Chapter 621: Sacrificing Preferences
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"A nightmare," Ami repeated. "I'm fine with being underestimated by my enemies right until the moment my dagger sinks into their backs, but how do these people acknowledge Naruto as a strong Hokage candidate in one breath and think he's too dumb to realise the practical benefits I get out of our relationship in the next? Come on, he was trained in politics by the Third and the Fifth, of course he knew what it meant when the ambitious foreigner approached him with ideas for how to improve the village! The fact that he went along with it anyway, and look, it turned out to be massively beneficial, is a sign that he's a forward-thinking leader of the same cut as the Seventh, not that he's being exploited by some extremely hot, diabolical social spec."
It was a beautiful sunny day, not that you'd know it from the windowless secure discussion space, and Ami was luxuriating in the unprecedented position of participating in a strategy meeting as a family member rather than an external consultant. The difference, to Hazō's eyes, was subtle, but he had the vaguest intuitive sense that she was more relaxed than usual–or, to be more precise, that her unchanged relaxedness was less performative than usual.
Or at least, she was luxuriating as much as was possible given she was in the middle of a frustrated rant. Shockingly, it seemed people were suspecting her of ulterior motives as she went around persuading, bribing, coercing, and possibly seducing people into supporting Naruto's candidacy. Kei was nodding along sympathetically to every word. Mari occasionally rolled her eyes good-humouredly, but couldn't poke fun too hard considering her own troubles getting people to lower their guard around an infamous social spec who they knew wanted to change their minds about something. Hazō himself was more distracted by watching for clues that might help him figure out just what he'd done by getting Ami to join the family.
"It's honestly embarrassing," Ami said. "Does somebody need to sit down with these wise old men and explain to them that private and public interests can overlap? I care about my–my family's welfare. I care about my ambitions. I care about the future of the world at large, and Leaf is an inextricable part of that, no matter how much fate hates it and wants it to suffer. I care about the KEI, even if I never intended to. I care about control and freedom and fun. What kind of primitive ape does it take to collapse me to just one of those things and think they're being perceptive?"
"Sorry to hear that, Ami," Hazō said as a default response. "So you still think Naruto is the Gōketsu's best candidate? I mean, bearing in mind our priorities are the Dragons, necromancy, lithosealing, and generally having a Hokage who lasts longer than Hagoromo Ritsuo at a brothel."
"I told you," Mari interrupted, "those are just slanderous rumours with no known basis in fact."
"A claim that cannot be questioned since Mari is their originator," Kei added.
"Hah!" Ami laughed. "I knew it. Minori owes me dinner."
For his own peace of mind, Hazō decided not to ask which Minori.
"Naruto's barred from the Seventh Path," Ami said, "but since there aren't any scrolls to spare, that's not a big deal, and his combat style isn't very Dragon-compatible anyway. Also, call me callous, but I'd rather see clan bosses taking the hits from giant unstoppable eldritch abominations than the kid I'm fond of who happens to be one of this world's great hopes for peace."
"Are you talking about AMITY?" Mari asked.
"Yup," Ami said. "All the raw materials were already there, and I've been hard at work making sure he believes. Between him and Lord Utakata, something is going to stay standing even if AMITY falls, and if they can achieve their full potential as Kage, and maybe get Lady Fū on board, they might be able to make this peace last even if the old warmongers don't cooperate.
"Because who else is there? Tsunade's a dyed-in-the-wool cynic. Lord Akimichi will emulate the Third's iron fist in a velvet glove, which was the perfect tool for solving the problems left behind by the Second's generation, but is worse than useless for solving the problems of the Ninth's. Lord Hagoromo won't even make it that far. He'll drag Leaf kicking and screaming back to the golden age of the Sixth Hokage and then run out of strength. Kurenai… Sorry, but Kurenai doesn't have what it takes. There's a price to be paid for staying away from politics until it gets fed up and comes knocking, and I suspect we're about to see her pay it."
"AMITY is your ballpark, Ami," Mari said. "Ours is making sure the world doesn't get eaten by Dragons or conquered by Akatsuki. Tsunade is already on board with our lithosealing research and she's a summoner. We can't overlook the advantages."
"Sure you can," Ami said. "You want to save the world your way or no way, or you'd already have shared lithosealing with Orochimaru, and taken the Pain gamble instead of counting on killing Akatsuki and then somehow pulling a new world peace out of the rift before everything implodes. That attitude's not going to fly with Tsunade, whose idea of compromise is that she gets what she wants and you get whatever you want that happens to be compatible with that. Naruto, on the other hand, is the most open-minded person relative to his power on the continent."
"It bears repeating," Kei added, "that Lord Akimichi's present political stance is to a large extent a specific reaction to mine, and by extension to yours, which largely inspired it. He will be approaching any negotiations–which will be starting from zero–with an antagonistic attitude by default, being sceptical of your iconoclastic motivations, and in no haste to hand you additional power or privilege merely because you claim it will be to Leaf's ultimate benefit."
"Lest we forget," Ami said, "Naruto also hates Akatsuki more than anyone else, since not only did he lose all the same people to them as the others, but they tortured him personally. If we're going to take down Akatsuki–which, just to say it again, is a terrible idea until we have a better plan for what comes afterwards–we'll want that hatred on our side. Tsunade, like all of her ilk, is too used to not picking fights with the few people who could kill her, and Lord Akimichi's grown up as the protector who stands between the ISC and danger, not goes drawing it to them."
"Fine," Hazō said. "Naruto it is. How actively do you think we need to be campaigning for him?"
"Actively," Ami said. "The Hagoromo support is a really bad sign. Needless to say, we can't accept him as Hokage–there's too much riding on the next couple of years to wait for him to destroy himself–but the whole idea of the conservatives nominating him just because he's a jōnin and Hinata isn't stinks in the first place. Whatever they're cooking, we need Naruto's position to be strong enough to counter it. That means swinging anyone who's wavering or uncommitted, but it also means screwing Lord Hagoromo over wherever we can. If we can make him lose enough face early, then his backers will lose face alongside him, and that makes it harder for them to influence the others if they decide to pivot. Who's going to follow your advice for which horse to bet on when your last pick turned out to be a lame nag that keeled over halfway down the course? Also, did I mention that the Hokage who banned the Gōketsu from taking on the Hagoromo is gone and his interim replacement has more urgent fish to fry?"
"May I just say, dear sister, that your words are suffused with even greater wisdom and radiance than usual today?"
Hazō nodded. "Screwing over the Hagoromo–the one cause that unites all right-thinking men and women. Anything else on the agenda today, or do we want to leave the meeting on that high note?"
"As it happens, yes," Kei said. "Hazō, after extensive research and discussion, Snowflake and I have developed a flawless, unsurpassable solution to the Mio problem."
"I'm all ears," Hazō said, which was a sealmaster idiom for "I just discovered that I made a terrible mistake and am now suffering the consequences".
Kei chose to ignore this. "It is simplicity itself. You need only take Mio as your concubine."
"I-I beg your pardon?"
Mari stared.
Ami, who was naturally in on the whole thing, giggled at his reaction.
"Why," Hazō emphasised, "would I want to take Mio as my concubine?"
Then the gears began to turn.
"No, wait, I think I see it."
The purpose of the Concubine Laws, or at least the part of it that wasn't about getting Kei a way to sort-of marry her girlfriend, was to extend some clan rights to clanless lovers of clan ninja. A concubine Mio would, as an extension of being permitted to learn certain clan secrets (specifically, the ones she already knew), be made responsible for the keeping of those secrets before the law, with "her" clan head determining the punishment for violation. Hazō would simply have to harden his heart and make it clear to her that said punishment was guaranteed to be capital. There was too much at stake.
"Thank you for finding a solution, Kei," he said. "I really appreciate it."
"Not at all," Kei said. "You should be aware that I have already coordinated with all relevant parties and established its viability. You need only grant your consent and it can be executed as early as tomorrow."
"Already coordinated?" Hazō asked. "Shouldn't you have talked to me first?"
"And waste your time with a speculative proposal that might collapse at the implementation stage?" Kei asked. "Hazō, this may be the first time you have entrusted me with personally resolving a complex situation with meaningful stakes and a significant social component. It would have been unacceptable to present you with a less than perfect outcome. Snowflake was in full agreement."
"I see," Hazō said. "I think in the future, I'd still rather be brought in earlier. I'm not saying this is a bad plan, but if it had been, I'd want to be in a position to say so early instead of waiting until the end when everything was lined up. I'll get back to you once I've talked it over with Ino."
Kei blinked. "Hazō, this is an internal clan matter. Why does Ino have any kind of voice in it?"
"What do you mean, why?" Hazō asked. "She's my girlfriend."
"Oh," Ami said after a second. "Is that what this is about? Hazō, you do realise that every single member of the Gōketsu main family other than you and Kagome has already sacrificed their spouse preferences for the good of the clan? You're insulting all of them by refusing to take a concubine unless your love life stays harmonious."
"What are you talking about?" Hazō asked.
"Mari chose to marry Jiraiya for the sake of the team," Kei said, "despite a lack of prior inclination towards marriage as an institution and an instinctive distrust of any man capable of physically or otherwise overpowering her. I chose to marry Shikamaru in order to secure a clan alliance despite the inherent insult to and sidelining of my existing lover and the fact that I had no desire to marry any man–as well as being forced to separate myself from my family in a way that has indeed greatly impacted on my relationships with you all. Yuno chose to leave her village and marry a foreign shinobi in order to secure a Leaf-Isan alliance, and Noburi chose to be that shinobi in order to bind her to the Gōketsu rather than the Hyūga despite his professed unreadiness for marriage and the unresolved emotional complexities between them."
"That's not every single member," Hazō objected. "You left out Akane."
Ami gave Kei a perplexed look.
"He doesn't know?"
"I assumed he did," Kei said.
"Don't look at me," Mari said as Ami's gaze swivelled to her. "I was hardly going to be the one to explain it to him if she decided not to."
"Explain what?"
"Hazō," Kei said patiently, "you were both aware for a period of years that you were each other's one true love, and furthermore you are a clan head without an heir and Akane was always a realist in regard to the typical shinobi lifespan. Is there any doubt in your mind that if she intended to marry you, she would have arranged it by this point?"
"Jiraiya told me she'd asked his permission, way back," Mari said. "When he didn't give her a final answer, she nominated Ino instead. But then Jiraiya died and you got final say over who you married… and years later, here we are. It's obvious to everyone that she decided to give up her claim for the sake of the clan, for when you needed a political marriage with Ino or someone else."
"So with all that in mind," Ami said, "you can see where it's not a good look for you to consider rejecting a purely paper agreement that doesn't even block you from getting married because it might upset your girlfriend."
Hazō was silent. Akane had given up on marrying him? For the good of the clan? Without ever saying it to his face?
Was this his fault? Should he have been more sensitive to her feelings instead of just going with the flow? Should he have taken the initiative and married her, and politics be damned?
Would they have been closer as a married couple? Would he have been better able to support her, especially after the trauma of the Shirogane mission? Would their marriage have been a source of strength when she needed it?
Would she still be alive?
"Wait a second," Mari said. "I can see how the Concubine Laws do the job for us. But does it have to be Hazō taking Mio as a concubine? It seems like his authority over the partnership should stay the same no matter which clansman is involved."
"Naturally," Kei said. "In fact, I was about to raise the issue, were it not for the unexpected digression regarding Ino. Proposing Hazō as the default partner was Ruri's suggestion, with the intent that Mio, whose feelings about Hazō are well-established, would firmly reject his candidacy and name one of the others, perhaps Haru or Jin, as her counter-offer. This would restore her agency and grant her a feeling of ownership of the final arrangement. It was not anticipated that my success on the social level would be so thorough as to force her to uncritically accept an initial offer that should have been unpalatable to her."
"Of course," Mari said, "don't forget that whoever becomes Mio's clan partner will have to bear a cost in terms of using up their concubine slot, and the adoptees are much more likely to one day want a KEI lover with whom they can share their rights than you are. Arguably, that makes Kagome the ideal candidate, but I'm not even going to try guessing how he'd feel about a proposal like that right now."
Hazō sighed. Things would be a lot simpler if Hazō wasn't currently busy trying to convince Kagome-sensei that he was a precious member of his family and not a subordinate useful for his practical benefits rather than his opinions.
"You know," he said, "we wouldn't have to worry about any of this if we could just close this legal loophole altogether. Is there some reason why we can't just get the Clan Council to vote to allow legal protection of secrets known to ex-clan ninja and capital punishment for those who disclose them?"
"A number," Kei said with sudden coolness, "of which the most obvious to my mind is that in exchange, assassinations must cease completely. Any other condition is unacceptable.
"However, if they do, then every shinobi wishing to leave their clan will no longer be restrained from doing so. The number of clan-leaving shinobi will rise, steadily so as the KEI becomes an increasingly more viable alternative. So will the number of shinobi who join a clan only long enough to secure clan secrets before leaving once more, a practice presently limited to the greatest villains of the shinobi world. Between the loss of shinobi who would otherwise have remained out of fear for their lives, the increased risk of clan-secret tourism, the proportional growth in power of the KEI as a result of both, and the overall increase in the number of people capable of sharing clan secrets–whether accidentally, in the belief that they can evade the consequences, or in more complicated conditions such as when those secrets might determine eventual spouses or children's survival on the battlefield–the costs to the clans in this scenario may outweigh the dangers of the current situation. Certainly, the issue is not trivial.
"Besides, Mio's cooperation is secured for now, but if we renege on the possibility of any deal with her in favour of a longer process of legal reform that focuses exclusively on benefit to the clans, there is no guarantee that she will stand patiently by until its conclusion.
"Nor, arguably, should she. Hazō, I appreciate your feelings, and I am certainly less than pleased with the risk posed to my family by Mio's desires, but it is a fact that we failed her and are now reaping the consequences."
"Failed her how?" Hazō exclaimed. "Whatever she may think, we showered her and her sister with valuable clan secrets where any other clan wouldn't even have thought about it for years. We may be the only reason she survived the war."
"Yes, Hazō, and in a way, that is the point," Kei said. "Our purpose for adopting Mio and Misa was quite specific: we wished to develop the power of the clan and identified the optimal candidates in terms of practical value and ideological alignment within the shrinking pool of potential adoptees. We then shared our clan secrets with them in order to increase their odds of survival, since they could hardly contribute to the clan's power from beyond the grave. We were not acting out of some purely philanthropic impulse.
"Mio's purpose, we later learned, was equally mercenary: she wished for us to protect her sister, and would obey whatever orders and pay whatever lip service to Uplift necessary to achieve this. This is no stranger than our motivation; in fact, our clan is the anomaly for filtering potential adoptees by their beliefs rather than merely potential and reliability, whereas most adoptions are ones purely of convenience.
"And mercenary the contract remained. I was not present at the estate often enough to judge, which is my own sin, but how often did you interact with her, Hazō? How often did you personally seek her out to solicit her opinion, or to assist her in integrating into the clan and finding ways to contribute to the Uplift she pretended to believe in, or any other such interactions that are both desirable and practical in a clan as small as ours?
"When she lost her sister and thus her entire world, did you approach her in your pastoral role as clan head, or in a private role as friend, and keep approaching her for as long as was necessary? Nor did I, despite having an extensive understanding of her pain. Certainly, my clumsy attempts at consolation would only have deepened the wound, but I am nevertheless responsible for not having conducted them. Nor did any of the rest of us, not until it was far too late.
"The deathblow, in my judgement, came with Akane's death, when Misa and Mei's standard-issue shared funeral was juxtaposed with you transforming the world with the dramatic and excruciatingly expensive Team Akane Seal Bank. Past that point, why would anyone expect us to see Mio as family, as opposed to a soldier whom it was rational to optimally equip for carrying out her duty?
"Thus, from Mio's perspective as I understand it, any implicit or explicit promise of family was betrayed by our neglect. We failed our shared objective of protecting Misa. Mio, meanwhile, served us faithfully if passively, obeying all orders to the best of her ability, and completing missions and fighting on battlefields in our name. Is it any wonder that she should now wish to annul our mercenary contract and seek a better life for herself?"
"She could have done something," Hazō said, but uncertainly. He didn't dare say that Mio should have taken the initiative in seeking out help when in crippling emotional pain; neither Kei nor Mari had proven able to so so in their time, and would quite understandably bite his head off for suggesting it. "She could have tried to be family with us from the start instead of waiting for us to do something."
"I am not at fault–she should have started it. The familiar playground refrain," Kei said. "Do you condemn me for having been so slow to bond with you over the course of our acquaintance? Would matters have been better served if you had waited for me to reach out? Not everyone is an extrovert keen to explore unfamiliar emotional terrain, especially when past experience has taught them to be wary of clan shinobi, and when during the crucial early period, they have a beloved sibling to cling to instead. We adopted her; it was our duty to guide her into the type of relationship we desired. Again, I do not endorse Mio's choices, which endanger those who were not party to the behaviour and decisions she resents. However, I will advocate for her interests to the extent that my position allows, as I should have done long before."
"Her interests," Mari said, "are leaving the clan and not being assassinated. I'm all for both of those. Whatever happened in the past, right now she's a liability to the clan, and getting rid of her the old-fashioned way is going to kick off a Gōketsu-KEI war nobody in this room wants."
Kei and Ami nodded.
"For what it's worth," Ami said, "I think the problem is that both of you went into this with warped expectations. To you, family means Team Uplift with special guests, and everybody else is an outsider. There was never a chance of someone like Mio becoming a special guest. As for Mio, she thought you had the power to keep Misa safe when nobody has that power. The shinobi world kills everybody sooner or later. Maybe if things had happened the other way round, if Akane had died first, she wouldn't have had such unrealistic ideas of what the Gōketsu could do for her."
"Maybe," Hazō said. "I'll talk to Jin as the adoptees' representative and see what he thinks. Now, if there's nothing else, I need to go deal with the much safer and more relaxing issue of strategic-scale explosives."
-o-
You have received 1 + 1 (Brevity) = 2 XP.
-o-
This meeting took up the morning (and XP was awarded accordingly). It is now the early afternoon. The other two scenes have not yet taken place.
What do you do?
Voting closes on
Last edited:
