Ino was a truly beautiful young woman. Sunsets and properly-drawn brush strokes beautiful. Hazō was reminded of this every time she came through a door, or laughed, or cocked her head and gave him that little half-smile with the dancing light in her eyes that said she was about to tease him in some subtle way that he might or might not understand. He was even reminded of it by the way her 'o's were rounded like fresh cookies.
Tonight, when she came through the door, she was wearing that smile for the first three seconds and then it disappeared to be replaced by the expression of a sealmaster who noticed a misplaced drop of ink a moment before infusion.
He had been waiting in the private reception room for ten minutes while one of the women who made his heart sing finished up the daily business of being the leader of one of the most important families in the world. His feet were arranged with exacting care in the well of the kotatsu and the blanket draped around him. The room was well-stocked with pillows, their fullness apple-red to the eye and mesmerizing to the touch, and he had carefully stacked and tucked and punched and folded until his damaged body was properly supported. He thought he had managed to make his position look casual but Ino saw through it like onion skin.
"Hazō? Are you okay?" She paced to him, steps long and hurried, and settled carefully beside him, slipping her legs under the kotatsu blanket and resting slim fingers on his bicep.
"I'm..." Midway through the phatic he ran out of energy to dissemble and let the words trail away into a sigh. "I'm tired, Ino. That's all."
"This looks like a little more than tired."
He shook his head. "Not like that. I didn't sleep well, but it's more just... Everything else, really. I'm tired of running from one mess to the next. Tired of being stupid and saying the wrong thing all the time. Tired of everyone looking to me to solve every problem. Tired of worrying about how we're going to keep food on the table and still pay all these debts. Tired of knowing that..." He shook his head. "It's just dumb stuff. I don't want to ruin the moment. How are you doing?"
"I'm worried about my boyfriend." The word still carried the wariness of a doe finding a bush too heavily laden with ripe berries: Things too good to be true often weren't. "What kind of dumb stuff?"
"Really, it's nothing."
"Hazō."
He sighed. "Kagome-sensei shot down an idea I had for interconnected trisection. It was pretty cool too. It would let you reduce transmission lag by twenty percent, which means you could interweave a fourth node without having to worry about cross contamination. That would let you use a third-chord harmonic to—"
He stopped as he saw the tiny little smile on her face.
"I was babbling again, wasn't I?"
"It's okay. You're cute when you get technical. You get swept off somewhere else." She studied him for a moment, ocean eyes curious. "Do you even see me when you go there?"
He bit his lip nervously. "I...it's not that I'm ignoring you."
She cupped his face for a moment. "It's okay, really."
He considered continuing. Of trying to find a way to describe what it was like to put brush to paper and trace the cracks of drying Paint. How those brief moments made a noisy brain quiet, of how they were one of the three ways that he knew to render his existence peaceful, and the only one that worked when he was alone.
Explaining all that would be like offering a bookbinder's masterwork to the illiterate, and he strongly suspected that he would be mocked for eternity were he to mention that the other two methods of quieting his brain were to sit silently with either Akane or Ino leaned back against him, his arms around her and the scent of her hair in his nose. Ino smelled of the fresh peaches infused into the water with which she bathed her hair each morning. Akane smelled of the outdoors in whatever season prevailed, and often very faintly of vibrant exercise.
"I'm sorry anyway."
"It's okay, really. So Kagome shot it down?"
"Yeah." He shrugged. "It's fine. Better that he got it now than that I based further work on it and all of it be unsafe. Still, he can be a bit...blunt. And it was already a bad day."
"Why?"
He sighed and slid an arm around her waist, badly needing to quiet his own brain. She took the hint and turned, settling with her back against his chest and side. Her fingers traced down the outside of his arm, drawing a brief hum of pleasure. He stroked her hair softly, meditatively, feeling the world go calm and slow around himself. The only light was from the three candles arranged on the kotatsu; they rippled across her skin like water lapping on a beach.
"I talked to Haru last night, about the disciplinary action. He was polite but..."
She waited patiently for him to grope his way to the words and then offered her own. "But he was distant and formal and it made you sad, because you would like to be his friend but you need to be his Clan Head?"
"Yes."
She rubbed her head on his shoulder in brief comfort. "I know how it feels. I'm having to do it myself, mostly with people older than me who have been my teachers my entire life. There may even have been a few diaper changers and knee-dandlers in the mix somewhere." She huffed in softly amused frustration. "You're lucky, in a way. Mari and Kagome were your teachers but only for a couple years and they have no particular ambitions and no experience having been in a clan. You're setting all the rules and expectations from scratch instead of rebuilding them."
"I suppose."
"Was that all?" The words were quiet but the ones that followed ran on hurried feet. "Not that it isn't enough. I didn't mean—"
He pressed a kiss to her temple. "It's okay. No, it wasn't all. It wasn't important. Just stuff."
"Like what?"
"We've got a couple sick people who aren't responding to treatment by the herbalists and physikers but all the medic-nin are busy with newly-arrived survivors from the front. And then we found out that we got a bad batch of tubers. Not only did it spoil all the food in the pantry but now we've got maggot worms running around the kitchen and food storage. If we don't get them out before they pupate we'll have to burn the place down and rebuild."
"Are they dangerous?"
"Maybe if you tried to eat one and choked on it, but that's about it. Mostly they just stink to the treetops." He sighed and shifted slightly to ease his leg.
"And you're tired of hurting."
"No, it's—"
She stroked one hand down the back of his head. "I won't tell."
"Okay. Yeah, I'm tired of hurting. Lady Tsunade gave me medicine that makes the pain be far away but I can't think when I'm on it." His fist clenched at his side. "I'm tired of being so
weak, so damn
useless. I can barely walk faster than a child and I've got no strength in my legs and—" He cut himself off. "I'll get over it, I know. I'm mending and pretty soon I'll be allowed to do physical therapy to get back some of the muscle tone."
"Is this your first time being injured?"
"To this level, yes. I've been banged up before, but nothing that took me off the mission roster."
She tipped her head back so she could look at him enough to stroke his hair. "It will be okay, really. We've had plenty of people get hurt over the years and they've all recovered. Lady Tsunade and the medics she trained are the best."
"Sure." He huffed in annoyance. "Besides, I don't have
time to be busted up. There's two separate wars going on and I can't do anything about either of them. Cannai needs things and I...I'm just tired, Ino."
"I know." She lay there, cuddled into him and reaching back and up so she could stroke his hair for several seconds. "Anything else?" she asked softly.
"Akane."
She nodded, still looking at him upside down. "Why?"
"She wanted me to do something and I didn't. Or, at least, not yet."
"Is it about Haru murdering those Yakuza?"
He looked down in surprise. "You know about that?"
"Everyone knows about that, Hazō. It's all over town."
He rubbed his face with his free hand. "Of course it is."
"You did call a meeting of your entire clan," she said carefully. "Did you think it would stay covert with that many people in on it?"
"I suppose I didn't really think about it. I was trying get through the latest crisis, didn't look far enough ahead." He sighed. "I'll do better."
"I know." She shifted a bit, rising up on her knees so she could kiss his temple again and tuck his head under her chin and wrap her arms around him.
It was a vulnerable position. Years of ninja training and time in the woods told him that being grappled like this was a danger, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He let his eyes fall shut and drifted, watching from a distance as his breathing slowed and deepened.
The heat from the kotatsu's brazier soaked his feet and the heat of Ino's throat seeped through his head. Far off, possibly in a different wing of the house, he could hear a baby crying. The noises of the estate were a susurration in the background, the sounds of homes and lives that weren't his responsibility.
"I brought poetry," he murmured without opening his eyes.
Ino's chest spasmed as she suppressed a laugh. "You brought me poetry?"
"Mm-hm."
"
You brought me poetry."
"I can bring you poetry if I want to."
She settled back into seiza, one hand still resting lightly on the back of his neck and a smile in her voice. "You, Mr Plans to Change the World, Daimyo of Lists, Breaker of Convention, and Stomper of Paradigms, brought me poetry."
He opened his eyes so he could glower at her properly. "I have depths."
Her face shivered in a life-and-death battle against laughter. "I've never doubted it."
He glowered a moment longer and sniffed. "Do you want the poetry or not?"
"Did you write it?" He couldn't tell if the words were kittenishly inviting or drenched in dread; Ino was still a woman of impenetrable mystery when she wanted to be.
"I wouldn't do that to you. It's a collection by Master Tanaka. Tanaka Ryōji, not Tanaka Fumio. His
third collection."
"His third?!"
"I noticed last time that you didn't have it so I asked Mai to dig up a copy. She found one in a private collection in Keishi."
"She went all the way to Keishi just to get me a book of poetry?"
"She was coming back from a courier mission and I asked her to divert a few hours to check the city since it was on her way."
She raised one eyebrow and studied him, doubt drawn across her face like curtains. "'On her way'? Where exactly was she coming from?"
The answer was '
Tani, in River' but certainty had settled raven-like on his shoulder, whispering of the mockery that would come if he admitted it. Especially the part about how Mai had spent a full day and part of another scouring the place and delaying her return as a result. Still within the allotted time but only barely.
"Do you want the poetry or not?"
"Yes! Yes, I want it. Thank you, Hazō." She leaned in and pressed her lips to his in gratitude. The scent of peaches flowered around him.
She leaned back, watching in amusement as he got his breathing back under control, and then she nodded towards the vase on the kotatsu. "Also for me?"
"Mm-hm. And I took Mari with me to the shop and had her arrange them there so that the owner could tell me if she was playing any pranks."
Ino gasped dismay, one heart pressed to her chest in horror. "You had
another woman arrange your gift of flowers?! Hazō, don't you understand what that means?! How could you?! If you really wanted to leave me for Mari, there are kinder ways to do it! I know she's prettier than I am, but she's too old for you!" The words trembled away and she bowed her head, flaxen curtains of silk falling across her face. Her shoulders shook, once, in suppressed tears.
Alarm clutched at his stomach but he pushed it away and surveyed her the way he would have surveyed a potential ambush site. Yup. She was barely even trying to hide it. It became even more obvious when she tipped her head so she could peak up through her lashes to see his reaction.
"You're messing with me again," he grumbled.
Her grin was stolen straight from a prankster street urchin. "A little. And hey, look! You caught it."
"Harumph."
She cuddled up against him, head tipped on his shoulder and right arm wrapped around his stomach, the third-arm problem meaning that her left was awkwardly squinched up so that he could slip his around her shoulders. "It's sweet of you, thank you."
"You're welcome. If there's anything else I can do, let me know. For you, for the Yamanaka, whatever. I don't think I'm very good at this boyfriend thing, but I'd like to be."
She chuckled and patted him on the chest. "You're doing fine. Now hug me and hush."
Author's Note: You didn't mention seals because Mari and Kagome were not okay giving away your unique seals and the Yamanaka get discounts from the Nara on their mundane stuff while the Gōketsu's limited production capacity is already maxed out producing for yourselves.
This update covered 24 hours.
XP AWARD: 4
Brevity XP: 1
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EDIT: Some things that didn't get addressed from the plan:
- DONE
- (offscreen) Send Mari with Haru to yakuza families
- Mari is there as bodyguard, Haru does the talking
- Bring wergild
- Haru is paroled for the duration of the war, Hazou will revisit the issue afterwards
- INCOMPLETE There wasn't a good time to do it since Hazō was busy all day.
- (offscreen) Seal Research:
- While it's raining:
- Test acid macerators
- (If Kagome approves) test many SIN-10s
- Verify if permanent MEW can be produced with 10,000kg of granite+dirt on a skytower.
- Try a MEW every 1000 kg and work up
- DONE. You found some weavers and gave them some spider buttrope. They're experimenting with it and will get back to you in a week. Cannai has told the dogs to spread the word that you're looking for someone who is willing to hunt bison for trade. He said it might take a couple weeks so don't bother including it in plans until then.
- (offscreen) Delegate details of bison and spidersilk trade to Gaku
- Find civilian weavers and give them a sample, don't proceed if they're unable to work with the spidersilk.
- If they can produce quality garments, offer them adoption
- Approach Meiori and Aburame for a possible collaboration
