Keiko stood in front of Hazō, arms crossed. That eerie icy glint that he sometimes caught in her eyes was currently in full effect.
"Hazō, I have been taking your suggestions for my training seriously up until now," Keiko explained in a measured voice, "because although your plans tend to be rough and incomplete, I respect your understanding of long-term strategy and prioritisation. This, however? This is the most absurd thing anyone has ever asked of me."
"It's not like I'm suggesting anything unreasonable, Keiko," Hazō doggedly carried on the argument. "All I want you to do is let me tie you up with this rope and then do exactly as I tell you."
He felt a sudden preternatural shiver, but didn't have time to move before Inoue-sensei's hand came down on top of his head like a godly hammer of hair-ruffling judgement.
"Well," Inoue-sensei grinned, "aren't you two a pair of early bloomers? Hazō, Keiko, it looks like it's time we had a little talk. I didn't expect to have to do it so soon, and I admit I didn't expect it would be you two, but sometimes you've just got to roll with the punches."
"Inoue-sensei, what—"
"Hush," she waved Hazō into silence, "this is important. And by the sound of it, we need to start at the very beginning. Kids, wanting to make each other feel good is one of the most fundamental human drives. There's nothing wrong with it, and don't ever let anyone tell you different. But both parties have to be fully on board—if you try to make someone feel good when they don't want you to, you're going to hurt them. And depending on what you were trying to do and how the other person reacts, you could just both be really embarrassed, or you could lose a friend, or you could scar somebody's soul forever, the way intense torture does. Needing consent is an iron rule of sexual relationships.
"Now," she continued, looking straight at a mortified Hazō, "sometimes making someone feel good might involve doing things to them that you'd normally only do to an enemy—like tying them up or forcing them to obey your orders. You might think consent is more complicated in those cases. It's not. We'll talk about safewords in a bit, but the long and the short of it is that if Keiko says no, that means no, and you stop asking. The flip side is that you never say no when you mean yes, or when you want to be convinced—once you start giving out mixed signals, you're well on the way to wrecking things for yourself and the entire rest of the female gender."
"But Inoue-sensei—"
"Yes, Keiko, I know, all of the above goes for both genders, and I'm covering some very complicated issues in very basic ways. You can ask your questions once I'm finished, or find me later. Now, let's talk about protection…"
-o-
It was days before Hazō and Keiko could look each other in the eye.
-o-
"That's not what he meant, Inoue-sensei," Keiko patiently explained the following morning. "His ridiculous idea was intended so I could practice my fingering with the Zephyr's Reach Technique. He thinks I should get better at handling delicate objects, and using it while leaving my hands free."
Inoue-sensei gave a sagely nod. "I might have known he'd see the creative applications of that technique straight away. There's a reason it's considered one of the Twelve Great Ninjutsu of the Bedchamber."
"But Inoue-sensei, that's not—"
"It's all right, Keiko. You don't have to hide these things from me. I assure you, it's been a very long time since I could be embarrassed by anything sexual. Heck, I'm proud of you!"
Keiko gritted her teeth. "I—you—you are impossible!"
Keiko stomped off in a huff in Hazō's general direction. Inoue-sensei watched her go, a mischievous smile playing about her lips.
-o-
Hazō was setting up his experimental seal-testing environment when Noburi came over to talk to him. For some reason, the boy seemed ill-at-ease, his face tense and his fingers unconsciously curling in and out of fists.
"Hazō, I know about you and Keiko."
"You... oh." Hazō stopped what he was doing immediately and redirected all mental resources to emergency damage control.
"I saw Inoue-sensei giving you and Keiko the Talk together last night, with all the hand gestures. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but then she gave it to me this morning."
Hazō chose to keep the hand gestures where they were, sealed in the deepest and most inaccessible vaults of his memory. "No, Noburi—"
Noburi held his hand up for silence, his voice trembling a little. "Hazō, Keiko is a very special girl, so if you and she are going to be together now, you have make sure you take care of… of…"
He broke off for a second.
"Dammit, Hazō, how could you?" His voice returned as a mixture of anger and sadness. "You've got Akane practically worshipping the ground you tread on, and you still had to… you had to go and…"
Hazō sighed, quietly incrementing his Revenge on Inoue-sensei Counter. "It was all a misunderstanding, Noburi. Inoue-sensei's just being weird. I don't have any… designs… on Keiko at all."
"Really?" Noburi's voice rose in unrestrained hope.
This was the moment that Keiko chose to storm into the experimental area.
"Hazō, tie me up immediately. We will demonstrate to Inoue-sensei what you want me to do with my hands."
-o-
Hazō lay on his back and stared up at the peaceful blue sky above, wondering when Noburi had learned to punch so hard. The boy had run off after socking Hazō in the jaw, and Keiko was sitting silently on a tree stump, apparently having some kind of breakdown at the collective insanity of all those around her.
The only thing that could possibly make matters worse would be… ah, yes, here she was. Akane's expression was unreadable as she came into view above him.
"Handless Zephyr's Reach training?" she asked briskly, almost as if ticking off a checksheet.
"Yes," Hazō replied with an immediacy born of shock.
"Inoue-sensei messing with us all?"
"Yes."
"Just friends with Mori?"
"Yes."
"I'll go catch Noburi and sort things out."
At that moment, Hazō could have kissed her.
-o-
After catching up with the pacified Noburi, Hazō had taken him into a private corner of the training area for a little talk.
"About earlier…"
"No, sorry, Hazō, it was my bad," Noburi quickly cut him off. "It was stupid of me to jump to conclusions. And you're really not—"
Hazō did not resist the temptation to roll his eyes.
"Noburi, I do not have feelings for Keiko, I have never had feelings for Keiko, and she's not really my type so I don't expect that to change anytime soon. And if it did, I'd talk to you before making any big decisions, because you're my friend and I don't want to hurt you."
"Wow," Noburi said quietly after a few seconds. "I've just realised I was acting like a total dick. I've really got to make more of an effort to listen to what you're saying.
"Still," he brightened up, "at least now I can cheer you and Akane on with a clear heart!"
Hazō blinked. "What? Noburi, we're master and apprentice—we don't have the kind of relationship where you think about romance. That would just be weird. It would be like one of us four having feelings for Inoue-sensei. And she's older than me and she still has a crush on that genin from Leaf. There is nothing going on at all whatsoever—you know, just like between me and Keiko.
"Speaking of whom, I should find her and start our training. Once Keiko started practising in front of Inoue-sensei, she decided my Zephyr's Reach idea wasn't as bad as she first thought."
-o-
"So since we're preparing for the trip, I was just wondering if you'd like to join us, Kagome-sensei."
Kagome's eyes narrowed even further than usual. "Why would I want to leave here? Here is safe. Are you trying to get me killed? Are you trying to get everyone killed? Is that your game?"
Hazō sighed wearily. "Kagome-sensei, you don't have to go if you don't want to. But as I told you, Iron is probably going to get very hot soon, and I think it would be safer for all of us to be somewhere else when all the Liberator stuff goes down."
Kagome nodded thoughtfully. "There's sense in that. But you've got a team, and you're expecting me to trust all of them. Any one of them could be a spy. Hell, they could all be spies. That jōnin of yours—what'd you say her speciality was?"
"Oh, she's a genjutsu and seduction specialist," Hazō said off-handedly, catching himself when it was just too late.
Kagome jumped up. "Genjutsu? Seduction? So that's what this was about all along! Get close to old Yū, sucker him into trusting you… and then I wake up one day and I'm a helpless toy in her hands!"
Hazō had a sudden brainwave. "You've never seen her close up, have you, Kagome-sensei? Before you come to any conclusions, let me show you a picture of what she looks like."
He slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out Inoue-sensei's Wanted poster.
Kagome stared at it (once it was brought over to him via clone). "Helpless toy… in her hands…" he muttered in a slightly distant voice.
"Uh, Kagome-sensei?"
Kagome gave him a stunned look as if snapping out of a daydream.
"What?"
"Do you think you'll be interested in coming with us?"
Kagome shrugged with an unconvincing show of apathy. "I guess I might think about it. Say, your jōnin's name isn't Ayako, is it?"
"Um, no. It's Inoue Mari. Why?"
"None of your business," Kagome snapped.
Then his gaze softened. "They all lie to you, kid. Never forget that. The worst ones aren't the ones that lie about being your enemies. It's the ones that lie about being your friends."
-o-
It was a warm evening. Hazō was practising his sealcrafting, Noburi was busy ingratiating himself with the local merchants, and Inoue-sensei was away, doing whatever it was Inoue-sensei did when she was not spreading chaos within the ranks of her own team. That left only Kei and Akane, folding spiky local plants into caltrops together, in Kei's case without the use of her hands.
After experimenting in front of Inoue-sensei (not like that! Ugh, it felt as if her mind was forever tainted by the events of the last couple of days), Kei had decided that Hazō's basic plan was sound. She then proceeded to discard roughly eighty percent of it, and refine the rest. Excessively subtle tasks such as dice manipulation and carrying powders were categorically impossible. Excessively fast or forceful tasks such as throwing and deflecting shuriken likewise. Furthermore, his general draconian strategy bordered on the creepy. (Would Kei have objected had it been Inoue-sensei who asked her to? She was under no obligation to answer that question.)
Overall, she felt Hazō had very limited understanding of the implications of sealless ninjutsu. It could only be applied to the most basic techniques, and there was inevitably a price to pay—there was a reason even S-rank ninja invariably used hand seals. In the case of the Substitution Technique, it was primarily range. In the case of Zephyr's Reach, you would normally regulate the flow of chakra through your hands to keep the stream of air and the manipulator on its end unseen while you mentally controlled them. Without that, they became a faint green shimmer in the air, not dazzling but not invisible either.
Another of Hazō's recurring flaws, Kei continued mentally grumbling, was his failure to plan around their resources. They were (always) low on funds, and Hazō had decided to schedule addressing this problem for after individual training, and yet he expected her to practise picking locks, and Ishihara to construct tools (physically impossible tools in some cases), in the meantime.
That left caltrops as one of the few things Ishihara could usefully make right now, but Kei was bitterly regretting her decision to help as part of her ninjutsu training. She had already been feeling irritated before she came here, and she had not anticipated anything like this degree of incompatibility.
"I'm just saying, Mori. You're on a team with Hazō-sensei, one of the most youthful men I know, and Inoue-sensei, who practically has too much youthfulness, and we're on a journey to see the world and become stronger. Why are you being so pessimistic?"
"Would you kindly abandon the act?" Kei very nearly growled. "Righteous Face Punching Style was an unsuccessful joke. Hazō never took it seriously. Your pretending to do so is nothing more than an embarrassment."
Ishihara smiled beatifically. "Maito Gai, Leaf's greatest jōnin, says that embarrassment is what happens when you try and inevitably fail to behave like other people. It doesn't apply to those who are in touch with their own youth."
"A perfect example!" Kei exclaimed. "All you are doing is casting platitudes in my general direction! A statement is not true merely because it is appealing. You continue to act as if we are on some great adventure, when the truth is that we are locked in a constant struggle to survive, and your… your wilful obliviousness is only endangering us further!"
To Kei's deep, deep horror, Akane lowered the caltrop she was folding to the ground, moved over next to her, and nearly placed her arm around Kei's shoulder before hesitating.
"Trust me," Ishihara said softly, "everything is going to be all right. You're a gifted ninja, in a powerful team filled with passion and determination. We're going to figure out where we want to be in life, and then we will all work hard, and share our strengths and cover each other's weaknesses, until we finally get there. And in the meantime, I'll be here whenever you need a big sister to lean on."
Caught completely off-guard, Kei teetered on the edge between accepting her senior's misguided kindness (together with her unnerving physical proximity) and fleeing as was only natural and acceptable. After a second, her instincts made the decision for her.
"I have a big sister," she said as she rose to leave. "And if I ever see her again, either she or I will die."
Akane stared past Mori's retreating back, in the vague direction of Leaf. "Everything is going to be all right," she repeated to no one in particular.
