Noburi snorted. "Hazō, how many times have we had some variation on this conversation? You took the lead role in the team and I learned to accept that. We went where you said and did what you wanted. We became a clan and I was okay following Jiraiya because he's Jiraiya...and then he died and you became Clan Lord. I've gotten used to being the second, maybe third fiddle on this team, but I've always felt like I had something unique to contribute." He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "That said, it doesn't matter. Teaching you this is the right move so I'll do it. I want something from you, though."
Hazō eyed him carefully. "What's that?"
"I want you to teach me Shadow Clone."
Hazō couldn't deny (though he also didn't want to admit) that the prospect made him nervous. In the shinobi world, every path to power worthy of the name came with dire warnings about the terrible things that happened to over-ambitious beginners or even careless masters who made the wrong mistake just once. Kagome-sensei was the living embodiment of those warnings, but in his time, Hazō had also been lectured about the horrific, dimension-spanning consequences of a failed summoning (or worse, reverse-summoning) and the gruesome fates in store for power-hungry technique-modifying tadpoles who didn't have the common sense the Sage gave a tree slug. Soon, he'd add another set to his collection from Noburi and the Hidden Leaf medical tradition. Hazō suspected that he was well on his way to becoming the most admonished ninja in history, if not there already. (He was also well overdue some grim, melodramatic rants about the perils of runecrafting, but fortunately, Kei was picking up the slack until he got round to fulfilling his responsibilities as founder and came up with some.)
The Shadow Clone Technique was no exception. Certainly, the Academy made sure that all would-be ninja were clear on the mutilation or death that awaited a student who was lackadaisical in their ninjutsu studies (it was not the harshest set of dire warnings, that being kunai safety years before, but it was certainly the longest), but the Shadow Clone Technique went so far beyond the norm for self-harm potential, with so many ways to cripple or kill the user
when perfectly executed, that it merited a lecture series of its own.
Hazō had chosen to take the risk of learning it and using it every day, and he stood by that choice because WHOOSH was more than worth it. He'd encouraged his loved ones to learn it, one after another, in the knowledge that they almost never rejected his recommendations (even as they spoke, Noburi was reaffirming Hazō's authority as leader), and unilaterally inflicted that risk on them as well. Years later, understanding their fragility, their
mortality, as he never had back then, and with the comfortable excuse that WHOOSH was currently impractical and the decision could be put off, could he really inflict the risk again, on someone for whom it was orders of magnitude greater?
He looked at Noburi, seeking answers that nobody else could find for him. He looked at his brother's expression of implacable resolve, so rare on the easygoing youth's face. But in that same expression, he saw Akane, the ultimate reminder of what would happen if he failed his family.
He also heard
her answer, the words he already knew she'd say because she was the one who'd taught him the lesson to begin with.
We have our own lives and our own agency. Trusting you with our training is our choice too, and if you
trust us,
then you need to trust that we can choose differently if we want to. Trust that we're adults who can make our own choices, and let us pay the price for that freedom if a price has to be paid.
He also knew that the Akane in his heart was speaking from experience. The last time she suppressed her own feelings and let somebody else make her choices for her, it broke her. Hazō still believed that it was the final reason for her death, not some probably-Rock assassin who his girlfriend at the height of her power could have shattered with a single fist.
"You've got it," Hazō said. "I always meant to teach you as soon as you'd studied its interaction with the Vampiric Dew and proved it was safe, you know that. I won't pretend I'm not worried, quite a bit if I'm honest, but I'm not going to stall or try to talk you out of it. At the end of the day,
you're the rising star of- the medical world–"
Noburi raised an eyebrow at the hasty swerve, but didn't interrupt.
"–and I absolutely trust you to know when it's safe for you to learn. If you tell me you need to learn it
now, as part of that research, then I trust that you know the risks and that you can handle them.
"Or," Hazō added, not quite managing to keep the hope from his voice, "maybe you're asking because you've already researched the interactions and I just didn't notice you doing it? Because if that's the case, I salute your diligence."
"Yeah, I wish it was that easy," Noburi said. "Maybe if I was back in Leaf with a Bloodline Limit expert who also knew the technique, like Tsunade or Dr Yakushi."
"Wait, what?" Hazō interrupted. "You'd still trust that man with your insides?"
"What?" Noburi asked. "You think I'd turn my back on him just because he's apparently Orochimaru's right-hand snake? You, who rush to Orochimaru's side whenever you have a new shiny to bribe him with?"
Noburi shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not
happy. But I see him at the hospital every now and then, and he's the same guy. He jokes around, he answers questions and gives good advice, he talks about what a shame it is he can't spare the time to do research together… And having studied with Tsunade, I kinda get it now. Don't get me wrong, Orochimaru's an irredeemable monster and letting him into your life the way you do is the stuff of the cautionary tales your mum should have told you as a kid. But I get it. If you're passionate enough about medicine, making one of the Three your full-time sensei isn't just a temptation. It's an order from your heart and mind. Maybe I'm not passionate enough about medicine, because I can't make the sacrifices Dr Yakushi must have made, and I don't know what he does to live with himself after helping Orochimaru be Orochimaru day after day, but having been where he is for a couple of months and then having to stop… I dunno, I guess it humanises him, sort of."
He paused, but right as Hazō was about to move the conversation on, he spoke again.
"It's been on my mind. Before too, a bit, but especially since. I can't be evil to reach for those heights. Vivisection, human experimentation, all that stuff… it must teach you so much, but it's just not in me. People are too real to me. I try to see who they are, to connect with them–it's like an instinct. I'd kill myself if I tried to go the Orochimaru route. I don't mean like cut my throat or anything. I mean I'd die inside, bit by bit, and I don't think it would even take very long.
"But I can't go the Tsunade route either. I can't take humanity and put it where my heart's supposed to be, and act like everything that's not the Big Cause, or obviously a piece of the Big Cause, straight up doesn't exist. My bonds with people are what keep me going, and besides"–he glanced aside, at Yuno's bedroll–"I have responsibilities.
"But to justify that to myself, how I'm refusing to take these routes right in front of me that have been proved to lead to the place I need to go, how I'm refusing to make the sacrifices that need to be made, I have to be
better. Better than I am. Good enough to make my own route that's just as good as either of theirs.
"And I'm not. Studying with Tsunade, reaching special jōnin–I ought to be celebrating, but at the same time all it did is show me how much I still don't know. How useless I am at the heights that other medics aren't already handling. Right now, part of me is excited to do the interaction research–put what I learned from Tsunade to work on a level I haven't done before, leave my own mark–but a little part of me is scared that I'll find out I'm still not good enough. Still nowhere near the stuff Tsunade can do blindfolded with both hands tied behind her back. Heck, the stuff she can do
without breakfast. Oh, and there's the realistic possibility of killing myself. Don't get me wrong, I will be taking every imaginable precaution, but Tsunade always says there's no such thing as enough precautions. There will always be a patient you can't save.
"And let's not forget," Noburi finished, "I'm not in Leaf. All the people and resources I was counting on for when we got here? Erased. Gone for good. No hospital, no tools, no senior medics, no library. Just me."
The silence was cold, interrupted only by the half of the team that was cheerfully splashing around in the far half of the pool with no sense of timing.
"So let me make sure I understand correctly," Hazō said after gathering his thoughts, "practical obstacles aside, your main concern is that you're still only a special jōnin at seventeen, and not quite as good as the ancient living gods of medicine whose brains are bursting with rare texts and forbidden lore and the results of forty years' worth of research and, in
at least one case, crazy self-modifications that only a tunnel-visioned obsessive would ever risk. You're also worried that your bonds with the people around you, including arguably the world's greatest sealmaster and creative visionary,
definitely the world's foremost research safety expert, a probably global expert in doing things to the brain even the Three don't know how to do, the princess of optimisation who had the resources of half a village and will again, a soon-to-be-resurrected S-rank sealmaster and ninjutsu creator, et cetera et cetera, will dramatically slow down your progress compared to the man who only has his one apprentice and the woman who only has a bunch of subordinates who at best learned from her to begin with. You're right, Noburi. You've already failed and might as well respec into a field where you have more growth potential while you're still young. Maybe Yuno can teach you underwater basketweaving. It's actually pretty fun."
Noburi tried to glower, but it didn't come naturally to him, and the bitterness fizzled out before it could gain momentum.
"Fine, make light of my deepest feelings, why don't you?"
"I will," Hazō promised, "every time they get between you and the happiness you deserve. Noburi, for real, you are not behind the curve. First, because there is no curve. Everybody grows at their own rate, and running into the right opportunities is as important as patiently accumulating experience day by day. The half of my power that doesn't come from seals I've researched comes from being in the right place at the right time and seizing the opportunity, like when I looked at that summoning scroll, or when I got to study the Great Seal, or when we won Asuma's competition and I got the Dog Scroll–which actually led to the other two, now I think of it. For as long as you're by my side, I promise you, you will regularly run into S-rank weird crazy shit–heck, look where we are right now–and you may not be a fifty-year-old demigod just yet, but I know you've got the talent and ambition to seize those opportunities just like they once did.
"Second, because you're going to take that curve that doesn't exist and break it in half. There's an up-front investment to be made for WHOOSH that might make you feel like you're stalling for a while, but my lists say the pay-off's a beast, and my lists never lie. Once that's done with and we secure you a stable chakra supply again–and we
will–you'll be learning at a rate that would make those three-in-a-generation geniuses weep. You'll make your own path because you'll have to, because everybody else's path will be so slow it hurts. By the time
you're fifty, you'll have cured death, aging, and stupidity, and Tsunade will be studying the textbooks you've written while Orochimaru will be extremely dead after you turned off his immortality with your little finger and then blew him away with the S-rank ninjutsu you never stopped learning because you're just that talented. The lists never lie."
"Didn't Ami once give you a post-interaction survey that mathematically proved you were doomed to marry her?"
"And I
was doomed to marry her, more than once," Hazō fired back. "It's just that I always got out of it because I am also a genius who's busy breaking the curve in half, and I
especially don't bow down to fate."
Noburi snorted. "I don't think that's how any of that works. But… thanks for the pep talk. I'd forgotten how good at those you were."
"Any time," Hazō said. "Now, before you dive into your research with renewed vigour, I
will need your help for a few days figuring out the chakra water for my runecrafting. After that, your time is all yours. Team Uplift really hasn't been leveraging your potential as a researcher, but from now on, you can consider that your main job. Well, that and keeping us alive. I'd appreciate it if you didn't slack off on that just because medicine's more interesting."
"My Yuno might be able to compete with medicine in my heart," Noburi said thoughtfully. "No promises for the rest of you."
"If that's a hint that I should be trying to seduce you, dream on,"Hazō said with his best Iron Nerve straight face. "I like my girlfriends slim, long-haired, and female. I also enjoy not being murdered, though I can see where recent events might have confused you about that." He glanced back in the direction of the tunnel.
"One more thing," Hazō said, largely in order not to part on that note. "I might need to pick up some medical lore, at most some basic medical ninjutsu, for the sake of any biological runes I try to make. I like keeping my options open. Also, I might want to study biosealing one day." He gave the obligatory pause.
Noburi took a couple of seconds to react. "Oh, no," he said flatly. "Help, help, this insane lunatic is going to get himself and/or us killed in some particularly horrifying fashion, and maybe go evil and turn into mini-Orochimaru first. Woe is us. Hazō, what on earth are you thinking."
"Is that the best you've got?" Hazō demanded.
"Hey, it's been a long day and I'm tired. Take it from your doctor, pep talks are no substitute for collapsing into an exhausted mess for a few hours. And anyway, you've already heard what I've got to say on the subject, and coming up with new material takes time. Maybe we could have some kind of shortcut for when I'm not in the mood. You tell me you want to study biosealing, and I say BS, which is short for 'biosealing speech', and then you imagine a couple of minutes of Noburi screaming and ranting in your head."
"Genius," Hazō said in wonder as the possibilities began to flood into his head. "This could revolutionise the Clear Communication Technique. Screw the Nara. We'll be faster and better. They'll still be in the middle of using their hands while we'll already have finished using tongue alone."
Noburi was giving him a strange look, but it was too late. The medic had shown him how to take his technique to another level, and now Hazō urgently needed a practice partner. And what luck, Kei, the co-creator of the original, was right there, dripping wet from her relaxation time and surely open to a well-phrased invitation. In fact, he should see if Tenten was up for three-way experimentation, so as to demonstrate how well his technique would work with her preference for brevity.
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