Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

There was almost certainly some reason why this was a bad idea.

No, there was a blindingly obvious reason why this was a bad idea. This was something he couldn't do with an escort. He doubted Mori could be convinced to part with the deep, dark secrets of the universe in the best-case scenario; she'd almost certainly clam up in front of a third party whom those secrets did not directly concern (and who had not been directed her way by Keiko).

On the plus side, such as it was, not needing a minder (or, rather, not being able to bring one) left the rest of the clan free. Noburi was alternating between managing the world's chakra supply and trying to work through things with Yuno—Isan was going to be a priority the second a Seventh put on the hat; plus Noburi was a real person with real feelings, and when he had time, Hazō worried whether he'd be able to find romantic happiness amidst all the political pressure. Mari was corrupting the innocent, and further corrupting the corrupt, and Hazō didn't know where she drew the line between instrumentality and hobby, and didn't have the skills to try to work it out. Keiko was probably single-handedly protecting the future of the Nara. Kagome-sensei had been called back to his slavery at the workshop, and that was a problem that would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later (certainly, it wasn't an area in which they could solicit the help of the ever-smiling Rock ninja). Faithful adjutant Akane was not stuck at his side for now, and therefore had gone out to comfort Yamanaka.

And as for him, he was about to face the great unknown.

"Got your message," Mori said, leaning comfortably against a wooden wall decorated with a fan symbol. "You want to go somewhere private with me on the third date. You sure took your time. Do you have any idea how many charming Leaf men have already asked me out?"

Hazō had mentally fortified himself before this meeting. He was no longer a helpless boy to be battered around by the whims of an unreadable, chaotic, possibly insane jōnin. He was Gōketsu Hazō. He was the leader of his own clan, and he had the strength and the insight to steer it through both political and physical disaster. Today, he was a political figure in his own right. He outranked the woman in front of him. No matter what happened next, he was going to remember that.

Hazō rolled his eyes as if unimpressed. "Still not a date, Ami. And what happened to us being siblings?"

"Oh, so you're officially recognising it?" Mori asked with an expectant expression.

Damn. How was he supposed to answer that without giving her ammunition?

Hazō decided to try the straightforward route. "We're not siblings, Ami. That doesn't mean we're dating either."

Mori looked mock-hurt. "After all we've been through together? Hazō, just what am I to you?"

Double damn.

Don't insult the Mori. Don't give an ambiguous, exploitable answer to the Mori. Don't give an unambiguous, exploitable answer to the Mori.

"Someone I trust enough to talk to about an important personal issue," Hazō finally said.

"I can work with that," Mori said. "So how private are we talking here? Because those anti-Hyūga seals don't come cheap, and while KEI HQ has a few, it's also full of people."

"You have an official HQ now?" Hazō asked. "I figured living space would be at too much of a premium. We haven't even tried buying a new compound in Leaf right now."

"Yeah," Mori agreed. "That would not be fun. That's why we all joined the Uchiha instead."

Hazō choked. "You did what?"

"Geographically," she clarified with a smirk. "The Uchiha District is huge—it's practically a castle town minus the castle—and Sasuke doesn't draw as much anti-clan resentment as the rest, what with the actual clan having been wiped out when he was an innocent little child. He's providing housing and facilities for KEI ninja and families who're homeless thanks to the Collapse, plus those who just had lousy housing because KEI members below jōnin get a raw deal when it comes to income. He doesn't need the empty space, and boy is this going to pay off for him long-term.

"Irony being," she added, "the Clan Council could have headed this off and fragmented the KEI into little pieces just by backing you on the Shimura vote. Now, instead of a bunch of penniless minor clans that can be defeated in detail, they've got a single monolithic force to reckon with.

"Anyway, the Uchiha District's great, and restoring it is going to give those KEI families plenty of employment, but that also means it's full of people, plus privacy seals are in short supply."

She made kitty eyes. "I don't suppose you'd make me any?"

Hazō shook his head, choosing not to give a more detailed answer. Mori did not need to know that the Gōketsu had no way to make any of their own. Frankly, that itself was a strong argument for keeping Kagome-sensei in the sealing workshop (though no argument was ever going to be strong enough). The faster Leaf got its seal stores replenished, the better the guarantee that it wouldn't run out of privacy seals and become ripe pickings for a resurgent Hyūga Clan.


The torch-lit cave, out in the wilderness way beyond cleared Leaf land, and deep enough (according to Mori) to put them outside estimated Byakugan range, might have been a romantic setting for a secret assignation if he wasn't here with with a woman whose feminine charms were just another level of danger to be on constant alert for. It had been a deliberate trade-off—the Hyūga were unlikely to have anyone with particularly powerful Byakugan to spare on a spontaneous spying mission, and anyone who came this far out would be better confounded by their complete disappearance than by an impenetrable globe of darkness.

"The development of excessively elaborate yet ultimately practical escape plans is another useful pastime for creative minds," Mori noted. "Unlike rational calculation of the net value of familiar individuals' lives versus their termination, it has practical applications insofar as any such plan may be implemented in an emergency. Furthermore, it does not result in a feeling of annoyance when one realises that a given friend or acquaintance is worth more dead than alive. In addition, the preparation of supply caches and shelters such as this one seems more than reasonable in the context of a global war that may necessitate flight at any moment."

"Wait," Hazō said. "This is a supply cache?"

"Mmm. There are individual people in Leaf I care about, but it's not like I ever swore allegiance to a second village. If I have to go, I go. Feel free to use this if you have to turn missing-nin again, or if there's no Leaf left to be loyal to and you can't make a break for Mist."

Hazō couldn't decide if that was Mori being kind, fatalistic, or both.

"Hey, Hazō," Mori asked, leaning back on her bedroll, which was there to make the hard floor of the cave more comfortable, and definitely not for any other purpose, "do you ever miss Mist?"

Did he miss Mist? The home of the Kurosawa, and Aunt Ren. A place long-warped by a will that did not believe in humanity. A place only now remembering what it meant for one person to trust another. A place where the clans were not merely overwhelmingly superior, but lived in their own separate world, to the point where it was natural to cast out one's most loved daughter into the hell below for the crime of loving a common-born.

"I miss Mum," Hazō said. "Everyone else I care about is already here."

"So nothing counts except for the people?"

"I suppose there are the little things," Hazō said after a little further thought. "Nobody here knows how to cook fish properly. The architecture can get ridiculous because they have unlimited construction materials and get to indulge themselves. Have you seen how many two-floor buildings there are? And you can get news about the outside world on any street corner, but half the people don't know their own village's laws."

"Tell me about it." Mori laughed, making shadow puppets with her fingers in the background. "The buildings don't come with back doors by default. They can censor writing before it goes into circulation. They worship fire. And the idioms keep throwing me off, too. I haven't heard anyone mention a shark in over a week."

"I noticed that. Have you heard the one about knocking on wood?"

"Yeah. Here they think it wards off bad luck. Can you believe this is the village Yagura was scared of?"

Hazō smiled to himself. "So what about you? Do you miss Mist?

"…Ami?"

"Just the little things," Mori said. "People, not so much."

"No?" Hazō asked, surprised. "Most of your family is still there."

Mori shrugged. "Lady Biwako finds me irritating as all hell, couldn't begin to guess why. Grandpa Ryūgamine's awesome, but he's always keeping me at arm's length. My parents died to me when they abandoned Keiko. Everyone else puts me on a pedestal, which I've fully earned, but it's not how you make bonds with people. I do the work, and I go on the missions, and every now and again they call on me when they need the best of the best, but other than that, my clan and I mostly stay out of each other's way."

Hazō didn't understand. He was clear on anti-clan sentiment, even (especially) against one's own clan. It was how he'd lived his entire life. But the clan had never been his family. He had unforgivable grandparents in there somewhere. Aunt Ren was his mother's older sister. He'd met other Kurosawa kids at the Academy—Shin sprang to mind—and they weren't any more standoffish towards him than they were towards anyone else, but they didn't pretend they had any personal connection either. That was all.

Mori had a family. She was surrounded by people with the same blood and the same loyalties. People who liked and respected her. It had taken Hazō sustained effort and incredible luck to arrive at the place that she'd got for free just by being born. With all her talent and determination, couldn't she have fought to make that work?

He didn't understand.

"There has to be someone you miss, right?" he asked insistently.

"Some relationships were built for separation," Mori said coolly. "Others weren't intended to survive it. Generally, though, having everybody as your friend is the same as having nobody. Think about that while you're building yourself one clan to rule them all.

"Let's change the subject."

Hazō was happy to. Possibility of manipulation aside, he found he didn't like hearing a melancholy Mori. He was starting to get used to her mercurial moods, or her mercurial selves, or whatever it was they were, but the shifts between them were unmistakable. This felt too much like her default bouncy persona, just with the bounce drained out of it. It was like seeing something human behind the Mori Ami he knew, and he didn't know how to relate to that.

What would Noburi do at a time like this?

"So how are your diabolical plots going?" he asked with exaggerated cheer. "Anything interesting happening other than taking over a legendary clan in a foreign village?"

Mori's expression shifted instantly into what was best described as an evil grin. "You first. Are you done subverting the Merchant Council yet? Or are you doing the guilds first?"

Hazō blinked. "I was expecting something more along the lines of what my plans are for the civilians on the Shimura estate."

"I'm skipping that step because it's boring. Obviously, your humanitarian efforts are part of a long-term campaign to seize control of the civilian world and leverage its resources to catapult the Gōketsu to eternal prosperity. I'm more about connections than money, or I'd have thought about doing it myself. Seriously, though. Civilians run the banks. Civilians sell the things ninja buy. Civilians make the food ninja eat. The telescope was invented by civilians, and I don't think anyone's ever thought about what that means. So I figure you do bottom-up, I do top-down, and all sorts of interesting things will happen when we meet in the middle—as the seamstress said to the priest."

The image tied Hazō's mind in knots as he tried to figure it out, which was almost certainly the intended effect.

"I'm not touching that one with a barge pole," he finally said.

"I don't like it when things are too easy, so I'll let that one slide," Mori said. "Although that in turn—"

"Leaving that entire subject aside, what about you?"

"Hoo boy," Mori said. "Rock drops, everybody dies. Not quite what I had in mind, but obviously I had the contingencies. In a world where people can walk on thin air and there's an incoming world war, some kind of overkill decapitation strike was always going to be on the cards. Frankly, I'm amazed the damage was so limited. I'd have got rid of the clans altogether and focused all my resources on subverting the clanless. New world order, cast off the shackles of clan rule, no omelette without breaking eggs… Play those cards right over the next couple of generations, and assuming the world survives that long, it's in the palm of your hand. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they'd just got in touch with me in advance."

Hazō recalled the empty space where the Nara compound had been.

"Could you have done that?" he asked, horrified. "Used your influence on the KEI to back Rock up from this end?"

Mori laughed lightly. "You realise that if I say yes, that's grounds for execution, or exile and Mist-style interrogation, right? Anyway, no. Same reason I didn't make a bid for Mizukage, unremarkable combat skills aside. I live for control, freedom, and fun. No one gets to take those away, not even myself. Also..."

Her voice instantly became ice.

"They came this close to killing Keiko. I will wipe Rock off the face of the earth before I let them finish what they started here."

Hazō shivered despite himself.

"Orochimaru, though," Mori said perkily. "Ouch. That blindsided me like a chakra megalodon hitting a dinghy. Lucky you kept him occupied long enough for me to figure out countermeasures, because it would've been a toss-up between death and enslavement, and those are two things I'm not big on, though obviously I'd make an exception for the Tsuchikage."

Images flickered through Hazō's head, then urgently unflickered.

"Are you serious?"

"Deadly." Mori's expression shifted into something different still. Her shadow on the wall stopped flickering. "Being valuable can be a liability when the strong see you as prey. You will not be left alone. Threats must be eliminated. Resources must be exploited. Free will counts for nothing in the face of true power. If that power judges you valuable, it is useless to run. It is ineffective to hide. It is hopeless to fight. All you can do is bargain, and hope that the other is inclined to listen. The weak can only win using the cunning that the strong had no need to learn."

Hazō shivered some more. If that was how Mori, a jōnin who danced circles around Kage, saw Orochimaru… what did that say about his own approach?

"What did you do?" he asked anxiously.

"I improvised like my life depended on it, which, you know, it did. Just so you're aware, if Keiko ever pushes herself as far as I did, she will die, so I wouldn't get your hopes up on that end."

"You improvised?" Hazō repeated incredulously. "You're still a Mori, right?"

Mori shrugged. "People are complicated. Very complicated. Besides, how would a ninja clan even survive if none of its seniors had workarounds for being mentally crippled? Look at how much the Nara Clan gets done every day even though your average Nara can barely be bothered to get out of bed in the morning."

"Setting the profound weirdness of Bloodline Limits aside, the good news is that's three out of three sorted, plus I get extra setup time before Asuma gets sworn in."

"Three out of three?" Hazō asked warily, his head still filled with the idea of Keiko dying of Frozen Skein.

"Mmm. Naruto's with the KEI. Tsunade's bribable and bribed, and will be locked in once my new plan is running. Orochimaru's already signed up to said plan—and I'll serve myself to the Hoshigaki on a platter before I go through that negotiation again—and he'll be mine as soon as the benefits start rolling in and he sees how much more valuable I am off the dissection table."

"You're wrong," Hazō said with absolute, unquestionable confidence. "I've met Orochimaru. You were there. He does not negotiate. Even you couldn't have turned him for real."

"Hey, I had whole minutes to come up with this plan," Mori said. "It's foolproof. The trick to dealing with somebody who already has everything they want is to get them to want something new. Also, Tsunade and Orochimaru are surprisingly similar when you talk to them, and you can deal with them practically the same way. Except the part where Tsunade makes you feel like you're one misstep away from a violent death, while Orochimaru makes you feel like you've already taken it."

"And if I ask you what the plan is, will you tell me?" Hazō asked. "Because the idea of making Orochimaru want something new is up there with resurrecting Captain Zabuza so I can offer him clan adoption."

"I suppose I could spoil the surprise… as an extra-special favour." Mori grinned in anticipation.

"Forget it. I'll just wait for you to make my life even crazier like I always do," Hazō grumbled.

"That's the spirit. But enough about how awesome I am. You had something you wanted to talk about, right?"

Hazō hesitated. He watched her expression, but between the darkness of the cave and the inscrutable Mori smile, he gave it up as a bad job.

"There's something I want your advice on in strictest confidence."

"Mmm. How strictest are we talking?" Mori asked in a leisurely tone of voice.

"The kind where you don't have to ask that question," Hazō said firmly.

"Ah. Gotcha. On the understanding that if it's something that threatens Keiko's or my safety, I will betray your trust without hesitation."

Not that he'd expected any different, but it still gave him pause. The idea of leaving it to Mori's judgement, and having her make a decision that could potentially doom him, was not a comfortable one. On the other hand, he reminded himself, he was here because he thought not consulting Mori could potentially doom him.

Some days it sucked being Gōketsu Hazō.

"Not long ago, I ended up in a sealing-related incident. Ever since then, I've been having moments of clarity in which I can see what's there to be seen, not the false picture of the world painted by our reason and our senses. That's resulted in… complications. It's sometimes put me out of sync with the world other people see. I forget how to communicate with them properly, or say things that they aren't able to understand."

"Go on."

"In some ways, it's been a little like having an extra sense. I reached out and touched it of my own free will once, and it gave me a rational perspective in a difficult time when I wasn't sure how to deal with my circumstances, but it also meant thinking very differently to how I'm used to, and I'm not sure how to feel about that."

"Uh-huh."

"The worst incident was after I got hit with a completely unrelated psychic attack"—Mori gave him an "of course you did" look—"and the next thing I knew, I was having what felt like memories of countless possible futures, and it took me time to remember that this wasn't any of them.

"Oh, and I've also made some bad judgement calls I can't account for, and the rest of the clan thinks it might be related. I'm hoping I can just blame it on my own stupidity.

"Does any of that sound familiar? Keiko thought you might be able to help."

Mori took her time before responding.

"What specific information did she convey?"

Hazō's danger sense spiked.

"Just that! That I should go talk to you because you might be able to help."

Mori nodded. "Doubtless, the combination of excessive trust and guilt has led her to condemn herself, and now she only awaits appropriate punishment."

"You should probably talk to her about that yourself," Hazō said.

"I intend to. My original reaction would naturally have been to incapacitate you and convey you to the nearest volcanic caldera for immediate disposal. However, it would be inconvenient for me to leave Leaf at this time, and accordingly I would have to rely on the tools at hand, limiting myself to dismemberment, decapitation, and incineration, where the ashes of the torso would be spread to the four winds, while the others would be sealed in separate storage scrolls, beyond the reach of time, and ultimately concealed in some unremarkable location far from civilisation. Ideally, I would want at least the head to be transferred to the Seventh Path, but it would probably be best not to involve others in the process."

Hazō slowly began to rise from his bedroll.

"Stay still while I recalibrate," Mori snapped.

Hazō stood still.

"Keiko loves you," Mori said gently, contemplatively. "She loves you so much that she's taken what she thought was an enormous risk for you. Please don't worry about that, by the way—I'd have done the same if I had another person I loved that much, except more subtly so it couldn't be traced back to me except by guesswork.

"When did she open up her heart enough to start loving people?" she said with distant wonder.

Had one of Mori's mode shifts just saved Hazō's life?

"If she loves you that much," Mori said, "then I will respect her agency. What is it you want, Hazō? Do you want to suppress the connection, and pay the price in return for much-undervalued normality? Do you want to tap into it for power, forfeiting your humanity in order to be free of its limitations? Do you want to see deep truth, free from the lies that people need to live?"

Hazō looked between Mori and the shadows on the wall of the cave, seeing the choice he couldn't escape. He listened to her voice, a voice that was eerily precise in both its temptation and its warning. He remembered his speculations.

"Mori," he dared to ask, "are you already—"

The freezing surge of killing intent nearly stopped his heart.

"No!" Mori's eyes blazed. "I will never surrender control to something just because it's more real than me!"

If Hazō broke the silence, if Hazō breathed, he would die.

Slowly, the killing intent faded. Hazō's heart unfroze, followed by his mind, and then the rest of his body.

"Sorry about that," Mori said. "Sore point. You were about to ask about the Frozen Skein, right? What has Keiko told you, anyway?"

"Not much," Hazō said warily, his heart deciding to compensate for its earlier paralysis by beating very, very fast. "She doesn't like to talk about it, so most of it I've worked out by inference. The Frozen Skein lets you calculate and predict things that would be too hard otherwise. There's such a thing as going too deep, and it's dangerous. She's sort of hinted, maybe by accident, that it's designed for a purpose. Maybe to contact something?"

Mori nodded. "Pro tip for the future: you do not tell Nara, or Mori, or any of the others, that you're looking into this sort of thing unless you really, really trust them. Also, do not let the Yamanaka read your mind for any reason whatsoever. As clan head, you probably have immunity anyway, but you'll forgive me if I have less than perfect faith in Leaf law after watching Orochimaru get his compound back."

"You mean because they might get exposed?"

"That too, but mostly because they're Yamanaka. I'll let you fill in the blanks yourself."

"All right," Hazō said, making a note to fill in the blanks himself. "So was the Frozen Skein designed? Please don't answer the question if it'll mean me getting assassinated or something."

"Let's go with 'neither confirm nor deny'," Mori said. "Shikamaru's not going to kill you, the Mori aren't laying a finger on my little brother slash love interest while I'm their sole representative in Leaf, and the Tama haven't dropped by. Still, I'd rather not get you into trouble that doesn't advance my plans. Let's just say the Tsuchikage's made an enemy of the Tama by risking the end of the Nara bloodline, and leave it at that.

"Back on topic. What do you want to do about this connection of yours?"

What did Hazō want to do? It was useful. It was dangerous. It was unpredictable and difficult to understand. It was powerful. It was, according to all known authorities (Keiko, Kagome-sensei, and Mori) grounds for throwing him into a volcano for the greater good.

"I want control," Hazō said eventually. "Everyone's scared that something will come and take me over, and I want to make sure that doesn't happen. I can't predict all the implications, and it seems like some of them happen without me knowing, but I want my will to be the deciding factor in what happens to me, not someone or something else's arbitrary decision."

"Good," Mori said. "Nothing is more important than control.

Her voice took on a low-affect, academic lecturer tone. "The absolute first rule in handling something greater than yourself is limiting the channels it can use to affect you. That means, above all, that you must train your senses to recognise intrusion. It is our great fortune that humans have only a few senses to track. Hearing is a primary mode of interaction. Learn to distinguish your inner voice so that you are not deceived into believing that another's thoughts are your own. Learn to read influences concealed within the sound of a voice. Some take effect even if one rejects their verbal meaning. You may find yourself facing something that relies on voice as its primary means of communication, and reading the nature of its speech like an unfurled scroll will greatly limit its total influence.

"I imagine the same must apply to vision. Always rely on your other senses to validate what you are seeing. Any genjutsu mistress will tell you that making someone see what you want is on a completely different level of complexity than making them believe it's there. The more senses you utilise, the less impact there is from some being subverted.

"The most dangerous is emotion. By default, human beings are not taught how to identify their emotions beyond basic intuition, much less how to manage them. There is no casual solution for this except to learn the detail of your inner world to excruciating depth—a task more difficult in your case since you can never count on being in a completely unmanipulated state. Be in alignment, and learn what baseline feelings you experience in any given situation.

"In short, imagine that you're facing Mari-sensei, and she's stopped playing around."

It was like being stabbed with a knife.

"But it's not all bad news," Mori said perkily. "Humans are crazy powerful. You need to internalise that as well. The Dispelling Technique is you shattering the reality someone else's imposed on you through sheer force of will, with chakra as a medium. Not everything in there is stronger than you, and that goes double when you're a human being with your back against the wall."

"Are you saying I can fight back?" Hazō said incredulously.

"Something to think about," Mori said. "Disclaimer, though: I am not you, for which we should both be grateful, so if any of what I say turns out to be wrong, I reserve the right to dodge all the blame and watch what happens from the other side of the continent while eating honeyed nuts.

"Actually, Leaf's slap bang in the middle, so maybe I'll take Keiko on a holiday to Fang instead, and watch from there. Those telescopes sure are useful, huh?"

"Thanks," Hazō said. "I'll be sure to bear that in mind."

"I mean it about Mari-sensei, you know. You have no idea how lucky you are to have a genjutsu mistress you can truly trust for a practice partner."

Truly trust. Hazō vaguely hated the part of himself that put a question mark next to those words.


"So it's like that after all, huh?"

"Like what?" Hazō asked.

"I saw her before the elections, back when we made the non-intervention pact. She wasn't the woman Keiko described during the Chūnin Exam or the Heartbreaker. Something happened, didn't it?"

But if Mori didn't know, then Hazō wasn't going to be the one to tell her. Not about Mari's breakdown, and not about the person who emerged out of it. Not when he didn't understand himself.

Mori read the silence.

"I don't do genjutsu, but I like to think I'm pretty good at influencing how people think and feel, and there's a hell of a lot to learn if you want to do the thing properly. If you ever need someone to mess with you in distressing but helpful ways, I'm your gal. Actually, maybe I should do that anyway, if it'll make Keiko happy."

"How will I tell the difference?" Hazō asked sceptically.

"It'll hurt more," Mori said matter-of-factly. "Tempering your heart and mind against the nightmares, remember?"

Hazō imagined Mori being even more Mori-like in his vicinity.

"Can I get back to you on that?"

"Mmm. Keep me posted. Don't forget that I'm here to help you as someone Keiko loves, and that I'll make the depths of Orochimaru's secret lab look like a Hot Springs resort if you so much as lay a finger on her.

"So, are we heading back, or have you decided to err on the side of 'love interest'?"

Hazō fixed her with the best disparaging stare he could muster with what was left of his emotional energy.

"Ami, you do realise that if anything happened, Keiko would kill me and everything you told me today would be a complete waste of time?"

"You make an interesting point, little brother."


You have received 2 +5 = 7 XP.


It is late evening. Hazō has been thoroughly interrogated by the clan, and has duly explained what he's learned about Ami's plans, and her advice on possession. Keiko was not present. There was much boggling of minds, with the exception of Mari, whose response amounted to an ominous "Interesting…" Overall, the meeting was judged "not a disaster, relative to what we feared". Hazō chose to omit certain personal details on both sides, as they weren't strictly relevant and he was uncomfortable sharing them.


Hazō is emotionally drained but otherwise alive, and the Gōketsu have reassembled, their various tasks done for the day. The night is still young, and the hours are still social.


Agent Snake has responded in a puzzled affirmative to the invitation. Expect her tomorrow night.


What do you do?

Voting closes on Saturday 7th of December, 2 p.m. New York Time.