Hazō thought he was holding her tight, but Kurosawa Hana's hug was stronger than Kuroda-sensei's Secret Mist Taijutsu Art: Infernal Rib-Breaker, a grappling move he claimed he'd once used to slay a chakra bear (which, according to Hazō's fellow students, was a confession of fratricide). He could feel himself starting to get dizzy from lack of air, and the pressure on all his new bruises wasn't ideal either, but just now he found that he didn't particularly mind.
In the background, there was a hissing sound like a pair of kunai being slid back into their sheaths.
Finally, Mum disengaged. She reached out and closed the door behind her.
"You're here," Hazō exclaimed. "You're really here!"
"I'm really here, cricket," she said, stroking his head.
A few seconds later, she finally began to look up.
"I apologise for my precipitous behaviour—" she stopped sharply. Her stance changed to a Kurosawa form Hazō didn't know.
"Not at all," Mari-sensei smiled. "Jiraiya told me this might happen."
"Is Lord Hokage here?" Mum asked.
"Still working. But if you'd like to join us for dinner…"
"No," Mum said stiffly to Mari, "I have inconvenienced you enough. I will locate my lodgings and contact Lord Hokage to arrange a meeting on a different occasion."
"Please, Mum…" Hazō didn't know or care about the formal implications of the situation. She was here, finally here. He couldn't bear to let her go for anything in the world.
She looked down at him. A little warmth returned to her eyes.
"Please," Keiko added. "I have greatly anticipated meeting you." She hadn't mentioned anything of the sort to Hazō, but he was grateful for the unexpected support.
"Well," Mum said uncertainly, "I suppose if you insist on my staying—"
"I'm here!" came a scream from down the hallway. "Everyone get down, I'm going to blast those stinkers to—"
In a flash, Mari-sensei was at Kagome-sensei's side, gently pushing down his tag-filled hands. "Just an unexpected guest, Kagome. Nothing to worry about."
"But she was screaming and breaking down the door!"
Mum, in full diplomat mode, managed not to look embarrassed at this.
"You must be Kagome?" she asked. "The sealmaster? I saw your trap array outside. Very fine work."
Kagome-sensei eyed her suspiciously. "How'd you get through, huh? I know for a fact the safe route to our front door isn't lit up tonight."
"It was a trap array," Mum repeated with a touch of puzzlement. "You just have to pay attention. It did, however, contribute to my loss of composure, for which, again, I apologise."
"Who're you supposed to be, anyway?" Kagome-sensei asked.
"Kurosawa Hana," Mum gave Bow Four: Proud But Non-Threatening. "Hazō's mother and special envoy of the Village Hidden in the Mist."
"Huh." Kagome-sensei awkwardly shuffled his explosive tags out of sight. "Kagome. Gōketsu Kagome. Sorry about the trying-to-kill-you thing."
"This is normal for a first-contact negotiator in the diplomatic corps. Please pay it no mind."
Keiko stepped forward uneasily. "My name is Keiko. Pleased to meet you."
"A pleasure. Thank you for always looking out for my son."
"I'm Mari—"
"I know who you are."
A chill wind blew through the room.
"Of course you do," Mari-sensei said lightly. "Please come inside. Tonight's dish is grilled wrasse with Akimichi-style five-flavoured rice."
Hazō looked up at Mum pleadingly.
"Thank you for your hospitality," Mum said as she allowed herself to be led into the dining room.
She took a seat next to Hazō, placing everyone between her and Mari-sensei.
"There are fewer people here than I expected," she remarked.
"Jiraiya is up late working," Mari-sensei explained, "and Noburi is otherwise engaged. That means a full third of our clan is away."
Mum nodded as if acknowledging some unseen implication.
Her gaze shifted to Hazō, then to Mari-sensei again.
"May I ask why my son has been subjected to excessive violence?" The tone was calm, but with a certain "before the storm" quality about it.
"It's not her fault, Mum," Hazō interceded quickly. "I just decided to spend today challenging jōnin to fights."
Mum's eyebrows crept upwards.
"
Why did you decide to spend today challenging jōnin to fights?"
"It seemed like a good idea at the—training. It was all for training."
"Do you… often spend the day challenging jōnin to fights?"
Hazō shook his head. "No, this was purely spur of the moment."
Mum gave Mari-sensei a piercing look, as if to say, "And you let him do this kind of thing?"
Which annoyed Hazō a little. He was a grown man now, nearly a chūnin. He could make his own decisions about when to get beaten up by jōnin.
"Please do not be concerned," Keiko said. "Hazō commits bizarre and irrational acts on a daily basis, and they seldom have lasting consequences."
"That isn't as reassuring as you may think, dear."
"Apologies. My standards for what constitutes a crisis may have been warped over long-term exposure to this family."
"I'm sorry to hear that. I would, however, be delighted to hear more about these bizarre and irrational acts you speak of."
"Of course, ma'am."
"Please, Keiko, call me Hana."
"I will endeavour to. As to the matter of Hazō's daily life, only recently—"
"So, Mum," Hazō interrupted. "How was your journey? Did you encounter any interesting objects and/or individuals?"
-o-
The dinner had been a nerve-wracking affair. Mum had quickly taken to Keiko, and was plainly planning to mine her for every last embarrassing detail of Hazō's recent life. She had made it mortifyingly clear that she was prepared to let the exchange of information flow both ways, and Hazō had no idea how to prevent the looming double disaster.
Kagome-sensei had been predictably shy around strangers, though Mum tried to engage him in conversation a few times, and even made a little headway by praising his cooking and asking for advice on how to better secure her diplomatic quarters (conflict of interest? What conflict of interest?).
Mum and Mari-sensei had said little to each other beyond asking to pass the salt and a minimal number of purely factual statements. The flawless coordination with which they failed to communicate, and the care with which they phrased anything addressed to Hazō, made him wonder if he'd already missed some kind of silent exchange. He had a very bad feeling about this, made worse by the uncertain sense that every time he spoke to either Mum or Mari-sensei, he was shifting some kind of sophisticated balance to potentially disastrous effect. It wasn't difficult to imagine what could be happening between his mother and the woman partly responsible for him becoming a missing-nin, even if the mechanics were going completely over his head, and he had no idea what to do about it. The meal's only saving grace was that Keiko was available as neutral ground for both women to speak to without implications, though being the target of so much focused socialising was visibly draining her will to live. Why had Jiraiya and Noburi chosen this night of all nights to be away?
At least it was all done now. Keiko had beaten a swift retreat as soon as the meal was over, and Mari-sensei had made her own excuses, followed by leading away a confused Kagome-sensei.
"So, cricket," Mum said, finally taking off her diplomat mask (one of those dual masks, with amiable courtesy on one side and dispassionate subjugation on the other) now that they were alone, "want to go catch up in your room?"
"Actually, do you think we could bake cookies instead?"
Mum gave him a puzzled look.
"Not that I don't like to hear that you've spent two years waiting to taste my cooking again, but I think using someone's oven to bake on your very first visit to their home might be a bit much. Tell me you haven't done that to any major clans."
Hazō saw the opportunity. If he could just help Mum see Mari-sensei as he saw her, affectionate and playful rather than Shikigami's faceless fellow traitor…
"Weeeeelllll…" he said, "not exactly, but there was this one time Mari-sensei tricked me into delivering a confession bouquet to the Yamanaka heir…"
"Did she now."
"Yeah," Hazō said, leading Mum up the stairs. "In fact, now I think of it, that was also the night she first told me her plan to marry Jiraiya and get us adopted, months before we'd even decided to bargain for Leaf citizenship, and managed to completely convince me it was a joke. Huh. But let me tell you the story in order…"
-o-
Mum was the perfect audience. She laughed at his friends' antics, gasped at the "plot twists" of his life, and held him close whenever he had to stop because some memories hurt to touch. It was far from the first time he'd narrated some version of his adventures, but the first time he felt like he could freely talk about what they meant to him.
The factual details were harder to handle. Mum was still a Mist ninja. On a legal and political level, she and Hazō were a single step away from war. There was so much he had to omit from his account. He couldn't boast about skywalkers. He couldn't talk about all those civilian sailors' blood on his hands, or about Minami's death at the hands of the vengeful yakuza. He didn't even mention their pangolin issues because that might count as information of strategic importance (at least as far as summoners were concerned). It was so, so hard, compartmentalising everything away from the person he trusted most, double-checking every word before he said it, but tonight of all nights, he couldn't afford to let OPSEC slip. If Mum learned anything she was obliged to report to Mist, the divided loyalties would hurt her far more than the wall Hazō was forced to put up between them.
He didn't talk to her about the breakup. He wanted to—he wanted to bury himself in her arms and finally let himself cry, even if it meant admitting how much of an idiot he'd been to the person whose opinion mattered most—but he held back. She was tired, and as emotionally exhausted as him after the narration of his life post-Mist, and it was too much to throw at her. Maybe another time. Maybe tomorrow. Because he
would see her again tomorrow, if only to confirm that tonight hadn't been a dream.
There was plenty else they didn't talk about. Not how, by his village's law, he was another mother's child. Not how Mum was here—here in Leaf, and here in this house—only on the Hokage's sufferance, with no legal standing except what he had chosen to accord her, easy to get rid of if she overstepped. Not how she'd had to leave her entire life behind in order to get even that much. So many wounds healed and so many new ones opened.
He talked to her about Uplift, though. That one belief transcended village barriers by definition. That one part of him, latent during their years together, was something that he had to share with her no matter what. He talked to her, and she tried to understand like nobody else had tried.
She understood the gap between clans and common ninja better than anyone. She didn't understand why civilians' lives were so important, but because she could see how much it mattered to him, she tried to see the world through his eyes. And she was horrified, properly horrified, at the idea of scorch squads, which told him once and for all that she was not complicit and, until now, not even aware of the problem. She said, eventually, that they had to stop for now because she needed time to think, but in the meantime… she was proud of him. She was proud of him.
Eventually, they ran out of words, and for the rest of their bittersweet reunion, she simply stroked his head as it lay in her lap.
-o-
Hana came down later than expected, but Mari had been prepared to wait. They needed to have this conversation before things went any further. She didn't want to think what it would mean for Hazō if he had to keep watching the two mother figures in his life at each other's throats, especially not now when he so badly needed them as sources of support. Besides, she'd always known that she'd have to pay the price for her sins someday. Might as well get it over with.
"I'm sorry to keep you up when you probably haven't had a chance to unpack," she said, "but I was hoping to have a word with you before you left—to clear the air between us." She beckoned to the bloodletting chamber they'd repurposed into a conference room.
Hana followed. There was no Kurosawa diplomacy to her body language this time, or at least no technique that Mari could detect. Hana was a predator with claws unsheathed.
"Yes,
Inoue, let's clear the air." Hana's eyes locked onto hers. "You took my son from me. If you were anything other than the Hokage's wife, you would be dead where you stand."
Mari reeled on the inside. She had plans for hostility. Hatred. Even threats. This… this was pure killing intent. It was a threat only in the same way that an incoming fireball was a threat.
Part of her mind naturally engaged in survival mode. Mari
was the Hokage's wife, legal minutiae notwithstanding. Hana acknowledged this. Would she stay rational? Mari, who was barely starting to grasp the kind of family bonds that were natural to Hana, already knew that she herself would defend her family to the death. If Hana saw her as a genuine threat to her son, rightly or wrongly, Mari had no doubt she'd be engaged in a life-or-death battle. It was still possible right now, if unlikely—a jōnin of Hana's calibre would hardly attack immediately after giving warning, rather than waiting for Mari to lower her guard again.
It was an unfavourable matchup—Mari could hold her own at CQC against most women, but Hana was a swordswoman with superior natural reach
and she was ready for genjutsu. She'd be vulnerable in the moment she went for her swords, which could be in a storage scroll somewhere on her person, but she would have accounted for that. A Kurosawa always had the right move ready.
Most important of all, Hana was a combat specialist who had lived to her thirties. Unless the mission specified otherwise, Mist's standard doctrine was to sacrifice one team member so that the rest could get away.
"Make a move, Inoue."
Oh, yes, the Kurosawa were a diplomat clan as well, trained to read body language since birth using generations of clan secrets, versus Mari's standard Mist training followed by learning from experience. A reminder of that eternal gap between commoners and clan ninja.
"Please," Hana said, a cruel smile finding its way onto her face, "make this self-defence. I've spent two years waiting."
Mari had to defuse the situation. She was better than this. Getting into trouble and then talking her way out of it had been her way of life for as long as she could remember.
"Please, Hana, I know it was a—"
"I did not give you permission to use my given name."
"I made one mistake," Mari said, "and I've spent all this time trying to make up for it. I'm not asking for forgiveness, but please judge me on
all of the facts."
"I know all of the facts," Kurosawa said, "and not just the ones in the Mist dossiers. You think I don't remember you, Inoue? Caring about nothing but your own pleasure, sleeping around and living in drug dens and doing other things I won't dirty my mouth with, leaving a trail of broken hearts and corrupted innocents in your wake? Kanna was weak-willed. Shikigami was a fallen idealist. But you… you didn't have anywhere further left to fall."
That condemnation was a heavier blow than Kurosawa knew, and not just because every single word of it was true. Jōnin were the village's heroes, beloved and feared all at once. Even Captain Zabuza, who'd cared about nothing but his work, couldn't escape his own legend. Kurosawa Hana was no exception. How could Mari not have known about her, the woman who'd mastered combat and diplomacy both, turning enemies into loyal allies or destroying them as the mission demanded—all without ever sacrificing her dignity or her integrity?
Even after she abandoned the Kurosawa Clan in order to be true to herself, and the clans' smear campaign portrayed her as a selfish traitor lest others follow her example, she didn't compromise. Even after the Kurosawa elders convinced the Mizukage that it was inappropriate for her to represent Mist in top-level negotiations and her income plummeted, she didn't compromise. Even after her husband died and she was left to take care of her child on her own in relative poverty, she didn't compromise.
She was everything Mari could never be.
It was pure chance that led Mari to be friends with Hazō's instructor, long after she had herself become a jōnin and ceased to need or want role models. Pure chance that had promoted him to her attention. Then, the bright child with a valuable bloodline was a natural candidate for Shikigami's list. And yet… Kurosawa Shin ticked the exact same boxes, but with clan training and a better record. Why had Mari chosen Hana's son? Had she been trying to step out of or into her shadow?
Pure chance struck again. Hazō had been among those Mari rescued. His presence both constantly whispered that she could be more and constantly reminded her that she was less. Still, at least he was not his mother.
Then Kurosawa Hana had returned, unchanged, charging into the dragon's den at the first opportunity purely because it was the right thing to do. Made a direct part of Mari's life, perhaps forever.
But Mari was an adult now. They should have been equals. They should have been strangers. It shouldn't hurt that the woman she'd admired so long ago had nothing but contempt for her, had never had anything but contempt for her.
"Everything you've said is true," Mari said, steeling herself. "I'm self-aware enough to know that. But everything Hazō must have said is true as well. I made a choice. I took them with me. I put their welfare ahead of my own. They were a second chance I did not deserve, but however much you hate me, Kurosawa, you must admit that I took that second chance."
Kurosawa shook her head, rejecting the appeal.
"You took my son away for your own use, and then you took him again. You didn't know him, Inoue, or those other poor children. You picked them up at the last second because you ran into them by coincidence and you recognised an opportunity. Tickets to redemption. Convenient tools to make up for a lifetime of callous selfishness. Or are you going to look me in the eye and claim that you cared about their individual welfare before, while they were dying one by one in the swamp?"
Keiko.
Noburi and Hazō had been tag-alongs at first, it was true, but Keiko… Keiko had been her miracle. The right person at the right time, her apathy towards life and death calling to Mari as a reminder of the darkest days of her own childhood. For the first time, somebody she could help with her toolkit meant for psychological destruction. For the first time, somebody she wanted to.
Would Kurosawa believe that, or would it sound like Mari was grasping at straws? Worse, would telling her that her precious son had been an afterthought only fan her anger?
No, Mari decided, she wouldn't bring Keiko into this. Her daughter—yes, her daughter, who did not have a better mother to turn up and demand her back—was finally finding her own happiness. Mari would not drag into her into somebody else's fight.
"Maybe you're right," she said instead. "Or maybe changing who you are is slow, and sometimes you have to use tainted tools because they're all you have. But this isn't about me at all, is it, Kurosawa? What you want to hear, what you want to know, is whether I have Hazō's best interests at heart. I do. It doesn't matter how it happened. It doesn't matter whether I'm a saint or a monster. I want Hazō to be happy and safe, and that isn't going to change."
"Very good," Kurosawa said, her words dripping with venom. "Simple, clear statements, nothing too provocative, a natural progression to the exact thing I want to hear. Professional. I can see how you kept Shikigami dancing to your tune."
Her? Making Shikigami dance? He was the one who—no, not the time, not the point.
"We all know the basics," she went on. "If you want to know who's behind a plot, ask who benefits. If you want to know whether to believe someone, ask
how they benefit. You are a career manipulator saying the exact things that will benefit you the most. That is all you are, in the end."
It was an unwinnable scenario. As a fellow practitioner, Kurosawa would be aware that she had no way of knowing what level Mari was playing at. Mari could be exactly this skilled and being honest, or she could be better than Kurosawa and successfully faking both this level of skill and her honesty. One of the rare times when being an acknowledged expert was the worst thing in the world. Worse still because Kurosawa
had successfully called out part of Mari's strategy, while being diametrically wrong about her intent.
"You can lie, Inoue, but you can't hide the facts. Hazō isn't just an implement for your redemption. He's your meal ticket as well. Do you think I don't know my own son well enough to hear the personal pride in his voice when he tells me that you bargained your way into Leaf? You exploited his talent, which he considers to be more valuable to Leaf than a jōnin clearance's worth of Mist secrets. You even managed to twist a quid-pro-quo negotiation into a successful seduction, which is nothing less than I'd expect of a woman with so much talent and so little self-respect.
"So yes. I do believe that you want Hazō healthy and happy and loyal. He's both a valuable resource and a tool for you to convince yourself that you're no longer the degenerate failure of a human being that you've been for your entire life."
Kurosawa lowered her voice. It was almost gentle.
"But that isn't love, Inoue. It isn't even responsibility. The longer you spend convincing yourself that someone like you is capable of being a parent, the less of you will survive when you finally look into a mirror. If you really think you care about Hazō, you won't let him be there when it happens."
Mari hadn't taken advantage of Hazō. She hadn't. She'd poured so much of herself into protecting him and the others, into keeping them safe and helping them grow. The happiness she'd found in those years, even amidst all the pain and fear, hadn't been a lie.
But what did it mean to say that her happiness wasn't a lie? Her pleasure in her Mist years hadn't been a lie either. She'd used person after person, treating them as tools in ways that Hazō with his innocent worries couldn't even imagine. What was the difference between pleasure and happiness? How could you ever know that you'd stopped treating people as tools, rather than just getting so good at it that you could make them happy too and then use that as another source of pleasure? How could you ever, ever know that you'd stopped lying to yourself?
She'd thought she was changing, but pieces of disproof were flocking over her like vultures brought by Kurosawa's words. Mari had made Keiko fall in love with her, then avoided dealing with the mess even if it doomed Keiko to the agony of spending every day with a woman she could never have. In the Liberator's village, she, the mistress of manipulation, had murdered a young man for being inconvenient even as he was busy giving her the keys to his heart. She had encouraged Hazō to take up the ninja discipline with the highest beginner fatality rate, and hadn't that paid off nicely?
She'd used her forbidden technique to wipe Hazō's memory just so she could avoid a real emotional connection. She, a socially adept jōnin, had made a deeply troubled little girl take on the responsibility of dealing with an entire alien race. She'd broken her word to the rest of the team and prompted Hazō and Akane to pursue the path she wanted for them, then forgot about them until they blundered into a disaster she might have been able to prevent. She'd dragged her genin into a family arrangement they never asked for, selling one off in the process and abandoning another. Then, having got what she wanted, she retired, the jōnin leaving the genin to do traumatic and near-fatal missions on their own.
How many incidents could she remember? How many others felt so natural that they just blended into the background fabric of daily life? How could she prove she'd changed when the opposing narrative was such a perfect fit?
She couldn't tell anymore whether Kurosawa was right or wrong. She reached out into the void, but she couldn't grasp objectivity, or maybe there was no objectivity there to be grasped. But if she left it down to faith, then at the end of this battle which she hadn't meant to be a battle, she simply couldn't believe in the new Mari more strongly than Kurosawa believed in the old.
There was only one conviction that her unstable self could accept with certainty. When she thought of what it meant to be a parent, all she could remember was the man who'd acted as her father, a smiling abuser she'd executed with her own hands, and her mother, who'd chosen to sever their bond of trust rather than disrupt her comfortable life in order to protect her daughter. So if a woman who had spent every day of twelve years showering her son with love and fighting for his sake—a woman who'd raised someone as impossibly pure as Hazō in the hellhole that was Hidden Mist—told her that she was unfit to be a parent, then Mari was unfit to be a parent. She'd always known, in her heart of hearts, but thought that if she pretended hard enough, maybe it would come true.
"You and I will be civil to each other in public because we're both professionals," she vaguely heard Kurosawa say. "But don't forget for a second, Inoue, because I won't…"
For an instant, Mari glimpsed the deep pain behind Kurosawa's eyes, feeding the anger like an unending magma stream feeding a volcano.
"You took my son away from me, and I can never have him back."
-o-
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