“How was your day, Keiko?” Mari-sensei smiled as Kei joined the rest of the clan at the dinner table.

It was a typical evening in the Gōketsu home. Kagome was attempting to convince Jiraiya of the merits of a new and improved security system for the compound. Jiraiya was attempting to explain the political repercussions of completely obliterating any stinker who so much as looked at the border of Gōketsu land without permission. Noburi was, or rather had been, chatting amiably with Mari-sensei. And Hazō… Hazō was too quiet, and had that gleam in his eye. Blood raining from the heavens as the very earth beneath her feet tore itself in twain would have been less ominous.

No, poor example. That would merely be a consequence of Jiraiya accepting Kagome’s proposal.​

Rather than dwell on the fact that she lived in the same building as two potential harbingers of the apocalypse, Kei chose to attend to the basic norms of social interaction.

“Pleasant, thank you. I spent the morning reading and the afternoon training with a friend.”

Mari-sensei gave her a knowing smile. It was concerning that Mari-sensei thought she knew something, because Kei didn’t know anything.

“You know,” Mari-sensei said innocently, “Hazō has come up with the most fascinating idea.”

“Yes,” Kei lamented, “I can tell.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Hazō explained, “about your date with Nara.”

“It was not a date,” Kei said for perhaps the thousandth time. “It was an instance of two individuals spending a day together in order to facilitate greater mutual knowledge and familiarity, arranged in anticipation of a potential long-term relationship. I fail to see how there is any room for confusion.”

“Um,” Hazō said eloquently. “That aside, what I’m trying to say is that I think I can do a much better job planning a date for you. It would give you plenty of opportunities to bond, while simultaneously testing whether you two are really compatible and whether Nara is worthy of you.”

“That is very thoughtful of you,” Kei lied, “but I fear—“

“I have already developed a meticulous plan that covers every factor that could possibly be relevant to building a loving marriage. Unfortunately, Mari-sensei only gave me permission to prepare a single date, and there’s a mountain of things to test. But don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to fit them all in, even if I’ve had to optimise.”

For some reason, a chill went down Kei’s spine at that last word.

“I’m confident you’ll be able to handle it, and if Nara is half the man he needs to be, he should be prepared for all of the trials—I mean events on my list as well. Don’t worry, Mari-sensei has given me the go-ahead on every last one.”

This did nothing to assuage Kei’s concerns.

“Why am only hearing about this now, dear wife?” Jiraiya asked mildly.

“You’ve been so busy, beloved husband, and I wouldn’t want to waste our time together with tiny details,” Mari-sensei purred.

Hazō passed his list to Jiraiya with an expression of keen anticipation.

Jiraiya scanned it.

“Sage’s ballsack, this is the biggest pile of indescribable bullshit I’ve seen in my—“

Mari-sensei leaned over and whispered something in Jiraiya’s ear with a seductive smile. Her hand, Kei couldn’t help noticing, had dipped under the table.

“Hazō, you have my complete approval,” Jiraiya stated firmly. “Keiko, you are to carry out all of the items on this list for the good of the Gōketsu Clan. This is a priority order.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kei said disbelievingly. “I do not at any point recall granting Hazō permission to interfere with what he mistakenly considers to be my love life. And besides, Nara Shikaku is the most sensible man in the village. He would never consent to his only son and heir being put through one of Hazō’s ill-conceived schemes.”

-o-

​ “Good morning, Gōketsu. Please accept my generic praise of your clothing and appearance.”

“Thank you, Nara,” Kei said demurely. “Please consider me to also have paid lip service to the ambiguous expectations of our culture.”

“You’re too kind. Shall we depart?”

It was, Kei had to admit, a fine morning for a da—an instance of two individuals spending a day together in order to facilitate greater mutual knowledge and familiarity, arranged in anticipation of a potential long-term relationship. The clear sky and gentle breeze gave their surroundings a much-needed sense of peace as they stood side by side, studying Hazō’s list as if it bore the details of their death sentence (which quite possibly it did).​

Dear Gōketsu Keiko and Nara Shikamaru, the list of activities below is, based on exhausting research, the ultimate test of two individuals’ suitability to be husband and wife. Upon completing it, you will know for certain whether your marriage is meant to be.

1) To establish that the two of you would be able to live a stable, fulfilling life together even if something went wrong and the Nara Clan disowned both of you, you must find a suitable flat to rent. Points will be awarded in categories including lines of sight, structural integrity, escape routes and proximity of day care. While carrying out this task, you must also protect your happiness by designing and implementing a security system capable of satisfying Kagome (appalled rant time 15 mins or less). Finally, you must demonstrate your ability and determination to keep each other safe in your new home through the many vicissitudes of life, particularly 2v2 close-quarters combat.

“Nara,” Kei said lightly, “if either of us finds ourselves no longer part of the Nara Clan, I intend to divorce you with all conceivable haste and pursue solitary living arrangements. Is this acceptable to you?”

“I have the paperwork readied in the top left drawer of my desk.”

“Truly you are the husband of my dreams. Let us move on to Item 2.”

You must enjoy a romantic meal together at the Yabai Café (see map attached), solidifying your feelings for each other while balancing a projected monthly budget as Nara Clan leader and wife (see form attached) and dealing with sycophantic petitioners seeking the clan’s favour. There will also be surprise events to test your martial compatibility (see weapons identification chart attached).

Kei and Nara exchanged world-weary looks.

“Gōketsu,” Nara said, “next time we play Strategic Dominance, would you do me the honour of being my partner so that together we may visit utter and remorseless devastation on your stepbrother and everything he loves?”

“I’m afraid the position of my partner is already taken,” Kei replied, “but I will be pleased to join you in an alliance of convenience.”

-o-

​ “Welcome, sir, madam,” the waiter beamed. “I am delighted to see the two of you again. I assure you that this time you will have a culinary experience to remember.”

Kei collapsed dejectedly into a seat. “This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. The universe exists solely to make us suffer, and its every act, both of torture and of reprieve, is all part of one grand design intended to steadily break our spirits.”

“It is a rare pleasure to meet another enlightened being,” Nara said sardonically. “Two house specials. For my own peace of mind, I will not inquire as to what they are meant to be.”​

“And to drink, sir?”

“Gōketsu, are you carrying a waterskin?”

“I am. It was inevitable for a plan of Hazō’s to create a survival situation one way or another, especially if diplomacy was involved.”

“I assumed the same. No drinks, please.”

-o-

​ “Would you say this is an accurate estimate?” Kei asked, simultaneously stabbing her chopsticks into the eye of Nara’s side dish as it reared up on four of its tentacles.

“Twenty percent higher at least. Our latest round of investments in the carpentry industry will have begun paying dividends by the time I succeed my father.”

Nara glanced at the ichor dripping from the chopsticks as he filled in another box. “Chakra octopus again?”

“Yes, though I stand by my belief that this is a mutated sky squid. Octopodes are not nearly so… lively… out of water.”

“Mmm,” Nara said noncommittally. “Exploding tag on the bottom of the serving tray.”

Keiko unhesitatingly lifted the tray and threw it shuriken-style at a nearby rooftop. There was a scream of pain followed by an almost inaudible thud.

“Please charge all damages to Gōketsu Hazō.”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

“Forgive me for troubling you during your meal,” a wrinkled old lady simpered as she limped towards their table, “but I have a wonderful business proposal that will surely double the Nara Clan’s funds in exchange for only a tiny investment…”

“Noburi,” Kei said coolly, “you are incapable of sounding like a genuine old woman, and always have been.”

“Who is this Noburi? I am but a—“

“Submit your proposal in triplicate at the front desk by 9 am tomorrow morning,” Nara said distractedly. He unscrewed the top of the salt cellar and upended it over what they had eventually decided was a salad, then tasted the result and shook his head mournfully. “Naturally, any applications not countersigned by representatives of the Merchant Council and the relevant trade guild will be disposed of unread.”

“Assassin by the leftmost parasol,” Kei muttered, crossing out a misplaced equation.

“Shadow Imitation Technique! Gōketsu, if you wouldn't mind?”

Kei cast a practice kunai without looking. Nara disengaged his technique with perfect timing, and the kunai took Hazō (who else) in the chest, breaking his current disguise.

The latest petitioner (or rather the same petitioner’s latest form) would not give up so easily. “Surely you could make an exception for just one tiny proposal from a humble member of the lowly Notahyūga family, which would surely perish without the Nara to think for them and the Gōketsu to fight their battles for them?”

“All yours,” Nara said to Kei as he occupied himself with grinding a new inkstone.

“Of course,” Kei said primly. “Lady Notahyūga, I would be delighted to receive your proposal if you first join me in a traditional Mist ritual of friendship. Please, take a bite from my plate.”

Kei slid the plate in Noburi’s direction, taking care to present him with the side currently gibbering most disturbingly.

“Excuse me,” Noburi choked, “I’ve just remembered that I need to macerate my stepfather.”

“It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Nara, lean left.”

-o-​

5) Demonstrate your capacity for cooperating in daily household chores by killing, cleaning and eating a meal jointly hunted in the wilderness. Since every couple needs to be able to improvise a meal out of random ingredients every now and again, the target of the hunt must be a chakra beast powerful enough to kill ordinary genin. While hunting, compose romantic poems to each other of length not less than two hundred words. A special guest judge will evaluate the poems on passion, eroticism and emotional manipulation. A second special guest judge will evaluate them on metre, rhyme and idiom. You must use at least one word from each row of the Kagome-encrypted list attached.

“’As for your beauty, ‘tis… effulgent.’ Gōketsu, what rhymes with ‘effulgent’?” Nara called out as he triggered the third trap along Retreat Route B.

“Try ‘refulgent’! Or rearrange the sentence so you can rhyme ‘beauty’ with ‘duty’!” Kei shouted over all the roaring while slapping an exploding tag on the back of the monstrosity she was clinging onto. She performed an elegant backflip onto a nearby tree. The exploding tag detonated, further cracking the quisling overlord’s chakra-reinforced carapace.

“’Effulgent’, Nara?” she asked sceptically as the monster crushed its own minions underfoot in a tap dance of blind agony.

“Third row, behind a Tobirama shift. It was that or ‘callipygous’.”

“We call them Byakuren shifts. And I do believe that Hazō has been relying excessively on his thesaurus. Upon my return, I intend to insert it into a place from which he will struggle to retrieve it.”

This was all her fault, Kei reflected as she held up four fingers and Nara pinned down a corresponding number of quislings with his technique. Water Country quislings were opportunistic pack hunters, the most innocent-looking member leading unwary travellers into an ambush where the rest would converge and devour them. It emerged that Fire Country quislings were a slightly different species, with each pack serving an overlord that provided protection in exchange for the luring of prey. Nara had been very understanding, and as they fled for their lives, he’d done his best to reassure her that overlords were at least much easier to cook due to their highly-developed musculature and abundance of redundant organs.

She threw her kunai at the four quislings, piercing each through the forehead, then leapt to another tree as the enraged overlord tore the one she had been standing on out of the ground. The fourth trap activated, eviscerating another quisling and cutting deeply into the overlord’s second spine.

“Nara," Kei asked as another chakra-boosted leap took her within sight of him, "would you say you are a hot-blooded stallion of a man who strips women bare to their souls with the penetrating gaze of his sapphire eyes?”

“I would not,” Nara snapped. “My eyes are brown.”

He triggered the fifth trap. Quislings, or at least their component parts, flew everywhere.

“Gōketsu, how do you manage to come up with this nonsense so fluently?”

Kei went steaming red. “I do not read anything of the sort, Nara, and I resent the implication!”

“What?”

“I mean, I have a theory about that transposition cypher in the fourth row!”

-o-​

8) In order to test your capacity for marital faithfulness and emergency trap disposal, you must wear—

“Enough,” Kei said flatly. “I refuse to entertain one iota more of this tomfoolery.”

Nara raised an eyebrow. “We are here under orders.”

“I am well aware, and I have had enough. Jiraiya must be made to understand that the mere fact that he is the Hokage, a legendary hero, my clan leader, my stepfather and arguably the most powerful man in the world does not give him the right to dictate what I do with my free time.”

Nara stared at her in wordless, horrified fascination.

“This is not an act of public defiance,” Kei qualified. “The circumstances of this… instance of two individuals spending a day together in order to facilitate greater mutual knowledge and familiarity, arranged in anticipation of a potential long-term relationship… are known only to your father and my clan. If Jiraiya is to lose face, it is only before Nara Shikaku, and there are far greater factors conditioning their relations.”

Nara continued to stare. The implication, that anything other than abject submission to Jiraiya’s will was somehow unthinkable, slowly made a cold rage creep into Kei’s blood.

“I have willingly signed over my hand in marriage to these people,” she said in a tone far below freezing. “I have granted them the right to determine where I live, whom I obey, whom I may formally love and whose children I will be compelled to bear. If they believe that I will tolerate one step further into my private life without my consent…”

“Then what?” Nara asked as if unable to stop himself.

“I do not know,” Kei said, the anger dissipating—no, transmuting into something else. “When I fought for my village, I was mediocre. When I fought for my survival, I was competent. When I fought for my friends, I was dangerous. What will I be if I am forced to fight for something that is mine?”

Despite the clement weather, she could see Nara shiver.

“It is something,” she added more neutrally, “that any prospective husband would do well to bear in mind.”

“Y-Yes, ma’am.”

She found herself feeling a flash of guilt. She had not intended to catch Nara in the crossfire of her feelings. They were not a thing to be inflicted on other people at the best of times, much less when the other person was a rare and valued exemplar of common sense in a village of full of fools and madmen. What if she made him feel uncomfortable and he turned his back on her? What if such behaviour created a rift between them that she could not later heal? What if, even without any long-term consequences, she caused him pain through no fault of his own?

“With that said, Nara,” she consciously relaxed her voice and posture, “the day is not yet done, and my schedule is perforce completely clear. While I do intend to set Hazō’s list aflame and then creatively apply Wind ninjutsu to the ashes, that is not to say that I would be entirely averse to remaining in your company a little longer.”

“Well,” Nara said slowly, “if I go home now, I’m only going to get quizzed endlessly about the events of this... this event which you have so excellently summarised in a way I don't have the energy to repeat. Whereas a later return will allow me to bypass my family and Shiori and head straight to long-awaited bed. I suppose there are more troublesome things I could do than spend the intervening time with you.”

“In that case, I recall that, courtesy of our previous planner’s imbecility, you never did show me Senju Memorial Park. Though I should mention, purely as an objective forecast, that if you attempt to hold my hand your next awakening will be in Leaf General Hospital.”

“It will,” Nara agreed, “as they will have to urgently check my brain for lupchanzen.”

Kei felt a stab of alarm. “How do you know about lupchanzen?”

Nara gave her a pitying look. “Gōketsu, your uncle has now spent several weeks living in Leaf. By this point the daimyo’s wife’s cat knows about lupchanzen.”

“Well, then,” Kei said, “lead the way while I weep over the tattered shreds of my clan’s reputation.”

-o-

​ “And do you know what Shiori said to me then?”

“Dare I ask?”

“’Don’t worry, Shikamaru, it’s meant to be on fire.’”

Kei giggled despite herself. “And the hand gestures?”

“Oh, those?” Nara looked down at his hands, as if not realising he’d been quoting with them as well. “’Let us move on so that we are not sidetracked by unimportant questions’. She often tries that one when I’ve caught her red-handed.”

“I see. Incidentally, do you recall if she reacted at all to the thank-you note I sent with that game?”

“There was no game,” Nara said emotionlessly. “I remember no game. Shiori remembers no game. There was no game.”

“Is—Is that so?” Kei unthinkingly backed a few steps away from him and the haunted look in his eyes.

The walk proceeded in uneasy silence.

Eventually, the two of them came to a bench, on which Nara sat down heavily.

Kei sat beside him, joining him in staring vaguely at a koi pond. She had failed to distract him from his mysterious game-related trauma once before. This time, she would be an effective friend, or what was all her alleged intelligence for?

Perhaps this was a good time to ask. It would hopefully engage Nara's inexplicably paralysed mental faculties, and the question was one she had been contemplating a great deal of late.

“Nara, why me?”

“Hmm?”

“Why does your clan have any interest in me?” Kei expanded. “As a Mori, I am a barely-competent genin. You must have Nara of superior abilities by the dozen. And your clan has proven beyond any doubt that you know how to forge unbreakable alliances without intermarriage. Why expend all this effort to obtain me?”

Nara studied her wordlessly for a while. They were alone in the park, Kei realised, beneath a slowly darkening sky. There was a peculiar sense in the air. Not of romance, however certain persons might delude themselves, but perhaps of intimacy.

“Because we are failing,” Nara said.

“What do you mean?”

“The Senju after whom this park is named sought to save the world with their open hearts,” Nara said distantly, meditatively, gazing into the koi pond as if sufficient contemplation of its depths would reveal the secrets of the universe. “They came further than any have before or since. But it was not enough, and now they’re gone.

“The Uchiha, who first fought then supported the Senju, sought to save the world with their unyielding determination. We know, now, what happens when such determination points itself in the wrong direction even briefly.

“The Nara, who supported both, have sought to save the world with genius and patience. It is not enough.”

“I don’t understand,” Kei admitted. What did any of this have to do with her?

“Patience is not enough,” Nara said. “We have been exerting control, slowly and subtly, for as long as the clan has existed, and the world is still like this.

“Genius is not enough. A bright spark independently arrives at a vision for a peaceful utopia, and his first world-changing act is to create a weapon that heralds a new scale of destruction. This is not an anomaly, Gōketsu. Every genius ends up drunk on their own brilliance in one way or another."

“Then what are you saying?” Kei asked quietly. “That there is no hope? That the Nara have resigned themselves to waiting for the end?”

“No,” Nara gave a wry smile. “The curse of apathy cuts both ways, you see. Those who aren’t enthused by visions of victory also aren’t depressed by the prospect of defeat.

“The Nara need to change, Gōketsu," he said in a voice that sounded like it wanted to be casual but wasn't. "That’s your answer. And it seems our motivation doesn’t stretch far enough for us to change ourselves. We need new ways of thinking. We need enrichment through intellectual exchange in order to escape our stagnation. It’s why we’ve thrown ourselves behind Jiraiya. He is the right man in the right place at the right time, and with our help he might be able to break down the walls that isolate the villages. It will not be enough for eternal peace—we’ve run the calculations—but it will give us direct access to the others of our kind. A chance to unite instead of being pulled apart by political currents. And that will be something the world has never seen.

“To my father, your adoption is probably a microcosm of that. You’re similar enough to fully integrate and different enough to offer something new. The fact that you also further various political goals doesn’t hurt either.”

“Me?” Kei asked dazedly. “You think I have something to offer? Something to teach?”

“I think nothing,” Nara said. “I think it is unreasonable to place towering expectations on a random stranger—no offence—because they happen to have a convenient background. I think you are a decent person who deserves better than to be caught up in the troublesome machinations of three powerful clans.

“With that said, if you choose to treat this injustice as an opportunity to find out how far the full extent of your abilities can take you, that is your right. And I daresay there are more tedious diversions than taking an interest in a spouse’s personal projects.”

It was as close, Kei suspected, as he would come to an open pledge of support.

“Thank you for your thoughts, Nara,” she said. “If you would kindly escort me home… I believe I have much to consider.”

“Of course, milady. And if I should be struck with a sudden urge to trespass into your domicile and challenge your stepbrother to some game for the purposes of intellectual evisceration?”

“Nara,” Kei attempted a wicked smile, “be my guest.”​