"Keiko, there is not one thing you just said that makes sense!"
"On the contrary, I can provide extensive—"
"Hold it," Hazō said. "You can get back to telling us how much you suck when I'm done."
He took a deep breath.
"Did you or did you not just walk out of that arena as the Chūnin Exam champion? Do you realise that by definition that makes you the greatest genin in the world?"
Keiko opened her mouth.
"I'm not done," Hazō snapped. "Have we, or have we not, repeatedly bet our lives on your planning skills, and always come out alive and sometimes unharmed? Are you, or are you not, a key part of the lives of many people, all of whom clearly have better judgement than you?
"Which part of that lets you say that we're not allowed to take care of you?"
Silence. Keiko thinking. Had he got through to her?
"You are missing the point," Keiko said. Hazō decided that just because the table was going to be replaced anyway didn't mean he should beat his head against it.
"You declare me to have objective value because you lack a clear point of reference. There is nothing about me that makes me particularly suited to being the Pangolin Summoner, and in fact I possess a number of features that render me less fit for the purpose. Countless shinobi would have fared better with the same resources. In regard to planning, I have stated before that I am average at best by Mori standards, and it is merely ill fortune that you were burdened with such, as opposed to a superior logistician, and an emotionally unstable one at that. Ultimately, I am interchangeable, indeed best interchanged in order to serve the needs of the clan—"
Something in Hazō snapped.
"Fuck the clan!"
Keiko and Noburi reeled back.
"I-I beg your pardon?"
"The clan means nothing," Hazo snarled. "Jiraiya invented it because it was useful. We signed up because it was useful. You do not get to decide your value based on a new surname, a nice house and a bottomless pit of responsibilities none of us asked for."
"Hazō…" Noburi began.
"Still talking. We accepted the label, and we accepted the baggage that came with it, because it was the best way for everyone to get what they wanted. We got rid of Akane, and are in the middle of getting rid of Keiko, because that's what we thought was best for this clan that we'd all created. And by 'we', I half-mean Jiraiya, because we let him make the most important choices for us.
"I'm not saying we dismantle the clan. We can't and we shouldn't. But you and you and me, Kagome-sensei and Mari-sensei and Akane, are not the Gōketsu. We are Team Uplift, and always were."
He could see Noburi and Keiko frowning, not sure where this was going or why. Hazō's own momentum was starting to stall, but then inspiration flared like a bonfire being struck by a fireball.
"We don't know what it's like to have normal families. Keiko, you and I had our lives revolve around a single person, and we lost them two years ago, and even if we can get them back, the kind of relationship we had back then is gone forever. Kagome-sensei was alone for too long, and on some level he's still getting his head around what it means to have friends. Mari-sensei's family destroyed her. Noburi, you're an exception except when you aren't, and I guess Akane's normal because of course she is. And Jiraiya's an orphan with a weird, tangled family that keeps leaving him behind. Maybe one day I'll even consider him one of us, as soon as he stops using fear to keep us in line.
"We don't know what it's like to have normal families, but I've made a decision. I've had enough of acting like having 'Gōketsu' in front of our names tells us who we are to each other. I've had enough of "stepsister", and "adopted sister", and "sibling", and "clansib", whatever that means. I can't even keep them straight in my head. Noburi, you're my brother. Keiko, you're my sister. Kagome-sensei is my crazy uncle, if he wants to be. Mari-sensei isn't quite a big sister, and isn't quite a mother, and maybe we'll come up with a new word for what she is, but she's as much one of us as the rest. Maybe it's time we asked her about dropping the 'sensei'. And Akane being my sister would have been weird before, but I guess that problem has solved itself.
"Keiko, we are your family now. The word 'value' doesn't mean anything to family."
"Hazō, I do not know if I am ready to have a family," Keiko said with an edge of panic.
"Look at it this way," Noburi chipped in, "nobody is born knowing what to do. Especially into a family as weird as this one. We're all going to be making it up as we go along, even me."
"But I have already failed my birth family!" Keiko pleaded. "Profoundly and repeatedly. I even brought suffering to Ami!"
"Keiko," Hazō said bluntly, "we don't care. We are not interested in whether you can justify yourself. We are not interested in whether you think you're good or bad. We are not interested in whether we could have got a better deal, or whether you're high- or low-maintenance, and above all, we don't care if you succeed or fail. We've decided that we're your family, and there's nothing you can do about it."
