[The following scenes take place during the days between Keiko leaving for the Summon Realm and heading to meet with Jiraiya.]

"Inoue-sensei, I really do need to talk to you," Hazō called up to the branch where she was relaxing in the sun.

He heard her sigh in response before she rolled over and dropped down. "Hazō, I told you we weren't going to talk about Keiko when you asked two days ago, and that's fi—"

"Not about Keiko!" he interrupted her angrily. "Not really. About how to talk to Keiko. Inoue-sensei, I don't want to mess things up when she comes back."

"And why do you think you would do that?"

"Because I don't know whether to try to debrief her and act like things are normal, or yell at her for leaving us camped out in Fire, or hug her, or express that I want to hug her but respect her desire not to be hugged! I understand Keiko better than I understand most people, but not when she's how she was before she left! I—" The words caught in his throat before he forced himself to say them. "I'm scared of scaring my friend away, sensei."

Her face, which had gone from the hardness of a commanding officer to the openness of an attentive teammate, melted into the warmth of a concerned friend. "Hazō… let me handle any debriefing that needs to be done, okay? You just trust your instincts and be the supportive friend you are."

He nodded stiffly before looking down, embarrassed. "There's one other thing, sensei. Keiko and I both have… difficulties with people. We had begun sharing our coping strategies, and adopted a way of speaking that I would like to suggest she would find reassuring to hear you using when she comes back."

"What do you mean?" Inoue asked, one red eyebrow rising quizzically.

"Well, in normal conversation, you often either simply state your conclusion and hope the other person fills in the premises themselves, or the other way around, or you leave other holes in what you say to imply things without stating them outright. We found that by laying out our aims and assumptions at the start of a conversation, and going through our thought processes transparently, we were much less likely to run into conflicts, or confusions about what the other person meant."

She grinned. "Like you're doing now?"

"It made both of us much more comfortable navigating our conversations," he answered with a nod.

"And what do you call this marvelous method?"

Hazō shrugged. "Clear Communication no Jutsu? I don't see why it needs a name. But I do think Keiko would appreciate your making the effort, and it would make her more comfortable with the difficult conversations we need to have."

"I'll keep it in mind, Hazō. Thank you."

o-o-o-o

The frigid temperature made Akane's breath visible in front of her. Hazō-sensei had come up with the brilliant idea to combine extreme weather training, chakra capacity training, and experimenting with ice production at once. This involved placing water vessels of different amounts all around where the two of them were sitting and then having her maintain a cooling Elemental Mastery zone to see how large an amount of water she could freeze, and how fast.

Unfortunately, this meant they had to either stay up until the surroundings cooled off sufficiently, or wake up early in the morning. Fortunately, that meant the two of them were now sitting back-to-back under the stars.

"Akane," Hazō said suddenly, "I find myself confused about why you continue to refer to me as your sensei. Flattered, but confused. Your taijutsu is at the same level as mine. We're equals on the team. Hell, you're older than me. So why?"

She answered slowly, keeping part of her attention on maintaining the Elemental Mastery effect. "Even if those first two were completely true — and they're not, I never beat you when you're using Roki and you play a much larger role in leading the team than I do — you would still be my sensei in the ways of Youthfulness. I know you doubt yourself, Hazō-sensei, but your insightfulness and ability to inspire rival even Lee's. Perhaps they even surpass his. I don't think he could have convinced five other missing-nin that they should take the weight of fixing the world onto their shoulders. I know I couldn't have."

Hazō's scowl deepened. "I find it hard to view that as a success, given how much trouble it's caused us so far."

Her laugh startled him. "Hazō-sensei! Did you expect it to be easy?"

"I didn't expect it to drive the team apart like this, or to mean that I had to kill civilians to keep you all safe when it's ninja killing civilians that we want to put a stop to!"

Akane grew quiet for a long minute. "You're right, Hazō-sensei. Forgive me, I shouldn't have treated your concerns so lightly."

"No, I, that's… that's another reason I wanted to have this conversation. I worry that seeing yourself as my apprentice is making it harder for us to simply be friends. Noburi wouldn't have said that to me so formally. He would have said sorry and we would have moved on."

"Keiko would have said it, though, or close enough, if you two were using Clear Communication no Jutsu." Hazō felt himself blush a bit. That hadn't been a serious naming suggestion! "And I will continue to call you sensei because I trust and respect you. Those don't seem to exclude being friends, as far as I can tell."

"I suppose they don't," he answered. They continued to sit in companionable silence, shivering from the cold and the strain of deliberately emptying chakra coils, until the water in the last barrel had frozen solid.

o-o-o-o

Hazō tossed the log upwards and started rapidly forming handseals. "Multiple Earth Wall!"

Several slabs of granite sprouted radially from the log in midair, and the construct produced a brief earthshuddering thud as it struck the ground. Hazō nodded to himself. The first test of his research project for the day was a success! Now to grab a couple sets of Five-Seal-Barrier tags….

...

By raising MEW constructs out of logs on the ground, he'd created pillars to attach the support tags to and frozen one log in place around three meters up. Noburi wandered over while he was setting up a second platform higher off the ground.

"Hazō, what in all the names of the kami are you doing?" he asked incredulously.

"Trying to make the Yellow Flash more effective", Hazō answered simply.

Noburi took a second to look over the setup. Two logs suspended in midair, at three meter intervals. A third log resting on top of the higher frozen log. Pillars all around to support the central seals. "How?"

"One of the limiters on how we use PMYF is how far we can substitute. I want to test how and when we can do so. I can sub with a target resting on a barrier-frozen object within jumping distance, and I've been able to sub off of everything that could hold my weight, so now I want to see if I can sub with a target separated by a series of jumps."

"And that crash a couple minutes ago was..?"

"Testing if I could produce earth walls on a target in midair. More mass, bigger impact, better weapon. Though that depends on me being close enough, so I'd probably have to substitute with a flying target as well. Timing would be tricky."

Noburi was quiet for a couple of seconds, chewing the inside of his cheek, before his resolve firmed up. "How can you even be focused on this right now, Hazō? How can you be focused on anything? We botched our mission, we all nearly died twice in the same night, and now Keiko's screwing everything up even further by going MIA after dropping an explosive tag on the team's dynamics! And you just start suggesting training plans and doing research like nothing is wrong?!"

Hazō winced at the volume Noburi had managed to work himself up to. "Honestly, I think the research and training helps keep my mind off it. We'll deal with the dynamics when Keiko gets back—"

"If."

"—when Keiko gets back. And hey, if you're up for a distraction, I could use a partner."

"Why not have your faithful apprentice help, huh?" Noburi asked resentfully.

"She doesn't know as much about biology as you. Neither do I. I want to test what your water does to normal plants and animals, and you're the only one qualified to do the tests or judge the results."

Noburi was briefly dumbstruck. "Why?"

Hazō shrugged. "Curiosity? Distraction? Learning more about the deeper nature of nature? But mainly because, as the disaster in Hot Springs showed, we aren't good enough yet. We need to start leveraging what we have better, and part of that means understanding it."

"...Fine," Noburi said after a second. "But I get to test this," he added, gesturing upwards.

"Be my guest."

Instantly Noburi was replaced with the log at the top of the testing setup. "Nice!"

o-o-o-o

Hazō waved Kagome over as his sensei came back in from the latest round of reinforcing their camp's defences.

"Sensei! I got dinner ready for you."

The older man took the bowl of simple soup gratefully. "Thanks kid. Could use something warm. Open area has me jumpy."

Hazō frowned briefly. That might mean it was a bad time to have this conversation. But as long as he made it clear that it was only theoretical…. "Sensei, I had a hypothetical sealing question for you, if you wouldn't mind."

"Mmm?"

"It occurred to me that it might be dangerous for Noburi to try to drain an infused seal, but I wasn't sure why."

"Well, yeah," Kagome said after a thoughtful gulp. "Stability problem. Each intermediate pattern's gotta be stable during infusion, yeah? He pulls chakra away, does it in a different order than the infusion, now there's a different pattern. Way more bad patterns than good ones, chances say boom, squish, no more Nobby."

"I heard that!" the other boy called from his tent behind them.

o-o-o-o

"Gaaaaah it's not a Kotone cypher either!" Kagome's frustrated cry rang out over the camp.

"Problems, Kagome-sensei?" Akane asked brightly, taking a break from her one-fingered pushups nearby.

The sealmaster gesticulated wildly at the set of symbols Hazō had sketched in the dirt. "How the am I supposed to decrypt an incomplete message that I don't know the key to or subject of, huh? May as well just be in a different language. Ooh, actually, could be a Nakajima transliteration, stinking intelligence officials love Nakajima transliterations…. Maybe that one's a 'q'...."

"If it's frustrating, you could always take a break and work on the explosive belts to clear your head, Kagome-sensei," Hazō suggested gently, regretting that he'd set Kagome on the message immediately instead of waiting for the team's arsenal to be refilled like they'd been meaning to do since leaving Hidden Mountain. It was his own fault for giving the man a puzzle to solve, really.

Kagome waved him off. "You kidding me? This is way more interesting." Then he froze, and looked around the surrounding trees suspiciously. "Though this would be a bad place to get into a fight without the belts…. Yeah, I'll work on em. Good to take a break sometimes, right? Healthy for your brain. Least, Mari says so."

o-o-o-o

Hazō walked over to Kagome as they were packing up the camp and preparing to head for Rice. "Kagome-sensei, I had a thought on how to keep Jiraiya from killing us all."

"Is it gonna involve us all having lupchanzen stuck in our ears?"

"Would I do that to you?" Hazō asked mischeviously. Kagome grabbed for his explosives, making Hazō hurriedly add "No! No, I would not! That was meant as a rhetorical question with 'no' being the implied answer, sensei. You… might not like the idea, though. I figure Jiraiya is intelligent enough to keep us alive even if he's very upset at us, conditional on us being useful. I want to show him the PMYF and macerator seals—"

"You WHAT? Are you crazy?! That IS gonna involve a lupchanz getting stuck in your ears! And they'll probably staple your toes to the floor since after all you only need hands, arms, and eyes, so they can feel free to cut away all the other bits and feed them to their tame damnbeasts, or a gaki, or to one of the horrific medical experiments they keep secret from everyone below Double-Black clearance. Is that what you WANT?"

"If it means protecting the rest of the team, yes!" Hazō responded fiercely.

Kagome's mouth worked open and closed soundlessly for a few seconds before he could respond. "Stinkers wouldn't let the rest of us off that easy. They'd break your brain and make you work for them even after killing off the rest of us. No, better to keep what you can do secret. Besides," he said as his eyes darkened, "if that stinker thinks he can threaten my team and get away with it, it's not you guys that'll need keeping safe."