst types of sealing accidents relate to letting things in from beyond normal spacetime, and then pointed out that that's exactly what summoning does when it works right. Then there was the whole discussion tonight , where she was so strong on Takahashi. I'm worried about her."

"Oh?" Inoue said, her voice as far away as the stars. "Why is that?"

"I think she's losing connection to us," Hazō said. "She's bonding with Takahashi more, and it's pulling her away from us."

Silence hung heavy in the air as Inoue digested that.

"Is that a bad thing?" she asked. "Keiko needs bonds, needs stability. A life on the run, everything always in chaos...it's not going to make her happy. She might do better here in the village. Takahashi seems to be doing right by her. He's given her a father figure, one who plays to her gifts and helps her spread her wings. When we're walking to and from her lessons, she won't talk about the training in detail, but she'll sometimes talk about how the lesson went. It sounds like Takahashi hoards compliments like a miser hoards money, but he does give them when they're warranted. She could do worse."

Hazō looked at her in shock. Why wasn't she more bothered by this? "I'm afraid she's getting depressed again, sensei, and I think the training is related. Has she been using her bloodline during the training?"

Inoue sighed. "I don't know about the bloodline, and I honestly can't tell if she's getting depressed," she said. "She's lost in her thoughts a lot, but she's a thirteen-year-old girl in the middle of puberty, and she's got extra-confusing hormones, a genius brain that's chewing on some of the most complex stuff known to womankind, and a bloodline that changes the way she thinks and makes her low-affect to start with."

In training back at the Academy, the genin of Mist had practiced punching through bricks. It required a focus, a gathering of strength, a determination to do the impossible. Hazō needed all of that training to force the next words out of his mouth.

"She'sstillgotthatcrushonyou," he said.

Inoue raised her head just enough to look at him incredulously. "You're so cute when you're all awkward," she said gleefully. Hazō's eyes went wide and he frantically rolled away....

...but still wasn't fast enough, damnit. He sighed and tried to untousle his hair while glaring at his teacher.

"Fine," he said grumpily. "I need to talk to you and Kagome next. Will you come?" He pushed himself upright and stood, treewalking on the roof so that he was nearly parallel to the ground twenty feet below them. He offered her an expectant hand up.

She laughed. "Look at you, being all leader-like and having one planning conversation after another. So adorable." She took the hand and let him pull her up then continued the motion, jumping up and swinging around behind him like a monkey climbing a tree. She wrapped strong legs around his waist and squeezed so tight that the breath went out of him in a rush, leaving him utterly unable to resist as she tousled his hair with both hands, cackling gleefully all the while.

"Giddyap!" she said, grabbing his shoulders and kicking him in the hip with her heel.

Hazō was so surprised he nearly fell off the roof, but he managed to turn it into a mostly-balanced leap to the ground. She insisted on riding piggyback all the way around the A-frame until they got to where Kagome was working.

The sealmaster was sitting crosslegged with his back against the wall of the mini-fort as he prepped explosives. He'd unsealed a couple of boxes containing several hundred pounds of wet clay and a brazier full of hot coals. One after another he rolled up one of his explosive tags, wrapped a blob of clay around it so that only a bit of the paper was sticking out, put a wooden sleeve over the extruding bit, and then set the whole thing in the coals to harden.

"Kagome-sensei," Hazō called quietly. It didn't do to alarm the man. "May we join you, please?"

Kagome glanced over, then gestured to the grass next to him before going back to what he was doing. Hazō sank down to his right. Inoue knelt gracefully to his left, close enough that Kagome started to sweat a little.

"What's going on?" Kagome asked. "Is there a problem? Are those stinking stupid village ninja stinkers attacking?"

"No, everything's fine," Hazō said. "I just wanted to ask the two of you about our situation, tactically. If we had to fight the village, could we win? How much danger are we in?"

Inoue considered that, then looked at Kagome as though judging how honest to be.

"A lot," Kagome said. "Stinking ninja stinkers. Sneak up on us, ambush us with hundreds of arrows. Probably poison them. Or put it in the food. That's why I've only been eating stuff from my scrolls. You guys should too. Except you don't have any, but I guess you can have some of mine. Food, I mean. Not scrolls. They might put some of those toxic cloud seals on their arrows. Could fire a few inside one night, do for us. Well, they could have before I sealed off the door."

"About that," Inoue said. "If you're going to put an invisible wall in front of the door after we all go to bed, tell us first, okay? I nearly broke my nose when I tried to go outside in the morning." She leaned forward, her eyes seeming large and nearly luminescent in the silver moonlight and chiaroscuro wash of the brazier's glow. "I don't think I'd look good with a broken nose, do you?" she purred, taking a deep breath.

Kagome blushed. "Um, right," he said. He glanced at her, then hastily looked away. "I mean, no. Yes, you wouldn't. Um...right, sorry."

Inoue snickered softly and straightened up before turning her gaze on Hazō. "Honestly, I'm not sure how dangerous things are right now," she said. "Probably not too bad, though. I'm pretty sure we aren't going to be attacked in the near future." She shrugged. "As to whether we could win...well, that patrol we ran into on the way in was soft cheese, but they were a bunch of trainees and a jōnin who'd been promoted three weeks ago. They've definitely got some stronger fighters, and they've got jutsu that we aren't familiar with. They've got seals, which is always a wildcard. Those bows have seals worked into them—they fire farther than a kunai, and I've seen the good archers fire a barrange of arrows nearly as fast as Keiko can launch one of kunai. Those tapirs aren't normal, either. They've been very careful not to let me get a good look at their people doing serious training, but I've gone past some of the other training areas. The ground is disturbed, like someone's been using earth jutsu, and there's tapir tracks all over the place. Orderly, regimented tracks, not panicked running. No regular animal would be comfortable being in the middle of an in-progress earth jutsu, so either those things are incredibly well trained or they're chakra-enhanced."

"What do we do if we have to fight?" Hazō asked.

"Blow. Them. Up," Kagome said, as though speaking to an idiot child. "Boom. Squish."

Inoue chuckled. "That's actually a pretty good option. If we get attacked by one ninja I'll do exactly what I promised Gasai I would do. If we get attacked by multiple ninja then we throw explosives everywhere and run for it. Grab the rest of the group, get clear, and decide what to do then."

"I was thinking about the tactics classes back in the Academy," Hazō said. "The part about tactical assassinations and decapitation strikes. If we wanted to, could we get rid of the leaders that are a problem for us?"

Kagome sat up, suddenly interested. "How big can the pieces be?" he asked.

"We're not blowing anyone up, Kagome," Inoue said. "To answer the question, Hazō...probably? We definitely couldn't do it without turning it into a full-on battle, though. The minute they found one of their elders killed they'd be all over us. And no, before you say it, we can't just make it look like an accident. That's sometimes doable if you have plenty of time to prepare and if no one has reason to think that the person is being targeted. In this case, no way."

"I still like the Armageddon Initiative," Kagome grumbled. "Blow 'em all up. Boom, squash. Take the scroll, leave. Simple. Safe."

"Not necessarily," Inoue said. "We haven't seen the shrine except from the bottom of the hill. We have no idea what sort of guard they have, how many seals are guarding the place, or anything. I doubt we'd be able to get through the defenses quickly."

Kagome gave something halfway between a grunt and a chuckle. "I could," he said. "No problem. Stinking stinkers. People with their fancy seals, always trying to get clever. Try to build security systems they think are perfect." A crafty and more than slightly manic gleam came to the sealmaster's sunken eyes. He pulled a kunai and started fiddling with it. "Won't keep old Kagome in, though, will they? Oh no." He stabbed the kunai into the ground without seeming to be aware of it. "Cut right through those so-special defenses, didn't I? Hit the ground, scot free. Find a nice forest, get Mori her scroll without letting that stinker get his hooks into her leg and to the desk." Stab, stab, stab. "Yeah, that'd be the way. No more worrying about making quota, just boom! Squash! Steal. Run. Yeah." Stab, stab, stabstabstab.

"Kagome," Inoue said, leaning forward so she could catch his kunai hand with her right and lay her left on his cheek. "Kagome. Hey. Hey, look at me, okay?" She pressed lightly, turning his head and forcing him to meet her eyes. He snapped back to awareness, blinking in surprise. She smiled and gently took the kunai from him. "You okay?"

He suddenly seemed to notice that she still had her hand on his cheek; all the blood drained from his face and then came back in a blush so fiery it was a wonder his head didn't explode from the pressure. "Uh-huh," he said, starting to nod and then aborting when he realized it might dislodge her touch.

Inoue kept meeting his gaze and smiling, but slid her hand down his arm until she was holding his hands. "You with us?" she asked. "Seemed like you had a bad moment there."

"Oh, uh...I'm fine," Kagome said. He was fighting not to blink and his entire body was frozen like a deer in torchlight, but it was very clearly not fear that held him so still. "Just...um, yeah. Fine. Anyway. Uh...right, the shrine. Yeah, I bet I could get us in. One way or another. Probably pretty quick."

"You sure?" Inoue asked. She released his hands and sat up straight again. Just for a moment Kagome had the same expression as a child that just dropped its sweet in the dirt, but at least he was no longer frozen stiff.

"Have to see it," Kagome said. "Never know. Still, these stinkers aren't all that bright. Don't really know much about security. And their seals are balls."

Hazō opened his mouth to ask for clarification, but stopped when Inoue gave him a millimetric wave-off with one hand, held low and to the side.

"Sounds good," she said. "I'm glad we have you with us or we'd really be stuck."

"Oh," Kagome said. He looked down at his hands, long, ink-stained fingers twining around each other. Inoue followed his gaze and for a moment couldn't help but think that those could easily have been the hands of a scribe or a poet, instead of the fingers of a man whose writing killed people.

"Yeah. Well, that's me," Kagome said, shrugging mock-casually. "Unsticking whatever gets stuck." Something that was trying to remember how to be a smile draped itself over his face. "Usually with explosions. Because they work, and definitely not because I have a tactically crippled mind."

Inoue laughed softly. "Both true things," she said. "Hey, will you show me what you're doing with these clay things?" She turned so that she was sitting against the fort's wall alongside Kagome. She flicked her gaze to Hazō for just a second and gave him a tiny 'get lost' nod. The genin shifted backwards, using all the stealth he'd ever learned to vanish back into the fort while the two senior members of the team chatted about the best way to deliver explosions at short, medium, and long range.

o-o-o-o

In the morning, Hazō made a point of asking Noburi to be his water-fetching buddy. The other boy grumbled about the duty, but grabbed a quartet of waterskins and went along without real argument.

"You've got a hair thing," Hazō said, pointing at his own head and nodding towards Noburi's. The stouter boy tried to look up at his own hair, then pawed at it a bit with both hands. The cowlick stubbornly refused to be dislodged.

"How's that?" Noburi asked.

"Eh, you'll get it when you bathe," Hazō said, laughing. "Right now it looks like a haystack."

"Bleh," Noburi said, knuckling at his eyes and stifling a yawn as they arrived at the well. The sun was just barely coming up, and he clearly wouldn't have minded another hour of sleep. "Bath would be nice," he said, the last words a bit hard to understand as the yawn ambushed him and escaped. He shook his head and started pulling the bucket up.

"Yeah," Hazō said. "Me too." He fought back a grin. "I'm sure Yuno would like it if you smelled nice," he said slyly.

Without looking, Noburi sent a spray of water from his barrel to soak Hazō's shirt.

"Hey!" Hazō said, leaping back too late.

Noburi laughed. "I'm not the only one who needs a bath to smell nice," he said.

Hazō chuckled and plunged his waterskins into the bucket, then dropped it back in and hauled it up again. He looked around; there was no one anywhere in sight, but he still said nothing until all the waterskins were full and they were nearly back to camp.

A few minutes from the fort, Hazō stepped off the path and waved Noburi to follow him up into the trees. Noburi followed silently, clearly wondering what was going on.

Hazō settled on a branch and dug a piece of wax-wrapped honeycake out of his pocket. He broke it in half and handed one piece to his teammate before peeling the casing off his own. The other boy took the treat willingly enough and plonked down on the branch beside him.

"So—" Hazō began.

"She's nice. Yes, I know it is. Not thrilled but it is what it is. No, I realize that that would be a bad plan. No, she wouldn't. Yes, I'm sure. No idea, she won't talk about it." Noburi said.

"What?" Hazō asked.

"The answers," Noburi said, making a 'go on' gesture. "The answers to the questions you were going to ask."

Hazō blinked and thought it through, trying to match the answers to questions. "You think Yuno is nice but you know that the betrothal is supposed to be a sham. You aren't thrilled about that and, uh..."

Noburi waited, giving him an expectant look and snacking on his honeycake. "Yes?" he said. "Go on, you'll get it. I can already smell the wheels burning."

Hazō flicked him in the belly without looking; Noburi almost choked on the honeycake.

"Dunno," Hazō said finally. "What's the rest?"

"If we leave, I'm not going to invite her to leave with us," Noburi said. "That would be a bad plan. I'm sure she wouldn't betray me, even if her family wanted her too—she wears her heart on her sleeve even more than Ishihara does, and she doesn't have a devious bone in her body. As to why people avoid her, I don't know and she won't talk about it."

"Might be the axe," Hazō said.

"Yeah, the axe doesn't help," Noburi said. "By the way, thanks a lot for taking so damn long to finally bring this up. I bet Inoue-sensei you'd ask me about it two days ago."

"Oh," Hazō said, blushing. "Right. Guess I'm a little slow."

"Ya think?" Noburi demanded. He snorted and took another bite of the honeycake.

Hazō chewed his own cake for a moment. "What's it like?" he asked. "Dating, I mean. I know you've got a thing for Keiko."

Noburi sighed. "It's...weird, I guess. Keiko is smart, and hot, and she's from Mist so we get the same jokes, except that she never laughs. She's got that reserve that makes me feel awkward but it makes her seem really...elegant, I guess." He shrugged helplessly. "She doesn't want me, though, does she?"

Hazō grimaced. "No, she doesn't," he said. "Sorry, man."

Noburi nodded. Silence lingered.

"She can't like guys," Hazō blurted.

Noburi almost fell off the branch, and he did choke on the honeycake. "What?" he said, coughing.

"Well, she's got the thing for Inoue-sensei," Hazō said defensively. "She goes for girls, so obviously she doesn't do guys."

"She's thirteen, man!" Noburi said. "Of course she doesn't do guys!"

"Not like that," Hazō said, thwapping him on the shoulder in reproof. "I mean, you can't like both, right? If she's got it bad for Inoue-sensei then obviously she doesn't like guys. It's not that she doesn't like you in particular, it's just that you're a guy and she doesn't go for guys."

Noburi thought about that. "That makes sense," he said. He thought about it a bit more. "Huh."

"If she did go for guys, I'm sure she'd go for you," Hazō said.

Noburi snorted bitterly. "Yeah, because who wouldn't go for the fat kid with the screwed-up chakra system?"

Hazō looked at him in surprise. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "A, you're not fat, and B, so what about your chakra system? You've got more chakra than me, Akane, and Keiko put together, and you can actually share it with people. That's amazing. Girls should be so lucky."

"Yeah, thanks, Mr. Jawline and Abs," Noburi said. "You and your super amazing taijutsu and perfectly graceful all the time, never trips or stumbles."

Hazō let out a long breath. "Seriously?" he said. "You think...." He shook his head. "Look, the Iron Nerve may sound great, but it's got its downsides."

"Oh?" Noburi asked. "Like what? You're perfectly graceful all the time, you can beat down three chūnin at a time, you reproduce seals perfectly after a single glance. You're right, that does sound rough. I'm so glad that I can put chakra in water instead."

"At least you don't have to remember to be a person," Hazō snapped.

As quick as it had come, the anger drained away and left him deflated. "Yes, there's a lot of good about the Iron Nerve," Hazō said. "The part about copying seals—sure, it lets me do that, but that's a party trick. I can reliably draw designs, how nice. I still need to learn to infuse them or they're just pretty squiggles. Let me tell you, training under Kagome-sensei isn't exactly all honeycake and hot baths."

"Okay, that's fair," Noburi said. He paused. "What did you mean about being a person?"

Hazō thought about how to answer. "You remember half-speed sparring at the Academy? Everything is slow enough that you can choose exactly what you're going to do next. You can consciously tighten each muscle, choose exactly how hard you're going to push or pull. Right?"

"Yeah, so?"

"That's my life," Hazō said. "It's like there's a big catalog of every motion I've ever made, right behind my eyes. If I'm not thinking about it, the Iron Nerve will choose one based on my subconcious intent and replay it. I'll walk, or run, or tumble, exactly the way I did before. If I am thinking about it, then I can choose from the catalog, select which action gets replayed, but it's still exactly like the first time. In order to learn a new motion I have to concentrate on turning the Iron Nerve off. I have to focus on reacting...well, I can't say reacting normally, because for me the Iron Nerve is normal. I have to focus on turning the Iron Nerve off so that I can move on my own."

"Okaaay," Noburi said, clearly confused.

"You don't get it, do you?" Hazō asked. "I'm a windup toy except when I remember to be a person."

Noburi blinked. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again and thought. "Okay," he said finally. "I see why it bothers you. I'm still hating on you for the abs and the jaw, though."

Hazō laughed and hopped off the branch. "C'mon, barrel boy," he said. "Let's get back and drop this off. I want a bath and you need one."