The night was warm, soft and quiet around them. A myriad stars danced and sparkled in the sky, bright as jewels in the darkness of the new moon. The firelight cast a rosy glow over the faces of his adopted family as Hazō pondered the last year and the changes it had brought.

Noburi had hung a kettle full of flower petals over the flames and was keeping it from boiling by watching it intently.

Mari-sensei was looking into the fire, body relaxed but face pensive. Beside her but a carefully appropriate distance away, Keiko lounged against a log, cradling Kagome-sensei's carving in one hand and absently stroking its polished base with the other. For a wonder her expression was open and...could it be?...quietly happy? instead of its usual cold reserve. Pandā was semi-curled against her side, looking around the fire curiously but respecting the moment by keeping his boundless curiosity to himself.

Kagome-sensei was, of course, drawing seal blanks and stacking them in neat piles next to himself.

"This is nice," Hazō said quietly. "I'm glad I can be here with all of you."

For just a moment Mari-sensei's smile happened on only one side of her mouth, but then it firmed up and she nodded agreement. "It is."

"Thanks for summoning me!" Pandā blurted. "It's great being here!"

Keiko looked down at her summon, a fond expression momentarily brightening her face, but said nothing.

Kagome-sensei looked up, his hands going still as he looked around the fire. His headed nodded jerkily, although his long face looked nervous at the same time. "Me too," he mumbled, before focusing very intently on his seals again.

"It's been a weird year," Hazō said meditatively, looking back at the fire. "Scary and exciting, like the whole Arikada mess. Embarrassing—for me at least." He shot an abashed smile around the fire and a nod that said 'I really do not have to offer examples, right?' Quirked lips and quiet snorts responded 'No, you really do not.'

"Still," he continued, speech accelerating as thought trying to jump past the words, "it's been an honor to serve with all of you." He waited nervously, wondering if the others would mock.

Considering silence hung in the air for a moment before Noburi nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Not exactly 'serving', really, but it has been." He looked around at the others. "You guys are the best team I could have hoped for. When you look at me you don't just see the barrel."

"Why would they?" Pandā asked, confused. "Usually it's on your back, so you're between them and it. Do you have some sort of invisibility technique?"

Noburi laughed.

"The barrel is the means by which Noburi transfers chakra to others," Keiko reminded her summon. "Many ninja are foolish enough to believe that the only value a Wakahisa offers is this ability. Noburi is saying that we acknowledge him as a person, and as a teammate, who has more to offer than solely his ability to supply chakra."

"Same for you, Keiko," Noburi said. "It's like you said to me that time—our families are support, so no one looks twice. You offer a lot more than just your bloodline."

Keiko shrugged uncomfortably. "I suppose. My summoning contract is very usef—ow! What was that for?!"

Hazō flicked another woodchip at her; this time she casually batted it aside. "For someone who is so incredibly smart, you can be dumb as a box of rocks," he laughed. "We don't just value you for your contract, or your bloodline, or your ability to shoot flies out of the air at fifty paces, or your understanding of logistics, or your ability to talk us out of backalley situations with, admittedly, opsec almost as bad as mine. We value you for you, you twit." He flicked another woodchip across the fire.

Keiko glowered at him and started to say something.

"He's right," Kagome said, not looking up from his brushwork. "You're an idiot."

Keiko looked at him in shock. "What?"

"You're an idiot," Kagome said, putting the finishing touches on a final blank and setting it aside before looking up. "Someone as smart as you who thinks she's worthless? Total idiot. Really set-your-face-on-fire stupid. Pants on head kind of thing."

Keiko's mouth worked but no sound came out. Her expression made Noburi break down in giggles.

"Ahem," Mari-sensei said. "Perhaps not the most tactful way to put it, but not entirely wrong. Keiko, your self-image is wildly inaccurate. You don't give yourself nearly enough credit for all the things you're good at."

Hazō clamped down very firmly on his traitorous tongue before it could make any reference to pots or kettles.

At Mari-sensei's words Keiko's face went instantly blank. "Thank you, sensei," she said, offering the best bow that one can make while reclining. "You are very kind. Ow! Hazō, stop that!" She fired back, bouncing the woodchip she'd caught earlier off his forehead before scrabbling in the grass next to her for small twigs.

"Then stop being a twit," Hazō said, laughing and hiding behind upraised hands as she attacked. It did precisely no good, as Keiko's initial triple salvo slipped past his guard to bounce off both earlobes and his wristbone.

Keiko probably didn't stop being a twit and she definitely didn't stop glowering, but at least she stopped flinging things at him in favor of spreading her grumpy-faced look around at her companions, all of whom were laughing.

"Be nice, children," Mari-sensei admonished, smiling. "Honestly, I can't take you lot anywhere. I look away for two seconds and you're throwing things at each other." She shook her head in mock-dismay.

"This was not my fault!" Keiko yelped. "He starte—" Her teeth clopped shut as she realized just how childish that was going to make her sound.

"Yeah!" Pandā said. "No throwing things at my summoner, you dang dirty beakface!" He waved his claws threateningly at Hazō, only to promptly ruin the effect by looking up at Keiko and whispering hopefully, "Did I say that right?"

Hazō and Noburi promptly broke down laughing. Mari-sensei chuckled quietly. Kagome-sensei looked confused.

"Yes," Keiko said. "You said that just right."

Pandā nodded happily. "Thought so. I'm totally getting the hang of this human slang."

"Hey, Pandā, what's up with the 'beakface' thing?" Noburi asked. "I've heard you say it before."

"Oh, well, it's the Condors, right?" Pandā said with a manidaean shrug. "After the Great Betrayal and the First Condor War it became sort of a catchall insult."

"'Great Betrayal'?" Mari-sensei asked. "What was that?"

Pandā sat up as straight as his bodyplan allowed, wriggling slightly as he settled into what he clearly thought was an authoritative pose. "Long ago the Condors and the Pangolins were two of the Seven Great Clans. Trade was common, pangolins still walked the halls of the Great Academy, knowledge and art flourished. Then the Condors betrayed us; they led a swarm of driver ants to one of our key trade outposts. Highfort sat in the middle of the only pass across the Blue Mountains that the Pangolin clan had access to. The next nearest past was three clan territories away. The pass was our link to huge trade routes across the mountains, as well as the only way we could access the Great Academy.

"Anyway, the Condors led the ants to us and Highfort was destroyed. The swarm set up a nest in the ruins, cutting us off from the trade routes across the mountains, meaning that the Condors could control the trade and make us pay whatever they wanted. And, of course, we no longer had access to the Great Academy.

"We sent a delegation to demand that the Condors help us re-open the pass, but the dang beakfaces threw our people off the mountain. They all died, except for Panyāru, one of the junior guardsman accompanying the delegation. He made it home, badly hurt, and explained how the delegation had been attacked."

Pandā gave a studiously casual shrug of scaled shoulders. "Well, of course, there was nothing to do except beat those Condor twits into a ball. Unfortunately, when they realized they were going to lose they set off an avalanche that buried the pass. Still, they've kept their stupid beaks down ever since, too scared of the power of the Pangolin Clan to make so much as a peep!"

"Good for you!" Kagome said. "Stinkers deserved it." He nodded decisively. "Stupid traitors, pretending they like you just so they can convince you to go into an unholy doom fortress."

"What's an unholy doom fortress?" Mari-sensei asked in apparent confusion.

"Oh, you know," Kagome said. "Big stone fort, seals all over it. Massive central workroom with half a dozen desks, safes, cabinets and cabinets of stuff"—he waved dismissively—"and absolutely everything covered in the most horrific seals you've ever seen. Faces melting into bleeding walls, gibbering horrors that wouldn't stop sniggering from thin air for weeks no matter how many times you squished their stupid stinking faces in your dreams." He hunched in on himself, eyes shifting to the sides as both hands reflexively plucked seal blanks off the piles. Hazō's trained gaze didn't miss the tiny little foxfire flicker of infusion that danced for a split second across the surface of each paper. Kagome-sensei's breathing had accelerated, getting shallower as his shoulders tensed. Hazō shifted, readying himself to do...something, he wasn't sure.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Kagome-sensei blinked, his breath catching for just an instant before he obviously forced it to become regular again. He looked down at the seal blanks in his hands as though surprised to find them there. With careful precision he smoothed out the slight rumpling of the papers and set them back on the appropriate piles.

For three long seconds the night hung, silent and suspended among thousands of possibilities, as Kagome-sensei stared silently at the piles of seal blanks. No one moved or spoke as the explosives master mastered himself.

"They brought me in to figure what it all was," he said, his reedy tenor calmer and more connected than usual. "Me and three squads." He sniffed derisively. "Stinking idiots, every one. First they said I was bringing too many seals and too much paper which was obviously stupid. It was only one wagonload of actives and a few dozen scrolls of blanks and paper! Then they said I was crazy the way I mined the perimeter before going into the fort. I mean, it wasn't like we were short on seals, and I didn't even spend that long on it—not more than nine or ten hours! That's not unreasonble, is it?"

"Hey, you're here and they're not," Noburi said with a shrug. "Seems to have been pretty reasonable to me."

"Thank you!" Kagome shook his head like a horse chasing off a fly. "Anyway. We went inside, and those stupid stinking idiots blundered ahead down the hall until Satoshi's right side melted into Michiko's left and tentacles exploded everywhere with acid spraying off of them. Once we put the thing out of our misery the others finally started listening. We explored the place carefully and only lost four more of them before I started to get a handle on the patterns a couple days later."

The sudden grin showed teeth. "That's about when the perimeter started going off. Guess the owners wanted their precious little hellhole back. Everyone went running outside because of course they did and there was this giant mess of bodyparts where the first wave of stinkers had found my traps." He giggled manically. "One of 'em ran into a Force Wall I had set up at an angle like this, aimed to catch you in the chest. He was really short, though, so it caught him right under the chin. The body was jammed up against the underside of the wall, still upright. You could see inside his neck and I couldn't help thinking...you know how people always say 'I'm gonna rip your head off and spit in your neck'? Well, I mean, I could have walked over there and done it."

Hazō found himself caught between horror and laughter, so he settled for asking, "Did you?"

"Nah. Too busy dodging all the pointy things and explosions." Kagome shifted slightly, forcing himself to breathe. "Pretty bad fight. Stinkers were there in force, and over the last few days most of my idiot bodyguards had already gotten themselves turned inside out, or blown up, or had their eyeballs eaten with that really nasty schlorp noise you get before the thing crawls in through the socket and starts melting your brain out through your nose." He looked angry. "Stinking idiot. I told him not to touch that, but did he listen? 'You're just paranoid, Kagome.' Well, who's paranoid now, you stinker?"

"What happened then?" Pandā asked, eyes wide.

Kagome looked uncomfortable. "I, uh, I left."

"What? You left?" Pandā demanded. "I wanted to hear how they finally learned to listen to you."

Kagome shrugged. "By that time there were only two of them left and still two dozen of the attackers. I wasn't sticking around. It's not like Ayako cared, and she was dead anyway so I didn't have much to go back to. I went to Iron, camped out for a while until you guys showed up." He ducked his head. "I'm uh, sorry I tried to blow you up when we first met. I'm glad you didn't hold it against me. I've...I've really liked having a team."

"We have enjoyed having you as a teammate," Keiko said. An instant later she hurried to add, "And not just for your skills and the safety they bring us. Speaking with you is refreshingly straightforward."

"She's right," Mari-sensei said. "Life has been better since you joined us." She gave him an approving smile that made him blush all the way down his neck.

"Seconded," Noburi said. "Spies and Shadows would be so much less interesting without you." He grinned.

"What's Spies and Shadows?" Pandā stage-whispered to Keiko.

"A board game," Keiko answered. "It's about sneaking through a fortress filled with traps to achieve objectives such as 'steal the intelligence' or 'free the prisoner'. One team designs the fortress, the other tries to break through the defenses. The expected tactic is to avoid the guards and the traps, but Kagome realized that it was possible to use the guards to set off certain traps in a way that, through some very dubious rule interpretations"—she shot him a disapproving look—"destroyed most of the internal walls and gave the Intruder team a clear path to their objective."

"Ninja," Kagome said, completely unrepentantly. His tone set Noburi laughing.

"They're right," Hazō said, once Noburi calmed down. "Nothing would be the same without you, sensei." He nerved himself up. "You know, people don't often tell each other how much they value them, because it can be embarrassing. I want you to know, though: I'm so glad you joined us. We wouldn't be alive without you, but even if we had somehow managed to survive I wouldn't be the same person. Your seal training has changed how I look at the world, how I understand things. I have all those dreams and hopes that, frankly, are pretty unrealistic—convincing everyone to find peace? Using jutsu to help civilians, and then convincing other ninja to do the same? It should be crazy. A team our size, changing the world? Impossible. And yet, the things you've taught me make it maybe possible. The things you've taught me are the only reason that I believe I might be able to reach my dreams. Thank you, sensei."

He offered a full dogeza bow, holding it for two long seconds before sitting up and waiting fearfully for the reaction. Being physically naked would have been so much more comfortable than being this emotionally naked. Kagome-sensei wasn't good with people; how would he respond? Would he doubt Hazō's words? Would he laugh?

Kagome did neither of those things. He swallowed, and looked incredibly nervous, but managed not to stammer as he said, "Thanks. I, um...I'm glad too. I wasn't really happy before. And I was pretty lonely. Not so much fun talking to the tree rats, you know? You guys are way more fun." He ducked his head and hunched in on himself.

"Sensei...." Hazō hesitated. Asking this was awfully forward, straining against the bounds of propriety. It wasn't like when he'd asked Wakahisa and Mori to become Noburi and Keiko; they were peers. Asking one's sensei.... Still, it felt like the right thing to do. Kagome-sensei needed closer bonds, needed to feel part of a family again. And, plus, there was the whole issue of 'Mari-sensei'. Calling her that in public would cause issues with the other genin (mostly Keiko, though), but not calling her that in public after having used it in private would make it seem that he was pushing her away. If he did call her that, though, then Kagome-sensei would be left isolated.

"Sensei, we've all been through a lot together," Hazō said hesitantly. "Do you think, maybe.... I mean.... Would it be okay if we used your first name?"

Kagome stiffened. "What? First name? I don't have a first name!"

"That's weird," Pandā said. "I thought all humans had a first name? It's just that you only use it with close friends, right?" He looked at Keiko. "I thought I finally had a handle on this, but now it turns out that some of you really don't have them? Humans are weird." He turned back to Kagome. "How come you don't have a first name? Did your mother forget to give you one?"

"Uh...well, she probably didn't," Kagome said, fingers plucking nervously at his sleeve. "I guess I lost it in a sealing accident." He nodded happily. "Yes, that's it. Sealing accident. Very bad one. Ate my name. Anyway, it's bad luck to call a sealmaster by his first name. It makes seals go wrong."

"But you call the others by their first names all the time," Pandā said, his scales crinkling in a frown. "Wouldn't that make Hazō's seals go wrong?"

"I do?" Kagome said. "Oh...uh, well, see! That proves it!"

"It's all right, Kagome," Mari-sensei said. "Whatever that seal did to you to take your name away, maybe it will wear off eventually. If you do remember what it is, just let us know." She smiled at her genin. "And, on the subject of first names, I told you kids before that you're allowed to call me Mari-sensei if you want."

Hazō held his breath, watching Keiko while trying not to be obvious.

Keiko sat silent for a long second, then nodded. "Thank you, Mari-sensei," she said quietly. "I believe I would like that."