It was a grim and miserable morning at the Gōketsu estate.
Yesterday had been a challenging day, from dealing with Kei Ruri and the Pangolin issue to beating his head against the Great Seal replica for the Nth time. Then, just as Hazō was ready to collapse, Akane and Yuno came home from their mission, safe and even triumphant. It should have been an evening of celebration, and Hazō had certainly tried to make it one with a full-scale family dinner. Instead, Akane had headed straight to her room, claiming tiredness, and Yuno had been left to regale the Gōketsu with tales of how they and their Yamanaka teammate had killed two skilled chūnin and captured a jōnin of Rock's ruling clan without a scratch on them… and then wiped out food stores intended to feed thousands in winter, and walked away as the town burned. With the mission taking place late at night, the civilian population had all been home and asleep, or in some cases cowering indoors after hearing the explosions of ninja combat, meaning horrendous initial casualties from the fires that left the townspeople in no state to rescue their food supply (or block the flames from spreading across the tightly-packed buildings of the mountain settlement).
The flames still dancing in Yuno's eyes as she acknowledged her responsibility for thousands of civilian deaths were not encouraging, but Hazō was willing to leave that entire mess to Noburi. He was too busy trying to figure out what on earth to do about the girl who considered every death a tragedy, yet now had a kill count that made the
Sunset Racer look like Academy detention material. Hazō had wrestled with his thoughts all night, and come up with nothing resembling a solution, but as Akane's clan head and her boyfriend, he couldn't leave her to suffer on her own.
"Good morning, Akane."
The love of his life was in her rooftop garden, as was her morning routine come rain or shine (Mari had taken over caring for the plants during Akane's missions as her gardening junior with excellent reflexes; Snowflake, who had helped draft the safety protocols and was functionally immortal, generously filled in using her new freedom on days when both were out). She watered the plants one by one in silence as she stared into the distance.
"Hello, Hazō."
Hazō took a few tentative steps closer to her. His instinct was to reach out, maybe to pull her in for a hug—there were few better ways to start a day than an Akane hug—but he restrained himself. It was dangerous to distract her while she was within attack range of the friskier perennials, and besides, for once she might not be in the mood.
"Your right hand…"
Akane hadn't been injured gardening in months, not since she'd finished taming the mandragora.
Akane looked down at the bandage as if noticing it for the first time. "It looks worse than it is. I've already taken the antidote. It won't be a problem for the mission."
She returned to watering the plants in silence.
Hazō waited. The sense of wrongness persisted. Even a tired Akane normally gave off a stable glow, especially on overcast days like today, when the inferior celestial sun was slacking off on the job and the contrast was more noticeable. Instead, it continued to be a grim and miserable morning, the kind he hadn't seen since the Haru affair.
There was a clunk as Akane replaced the metal watering can in the supply shed.
"Akane," Hazō interrupted her as she reached for the fertiliser. "I didn't get to see much of you yesterday. Do you feel like hanging out a bit before you go out again tomorrow?" The spectre of Gaku hung over his shoulder, reminding him that this morning had been allocated to catching up on end-of-month reports from Gōketsu-affiliated businesses like the Ishihara Workshop. He told it to screw off.
Akane looked down at the bag of fertiliser she'd been reaching for. "Yeah, sure," she said vaguely. "What did you have in mind?"
-o-
You could tell a great deal about a person from the general feel of their room, Hazō believed. His was a place of intellectual stimulation, with diagrams on the walls and wooden models of various inventions that otherwise existed only in his dreams littering his desk. Noburi's was theoretically a place of hospitality, with a door open to set degrees depending on his degree of availability, and a variety of teas and snacks on the other side, but these days it was mostly a place of Yuno, despite her having her own room, and reviewing those living arrangements with them was just another thing on Hazō's to-do list. Kagome-sensei's was a fortress of security, with individual defences and everything arranged just so in order to instantly give away an intruder having gone through his things. Kei's felt somewhat hollow now that she had taken everything of emotional significance with her to the Nara, and did not visit overnight for Mari reasons, but it had once been a place of solitude in the safety of books, writing supplies, and jealously-guarded mementoes. Mari's was… complicated. It should have been a boudoir, Hazō thought with his vaguest of awarenesses of what a boudoir was supposed to be, but the dressing tables and mirrors and languorously-draped clothes and such had bowed to the incursion of a different life. A complete collection of Icha Icha lined the walls. That red haori hung from a hook as if waiting for its master to put it on before heading out. Hazō didn't know what was in the papers in one corner of Mari's work desk, but she'd retrieved them from Jiraiya's notes after Kagome-sensei had given them the all-clear for potential encryption, and never shown them to anyone.
Akane's room was a place of peace. Potted flowers, curated by Ino for maximum safety, stood beneath the broad, open windows. Drawings from the estate's civilian children (and a couple signed "Honoka") decorated the walls. A Church of Youth reprint of
Maito Gai's Guide to Attaining the Spirit of Youth had a little stand of its own in the corner. Akane's bed—
Akane's bed was neat with the blankets tucked in, much like a bed that had been carefully made before going on a mission (it was one of Akane's more morbid habits, like making sure her will was up to date), and not used since.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Hazō burst out. He'd meant to just spend time with her, doing whatever, and hope his presence was reassuring enough for her to talk to him if she was prepared to, but he couldn't watch her suffer and pretend nothing was wrong. He just couldn't. If there was any chance that he could make things even a little bit better…
"I can think about it after the mission," Akane said, walking over to a window. "I mustn't get distracted."
"OK," Hazō said.
For a while, she just looked out the window. Hazō waited, with no idea what to do next.
"I can still see the flames," Akane said in a soft, barely-there voice. "I thought they'd go away by now. I always recover quickly. But I can see them. I can hear the screams. People begging for help. I wanted to help them. Yamanaka said it was better for them to spend a few minutes dying in a fire than to spend weeks starving to death. I had nothing to say to her. She said I shouldn't put faces to collateral damage. I tried to reason with her, before. I tried, but I couldn't think of anything. She was a more experienced ninja, and better at arguing. I didn't know anything Lord Hokage didn't. I realised, after the first granary, that I could knock her out. Take her back to Leaf and face court-martial. Yuno wouldn't help. She said she wouldn't let her best human friend get executed for a bunch of strangers. They were probably evil anyway because most people were. There were houses collapsing in front of us. I couldn't knock her out because I wouldn't be able to carry her and Yamanaka and Shirogane. I had to help with the fires. I'd be a hypocrite if I made them do the dirty work alone. When we brought down the inn, I told myself it couldn't be helped about the people inside. Killing that jōnin would save Leaf ninja. It would end the war faster and save more lives. I said we only had to burn the granaries and warehouses. Yamanaka said the people were already dead. We were just destroying infrastructure so Rock couldn't use it again. Why did it have to be fire? Fire
hurts."
"Akane," Hazō said. He didn't know if he wanted to stop her because she was getting stuck in a loop and it was only getting worse or because he couldn't listen anymore. "I am so sorry."
"It's like this in my head," Akane said. "Over and over. I don't know why. It won't leave me alone. I think that's fair. Being dead won't leave those people alone either. I'll be fine, Hazō. Lots of ninja must be like this on the inside."
Hazō's blood ran cold. He had to do something. He couldn't let Akane be like this. He already didn't know how to help Kei or Snowflake with the self-hatred and pessimism enshrouding them. He didn't know how to help Yuno with her brokenness. He didn't know how to help Kagome-sensei with his paranoia. He didn't even know what was wrong with Mari. Ami was Ami. He couldn't let Akane join them.
"This isn't your fault, Akane," he said. "Do
not shoulder the blame for this. You are not the reason we live in a terrible world where ninja have to commit atrocities to survive, and blaming yourself will not help you undo them. I wish I could undo the
Sunset Racer, but I can't, and no amount of blame will bring me closer."
Akane's eyes widened incredulously. "How is it not my fault, Hazō?
I set the fires. There is nobody else to blame."
"You were trying to protect Leaf and end the war faster," Hazō said. "And you were following orders. I'm not saying that's any absolution—I know I don't feel absolved either—but you didn't do what you did arbitrarily. There is a reason it happened this way, and it is not you."
"No," Akane said. "I was following Lord Hokage's orders. I was following the…"—her voice caught—"the Will of Fire."
Hazō winced on the inside. This was not a good association for a Leaf ninja to develop.
"I always follow orders, like a good girl. Like a good ninja. I've had my one chance not to burn a town. If Lord Hokage orders me to join a scorch squad, that's who I am now. At least it means somebody else won't have to do it."
"
This isn't about you, Akane," Hazō insisted. "It's not about Asuma either. He's locked into taking the actions he has to take, just like you are. It's about the system that keeps the world in a race to the bottom, where killing civilians is another thing that makes sense because not killing them is treated as a weakness which other people will take advantage of.
"The whole thing is an antlion pit. Even here in Leaf, when we tried to use scrip to benefit people, somebody else had to take advantage. Of course war is going to be nothing but atrocities when the people who make the calls are driven by this competition where the worst move wins.
"If you want to live by your ideals, if you aspire to something better than this disastrous status quo, then the world will punish you whenever you deviate from the competition."
Akane shook her head. "I'm not living by my ideals, Hazō. Weren't you listening? I killed thousands of people. Not one of them deserved it. Nobody deserves to be killed, but they weren't even a threat. They were just living their lives. I'm not being punished for being a good person in a bad world. A good person would have stopped them, whatever it took. I'm a hypocrite who'd rather kill thousands of people than… than…"
Hazō struggled for something to say. It was clear to him, crystal clear, that Akane had been cornered, that the fault was with the environment that forced good people to do bad things, not with somebody who always and relentlessly tried to do her best. He felt a seething hatred for the shinobi world that would do something like this to one of its few innocents, and forced it down because it wasn't helping.
"I should leave the clan."
Wait, what?
"What did you say?" Hazō demanded.
"Somebody like me can't be part of Uplift," Akane said. "I've betrayed everything Uplift stands for. Your loyalty's always been to Uplift first and Leaf second. So has everyone else's. I just failed that test, and there's no going back."
"No," Hazō said without hesitation. "I forbid it. You are not going anywhere.
"Akane, nobody can't be part of Uplift. Being forced to do one bad thing does not disqualify you from wanting to make the world a better place. Do you still
believe in Uplift?"
"Do I believe in anything?" Akane asked. "Or am I just empty? Lee told me to believe in Youth, so I believed in Youth. You told me to believe in Uplift, so I believed in Uplift. Lord Hokage told me to kill thousands, so I killed thousands. No amount of fixing worlds or systems can fix someone who thinks like that.
"I'm grateful to you for having faith in me, Hazō. I really am. But I'm not the person I thought I was, and I'm not the person you thought I was either. I'll talk to Kei when I get back from the next mission, and hopefully she can find something useful for me to do where I won't let anyone down.
"I'm sorry, but I really should be getting on with mission prep now. I've got equipment to prepare, and maps to memorise, and I want to get some last-minute athletics training in while it's light. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me."
And then Hazō was outside her room, just like that. He would not under any circumstances let her leave the clan, legal rights be damned, but in the meantime… it seemed an Uplift speech was not the right tool for the job. He really should have considered explosives.
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