It was not until this moment that Hazō realised how well-loved Minami Nikkō had been.

Dozens of people had turned up to see her name inscribed on the Leaf Memorial Stone. Family members stood off to the left, a few giving him cold looks but none yet approaching. To the right, a handful of Nara watched the ceremony, hands down at their sides. Behind them, scattered in the crowd Hazō could recognise the unreadable eyes of the Yamanaka, and a few Inuzuka with silent, perfectly-behaved dogs at their sides. Behind him, a towering giant of a man who could only be an Akimichi covered his eyes with a voluminous sleeve.

It was Mari-sensei who’d told him to come here. The Minami would probably treat his presence here as an insult, given that they held him partially responsible for their clanswoman’s death, but by the same token they would probably treat his absence as an insult as well. In Hazō’s opinion, out of the two people who had witnessed Minami’s death, Noburi was infinitely more suited to subtle social interaction. Unfortunately, Mari-sensei considered this an excellent practice opportunity since, in her words, “Jiraiya could reveal that he’d secretly been Captain Zabuza all along and it couldn’t make our relations worse, so I doubt you’ll manage it”. Hazō had tried to argue for a different candidate, but Noburi was busy with medic-nin stuff, Keiko had some kind of training that Mari-sensei was unwilling to interrupt, Akane didn’t count as a clan representative and Kagome-sensei was Kagome-sensei.

The celebrant carved the final stroke of “shine” into the Memorial Stone, completing Minami’s full name.

“With this, let the heroic spirit of Minami Nikkō ascend and become one with the Will of Fire, to watch over the Village Hidden in the Leaves forevermore. Through her sacrifice, that eternal flame will burn more brightly in each of us until it is time for us, too, to give our lives for the sake of the village.”

It was a strange mirror image to the rituals of Mist, which had committed his father to the endless depths, from there to watch over the village together with the other ancestral spirits. Even now, they pacified the natural world and the horrors that lurked within, allowing their descendants free passage and safe hunting, while dragging Mist’s foes into the dark abyss from which there was no return. Though the practice long predated the village’s foundation, the Mizukage had elaborated upon it, teaching that loyal shinobi could look forward to an eternity of guardianship among the honoured dead, while traitors damned themselves to becoming hungry ghosts, forever tearing each other apart in insatiable greed.

With the ritual over, the people began to gradually disperse. One of the Nara reached over and placed a sheet of parchment at the foot of the stone as an offering, and a few seconds later a gust of wind snatched it away. He gave an ironic smile, then walked away with a clansman’s arm around his shoulders. The Akimichi giant’s sleeve never left his face, even as he gave the stone one final bow. An Inuzuka whispered something softly to his dog, which let out a mournful whine. And the Minami…

One of the Minami went straight over to Hazō.

Be sensitive. Say less rather than more. We don’t know what relations were like between Minami and her clan, but sometimes, when a close relative dies, you can hate them from the bottom of your heart and still feel empty and abandoned after they’re gone.

The woman was in her thirties, with narrow eyes and a face that held no trace of tears. “Gōketsu,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to pay my respects.” The perfect neutral response. That much he’d been able to work out without tutoring.

“You let my daughter die,” the woman responded, the cadence of her voice unnervingly even for those words. “You failed to protect her. Do you think you have any right to be here?”

Don’t argue with the bereaved. It’s like trying to smother a fire with a cotton cloth. But at the same time, if you aren’t looking for an opportunity to change the narrative to your advantage, then you might as well not go at all.

“That’s the reason I’m here, ma’am. The least I can do after what happened is see it through to the end.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth either. Rationally, Hazō knew there was nothing he could have done. Rationally, Hazō knew that Minami was little more than a stranger, that they hadn’t had even a single full mission together and that the Cold Stone Killers business was a wall between them that they might never have been able to overcome. But still, remembering Minami Nikkō hurt, and on his own he wouldn’t have chosen to come here and reopen the wound.

“Why?” Minami’s mother read the rational half of his mind. “She can’t mean anything to you. You never met her before the mission, and then you let her die while you and the other miss—the other foreigners came home without a scratch on you.”

Hazō had met her before the mission, but that wasn’t relevant, and so came under “Say less”. Reluctantly, he let Minami’s mother in on the half of his mind she’d failed to read.

“It’s true that I didn’t really know her, ma’am. It’s true that she couldn’t matter as much to me as my old comrades did. But we deserved the chance to become friends.” This was what it came down to, and this part was no lie at all. “We deserved the chance to close the gap, and now we’ll never get it. I know that’s a very different kind of loss to losing family, but it’s still real, and it’s still worth mourning.”

“Is that so,” the woman said with no inflection.

“You were present during her final moments, weren’t you, Gōketsu Hazō?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come with me,” she said abruptly. “This is no place to speak truth about the dead.”

Hazō followed her and the Minami crowd, most of whom treated him as a stranger more than an enemy, likely unaware that he was part of Minami’s last mission. Some of them were doubtless curious about why the Hokage’s son was following them home from a politically insignificant chūnin’s ascension ceremony, but he suspected that on the whole they’d rather be left alone with their thoughts, or perhaps some hard alcohol.

The Minami compound was silent as the grave—again, testament to the captain’s popularity, given that losing loved ones was a familiar part of daily life to most ninja. Obviously, nobody could be happy on such a day, at least unless the deceased had some truly bitter enemies, but even so Hazō expected at least a murmur of activity rather than the lifeless, mechanical dispersal that occurred when Minami’s relatives reached their home.

One might have expected Minami’s mother, if no one else, to be approached by people trying to console her, but something about her frozen aura meant nobody even tried. She led Hazō wordlessly to a side building and up a set of stairs. He followed her to a living room, where before long she set a pair of tea cups between them like an impenetrable barrier.

“Speak, Gōketsu. Tell me of her final mission. Tell me how she lived and how she died, and why you are alive when she isn’t.”

Hazō tentatively took one of the cups. She took the other. The barrier did not diminish.

“I actually met Minami for the first time before the mission, when we still needed an escort in Leaf. We were heading to see the Nara…”

She bounced. She smiled. She radiated aliveness. When she spoke of the Nara, she opened her heart to a pair of perfect strangers without a second thought. She was excited about the bright future ahead of her now that she was serving Jiraiya himself. The irony dripped from Hazō’s lips like venom.

He spoke of their briefing. Of how a basic description of his and his teammates’ capabilities turned into showing off, intensifying in the face of her disbelief without ever leaving the bounds of truth. He wondered, in retrospect, if she might have felt bullied, as they outnumbered her and systematically told her that all her knowledge and experience were worth nothing next to theirs. He included that detail, remembering Mari-sensei’s teachings about the bonding value of harmless confessions.

He spoke of Minami’s transformation from teammate to captain, of how she raised that wall and then experimented with reaching past it. Of how Hazō accidentally told her about great and terrible mistakes made during the team’s time in the wilderness (omitting details, because even he sometimes learned from his OPSEC blunders). Of how she recoiled in horror, and made him fear that he’d pushed her away forever. Of how they gradually earned back her trust over the weeks spent fighting side by side, rebuilding what his carelessness had lost.

He spoke of the yakuza mission (again, as far as he was permitted), and of the tragic decision that had been forced upon their captain. Of how hard she’d fought to find a way to spare the civilians, and the resolve she’d shown when she realised there was none to be found. Of the moment, he believed, that had made her truly grow into a leader.

He spoke of the price of that decision for them all, something he’d barely talked about even with the rest of the team. Having come this far, and not prepared to relive this story ever again, he wanted to give it to Minami’s mother as complete as he could.

And finally, he spoke of the journey east. The house of heavy wooden logs. Static water. Flowing blood. Frozen air. The assassin’s lullaby. A second’s step between life and death, and how Minami had filled that second without hesitation so that in the next they would be already safe.

Was Minami a courageous hero, to engage the enemy at once while trusting her team to know what to do? Was she a clever tactician, to realise that giving the enemy time for more ninjutsu would spell disaster? Or was she a hopeless fool, to rush into the unknown without a plan? Hazō offered no opinion. What would be the point anymore?

The story ended. Hazō finished his tea, which had long since gone cold. Minami’s mother had not interrupted even once, nor shown one hint of emotion on her face.

Hazō couldn’t let it end here. He sensed that she was about to dismiss him, and then he’d never find out her reaction to his story, nor get another opportunity to influence her. He gathered his courage.

“What was she like?”

Minami’s mother stared at him blankly.

“Minami Nikkō. Your daughter. The… the friend I never made. Is there anything you can tell me about her?”

It was a gamble. Arguably a dangerous one. But the worst that could happen was that Minami’s mother took offence and kicked him out, and that would only mean resuming the previous status quo.

And beyond the teachings of Gōketsu Mari, maybe the answer to this question would give Hazō himself the closure he needed. Maybe if he found out what he’d lost, he would no longer have to wonder.

“I suppose I did just ask the same question of you,” Minami’s mother said distantly. “I wonder, though, how much there is I can tell you. Nikkō and I wasted the last of the time we had together. She defied me and started dating that Nara boy, and after that we never spoke. You knew her better than I did, at the end—or did you think I invited you here merely to apportion blame?”

“Please,” Hazō said, pushing the boundaries with his insistence, less for the clan now and more for himself. The thing he wanted was so close, and this was the only chance he’d ever get. “You’re her mother.”

“I was,” the woman corrected, but without feeling. She stared past Hazō, at something unreachably far away.

“If your account is to be believed, she never changed from her birth until her dying day. What kind of child smiles instead of crying after the trauma of being born? We had been planning to name her Minori, in accordance with tradition, but my dear husband took one look at her and said this little ray of sunshine had to be named ‘Nikkō’. Grandmother refused to see me for months.

“She learned to walk very early. She would run around the compound with a stick clutched in her hands, and my dear husband and I would take bets on whether she’d become a swordswoman or a seduction expert. He won the way he won every bet between us, though he never had a chance to collect his winnings.

“I remember one afternoon, when she was four years old, she came home with a black eye and a split lip from playing with some of the branch family children. I was all set to seal the exits and burn their house to the ground—but when I got there, all three boys were in bed covered with bruises from her stick, and they begged me to tell Nikkō that they’d never make fun of her nose again.

“The four of them were inseparable after that. We used to tease her, ask her which one she wanted to marry, and her answer would change every week.

“There was this one time when my dear husband came home from a mission, and she took his hand, and… and she…”

Minami’s mother stopped.

After a few seconds, she met Hazō’s eyes.

“Gōketsu, please wait outside.”

As he left, Hazō heard her draw a ragged breath.

After about fifteen minutes of sitting downstairs in the common area, a Minami clansman came downstairs to see him.

“Karen has asked me to tell you that you may go home for the day. If you are still amenable, she is prepared to have afternoon tea with you again on another occasion.”

The man leaned down, closer to Hazō’s ear.

“Whatever it is you did to my cousin… thank you.”