Within the absolute, frozen silence, Hazō felt a sudden stab of pain. The only thing Keiko loved? The only thing she had left?
Was this what it meant to have feelings for someone? That you wanted them and them alone, and other people simply ceased to matter? Hazō hadn’t expected Keiko to love him, not in those words, but he’d thought they were friends. He thought they’d gradually been growing closer. Had none of that meant anything to her?
Around him, the others didn’t appear to be taking it any better. Noburi was reeling, biting down hard on his lip, his body tense with obvious distress. Inoue-sensei’s expression was so flawlessly neutral it might have come from an anatomy practice dummy. Akane’s eyes were wide with dawning realisation. And Keiko herself, hand still over her mouth, looked like she’d just botched the infusion for the world’s biggest space-time manipulation seal.
Hazō was not too lost in his own pain to miss the voice of intuition whispering to him. Any second now, it told him, somebody would say something without thinking it through first, and the team would fall apart at a time when they were already on the edge of disaster.
“We need to keep moving,” he said loudly. “We’re still being pursued, and we should meet up with Kagome-sensei and get out of Hot Springs as fast as possible. If he’s not at camp, he must be checking the tertiary trap array.”
Was he the only one who’d cared about those times bonding over communication issues and hotly-debated plans? Had they been bonding, or had he been projecting his own desire for friendship onto her? Did Noburi feel the same way about him? What if he’d been wrong from the start, about what friendship was and how it worked? And Sage, what about Akane? If he was wrong about her…
“Keiko, we all care about you and respect your feelings,” Akane said suddenly, “but right now we have to put everything on hold until we’re safe. Now, you’re the least injured, so could you drop back and guard the rear of the formation? I’ll be just ahead of you carrying gear.”
Best. Apprentice. Ever.
“Noburi’s the most hurt,” Hazō picked up on her thinking, “so I’ll be in the middle with him doing the same. Inoue-sensei, could you take point?”
o-o-o-o
“Password,” Kagome-sensei barked, eyeing them perhaps slightly more suspiciously than usual.
“Eye socket spiders,” Hazō said.
Kagome-sensei grunted.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Something’s off about you. You’ve been gone too long, and now you’re all looking shifty, like you’re trying to hide that something’s wrong.”
There was a second’s pause.
“You thought you could fool old Kagome, did you?” Kagome-sensei shouted, reaching down for a concealed wire. “Well, I’ve got news for you, you stinking stinkers—“
“Kagome-sensei,” Hazō cut in urgently. “”You know that seal we couldn’t make work, the one with all the tentacles? Well, I had a thought about how we could weaponise it if we…”
Kagome-sensei groaned and let go of the wire. “You’re Hazō all right. Also, never think that thought again.
“So what’s going on?”
“We were forced into combat and had to run away. And now Hot Springs and everyone else is going to be after us for killing a jōnin in a DMZ.”
“You fought a jōnin.” Kagome said. “That wasn’t part of the plan. You don’t fight a jōnin without a plan. That’s like doing sealcrafting experiments with no safety protocols. In fact it’s worse, because if sealcrafting goes wrong, you might survive. In some form. What were you even—“
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“Kagome-sensei,” Hazō said. “Hordes of pursuing ninja? Out for blood? Possibly on their way here right now?”
“Oh, right.” Kagome-sensei reluctantly broke off his building tirade.
“Anyway,” Hazō said, the rest of the team still silent around him, “I was thinking we could head to Iron to hide out for a while. The hunter-nin should be long-gone by now, and with most of the missing-nin there eliminated, the area shouldn’t be getting much attention from any of the major powers. Plus you know it well, Kagome-sensei, and we have contacts there.”
“Right,” Kagome-sensei nodded. “That could work. Do us good to get out of here and far away from the lupchanz, anyway.”
“And I was thinking of stopping by the Swamp of Death on the way.”
“The Swamp of Death,” Kagome-sensei repeated slowly. “Is that what it sounds like?”
Hazō was quite proud of this part of the plan. “It’s a swamp in the Fire Country, filled with incredibly lethal chakra monsters and killer plants. It was where we were first hiding before Leaf led a Mist strike force to destroy our camp. But Inoue-sensei got us out just in time.”
Kagome gave Hazō a strangely sceptical look.
“So Leaf knows about this place, they’ve got people who know how to navigate it, and they know that Mist and a bunch of missing-nin know where it is.”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Not your finest moment, Hazō,” Inoue-sensei commented, her first words since… that. “After Hidden Swamp, Leaf will have changed its patrol routes to cover the swamp’s borders. They won’t want to ever have to send people in there again. Besides, don’t you remember the crazy chase we had to go through the first time round, with Leaf snapping at our heels until the last second? No, the Swamp of Death isn’t happening.”
“All right,” Hazō said, trying to salvage some credibility as the team’s plan-maker. “Then why don’t we cut across Fire until we reach Waterfall, and then cross from there into Iron?”
Inoue-sensei gave him a frustrated look. “You want us to spend more time in Leaf territory, and then time in Waterfall, so we can have a safer crossing into Iron? That’s like walking a tightrope over an abyss because the rope bridge looks rickety. Are you trying to get us killed?”
“I’m sorry, Inoue-sensei,” Hazō said sheepishly.
She sighed. “No, that wasn’t fair of me. Just… stuff. Let’s get moving.”
o-o-o-o
“Can you hear that, Inoue-sensei?”
Inoue-sensei gritted her teeth. “You mean that noise from behind us? Yeah, they’re catching up. That’s what I hate about killing jōnin – it puts your threat rating so high, people spare no expense trying to chase you down. We’ve got a decent lead, though. With luck, we can outrun them. We really don’t want to fight the kind of people they’d send after us, not in our current condition.”
“Um,” Hazō said. “Actually, I meant the movement coming from the south.”
“Fuck.”
Inoue-sensei didn’t need to spell it out. Leaf had spotted them, and although they might be able to handle a weak Leaf patrol – they’d done it before, after all – if either force managed to pin them down even briefly, the other would have time to catch up, at which point they’d be caught between the hammer and the anvil.
“Inoue-sensei?”
“Not now, Hazō, I’m trying to figure out how to not die.”