Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

It was not a good night at the Gōketsu compound. Mari-sensei was, to put it mildly, out of sorts. Jiraiya was busy trying to restore her faith in humanity, something Hazō hadn't managed over two years with his best lists and inspirational speeches. Kagome-sensei was locked up in his room, poring over stacks of notes while muttering something about "showing that condescending stinker what an educator can really do". Keiko had the Sheet up outside her door, meaning she had officially retired for the night. (The Sheet wasn't anything as banal as a keep out sign. Rather, it was a slowly-growing list of muscles, ligaments and other body parts which could be severed or broken without doing long-term damage.)

Meanwhile Noburi was downstairs on washing-up duty. Technically, the rota was organised into pairs, in part because six people's worth of dishes was a lot, and in part because the adults in the family were all terrible at it. Jiraiya had spent fifty years living a bachelor lifestyle, Kagome-sensei had gone fifteen without proper crockery, and Mari-sensei was bizarrely incompetent for someone who must have regularly disguised herself as a maid over the course of her career. Tonight should have been Noburi and Mari-sensei, but for obvious reasons that wasn't happening, and as the only other person at a loose end, it was inevitable for Hazō to get tagged in.

"So," Noburi said casually with his hands up to his elbows in the sink (the space they'd repurposed for the kitchen had amazing sinks, even the small ones being perfectly sized to contain a person). "You had a chance to talk to Akane earlier, for which incidentally you owe me all of your earnings in perpetuity."

"Wait, what? Why do I owe you anything?"

"Turns out the Wakahisa's natural enemy isn't hydrokinesis bloodlines," Noburi said grimly. "It's Rock Lee. Thanks to him, I now can't help thinking of my weapon of choice as a long, thick, wet implement held firmly in my hand."

Now Hazō had heard it, he couldn't unhear it either. He suddenly had a flash of insight as to what a cognitive hazard might be.

"I'm so sorry, Noburi. And you went through that just in order to let me talk to Akane?"

Noburi nodded. Apparently still thinking about Rock Lee, he suddenly squeezed the sponge in his hand so hard that water sprayed everywhere. Hazō carefully didn't comment as he reached for a dry towel.

"Well, your sacrifice wasn't in vain," Hazō said. "We got everything sorted out straight away. It was pretty amazing."

"Oh, really?" Noburi said cautiously. "What happened?"

"You remember how I told you about our fight, and you said some weird stuff about breakups? Turns out you were scaring me for nothing. As soon as we started talking, she said up front that the right thing for us to do was move on. After that, the only thing she needed to hear was reassurance that we'd always be friends, which I obviously gave."

A stock pot slipped out of Noburi's hands and sank out of sight.

"Blood in the water, Hazō. Did she… say anything else?"

"She said that no matter what was happening in our personal lives, Leaf needed us to be able to work together as professionals. After that we gave the talking a rest and got on with the training. She really is mature, isn't she?

"Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Hazō…" Noburi said slowly. "If breakups were hunter-nin, this wouldn't be you looking for warning signs of their approach. This would be you waking up to find Captain Zabuza standing over your bedroll with a raised sword and a shit-eating grin under his mask. My romantic experience can be summed up as 'Gasai Yuno', which I think actually puts me in the negative, and I can tell how screwed you are."

"Why are you talking about breakups again?" Hazō demanded.

"C'mon, Hazō," Noburi groaned. "Haven't you ever been turned down by a girl before?"

"Not once." The girls at the Academy had been split into two clear categories: those who wanted nothing to do with a troublemaker like him, and those who found troublemakers like him exciting. The former weren't even worth trying to ask out, and his mother had emphatically warned him away from the latter.

"Ugh. Well, when a girl turns you down and she doesn't hate your guts, she'll always say something like 'but we can always be friends'. Usually it's a lie and she'll never speak to you again, but I guess it's nicer than just being told to shove off. Do you see the parallel here?"

"These situations are completely different!" Hazō insisted. "Akane and I were already friends before we started dating. What's wrong with making sure that keeps going?"

"When you're dating, you stop being friends."

"You what."

"All right, that came out wrong. It's like, when you go from friends to dating, you're being promoted from genin to chūnin in their eyes. You're more valuable and you get extra privileges. And higher expectations, I guess. But you're not a genin anymore. If Command, which is to say Akane, starts treating you like one again, that means you've been demoted.

"But that doesn't mean she wants you to turn missing-nin."

Noburi stopped.

"OK, that went to a place I wasn't expecting. Well, whatever. She still values you, maybe even more now that you've spent time as chūnin, but you're probably pissed at being demoted. She's afraid that you'll cut off all contact and go live in the woods like Kagome and she'll never see you again. So she asks for reassurance that you'll always be her genin.

"Wow, that sounds mercenary. You know what, I'm dropping the metaphor now.

"Point is, of course she wants to stay friends. That's not the same as staying boyfriend and girlfriend. Ditto moving on. Moving on is the thing you do when you've lost a big emotional attachment. It took me time to get over Yuno even though I didn't really know her that well. And I have a big enough family that I've heard sulking young people get told to 'move on' as a synonym for 'get over your ex'. Besides, Akane isn't the kind of girl who'd want to 'move on' from a big fight without sorting out the issues first, is she?"

It might take time to sort out our feelings…

No. It didn't make sense. Not Akane. They were happy together. They were going to get married eventually. It didn't make sense. And besides, if she was going to break up with him, wouldn't she just say so instead of dropping these vague ambiguous hints?

"You're wrong," Hazō said. "Sure, there may be a few words here and there that could be interpreted badly, but Akane and I weren't like that. She wouldn't break up with me out of nowhere. It's not her style."

"Noburi gave a long, drawn-out sigh. "Out of nowhere, you say? I remember you talking about the fight itself, back in Mist. You think all that stuff about you treating people like tools was spontaneous and not, say, something she'd been thinking for a while but for whatever reason never managed to bring up?

"Akane's only human, Hazō. I bet she has stuff she finds hard to talk about like anybody else. Or maybe she did try to talk about it and you didn't notice, just like you didn't notice the breakup until I pointed it out to you."

"I told Keiko too," Hazō objected. "She seemed confident that everything was all right."

Noburi just gave him a look. "You're citing Keiko's expertise with love to prove your case. Maybe next you should ask Tenten to give me a speech about it."

Hazō winced. "Fine. Point taken. But I still think you're jumping at shadows. Akane just wouldn't do that, and I don't appreciate you saying things that could potentially undermine our relationship."

"Is that right?" Noburi snapped. "Fine, then. I'll stop wasting my time and just stay out of it, and you can enjoy Akane realising what an oblivious idiot you are on top everything else."

Hazō hadn't meant to make Noburi upset at all. He was just getting a little fed up with having to justify himself.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Look… why don't we compromise? We've got Mari-sensei and the self-professed master of the romantic arts beneath this roof. If we get their confirmation that everything's all right, will that satisfy you?"

"All right. But don't say I didn't warn you."

They went back to washing the dishes in tense silence.

The day passed in a flash. Maybe Hazō was just too tired from the training, or maybe meeting Ebisu-sensei had just been too traumatic, but right now he found himself barely able to remember anything that happened.

Dinner was great, though. Kagome-sensei was on top form—the whole tutoring thing really was doing wonders for his mood. Mari-sensei was either over her trauma or successfully repressing it (one never could tell). Jiraiya was in an unexpectedly good mood, though apparently the reasons were classified, and even Fifi wasn't pursuing her (its?) new hobby of trying to eat Hazo's—and only Hazō's—sandals, occasionally while he was still wearing them. It was the perfect time to bring up his laundry list of important topics.

"Say, Jiraiya…"

"Sense of impending doom tingling," Jiraiya said, but with a wry smile on his face.

"There is no escape," Mari-sensei said sympathetically. "Resistance is futile. Better get it over with before the food goes cold, dear."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Hazō said coolly. "I was just going to run a few ideas past you. Like scroll-based trade caravans."

"Isn't that an… what's the word I'm looking for?" Jiraiya put a finger to his lips. "Not oxymoron… not paradox… Never mind, it'll come to me."

Hazō ignored him. "Suppose we create ninja convoys, with each ninja carrying a ton of ninja scrolls to transport trade goods and similar. You've got far higher speed than any civilian caravan can muster and security because they're all ninja and can outfight or outrun any chakra predator. It'll be a popular service within a mission structure that will get the village lots of income because speed of travel and not losing caravans in the wilderness are two massive advantages any merchant will want. Plus, even if those already exist and I just haven't heard of them, we have three sealmasters, so it shouldn't be too hard to research higher-volume storage seals to give us an edge over the competition."

Jiraiya nodded thoughtfully. "Well, points for effort, but—"

"But wait," Hazō exclaimed, "there's more! The Merchant Council will love us for making their lives easier. And hopefully it might deal with some of the trade issues we were talking about yesterday. It's a simple technique that covers a lot of bases."

"So simple, in fact," Keiko said, "that it is a wonder that the logisticians of the world have not yet invented it. How delighted the Nara will be to learn of this gap in their arsenal, and how desperate the Mori will be to unravel its secrets that they may imitate it."

"Keiko," Mari-sensei said gently.

Keiko looked down at her plate. "Apologies. Training was… trying… and the notion of more to come does little for my stress levels. The sarcasm was mostly uncalled for."

"The point's valid, though," Jiraiya said. "Everybody knows about storage scrolls and everybody knows about ninja speed. The reason nobody does it is, as ever, that there's no demand. People just don't trade goods in the kind of volumes that would need a whole convoy of ninja, and the profit margins aren't going to be so big that you want to hire more than a standard team. And the kind of goods you'd want to carry in a lot of separate storage scrolls are mostly luxury furniture and such that people buy locally anyway.

"Sadly, much the same goes for those asses in the Merchant Council. They've had decades to come up with the right number of storage seals and a stable system for replacing them. Getting them to budge from a happy status quo is a fool's errand at the best of times."

Mari-sensei gave a meaningful cough.

"Oh, right, positive reinforcement. The idea itself isn't bad, kid, long as you ignore the eternal problem of 'Why hasn't anyone done it yet?' It's simple, easy to implement, and has a bunch of good consequences. Keep it up."

"Great," Hazō said. "Then I'll move on to my next idea."

"Just to be clear, how many of those am I going to have to suffe— listen to tonight?"

Kagome-sensei snorted, but said nothing.

"Two or three," Hazō shrugged. "The big one I've been thinking about is the end of your trial period. It's coming up, right?"

"Joy of joys," Jiraiya said. "I really should have pressed them to give me a longer term—you know, enough to actually get anything done—but on the other hand that meeting was already two steps from a bloodbath. Thank the Will of Fire for Nara Shikaku, arrogant, manipulative SOB that he is."

Keiko's hand paused over her dinner.

"If we could please avoid dangerously inflammatory descriptions of my imminent father-in-law, who has shown this clan no personal hostility and consistently acted in a fashion worthy of my respect?"

Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. "Now hold on here. This is my house, and I can say—"

Mari-sensei put a hand on his arm, which stopped him long enough for her to whisper something in his ear.

"So how's that whole thing getting on, anyway?" he changed the subject awkwardly. "Has he confirmed whom he wants as your groom?"

"Nary a syllable," Keiko said, some of the tension draining from her stance. "I believe that our Chūnin Exam performance has improved my odds of marrying Shikamaru rather than some lesser cousin, but it would be foolhardy of them to make a final judgement before observing the results of the tournament, the one instance in which I will be able to display my value—such as it is—independently of my team. Success there will be a priority if I wish to secure my future."

"You're OK with marrying Nara, then?" Noburi asked.

"If by 'OK' you mean 'resigned to as the least of an unknown number of appalling evils', then yes, I am OK with it. Over the course of a number of instances 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 have concluded that his presence is mostly tolerable, and, importantly, that he shares my attitude to the coming marriage. I do not believe that he will excessively interfere with my lifestyle, just as I intend to avoid involving myself in his where possible."

Mari-sensei and Noburi both nodded sagely, making Hazō wonder if he was missing some kind of subtext. The feeling was only increased when he noticed Mari-sensei give Noburi the brief, well-concealed look of surprise commonly reserved for when Hazō surpassed her expectations at doing the social thing. On the other hand, Jiraiya was merely playing the paternal role of listening to his child talk about things she thought were important (there was a special expression which Hazō didn't think Jiraiya knew he was making), and Kagome-sensei's gaze was somewhere far away.

"Back on topic," Hazō said, not at all begrudging the fact that he was seemingly being left out of part of the conversation, "I was thinking about the clan votes and whether there's anything we can do to improve your odds. Tsunade is technically Lady Senju, right? It came up when we were researching her for Noburi's birthday present. She must have a seat on the council even if she never uses it. Could she vote in your favour?"

"Don't think I haven't thought about it," Jiraiya said. "Trouble is, she's a sensible woman, meaning she won't touch politics with an eleven-foot pole. There's a reason nobody's mentioned her as a possible Hokage even though she's crazy strong, has major resources to bring to the table and is as noble-blooded as they come."

Hazō had an answer to that, but Noburi pre-empted him. "How about promising to invest in medical research once you've secured the hat? Yakushi-sensei is always talking about budget limitations, and how they're the biggest constraint on both Leaf's and Tsunade's medical work. Well, that and lack of intact bodies. It's not even really bribery, since Leaf medicine badly needs expansion anyway."

Jiraiya smirked. "Oh, it's bribery sure enough. Hoping Sunny doesn't see through bullshit is like hoping Akatsuki's leader will have a sudden change of heart and start resurrecting people instead of killing them—sit down, Hazō, it was a turn of phrase and resurrection techniques still don't exist.

"Investing in medicine is going to be a tough sell as far as the clans are concerned, though. Right now our biggest weakness, with the losses from that fight, is having ninja to dispatch in the first place, not keeping them alive once we do. Then too, any military doctrine based around skywalkers, which is our long-term goal, is going to deprioritize medic-nin. I'm sure I don't need to explain why.

"It's an option. I'm not saying it isn't. But whatever we do is going to need careful handling, like Sunny herself. She's got a vote, but she's also got zero political capital in Leaf, and the demerit for her in involving herself with Leaf politics is that it could ripple back across her medic-nin activities as a whole. I don't need to tell you what her losing her veneer of neutrality would do to her international work."

As far as Hazō was concerned, it would be worthwhile even then. Damage done to worldwide medical efforts would be a horrible thing to risk, but… Jiraiya was the only leader remotely open to Uplift. They needed him as Hokage. The world needed him as Hokage. With his support, there was a chance that Hazō could finally start acting on his ambitions. A chance to change everything—forever. The alternative was Hyūga Hiashi, a Byakugan user without vision, and the cycle of hatred and war continuing until there was nothing left.

"We need to talk to her," he said urgently. "Even if it doesn't work. We need to throw the kitchen sink at this issue, and our kitchen sinks could knock over the Hokage Tower. I know you're used to dealing with her on your own, but we can help. Noburi's the face of the next generation of Leaf medicine. He can tug at her heartstrings. Keiko can figure out how much we can afford to commit to better research funding if you give her enough data. Kagome-sensei can tell her in all sincerity that we're experimenting with better approaches to education, and medical ninjutsu sounds perfect for people with skill but low chakra capacity. Mari-sensei can…" Tsunade was apparently good at seeing through bullshit. That made manipulation dangerous.

"Don't you worry about me," Mari-sensei said. "I'm looking forward to handling her next time she's in Leaf."

"I'll, uh, take your word for that. As for me… I'll talk to her. Getting through to people is my speciality. I know the stakes are high, but the stakes are always high when your objective is to change the world. If I can get her to see it through my eyes, just for a moment—if I can get her to believe that what I'm aiming for is possible—then I know she'll agree to help us. She's a medic-nin. She already understands that helping others is the most important thing there is."

Jiraiya chuckled. "Man I'd love to see you try and work your magic on Sunny. Whether she crushes you like a bug or joins the starry-eyed optimist brigade, it'll be some much-needed entertainment in these stressful days. I'll make sure you get your chance."

Hazō tried not to imagine one of the world's greatest taijutsu masters, with more offensive medical ninjutsu up her sleeve than there were hairs on his head, attempting to crush him like a bug.

"Speaking of people who aren't going to crush me like a bug, no matter what anyone says, what about the Uchiha? There's an Uchiha Sasuke, isn't there? Is he the clan head?"

"Kinda sorta?" Jiraiya wobbled his hand horizontally. "He's too young to be acknowledged as clan head, so for now he has a regent representing him at council meetings and the like. A civilian, if you'll believe it, the best they could scrape up from Itachi's leavings. Not a bad man, as civilians go, but he's clearly out of his depth being surrounded by some of the world's top ninja, so he mostly abstains."

"Hmm…" Hazō rolled this information around in his head. "If we can get Uchiha on our side, can he tell the regent to vote for us? The Uchiha are supposed to be big rivals of the Hyūga, and so are we, so maybe we can take advantage of that?"

"Depends," Jiraiya said. "It's technically possible, but realistically, the clan isn't in a position to play in the big leagues right now. Sasuke isn't going to throw down with the Hyūga if he wants his clan to have any chance of revival."

"Then I'm out of ideas for now," Hazō said.

Just as Jiraiya was starting to relax, he spoke again. "Wait, just one more."

"Go on, kid."

"There's a Great Library on the Seventh Path, right? Have you been there? Could you take Keiko? Whatever knowledge there is in there, it can only help us deal with our pangolin issues."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Keiko stiffen. But they couldn't just not talk about the pangolins ever again, could they?

"I haven't been," Jiraiya said. "Nor has anyone else I know. The toads reckon it's probably a myth, meant to inflate the reputations of certain clans. I don't know for sure. Summon civilisation isn't exactly advanced, and I find it hard to imagine enough clans working together for long enough to create a bastion of learning, but I've been wrong before. If a place like that exists, I'd love to see it, if only to find out what kind of compromise they came up with for writing as a medium."

"I see," Hazō said. "I wonder if the pangolins have an actual location they could share with us. They were supposed to have been cut off from it by the condors, so now the condors are gone—"

"Hey, Hazō," Noburi exclaimed, "weren't you going to get love advice from the experts tonight?"

"Love advice?" Keiko asked. "From whom? She Who Sees Only Entertainment in Our Flailing? The author of those novels? Myself? Or perhaps Kagome will be your guide to romantic success?"

"Huh? Whah?" Kagome-sensei came down to earth with a startled look. "Double the amount of explosives."

Hazō shook his head at Kagome-sensei's attempt to guess the question.

"I'm vetoing that seal idea right now," Kagome-sensei tried.

Hazō shook his head again.

"Fifi didn't mean it. She was only playing!"

Mari-sensei took pity on him. "Nobody was asking you a question, Kagome."

"Oh. I knew that. I was just… joking."

"So," Jiraiya grinned. "Love advice. Lay it on me, kid. Time for you to see the Great Sage Jiraiya's true power."

"Well…" Reluctantly, painfully, Hazō summed up the series of events leading to this conversation.

"Kid," Jiraiya said with no ambiguity in his voice, "your ass has been dumped."

"But—"

"What my beloved and ever-so-tactful husband is trying to say," Mari-sensei said, "is that Noburi's right. I know it hurts to hear this, but there's really no other way to interpret how she's been behaving. You two have parted ways."

"That doesn't make any sense," Hazō said. "Our relationship's rock solid. She can't just break up with me overnight, because of one fight."

"It happens," Jiraiya said. "Take it from me, nobody really knows what's going on inside a woman's mind. Often, not even the woman."

Mari-sensei subtly elbowed him.

"I stand by that statement," Jiraiya said as he dodged successfully. "Men have the opposite problem. There are only a few things going through the typical man's mind when it comes to women, and believe me, none of them are helpful.

"What you wanted from Akane was simple, right? Love, attention, and, at your age, a certain amount of—will you stop elbowing me, woman?"

"Let's not get bogged down in details," Mari-sensei said smoothly. "What Jiraiya is trying to say is that just because your needs are simple doesn't mean everybody else's are. Without reducing people to their gender, about which we are going to have words later, Akane clearly wanted some very specific things from you, and she maybe didn't explain that as well as she could have. Maybe she didn't realise herself until something served as a trigger."

"What? But that's completely unfair! How was I supposed to fix things if she wouldn't tell me about them until it was too late?!"

"Making a relationship work isn't about 'fair', Hazō." Mari-sensei gave a sad smile. "It's about making sure everybody gets what they need. I've been in a lot of relationships where somebody demanded perfect equality in everything, even though the people involved were very different in what they needed and what they had to give."

"What happened?" Hazō asked despite himself.

"One of us left. Usually me. I had a good sense for when to flee a sinking ship, and yeah, sometimes I behaved like a rat. Being able to talk things through like an adult takes a lot of trust, which I didn't have."

Jiraiya was giving Mari-sensei a melancholy look.

"Well," he said with forced cheer, "at least it's not just you, kid. Communication's a skill that takes a lifetime to learn. Half the reason my novels are so true to life is that they're full of characters failing to tell each other what they really think."

"There are some who would call this lazy writing," Keiko said neutrally.

"Critics," Jiraiya nodded. "Screw them.

"Where were we? Shit happens. On one level, both of you were responsible for failing to communicate. But on another, on the level that counts, it's nobody's fault. Like I say, communication's a skill that takes a lifetime to learn. And worst of all, even though it's absolutely vital for being a decent adult, nobody ever bothers to teach it.

"Hey, Kagome, think you can put that on your curriculum?"

"Me?"

"Focus, dear, focus," Mari-sensei said. "The fact is, every relationship has these fracture lines, big or small. Yours had them too, even if you didn't realise it. Not just the treating people as tools thing, which I think we should talk about more later. There's also the status gap. The people on top don't always realise what it's like for those on the bottom. I was born a civilian. My mother's an innkeeper. But it only took a little while to start thinking of myself as a ninja, and start seeing all the little ways in which civilians are different, and then the big ways. It's not just about chakra and training. It's so much deeper than that. Right now, I can't even remember what it was like being one of them. Not that I'd want to remember those days anyway.

"It's the same here. You know what it's like to live as a clanless ninja and look up at those above you. Can you imagine Akane feeling like that right now? How you used to be the same as her and now you're like Leaf's Hoshigaki?"

Hazō shook his head. He hadn't thought it mattered. They were both Team Uplift. They were in love. What else did they need?

"Well, believe me, it makes a difference. You can change her life with a few words. She barely has a say in her own future. I can tell you now that she never forgot it for a second, just like she never forgot that she would always be something like seventh best when it came to wife candidates."

"But… she never said anything about any of this!"

"Did you ever ask?"

How was he supposed to ask when he didn't know there was anything to ask about?

"Don't worry about it too much," Jiraiya said. "So you screwed up. As someone who's spent fifty years screwing up, I can tell you that the best thing you can do is learn from your mistakes. At least Akane is still here and still wants to be your friend. She's not telling your future girlfriends that you're secretly a gay gerontophile, or buying special anti-you poison from a close friend with a complicated sense of humour, or sabotaging your seals to destroy you just like you destroyed her heart. So you're not lovers anymore. In time, you'll be friends again, and it'll be a deeper friendship for everything you learned about each other while you were dating. When it works, it works."

"This is all assuming you're right," Hazō said desperately. "What if It's just a misunderstanding?"

"It isn't," Mari-sensei said simply. "One or two things could be poor phrasing, but Hazō… it was literally in every single thing she said. I'm sorry."

Hazō could feel his eyes starting to well up with tears, and he was not going to cry in front of his entire family.

"Then why didn't she just tell me?"

"I'm sure she thinks she did," Jiraiya said. "Breaking up with people is tough. It's hard to want to hurt someone like that, especially if you cared about them to start with. Your instinct is to be indirect to minimise the damage. It's a stupid instinct. I once didn't know my girlfriend had broken up with me for two months—I thought she still hadn't come back from a long-term mission, and I only found out when I saw her kissing another guy in a bar."

"Great," Hazō said bitterly. "So what am I supposed to do? Get the Yamanaka to teach me how to read minds?"

"You learn to talk early," Mari-sensei said. "Every relationship is deep and complicated, because every person is deep and complicated. No matter what it looks like on the surface. You might not want to acknowledge that those depths exist, or you might be too scared to explore them in case you end up destroying what you already have. But if you learn to face them together, you'll have a stronger relationship, and you'll be able to deal with issues before circumstances drag them up full-strength like your OPSEC breach did."

Keiko's voice was the last thing any of them expected.

"Sometimes, you have to reach out and touch someone," Keiko said distantly. "Even if the gap seems unbridgeable and you have no means of navigation… I think you have to enter that space of uncertainty in order to learn that you are capable of something more."

In the dead silence, everybody stared at her.

"I apologise," she said, looking down. "I spoke out of turn."

"No," Hazō said. "No, that's…" He trailed off, not sure what he wanted to say.

He could feel it starting to sink in now. The depth of his failure. All these vital skills that he didn't know and nobody had bothered to tell him about. The fact that Akane… wasn't his Akane anymore, and he didn't know what she was instead.

"What do I do now?" he asked, trying to keep the notes of pleading out of his voice.

"You've been wounded," Mari-sensei said. "You have to give it time to heal, and not put any pressure on it in the meantime. I'm not saying don't see Akane, but don't seek her out. Wounds heal, or at least they heal enough that you can go back to active duty. There'll be plenty of time for you two to reaffirm your friendship then.

"As someone who's been dumped more times than there are stars in the sky," Jiraiya said, "I know every trick in the book for dealing with a broken heart. To begin with, you and I are going drink—seriously, woman, what is with the elbowing? If you crack my ribs, who'll be left to yell at Hiashi?"

"Hazō is not going drinking unless a mission demands it," Mari-sensei said flatly. "He is a young man with a growing organism, and besides, I will not be having him get used to alcohol as a coping mechanism."

Hazō barely caught himself before a reflexive "But Mum!", which was shocking in its own right.

"Nonsense!" Jiraiya said. "Nights out drinking are a perfectly normal, nay, essential pastime for any teenager. Why, when I threw that afterparty in Mist, he was drunk to the gills, and that didn't have any negative effects whatsoever."

That was somewhere between an exaggeration and a dirty great lie. Hazō could hold his drink as well as anyone, based on the parts of the evening he could remember. And finding an escape from his feelings inside more of that blurry sensation certainly sounded good right about now.

"What's that, beloved husband?" Mari-sensei said with an innocent sweetness that sent chills down the backs of everyone in the room. "You made our fourteen-year-old children drink with you and didn't monitor their alcohol intake?"

The two locked gazes.

Jiraiya broke first.

"Plan B. Kagome, do we have any hot chocolate?"

Kagome-sensei watched Hazō wipe his sleeve across his eyes.

"We have all the hot chocolate," he said softly. "All of it."