​ The future balanced on the edge of Minami’s readied sword. The crackle of lightning in the background faded into silence. Either Sōdai’s Prism had been dismissed… or it had finished charging.

Noburi stood exposed, his back open to a single lethal strike. Hazō was still holding Kagome-sensei’s wrists, because the man would do something desperate if he didn’t, and that meant neither of them could defend themselves. At this range, it would only take a single extended motion for Minami to disable the majority of their team. Then, Minami would go for Keiko, who couldn’t open up distance while the air dome was still up. Akane would try to protect her, sacrificing mobility against an opponent her fists couldn’t block. Would she have time to activate her Pangolin technique before Minami reached her?

It should have been crazy for a single chūnin to be a threat to the entire team. But Lightning users were fast, and Hazō knew from his mother how a swordmaster trained to cut through target after target without losing momentum. And that was before Minami drew upon her bloodline.

There was only time for a couple of words to prevent the inevitable, and Hazō didn’t know what they were. All he could think was, “Minami, wait!”—words she’d expect and therefore disregard. His brain had let him down at the worst possible moment.

He tensed his muscles. If he could push away Kagome-sensei in time, then maybe at least one of them—

The impact froze them all in place.

It took a second of disorientation to realise that the sound, flesh striking flesh, was not the opening to a final battle. Even Hazō, who was right there, didn’t connect cause and effect at first.

Akane had slapped Kagome-sensei hard.

As tension dropped, killing intent giving way to confusion, Akane calmly informed Kagome-sensei, “You were about to say something undiplomatic.”

“I wasn’t going to—“

Akane put her finger to her lips meaningfully. Kagome glowered, but Akane’s earlier dominance held firm.

“I admit that was a good start,” Minami said as she slid her sword back into its sheath. “I’d have gone for a punch myself.”

“What?” she raised her eyebrows at the uncertain looks. “I am a loyal shinobi of Hidden Leaf. I’m not going to murder the people assigned to me by the Hokage just because I can’t trust them.”

A collective wave of relaxation passed through Team Uplift. Hazō let go of Kagome-sensei, slipping the explosives out of his hand in the process. Trying to disarm Kagome-sensei was like trying to drink the ocean dry, but hopefully it would at least send the right message.

Noburi turned around, slowly and with no sudden movements, then stepped away to leave Minami plenty of personal space.

“Thank you, Minami,” Akane said seriously.

“Whatever,” Minami replied. “This doesn’t mean we’re friends. We have a job to do, and then we’re done.”

“That is acceptable,” Keiko said. “While I reiterate that we never intended you any harm, and that Kagome’s act of unimaginable idiocy was in no way sanctioned by the rest of the team, I understand that you may not be able to trust us in the aftermath. If we must conduct the rest of this mission on a purely professional footing, then I am prepared to do so.”

“Well, I’m not!” Hazō burst out, surprising himself as much as anyone. “Minami, I’m not ready to give up on being comrades just because one of our teammates doesn’t understand what that means yet. If you’ll just give us a chance, I know we can get past this.”

“You expect me to trust anything you have to say, Cold Stone Killer?”

“Minami,” Noburi said gently, “I know it doesn’t excuse anything, but there’s one thing you can’t doubt—Hazō stopped Kagome. He stayed up late because he was worried about your safety.”

Minami nodded. “That’s true. So maybe you’re not heartless killers out to get me personally. But it still means one of you is a rabid dog, and he’s so far gone that you have to stand watch to stop him killing people. And rabid dogs have to be put down.”

Kagome-sensei made a sudden motion, but Akane caught his hands almost immediately.

“Kagome, please,” she said in a low voice. “We can work this out without anyone getting hurt, but you have to help. And right now the best way for you to help is by staying very still and not making anyone feel threatened. Do you understand?”

“Fine,” Kagome-sensei growled. “But I’m not a rabid dog. Dumbbutt didn't have to insult me.”

“He’s right,” Noburi said unexpectedly. “I know you’re really angry at us right now, and you have every right to be, but we’re all Leaf ninja here. We’re all on the same side. Him calling you names is childish and wrong, but if you do the same thing, that’s putting a wall between you and us that doesn’t have to be there.”

Hazō internally winced. When they got back to Leaf, assuming they did so in one piece, he really needed to get more training from Mari-sensei. Noburi was making Hazō’s halting attempts at diplomacy sound like an elephant walking on a nightingale floor.

“There’s already a wall between us,” Minami said almost regretfully. “No matter how well you talk the talk, it doesn’t change what you are. If the Hokage thinks your skills and bloodlines are worth taking you in despite what you are, I trust his judgement. But the fact that it’s for the greater good of the village doesn’t mean you stop being the Cold Stone Killers who expect one of their group to go around murdering teammates. That wall, the one between missing-nin and loyal ninja, is there forever.”

Missing-nin. Cold Stone Killers. It kept coming back to that. Hazō knew the missing-nin stereotypes as well as anyone. For as long as that was what Minami saw when she looked at them, they weren’t going to get anywhere. No amount of kindness from Noburi, or reason from Keiko, or unwavering common sense from Akane, were going to make the conflict go away.

But Hazō thought he knew what would.

“Can I say something?”

Minami turned towards him. “Kurosawa. Don’t you get that this is a waste of time? You’re the people who handed over an entire country to Mist, and then turned around and started selling weapons to their worst enemies. Every word coming out of your mouth is going to be you trying to manipulate me.”

“That’s the thing, Minami,” Hazō said. “You think we’re evil, and you think we’re competent. You’re wrong on both counts.”

“I resent the implication,” Keiko gave Hazō a wry look. “We have successfully completed at least two of the missions we received since we became missing-nin, and in both cases our heavily-injured teammates ultimately survived.”

Minami gave Keiko a boggled look.

“She’s not wrong,” Hazō said. “Keiko, Noburi, would you mind if I explained how we became missing-nin? I think it might help.”

Noburi and Keiko looked at each other.

“You may,” Keiko said. “It would be futile to attempt to conceal our village of origin in any case. While there are doubtless unrelated shinobi in the world named Mori, just as we encountered a second Inoue on our travels, the probability of all three of us bearing names that are most common in the same village by coincidence is absurdly low.”

“Good,” Hazō said. “Minami, the three of us all come from Hidden Mist.”

“Right,” Minami rolled her eyes. “The most evil village. How did I not see that coming.

“Wait,” she paused. “We got taught at the Academy that Mist invented hunter-nin. We even have cooperative missing-nin hunts sometimes, because that’s the one thing you can trust Mist to do without stabbing you in the back. So if you ran away from Mist and you’re not the Seven Shinobi Swordsmen or something, how did they not catch you and execute you straight away?”

“It’s not that simple,” Hazō explained. “We originally got sent on a large-scale mission—many genin and chūnin, and even several jōnin. But then one night, a fight broke out between the jōnin. The leader of the survivors, a man named Shikigami, told us we’d been sent on a suicide mission and that we had to run if we wanted to live. We believed him. I mean, those stereotypes you have about Mist not being a very nice place? They’re all true. The three of us didn’t exactly fit in back home, and it was entirely plausible that the Mizukage would decide to get rid of us by sending us to certain death.”

Minami’s expression was still guarded, but less overtly hostile.

“It turned out later that he’d been lying, incidentally. He and his co-conspirators had cherry-picked us because we had useful bloodlines et cetera, and it was never a suicide mission at all. Shikigami wanted to found his own hidden village, and he wanted to do it in a place in the Fire Country called the Swamp of Death.”

“The Swamp of Death is real?” Minami interrupted incredulously. “I thought it was just an expression.”

“Oh, it’s real,” Hazō said grimly. “Many people died there. We were lucky to get out alive. And the only reason we did was that when Mari-sensei decided to run away before the hunter-nin got there, she liked Keiko enough to invite her along, and the rest of us by association. I don’t know what happened to Hidden Swamp after that, but it’s not difficult to guess.

“So what I’m saying is that we never intended to betray anyone. We were used by an ambitious jōnin, and we thought we didn’t have any other options because our village wanted us dead. By the time we understood that we’d been tricked into becoming missing-nin, it was too late to go back without getting executed.

“We all have people we left behind. I only have my mother, but Noburi and Keiko lost their entire clans. Even so, I’m glad we ended up in Leaf. Now that I know a different way of running a hidden village, I can see just how twisted Mist was. The Mizukage rules through fear. He talks about how all the other villages are constantly out to infiltrate us and bring us down from within, so everyone has to be on guard for traitors, and report suspicious activity to the secret police, and there are rumours that sometimes people confess to crimes when they’re accused whether they’re guilty or not, just so they get prison time instead of being sent to T&I. Compared to that, Leaf seems like paradise.”

Minami took time to let his words settle in.

“So Mist really is that bad, huh? And you didn’t run away because you’re traitors—if I can trust your story, which is still up in the air.”

“You may cross-reference any of this with Jiraiya,” Keiko noted. “While he has not explicitly stated so, I am confident that at some point his spy network will have vetted us and confirmed our backgrounds and circumstances.”

“That’s true,” Minami acknowledged. “Even if you can lie to me, you wouldn’t be able to get anything past the Hokage.”

“Exactly,” Noburi said. “You can trust his judgement, can’t you? If he’d just taken us in because we were evil but useful, he wouldn’t go as far as to adopt us into his clan. I mean, he’s OK with us being his kids. And I guess it’ll be our kids who inherit the clan someday, and he wouldn’t want his grandkids being brought up by evil missing-nin, right?”

Minami seemed to turn this over in her head. “Sage’s balls. It’s hitting me all over again how weird that whole thing is. No disrespect to the Hokage.

“Hang on, though. Maybe you were all innocent when you ran away, but you’re the Cold Stone Killers now. Obviously the missing-nin lifestyle must have corrupted you. In fact, maybe the Hokage’s hoping to redeem you so he can use your powers for good. I mean, he is the embodiment of the Will of Fire now. Believing in people is practically his job description.”

“Minami,” Akane said, apparently satisfied that Kagome wasn’t going to do anything catastrophic if she took her attention off him for a second, “have you ever made a series of choices that all seemed like the best you could do at the time, but in the end they somehow landed you in more trouble than you could’ve imagined when you started?”

“Not really,” Minami said. “I own my bad decisions. If I’ve screwed up, then obviously I could’ve done better. I know if I don’t take the time to figure out what I did wrong, I might end up doing the same thing again.

“But,” she added mercifully, ”I know what you’re talking about. I’ve bailed out friends who did that before.”

“OK,” Akane said. “That’s what happened to us. We took a mission we shouldn’t have taken because it seemed innocent enough at the time. We went into a demilitarised zone without realising exactly what that meant. We carried out an infiltration without paying enough attention to what could go wrong and how. We thought we were on top of everything. And then,” her voice dipped slightly, “we got innocent people killed because we weren’t prepared.

“We thought we could just go in, steal some information and get out. Nobody would need to get hurt. Please believe me, we would never have done it if we’d understood what it would mean.”

Minami’s gaze shifted uncomfortably away from the sorrow in Akane’s face, and finally settled on Kagome.

“What about him? He wasn’t an innocent running away from Mist. And I’m not exactly sure what Ishihara’s circumstances are, but Kagome sure as hell isn’t a Leaf-nin either. He’s a traitor and a missing-nin if I’ve ever laid eyes on one.”

Hazō took a deep breath.

“I can’t tell you about Kagome’s background. In fact, I’ve probably spilled enough of other people’s secrets for now. But when we’d found him, he’d been living in the woods for a very long time, and he was lost and alone, exiled from everything he’d ever known. Whatever made him a missing-nin to begin with, I think that must be enough payment for the crime.”

Minami shook her head. “If he’s willing to murder his team leader in her sleep, then I can’t imagine what he could’ve done in his home village. Probably blew up a few orphanages because they were the wrong colour. Whatever he did, crimes don’t just magically disappear because you run away from them.”

“Didn’t you say the Will of Fire was all about redemption?” Hazō objected.

“The Will of Fire is about protecting your loved ones and the village,” Minami said firmly. “If you betray the village—say, by trying to murder your team leader in her sleep—then you’ve rejected the Will of Fire and everything it stands for. And the Will of Fire is also about eliminating threats to the village, which right now means him.”

“Minami,” Hazō pleaded, “Kagome-sensei isn’t an enemy. He spent many years living alone, afraid of everyone, and with good reason. His paranoia was probably the only thing that kept him alive. I’m not saying that excuses what he did, but please try to understand why he did it. He doesn’t hate you—he’s just scared that you’re going to hurt the people he’s loyal to.

“In its own way, isn’t that like the Will of Fire? I want to believe in that ideal, and I want Kagome-sensei to be able to believe in it too, even if we’re both only human and bound to fall short of it from time to time.”

“Those are pretty words,” Minami said, “but don’t taint the Will of Fire by association with the likes of him. No matter how scared or how lonely I got, I’d never become the kind of person to hurt a comrade. If Kagome has, then he doesn’t deserve to be a Leaf ninja.”

“He’s not your enemy, Minami!” Hazō insisted, his hopes sinking. “He was acting to protect us, not to hurt you. He’s just… sick. He’s spent so long in constant danger that now violence is his only response, no matter what the threat. It’s not about betrayal or comrades or anything you’re thinking of. We’ll get him to understand that you’re not a threat, and then he can help us carry out the mission. I promise that we’ll deal with this properly once we’re safely back in Leaf, but right now we need him with us. He’s not a danger to you anymore, and he’s a valuable teammate.”

“So what you’re saying,” Minami said slowly, “is that Kagome wasn’t trying to kill me because of some calculated murderous plan, but because he’s insane and has an instinct to kill people if they seem like a threat?”

Hazō mulled this over. “’Insane’ is putting it a bit strongly, but essentially, yes.”

“Right,” Minami said in the voice of a woman coming to a conclusion. “We’re heading to the nearest outpost and handing Kagome over to a relief squad, who will escort him to Leaf. Once we finish the mission, we’ll come back and serve as witnesses for the trial.”

“You can’t!” Hazō shouted. “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you?”

“Yes,” Minami said levelly, “I have. You’re saying that he’s not in control of himself, and reasoning with him isn’t going to change the way he thinks. That means the only solution is to remove him from the mission as soon as possible.”

“No,” Hazō said, “wait. Let me talk to him. Kagome-sensei can’t lie to save his life—once he understands why trying to kill you is wrong, you’ll see it.”

Hazō looked Kagome-sensei in the eye and willed himself to feel all the rage and frustration he’d been suppressing at Kagome-sensei’s betrayal. Not his betrayal of Minami—that was its own issue—but his betrayal of Hazō and the team, deliberately ignoring their opinions on something as dire as murder. They deserved better, after all the love and kindness and sheer trust that they’d shown him all this time.

“I’ve had enough of your behaviour! I am sick of the way you dismiss other people by calling them stinkers or Dumbbutt or other stupid nicknames! It’s a cheap trick to let you stop seeing other people as humans, and it’s wrong, and it stops now. It’s because you let yourself do that to people that you think it’s OK to kill them, as if calling Minami ‘Dumbbutt’ somehow makes her less of a person so you don’t have to feel bad about killing her. Well, attempted murder doesn’t stop being wrong because of a nickname or two.

“Yes, we’ve all done things that were wrong, because in the ninja world it’s kill or be killed. That doesn’t make killing right, but it does sometimes make it the only option.

“This time, it wasn’t the only option. It should never have been an option at all. You thought there was some hypothetical scenario in the distant future in which some actions Minami could possibly take might bring some degree of harm to us, and that was enough for you to try to murder a fellow member of our new village!

“Fuck that. What you did wasn’t just wrong. It was unacceptable. You tried to kill a person, a comrade, on the off-chance that something might someday go wrong. It’s unacceptable, it’s insane, and if you ever try to pull something like this again, I will not forgive you.

“While we’re at it,” Hazō added more generally, in a calm tone of voice that belay the boiling anger within, “fuck the idea that it’s legitimate to kill innocent bystanders who did nothing wrong to protect clan secrets. Their lives matter as much as anyone else’s.”

“Actually, Kurosawa,” Minami eventually said into the stunned silence, “I think Kagome is a psycho who belongs behind bars at best, but I do get why he tried to do what he did. Clan secrets are a big deal. If we didn’t protect them, that could be the end of the clan. In the wrong place at the wrong time, or if enough clans lost their secrets, it could be the end of the village. I’m not saying it’s the way things should be, but an innocent person getting killed once in a while is a small price to pay for preventing the carnage that happens when a clan goes down.

“I know what I’m talking about here. The Minami used to be Hyūga until something went wrong with the bloodline. Then they wanted the ‘defects’ gone, and there were only a few of us. The only reason we survived was that we’d figured out enough of our abilities to put up a good fight. If the Hyūga tried to kill us, they’d be starting an inter-clan war under the Hokage’s nose.

“But if they’d had our clan secrets… if, say, Sōdai had changed sides and spilled the beans about his research… they could have found counters and just assassinated us one by one. And there’s no one like a Hyūga for timing an assassination so there are no witnesses.”

“I am inclined to concur,” Keiko said. “Even without considering the Mori bloodline, my clan—my… former clan—holds a great deal of restricted knowledge that could be critically disruptive to Mist’s economy and general infrastructure were it to fall into the wrong hands. Even the Mizukage are not trusted to handle it safely.”

“Sorry, Hazō, got to go with the majority here,” Noburi agreed. “You know the Wakahisa use... secret means in order to let us do the whole chakra-water-barrel thing. Imagine if an enemy got hold of those means, and figured out a way to cut the link between a ninja and his barrel from a distance. That’s it. No more Wakahisa Clan.”

“You see?” Kagome screeched, his pent-up feelings finally giving him the strength to ignore Akane. “You can’t just say ‘oh, Dumbbutt is so special that we’d better put our whole clan on the line for her’! You can’t just say ‘well, I can’t see how this could go wrong, so I may as well let it go’! That’s the kind of thinking that leads to dead sealmasters! If you want to survive, you Take. No. Risks!”

“Ah, yes,” Keiko said coolly. “Hazō, your continuing trend of verbal incompetence is an embarrassment to this team. While there must presumably be some matters in this world that can be resolved through the naïve application of morality, the majority need to be addressed through actual intelligent thought.

“Kagome.” The temperature of her voice, already uncomfortable, dropped several dozen degrees.

Kagome looked at her warily.

“Your behaviour is so disconnected from reality as to be the very definition of delusional. Did you imagine that killing a Leaf ninja would make us safer? Then consider a few of the likelier scenarios.

“Leaf discovers our actions. As comrade-killers are a liability to say the least, we are immediately banished from Leaf, leaving Mari-sensei and all our hopes of lasting safety behind.

“But no, that is foolishly optimistic. We already know Leaf’s response to those who threaten the lives of its citizens. A killbox.

“Then perhaps Jiraiya can intervene on our behalf? Is it not his clan that we protected? But Jiraiya’s authority is already unstable. His clansmen committing murder shows that he exercised poor judgement in adopting them, and that he cannot keep them under control. He will be stripped of the Hokage position in short order, at the end of his emergency term if not before.”

Cold fire entered Keiko’s voice, a mercifully rare element capable of destroying the world if unleashed in sufficient quantity.

“What happens when a leader is gone with no replacement prepared? A power struggle that leaves the village hopelessly vulnerable. If Uzumaki were recovered, the village might be able to protect itself, but wait! You have just sabotaged the mission that might make that recovery possible, and cast down the man responsible for seeing it through.

“Who will invade? Mist is weakened but craving revenge. Cloud, its likely ally, is at full strength. Rock has been building its forces for years, and even Sand might be tempted given their eternal need for more arable land. If invaded under such circumstances, the village will certainly fall. Will we be killed? Imprisoned? Locked in a sealing factory for the rest of our lives? The imagination runs wild!

“’We can conceal her murder!’ cries the passionate optimist apparently dwelling within your frame. Will this conviction withstand questioning at the hands of Jiraiya? The Yamanaka? Leaf’s Torture and Interrogation Unit? For recall that we are missing-nin, newly adopted and not yet trusted, and perhaps there are even those who blame us, the skywalker-givers, for the losses incurred on Jiraiya’s ill-fated mission. Certainly, there are those who will look for any misdeeds on our part, so as to bring down Jiraiya and be strengthened by the fall of an enemy. We will be questioned. We will be asked how Minami came to perish on a low-threat courier mission, while under orders to avoid any engagements. What foe outraced our skywalkers and penetrated our collective defences so devastatingly as to leave no body to recover? Will you, Kagome, lie with the artifice to deceive them all… for the rest of your life?

“If not, I hear the killbox beckoning us all.”

Kagome-sensei’s eyes were hollow and his hands were flicking against each other convulsively, as if trying to prime exploding tags that weren’t there. After a second, he fell to his knees.

Keiko gazed down on him as his body was racked with sobs, and there was nothing in her gaze but dispassionate satisfaction.

“I’m so sorry,” Kagome-sensei blubbered. “Dumb—Minami, please forgive me! I didn’t think!”

He crawled over to her, grabbing at her ankles.

“Please don’t tell Leaf what I did! Please! I’ll do anything! I… seals! I can give you seals! I know lots of seals. I’ll give you as many as you like! Custom seals! Special seals! Secret seals! I’ll invent new ones just for you! I’ll sleep tied up hanging upside down from a tree if it’ll make you feel better! I’ll tell you every conspiracy I know! I’ll… I’ll… Just tell me what I can do so this doesn’t hurt my team!”

Minami looked down at Kagome-sensei bemusedly. “Kind of hard to hate him when he’s like this.”

She sighed. “All right. Get up, you crazy idiot.

“You guys, I’m putting you on probation. Still not one hundred percent convinced you’re not evil, but since the Hokage’s willing to give you a chance, I will too. Don’t do anything to make me regret it.

“And Kagome, just so we’re clear... you’re my bitch now. I haven’t decided yet how you’re going to make up for trying to murder me in my sleep, but believe me, there’s going to be a lot of making up involved.”

She leaned down and pulled Kagome-sensei to his feet.

“There’s a deal, though. I’m going to drop the attempted murder from my report, and you’re going to seek help. Professional help. You think it’s OK to kill people just because it seems like a good idea at the time, and I will not have someone like that wandering around my village unsupervised. The Hokage will know what to do. Maybe the Yamanaka can straighten you out.”

“Of course,” Kagome-sensei stammered. “Whatever you say!”

Hazō suspected that Kagome-sensei hadn’t quite processed the fact that he’d just potentially agreed to undergo a Yamanaka mind-scan, and possibly worse. He decided he wouldn’t be the one to point it out.

“Oh, one more thing,” Minami said. “Mori? You’re fucking scary. Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

“That is the highest praise anyone has offered me in months,” Keiko said demurely.