He'd been silent long enough; it was time to speak the truth and make his teammates hear it.

Hazō took a deep breath to brace himself. "Noburi," he said. "I'd like to apologize."

Across the easily-storage-sealed hibachi that the team used for cooking dinner while sitting a mile in the air, Noburi's chopsticks paused. The former missing-nin looked at his teammate for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure, whatever. Apology accepted." He went back to eating.

Hazō blinked. "No, really. I mean it. I'm sorry. Minami is our squad leader but I should not have revealed your secrets in front of her. I fucked up badly."

Noburi sighed. He shot Hazō a meaningful look, then subtly nodded towards an attentive Minami.

Hazō shook his head, refusing to back down. "Minami, I'm saying this with you here because I feel like it needs to be dealt with immediately but I don't want you to think that I'm sneaking around behind your back whispering with the others. Plus, I need you to understand it as well. My bloodline is from a clan but I wasn't raised in the clan. Momma was kicked out for marrying poppa. I have no idea what it's like to grow up in a clan, and so I didn't really absorb the idea about clan secrets."

"Or secrets in general," Noburi mumbled into his noodles.

Hazō grimaced. "That's...not unfair. I really am sorry. I wanted us to be a team—Minami, I wanted you to be part of that team. I was hoping that if we could do a mission together, if we could work together to make a plan and execute on it, then maybe we could start to build some trust."

"And, of course, revealing my clan secrets and telling an outsider—no offense, Minami—"

She shrugged. "None taken."

"—revealing my clan secrets and my ace-in-the-hole technique, the legendary technique that I figured out on my own with no instruction, the thing that showed I was mastering my bloodline, the trick that could have saved my ass in a fight...yeah, revealing that to the first chūnin to come along, for the sake of taking out a civilian when we could have just walked in and punched him, that was definitely the right way to promote team bonding."

"I don't know what else to say, man. I'm really sorry. Especially since I didn't even realize the magnitude of the screwup until you all explained it."

Noburi sighed tiredly. "Hazō, you're a smart guy and a loyal teammate. You saved us from the spiderbear back in the Swamp. You convinced Kagome to join us; he's saved our lives any number of times, albeit that's kinda balanced by the fact that he almost killed our squad leader, got us all executed for treason, indirectly caused the destruction of Leaf, and possibly plunged the Elemental Nations into World War Four—"

Minami snorted quiet amusement.

"Sorry," Kagome mumbled, looking at his feet.

"—so maybe you don't get credit for that one. You saved us when we got captured after the Liberator mess. You invented the misterators, which really help me punch above my weight class, and I owe you for that even though you did leak the secret and I am not thinking about that because I want to stay positive instead of furious and you came up with the idea for skywalkers, and you cast the deciding vote for going to Leaf. That's worked out pretty well for us. I'm trying really hard to remember all these things because my alternative is to hate you so much that I punch you in the face until your brain turns to pudding. I don't want to do that. We're a good team, even if you are a fucking idiot and I want us to stay a team. So I'm really trying to focus on the positives here."

"Thank you," Hazō said, trying hard not to seem shocked at his teammate's maturity. "I just...I know how hard you worked to master your technique. If you had revealed skywalkers to Jiraiya before I was ready to do it, I'd be devastated. I messed up and I know it. I really want to make this right. I'll do whatever it takes."

"Hazō..." Noburi said, trailing off. He sighed, then shook his head tiredly. "What is it with you and secrets, huh? You can't manage to keep even one thing between your teeth? I mean, it's not like I've been telling Minami that you wet the bed until you were nine—"

Minami blinked.

"—or how you're such an idiot about girls that Pandā knew you and Akane were in love before you did—"

Keiko choked on her stir fry. Hazō blushed furiously. Akane, sitting close enough beside him that their thighs touched, just lifted her chin defiantly and made only a cursory effort to hide the small smile playing across her lips.

"—or how you went and cozied up to Yamanaka like, two minutes after telling Akane you were into her, all without even realizing that you were doing it—"

Hazō's eyes got wide and he looked at Akane in panic. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at him.

"—or about that time when Mari-sensei told us that the clan elder had said we couldn't talk to him anymore, and five minutes later you proposed that we go talk to him. Or how we call you Mr. MEW because you thought that instead of making a secure sleeping area with Multiple Earth Wall it would be better to sleep under canvas and get eaten by a chakra monster so that we didn't leave evidence of where we'd been for some random person who might theoretically at some point in the future possibly stumble across where we'd slept weeks earlier after we were hundreds of miles away."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Minami laughed.

"Noburi, I—"

"No, no, it's okay! I understand that lying has always been hard for you. I mean, that old woman in Iron spotted you as a ninja within two sentences."

Keiko coughing got worse; Minami pounded her on the back to help her not suffocate. Both of them were having trouble hiding the laughter that struggled to burst out.

"And of course there's the fact that the whole reason you got assigned to the original mission that made us all missing-nin was because you cheated the Yakuza and got caught by a civilian."

"Uh, Noburi...."

"Oh, and then there was the time you wanted to tie Keiko up and dominate her."

"You what?!"

"Do not be offended on my behalf, Minami. I was quite enthusiastic about the idea."

"It wasn't like that! That's not how it went at all!"

Akane shook her head sadly. "Hazō, it's not youthful to lie and especially not to oneself. You did in fact want to tie Keiko up and make her follow your commands."

Hazō glared at the World's Worst Girlfriend with a look made of equal parts shock, horror, and betrayal. "What do...you can't...why...? Minami, I didn't—!"

Minami sat back, raising her hands. "I'm not judging," she said. "You guys are grownups, you can make whatever sort of relationships you want. You wouldn't be the first teammates to share a bedroll."

"That never happened!"

"Oh, speaking of bedrolls—Kagome, remember that time that Hazō got all fussed about preparing for winter and telling us how we should winterproof the shelter and make winter clothes and everything?"

Kagome was clearly surprised to be addressed; his head snapped up and he looked around the group nervously. "Yeah?"

Noburi looked at Minami and rolled his eyes conspiratorially. "Kagome had been living in the woods for years and knew everything there was to know about winter survival. Mr. Mew here hadn't done any rough-field camping since the Wilderness Survival class at the Academy, but suddenly he's all full of ideas about how we should go to some of the locals to get help with winterproofing our quarters."

Minami smiled back, the expression a little uncertain. On the one hand, Noburi was sharing the joke with her and inviting her into the social circle. On the other hand, he was doing it at least in part to use her as a weapon against Hazō. On the stabbing hand, it was only in part—some of it was clearly a genuine invitation to be part of the team's social circle. "It's not too surprising," she said. "Hazō, sounds to me like you were trying to be proactive and take care of your team but didn't think it all the way through. Kami know that I did that enough when I was starting out."

"Oh?" Hazō asked, seizing upon the olive branch with desperate hands. "Tell us about that."

"Well, there was this one time...."

----------------------------------------

XP AWARD: 4

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, May 31, 2017, at 12pm London time.

----------------------------------------

Author's Notes:

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the USA during which we honor the memory of those who fell in service to the American armed forces. The holiday is technically tomorrow but my co-founder and I are having the Memorial Day picnic today, so I will be spending the rest of the day preparing, celebrating, and cleaning up. As such, I'm cutting the update here.

@Traiden, you are the only MfD player that I specifically remember as being in the military, although I'm sure there are others. To you and all of our other military players in particular: thank you for your service. To all those men and women throughout the world who serve with honor as protectors of their nation, whatever nation that might be: thank you for your service. To all of our non-military players: please join with me in honoring those who protect us.

----------------------------------------

A week has passed in game. You have completed all the dropoffs in River, collecting several more messages along the way. At the request of one of Jiraiya's agents you retrieved a young man and his sister from a hamlet two hours (as the ninja runs) away and brought them back to the agent's shop; all three seemed enormously relieved to see each other. They vanished into the back room and ten minutes later Jiraiya's agent came out with much grateful bowing and a stack of letters+delivery instructions.

You are currently camped out, on the ground and inside a MEW fortress, on a tiny hill in the Land of Wind. Minami is inside the city and you are under strict orders to wait for her without attracting attention or—and she was very firm about this—killing anyone. She has no skywalkers or skytowers with her and you are under orders not to use yours unless directly attacked by ninja.

You are alone with your team, surrounded by hundreds of miles of rolling desert, with nothing to occupy your thoughts except for watching the occasional bug crawl across the wall of your fort. What do you do?