You're unhelpable when you mourn
Clocks tick and bells still ring
The world carries on next morn
But nobody does a thing
Whispering behind their hands
Lost for kind words to say
Nobody understands
Then everyone goes away
Jōnin wanna fix things
When they can't it only fills them with shame
So they praise Wills of Fire
Is it being greedy to ask people to think of her
And say her name?
Seems when you lose your one
No one turns off the sun
You must weather the storm
You're unhelpable when you mourn
Especially her father's face, as his thoughts flashed back to the long-gone moment when he told Hazō-the-missing-nin to stay away from Akane because all he could bring her was heartache and danger.
Oof. Gut punch to the feels.
How was Hazō supposed to tell him that he had been right?
Hazō is hurting right now, but he literally extended her life by a lot. And we're all agreed that he'll do it again. He got her out of the Liberator debacle, and got her survivability-enhancing seals by the hundred, which might well have saved her skin during several missions.
Hazō took a military bath (fast enough but thorough enough to satisfy the angriest of instructors)
Practical, useful. Probably enough repetition to be engrained in supernatural eidetic muscle memory and natural memory alike. Reminiscent of Mist's exacting academy standards. Calling back to how Hazō used to be berated by the instructors too. Military standards - done in a mechanical way, simultaneously for thinking, because of Hazō's "shell-shock", because of his "puppet self" thing...
Holy shit how can you fit so many layers in a bath?
Sage damn it I love it when the curtains are blue.
He could remember, dimly, his father's death. The memories felt dreamlike, almost unreal, memories of someone else who happened to be observing a mourning child. He could see, now, that the child had been drowning—drowning in grief, drowning in confusion, drowning in anger.
Hat
(which all French people wear at all times) tipped low to FaintlySorcerous for this visceral yet relatable description. The entire omake, really. Cathartic, clever, beautifully worded.
He catalogued her makeup before looking beneath it; the powder revealed worry lines, artfully-smudged darkness at the corners of her eyes distracted from barely-visible bags, mascara offset bloodshot eyes. He kept looking, seeing the tension in her jaw, the clenched teeth, the—
Was thinking earlier today at how Mari acts so adult always, she's been Team Mum forever but even before - she's a twenty-something, right? But the way she acts regularly would be expected from someone ten years older, and the way she deals with her own demons and her past screams "someone in their 60s"... if we find Yagura in the underworld, let's make him pay twice over for the horrors of the Bloody Mist.
She was keeping it together, and that worried him.
RIGHT???
It had a doorway but no door.
The dual symbolism of doors, simultaneously ways in and obstacles, reduced to unconditional entry granted all. Classy.
As always, it wasn't pure. It was too many different kinds of things, all lumped together. He didn't have names for them, but he knew them the way he knew friends.
... are we gonna Mendeleev speedrun?
He had heard Kagome-sensei talk about it. Mica! That was it. While living in the woods, Sensei had found a sheet of it that he had repurposed into a hand-sized mirror with which to shave.
He likes rocks. We might have his next birthday present, tbh. Expertly-sculpted, beautiful as can be, rock-based mirror.
He stared, and then he smiled and pulled all of it together again to form the first version of a statue. A statue of his lost love, Gōketsu Akane.
Beautiful.
Asuma nodded acknowledgement and took one of the cookies.
Has he been growing a sweet tough specifically since he stopped smoking, or am I unobservant and it was already there? I think that's not the first time he's got cookies.
the idiots of the Kurosawa got their noses out of joint about your father and then refused to lose face by backing down.
Hard to lose face when keeping your face under control is literally your bloodline's main power.
Anyway, I'd like to lay out for you exactly what's going on and why.
LORD HOKAGE ASUMA SIR I LOVE YOU
Right now, Ruka gets that benefit and I'm sure it makes you grind your teeth."
Hazō carefully unclenched his jaw. "Not at all, sir."
Hahahahahahahahahahaha
Asuma snorted. "Here's your first lesson in Clan Headship: get better at lying."
Oh, he'll come to regret saying this. I mean, I hope he won't have to, but realistically he will.
"I immediately regret my words,"
.... it seems that sometimes, I share more than a name with a prophet. xD
It's possible that one or two of them would start loading up wagons and finding lodgings outside of Leaf.
I'm fairly confident that most clans and jōnin have readied caches and safehouses, secret and hidden, throughout at least all of Fire.
"Hagoromo Ruka is being banished. Technically, she's being permanently assigned to a post on the very edge of Leaf, but she isn't going to be rotated out and will be given explicit orders to remain on station 24/7. Contact with her family and friends will be heavily restricted; no visitors, one resupply mission per month, all mail in and out redacted of anything that isn't mission relevant. There is no one else at her post so she'll be alone, with no one to talk to and no one to watch her back against threats. Agents will check in frequently to ensure that she has not left her post or had unsanctioned outside contact. If they find that she has then she will be in direct violation of orders and will be declared a missing-nin with a kill-on-sight order."
Oooooh, that's morally conflicting. Beyond the ethics and morals of it, she's basically being tested and pushed to fault, too.
You and Lord Hagoromo are never going to like each other
We can still pretend, right? At least to see Ritsuo's face?
If you have suggestions on a better way to heal the breech between the Gōketsu and the Hagoromo, I'm willing to use those instead.
CAN WE ADOPT HARUMITSU, THEY CAN HAVE HARU
More seriously... yeah, I can totally see Asuma's plan work like a charm, if the GED classes happening aren't on Gōketsu grounds (so we don't have to have spy scares). I mean we're angry at the Hagoromo who follow Ritsuo's lead, but Ritsuo and some of his cronies hate all of Gōketsu: we do have less work to do to heal the rift, and they'll literally help us with doing our education job. It's win-win for us as far as I'm concerned. As for the KEI classes... we get to better our KEI standing, really. The Hagoromo probably won't. But if they do, hey, that's good. Clan-KEI relations improving is a good thing.
