"If we go to Jiraiya," Inoue-sensei said, "we can easily bargain Leaf citizenship out of him with those skywalker seals of yours, and with the promise of more great designs to come. We'll be safe without the need to marry anybody.
"You'll have everything you need for your research. You'll be able to be with Akane, and you'll give Leaf very strong reason to rescue your mother. You'll live a life of comfort, protected by Leaf as a top priority, with the influence to guide Leaf to create the better world you dream of. The rest of us will have the same privileges extended to us because they'll want you kept happy. The Yamanaka might even be able to help Keiko and Kagome. Noburi could become a great medic-nin without ever having to put himself in danger by leaving Leaf. I'll retire. None of you will need me anymore.
"It has to be your decision, because while there might be some leeway for the rest of us, you'll be too valuable to ever be allowed out of Leaf again. It's not much of a price to pay for everything you'd gain—everything we'd gain—but it's something you have to agree to before we bring it before the rest of the team.
"What do you say, Hazō?"
Hazō stared in shock at his teacher for one...two...three...five long seconds before lunging forward and catching her in a massive hug that squeezed all the air out of her.
"Are you crazy?" he demanded at last, pushing her back to arm's length. "Sensei, what do you mean we won't need you? We'll always need you! You're the only thing that's been keeping us together for a year now!"
She looked away.
Hazō shook her gently. "Keiko is alive because of you! Back in the swamp she was about ready to kill herself, and you pulled her out of it. And you've kept her together ever since—who else could have talked her down when she decided that none of us cared about her? You think Noburi could have done it, who still hasn't completely gotten over that crush or lost those insecurities? No! Kagome-sensei, who can barely stand to be around people? No! Me?" He laughed, sharp and bitter. "No! She would have decided she was worthless and left, and probably ended up dead."
It wasn't working; she was still looking away, still not swatting his hands off. Panic gaped beneath his feet as he scrambled for more words.
"Who kept Kagome-sensei sane in Leaf—and everywhere, for that matter? You think I haven't noticed that you're always the one to wake him up, and that you always sit between us and him when he's feeling especially nervous? Yes! I have noticed, and you know why? Because you taught me to notice things like that!
"Who kept the team from splintering after I screwed up with Jiraiya? You! You gave people a chance to say what they needed, you let them have a couple weeks of hazing to work out their mad, you kept it all structured and safe, and now everyone is pretty much okay with me again. You did that!"
She pushed his hands off and stepped back slightly. "Hazō, stop being dramatic. This isn't about me, it's about you and your decision. Now, I think—"
"It is exactly about you," he said, relief as she finally asserted herself again morphing almost immediately into frustration. "Sensei...." He took a deep breath nerving himself up; he could almost feel the world shift around him, clicking into a new pattern. "Mari-sensei, we would be lost without you."
She looked at him in surprise and he hurried to continue before she interrupted. "Mari-sensei, everything this team is, we are because of you. For one example, my Roki style is the only reason I survived against Bōsatsu; Roki is entirely based on the training you gave me in body language and microexpressions. Without your training we'd all be dead."
"Ah, good. A fighting style based around lying. At least I'm consistent." She grimaced. "We wouldn't have been in that situation at all if I hadn't killed Ko back in the fortress."
"What else were you supposed to do?" Hazō demanded. "He knew your real name and he was a creepy stalker who would have been trailing around behind us all the time, probably revealing our names and secrets to everyone. It was a forced move and you made the right choice."
She sighed. "It wasn't a choice, Hazō. I didn't stop to think about it, I just killed him. Stupid. Thoughtless, just like always. I should have had a plan."
Why was she being so ridiculous? "Oh, yes," he said sarcastically, "because 'hey, what if a random stalker who was perving on me back when we were in the Academy and still perfectly remembers my disguises after twenty years—"
"Twenty?" Arched eyebrow of sharpness.
Raised hands of placation. "Sorry. Still, over a decade. How in the world were you supposed to account for that in your planning?"
Sigh. "I shouldn't have reused the henge."
Now that was just ridiculous. She was doing this on purpose, wasn't she? "Why not? You told us yourself: 'Having a preestablished disguise that you've practiced is useful. It makes it easy to get all the details exactly right each time you assume the form, so that you don't end up with size seven feet one time and size eight the next, or a mole that isn't in quite the same place.' There was absolutely no reason to expect that it wasn't safe."
"But—"
"But nothing. Stop looking for reasons to doubt yourself. That's Keiko's routine, and you're not allowed to steal her act." Memories of his firey sensei's words over the last year, in the moments when she'd been most herself, surged to mind. "You are Inoue Mari, our teacher, our guide, our team mom. You are the living flame, dancing from battle to bar with song in your heart and mischief in your eye! You kick ass and take names and addresses for later! You go where you want, do what you want, seduce Sannin, charm people, break hearts and take hearts depending on your mood."
Raised eyebrow of amusement. "Throwing my own brags back at me? Remind me to talk to you when I need my memoir ghostwritten. Also, 'team mom'?"
He shrugged and smiled unrepentantly. "What? It fits. You look after us, you keep us from hurting ourselves, you help us grow up into good people. Look at what you've accomplished: Noburi and I get along, because of your training—"
"You did that on your own, I didn't—"
"All I did was ask myself 'What would Mari-sensei do?' and the answer was obvious: she'd charm him, open up and be vulnerable to him so that it shifted from a confrontation to a conversation."
Narrow-eyed stare. "I don't think I had taught you that back when you first did it. I think you're justifying things after the fact to make me feel better."
"Isn't that how you would have handled it?"
"Well...."
Hah! "There, see! And look at the team dynamics. Noburi and I grew to be friends, rough edges and brotherly competition and all. Keiko is slowly coming out of her shell—"
Unladylike snort. "Very slowly."
"So you admit she's getting better?"
"Well..."
"So is Kagome-sensei. You've kept him mostly calm for a year now—"
"He hasn't even been with us for a year, and besides—"
It was working! She was reduced to nitpicking now. "Months, then. You've kept him from running off or accidentally killing any of us, kept him from blowing everything up when we met Jiraiya in Rice, kept him from killing Arikada out of hand so that we could get the reward, kept him from killing anyone while we were in Leaf—and don't think I didn't see how hard that was!—and you did almost all of it with just words. Sure, you had to genjutsu him once or twice when things got really hairy, but that's on him. For the most part you've kept him centered and relatively calm just with words even when we were in a killbox. Do you think Jiraiya could have done that? No!"
Mari-sensei snorted. "Yes, well, Jiraiya doesn't wield the mighty power of tits. I doubt Kagome would have responded well to having the Toad Sage cuddle up to him."
"You did it, and it worked," he said firmly. "That's all that matters. No one else in that room could have kept him sane through that." Her mouth opened and he hurried on. "And don't you dare say that it was your fault that we were there. That was on me. I didn't think, I just shot my mouth off. The one time that I didn't pay attention to what you've been teaching me all this time, and I had to do it in front of Jiraiya of the Three. That's not you failing at teaching, that's me failing at having a brain."
She sighed, looking away again. Hazō studied her in suprise—her normally mobile face, the face that had eye-twinkles and smiles the way most people had skin, was utterly slack in an expression of sheer hopelessness.
"Hazō...." She shook her head and sat down, sitting crosslegged with elbows leaning on knees. "Hazō, I don't know if I can do this anymore. You're sweet to say all those things but we both know that you're cherrypicking the good and glossing over the bad. You've built me up to be this paragon of skill and human kindness, but that's just not me. I'm a liar, a manipulator. I'm not really good with people, I'm just good at making them do what I want. And I'm sure as shit not worth all the trust you seem to have in me." Her fingers plucked at the grass like ravens idly picking at a corpse. Her hair fell in front of her face, hiding her from sight.
He knelt seiza in front of her and reached out to brush her hair aside so he could see her face, only to find his wrist caught in a steely grip and pushed aside.
"Don't," she said. "Just don't. Leave me alone, Hazō."
He put his hands in his lap and kept his voice soft. "Why?"
She sat silent for long seconds before finally looking up at him. "For one thing, you literally wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for me. You'd be home, safe, with your mother. So would Keiko and Noburi. Mori Ami wouldn't be crying her eyes out about her missing sister. Kurosawa Hana wouldn't be drowning in the loss of her son.
"Shikigami was the one who thought up the idea of defecting, but he brought it to me and I figured out the details. I forged the papers he 'found' in the Commander's tent that convinced everyone it was a suicide mission and made it okay to defect—after all, if our leaders had betrayed us we surely had no obligation to them, right?
"That wasn't all, either. All the propaganda that he used, all the little psychological tricks? Those were mine. I wrote that big inspiring speech that he made back in the cave. He had great delivery and presence, but I was way better at getting the words right. And I was his shill when he got everyone laughing about Captain Zabuza's boxers. We planned that so that whenever people found themselves thinking about hunter-nin they would think about Captain Zabuza's underwear. Something ridiculous enough to distract them from the very serious threat. And, of course, we used that speech to cut off the chance that the Captain or anyone else could talk anyone into taking amnesty."
...
...
She what?!
Anger surged through him as the memories of momma sobbing into poppa's shirt after his death clamored for attention. Was she doing the same now, her face buried in one of Hazō's old shirts? She'd needed to be strong for him; who was she being strong for now? What did Mari-sensei mean 'drowning'? What did she know? For that matter, how did she know? She was just guessing, right?
"Oh." Everything crashing inside him prevented anything more meaningful from escaping.
She nodded. "Yeah. 'Oh.'"
He thought about that carefully, doing everything he could to set aside his emotional reaction and consider the matter honestly.
"Why?" he asked eventually.
She looked at the grass and offered a one-shouldered shrug. "Because I could. Because the Mizukage scared me. Because I knew that someday he'd kill me. Because I didn't like the way that Mist ran, and I thought we could do better.
"It was supposed to be easy. Recruit ninja that we knew would be willing to go with us, ninja who would plausibly defect but wouldn't be so important to Mist that they would make it a drop-everything priority to hunt us down. We'd set up a village in the Swamp, build something solid for six months to a year, then reveal ourselves to Leaf. We'd try for client state status and bargain down to citizenship if we had to. Leaf would have taken us; we would have been too valuable not to. Then that patrol dogged us on the way in, which blew our cover sooner than expected. Then I heard Jiraiya was sniffing around, and I knew the game was up."
She fell silent again, fingers trailing limply through the grass. "Do you know," she said without looking up, the curtain of her hair hiding her away from the world, "we had a conversation like this once before?"
Hazō frowned. "We did? I'm pretty sure I'd remember if you had confessed to orchestrating our departure from Mist before today."
She shook her head, setting her hair swaying like a curtain. "Not the subject matter. That's new this time. No, we had a conversation where I found myself feeling like I do now. Weak. Exposed."
She looked up and gestured vaguely around them. "It was back in Tea, after game night. I was up on the hill watching the stars and you came up that way, looking to be alone and not knowing that I was there."
She shifted uncomfortably, looking back at where her fingers were idly shredding a blade of grass. "You were feeling cut off from the others. We talked for a while, and I told you what it was like from my side. How I didn't know what to do. How I'm not this elite jōnin that the rest of you see me as, I'm just the gawky teenager from a few years ago who's somehow tricked everyone into believing she's a grownup. That I don't have some great plan for how to keep us alive and make the world better, I'm just making it up as I go along and I'm dropping the ball more and more."
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Chills danced along Hazō's spine. "I don't remember this conversation," he said carefully.
Her laugh was grim. "Nope. Truth Lost in the Fog...all the catharsis of personal conversations, none of the ongoing vulnerability. I wasn't willing to look weak in front of my team, so I killed you."
Hazō's eyebrows shot up. "I'm pretty sure I'd remember that." He poked his thigh experimentally. "Still alive, as far as I can tell." The sheer insanity of the topic was good; it build a wall between himself and the emotions.
"This Hazō is, sure," she said, lips twisting in self-disgust. "The Hazō I told my secrets to? Dead. I ripped his mind out and he died."
Hazō blinked, thinking that through. "So...you're saying that taking a few minutes of memories from me is equivalent to killing me?"
"Isn't it? What are we if not our thoughts and memories?" She shifted, looking at him intensely. "That's what I do, little Hazō. I warp people's understanding of reality, whether with genjutsu or with words. I change the things that make them who they are so that they become someone more convenient for me."
He studied her, carefully holding his face still until it finally split open in laughter. The sound bordered on hysterical as the anger and confusion and everything else transmuted into laughter.
He managed to choke the laugh back after his face began to hurt. The pain felt good, the laughter felt good. Clean, scouring away everything that had been so close to overwhelming him. "Mari-sensei, you are so full of crap."
"Excuse me?!"
"Sensei, we all try to make other people into something more convenient. Shoot, I'm doing it right now—I'm trying to warp your understanding of reality so that you'll stop beating yourself up about things that aren't your fault and will recognize just how amazing you are."
"Damnit, Hazō! This is not funny! I have lied to you, betrayed you, killed you even, and I keep dropping the ball when it matters. You are stupid to trust me. How can you be so incredibly stupidly stubborn not to see that?"
He shrugged, face splitting open in a grin as the laughter threatened to bubble forth again. "Hey, what can I say, I had—"
"—a good teacher, yes, of course you'd say that." She clenched her fists in frustration. "Hazō...seriously, you need to stop being so trusting. I just told you that I've betrayed you, and you're trying to make excuses. You're cherrypicking, spinning things, choosing just the bits that make me look good—"
"So you admit there are things that make you look good? Progress!" He pumped his fist in the air in over-the-top silliness, hilarity buoying him up.
"Stop it! What is wrong with you?"
"My sensei is full of crap?" he asked, eyes innocently wide. "The elite jōnin who taught me way more about being a ninja than the Academy ever did is being stupid? The woman who taught me almost as much about being a good person as my momma did is feeling like a failure because she's focused on the one time that she couldn't magically anticipate that her student would say something dumb, instead of on the hundreds of times her training prevented him saying something dumb?" He laughed. "You want cherrypicking, sensei? How's that for cherrypicking—you're calling out the tiny handful of things you've done wrong instead of all the many, many things that you've done right?"
He leaned in close, peering at her forehead with an intense frown. She watched him distrustfully.
"What are you doing?"
He rubbed his chin in thought. "I'm trying to figure out how you fit all that ego into such a tiny little head." It really was tiny too; funny how he tended to forget just how small Mari-sensei was. Probably something about being repeatedly dumped on his head during sparring.
"Hey!"
He leaned back, more laughter escaping. "Honestly, sensei, expecting yourself to be flawlessly perfect every single time? You don't think that's a little arrogant? Seriously, if Noburi said 'I am always flawlessly perfect', you'd think he was being egotistical, right?"
"Noburi, huh? Because of course you would never say such a thing," she said drily.
Hazō shrugged modestly. "Of course not. I'm far too perfect to be egotistical. And because I'm perfect I am right about the fact that my Mari-sensei is completely full of shit and needs to get over herself. Sure, you aren't some Sage-like perfect vision of perfect perfection all the time, but you're the only thing that's stood between this team and an early grave. The only thing that's kept us all working together instead of breaking down into squabbles. The only thing that's helped Keiko come out of her depression, if only a little bit, and helped Kagome get more socialized, if only a little bit. The only thing—"
"All right, all right," she said, waving him to silence with an uncomfortable look. "Stop singing my praises."
"Not until you say it."
She looked at him, narrow-eyed. "Say what?"
"Not until you say 'I, Inoue Mari, am not perfect but I'm pretty damn cool.'"
"I am not saying that."
"The only thing that's kept us all growing stronger and stronger when we could have just lain around feeling sorry for ourselves. The only thing—"
"Stop it, Hazō."
"Say it."
"I am not saying that."
"Saaaayyyy eeett!"
"No."
"I'll tell Kagome-sensei that you said you found sealing theory fascinating and would love it if he'd tell you every last detail about—"
"IInoueMariamnotperfectbutI'mprettydamncool!"
He laughed. "See, was that so hard?"
She tried to glare at him but couldn't keep it up. "I suppose." She sighed. "I'll think about it, anyway. Now, we were talking about you and Leaf."
Hazō eyed her for a moment. "Don't think I don't see what you're doing, Mari-sensei. You're deflecting, projecting reluctant agreement while shifting the topic so it will seem that I've convinced you. You know how I know that?"
She glared at him, sour-faced. "Because I taught you?" she grated.
"Because you taught me."
Inoue Mari was talented enough at emotional projection that even her grunts could contain multitudes: exasperation, irritation, depression, and a really powerful desire to be doing anything except having this conversation.
"Yes, well, maybe I'm deflecting, but it's important," she said at last. "What are you going to do about Leaf?"
Hazō nodded, forcing the smile off his face and taking three deep breath as he centered himself. This was no time for hysterical laughter. It really was an important question. "That's a tough one." He paused. "I think I really need to talk to the rest of the team about it. You're right about all the things you mentioned—except you retiring because we won't need you anymore, because we totally will—but there's a lot of issues, too. Kagome-sensei being the most immediate."
She nodded. "Yep. That's a bit of a sticking point. He would not want to go back."
Raised eyebrow. "'Would not want to go back'? Congratulations, Mari-sensei, I think you just won the award for Understatement of the Decade."
She stuck out her tongue. "Would you prefer 'would be strongly opposed to going back'?"
"I think the words 'catastrophic explosions' need to fit in there somewhere," Hazō said. "He'd probably think we'd all been taken over by lupchanzen."
Her sigh was more of frustration and amusement than the despair that had filled it minutes earlier. "Probably, yes. Still. I'm fairly sure I could handle it."
"Really?" A wealth of skepticism, all jammed into one word.
She grimaced. "Yeah. The only thing stronger than his paranoia is his dedication to this team. I could play on that, convince him that he has to go along to keep the rest of us safe." She shrugged one shoulder. "Easiest way would be to tell him that it was all your idea and that I thought you were insane but I couldn't change your mind, so I was reluctantly going along to keep an eye on you. I'd tell him that I had no right to ask him to stick his head in the lion's mouth but that I really needed his help and would he please not hate me for asking him to come along? I'd look at him hopefully, flash a microexpression of fear, and he'd start throwing gear in his pack while muttering about stinking ninja stinkers."
She paused, smiling sadly. "You know, it's funny...he's probably the most honest person I've ever met. Before we met him I had actually forgotten how many masks I wore. Since then I've started noticing it again. Noticing how I calculate my tone and my words, my expressions, my gestures. How I instinctively choose exactly the right angle of the head to inspire whatever emotion I want in m...." She stopped, lips curling in dismay and disgust. "I started to say 'in my target'. Patterns of years aren't lost in months, I guess." She shrugged. "I'm not sure if I'm losing my masks or becoming them."
Hazō floundered, adrift. The conversation had seemed to be moving in a better direction, and suddenly it was in deep water again.
"How do you mean, 'becoming them'?" he asked cautiously.
She shifted, turning to face him a little more squarely. "Remember back when we found Isan and I was interrogating that kid?"
"Yes...?"
"Remember how I said I was tired of killing people, of lying and seducing and hurting? 'I don't need to kill you and I don't want to kill you', I said. Very dramatic, very inspiring. Moment of real vulnerability, right?" She snorted. "It was total bullshit. I had no problem killing him, I just knew that the vulnerable act would be more effective. Torture is usually slow and not good at getting information. On the other hand, take a strapping young ninja who's young and dumb and full of cum, make him feel sorry for the poor, tiny, helpless, sexy woman and he'll start talking. Get him talking and he'll spill whatever secrets you want." A half-smile, sad and twisted, flickered across her full lips before vanishing like a soap bubble. "And I made sure to mention in passing that we had a med-nin. Seemed pretty good odds that they wouldn't have one.
"Funny thing though: masks can become truth. I really have gotten tired of killing people, and since Kagome joined us I've gotten tired of lying and seducing, and everything else I've built my life on." Her eyes drifted off into the distance and she snorted in frustrated amusement. "The man is infuriating. Social skills worse than a wet cat and he's got me feeling like I should be more like him."
She stopped, perhaps thinking or perhaps losing her train of thought. Hazō waited to see if she would continue; after a minute of silence he started to say something just to fill the gap, only to cut himself off when she spoke again.
"That woman and her son in Hot Springs," she said absently. "I keep having dreams about them. Not like the others; they're never staring at me or accusing me. Usually they're having a picnic, in the buttercup meadow near where I grew up. Just sitting on a blanket, talking and eating. Laughing." Her cheek flickered and she swallowed. "And I'm standing right there but they don't see me. I'm not even casting a shadow." She laughed. "That's it, that's the whole dream. Me, standing still and silent and looking down at these people that I didn't even kill. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and they got caught in the middle of one more of my screw ups. And they're happy."
Hazō licked his lips nervously. "Sensei, you're doing it again," he said. "It wasn't your fault."
"Really? Whose fault was it, if not the jōnin commander of a squad of genin?"
"That is not a fair—"
She cut him off with a disissive wave. "I really can't discuss it right now, Hazō," she said, her voice a mire of exhaustion. "Please let it go?"
He wavered. Sincerity or manipulation? Still...perhaps it would be best to back off for a bit, give her some time to stabilize? Or would that be exactly the wrong thing? Should he make her talk about it, or give her a chance to gain some distance?
"Okay," he said reluctantly. "We can talk about it later. But don't think I'm forgetting."
She shook her head. "Of course not, that would make my life easy. You can nag me about it later but right now give me some space, okay? I think I'd like to be alone for a while."
Hazō hesitated. This did not feel right. Leaving her alone when her mood was wandering around so wildly....
"Hazō, get lost." The tone was firm and angry for only a second and then she looked away, shoulders slumping again. "Just...go. I want to just be Mari for a little while. If I can even remember who that is." She shrugged one shoulder angrily. "Whatever, I can't be her with you here having feelings at me and causing me to instinctively mirror your body language and anticipate the flow of conversation and analyze the impact of my tone and...just go, okay?"
This felt wrong; leaving seemed like exactly the wrong thing to do, but he had no idea what the right thing was. He leaned forward, arms reaching to hug her again, only to be stopped by two fingers on his forehead.
"Don't." The voice was full of warning, the eyes full of simmering anger that had no valid target and would clearly love to find one.
He paused, then levered himself to his feet, anger and hurt making his eyes darken. "We love you, Mari-sensei," he said, the words measured and sharp. True words, but delivered in anger at her stupidity and self-pity, not in compassion at her pain. "You can stay here and wallow if you need to, but the truth is that that's what you're doing. You're tired and sad and scared, and you're seeing everything in the worst possible light. You're taking blame for things that aren't your fault and not giving yourself credit for things you did right. Your team sees how amazing you are even if you don't; we'll be here when you want us."
He turned and walked off without giving her a chance to respond.