Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 104 (Patreon)

Most people think bijuu are monsters. And sure, that's not wrong. They're building-sized creatures made of chakra who've leveled cities and eaten armies and generally made life worse for everyone within a five-mile radius. But if you actually sit down and talk to one, which admittedly very few people survive long enough to try, you'll find that most of them are surprisingly reasonable once you get past the teeth and the centuries of justifiable resentment toward humanity.

Kurama, for example. Big scary fox, massive chakra, killed a lot of people, sure. But at his core, all the guy really wanted was to stop being treated like a weapon. That's it. Naruto gave him a fist bump and some genuine emotional sincerity, and boom, best friends forever. World's most powerful partnership, born from what was essentially a hug and an apology.

Most bijuu were like that. They wanted respect. They wanted freedom. They wanted to stop being tools. Reasonable demands from reasonable creatures who happened to be the size of small mountains. You could work with that. A little goodwill, a little honesty, maybe some shared trauma over a campfire, and suddenly you had an alliance that could reshape the continent.

Moryo wanted to conquer the world.

That was the difference. Which made my life considerably worse. Because you can't fist-bump your way out of global domination. There's no heartfelt speech that ends with "and then we both agreed that subjugating all of humanity was maybe a bit much." She didn't want respect. She didn't want acknowledgment. She wanted a throne, an army, and probably a crown made from the bones of everyone who'd ever annoyed her.

And I knew this because she told me. Or rather, she told me without meaning to, because Moryo had one critical weakness that no amount of ancient power could cover for.

She couldn't shut up when she was annoyed.

The negotiation itself had been a slog. Hours of back and forth, offer and counter, loophole and bigger loophole, all of it going absolutely nowhere. But halfway through the whole mess, I'd started poking at her, and Moryo, bless her ancient heart, took every single piece of bait. I'd say something mildly disrespectful and she'd fire back with a three-paragraph rebuttal about her ancient glory and the insignificance of mortal understanding. I'd make a joke about her living situation and she'd launch into a lecture about the civilizations she'd brought to ruin before my ancestors figured out how fire worked. She couldn't help herself. The moment I implied she wasn't as impressive as she thought she was, the floodgates opened and out came the autobiography.

And I listened. I listened to all of it.

And somewhere between rant number four and rant number nine, I started piecing together who Moryo actually was. Her likes, her dislikes, what made her angry versus what made her genuinely angry, the difference between her performance and her real feelings. Little by little, the picture got clearer.

She wasn't a natural disaster. Natural disasters don't have ambitions. Moryo had ambitions. Moryo had a vision. Moryo had, and I cannot stress this enough, a name picked out for what came after. She called it her Thousand Year Kingdom. An eternal reign, a world remade under her, lasting forever because she'd be there to make sure it did. She hadn't thought through the details, but details didn't matter when you had the absolute conviction that the world was yours and everyone in it would come around eventually.

Still, it wasn't all bad.

After some back and forth with Tsunade and Orochimaru, we'd agreed to take the deal. A thousand clones, which was everything Moryo was willing to give, and on paper it didn't sound like much compared to what I used to field, but the number was misleading. A thousand wasn't the total. It was the ceiling. Moryo would keep feeding me chakra, enough to maintain a thousand clones at all times, no matter how many got killed or destroyed along the way. One goes down, another one gets made. Endless replacements, forever, as long as the deal held. That was still absurdly strong. Not "Black Death drowning the battlefield in ten thousand bodies" strong, but enough to change the war. Enough to stop Konoha from losing, at least.

The tradeoff was the problem.

Moryo wanted two of my clones, and she wanted full control. Meaning she'd be the one driving. My clones as her steering wheel. She said she didn't trust me to release her seals on my own, and honestly, she had a point, because I wouldn't trust me either. So her solution was simple. Give her two clones, let her pilot them like a kid with a plugged-in controller, and she'd handle the seal business herself. Walk them to wherever she needed to go, do whatever needed doing, and get her spirit back on her own terms without relying on a bunch of humans she considered backstabbing liars.

We said yes because we didn't have a choice.

The original plan was to agree to everything during the war, use the chakra to survive, and then quietly forget about the whole "freeing her spirit" part once the fighting was over. Wartime promises made under duress. Unfortunate but understandable. Nobody would blame us. Moryo could scream about it from behind her bars and we'd all pretend we couldn't hear her.

But now she had controllers. Two clones walking around doing her errands, answering to nobody but her. If those clones reached the temple and cracked the seal before the war ended, there was no promise to renegade on. It would already be done.

Which left us with a question nobody wanted to answer.

What do we do if she actually pulls it off? What do we do when the war's over and Moryo's spirit is already whole and the only thing left on her shopping list is the body? Do we fight her for it? Do we try to reseal what she's already unsealed? Do we just let her have it and hope the Thousand Year Kingdom comes with reasonable tax policy?

Haa. What a headache.

"We'll cross that bridge when she's standing on it," Tsunade said, which was her way of saying she didn't have an answer either.

Orochimaru already had a map out before she finished talking, spreading it across the table between the teacups, and the conversation turned to the war. A thousand clones was enough to hold the line, maybe, if we were smart about where we put them. Orochimaru started mapping out engagement options against the enemy forces. Tsunade pushed back on half of them. I listened, contributed where I could, which was less and less as the conversation went on.

There's a specific feeling you get when two people who are much better at something than you are start really getting into it. You go from participant to audience member and you don't even notice it happening. One minute you're nodding along and saying things like "right, that makes sense," and the next minute you realize you've been quiet for five minutes and nobody's noticed.

"Anyway," I said, already on my feet. Standing up first is important. If you wait for a natural pause in the conversation, you'll be waiting forever, because people like Tsunade and Orochimaru don't pause. They just keep going, and the longer you sit there the harder it gets to leave without it feeling like you're admitting you have nothing left to add. Which I didn't, but that's beside the point. "I think you two have this covered. I'm going to go check on the clones, make sure they're doing their jobs and not slacking off."

I walked out and slid the door shut behind me.

Outside, the village smelled half dead already. Smoke, trampled grass, damp earth, the sour edge of things being ruined on purpose. The village was mostly empty now. My clones had spent the better part of the evening moving the civilians out, and the ones still here were making sure there was nothing left worth taking. Poisoning the wells, burning the grain stores, wrecking anything the enemy could use if they pushed this far. War 101. Not fun, but necessary.

Then I saw the kid.

Small, maybe eight or nine, doing the crouch kids think makes them invisible, peeking over his shoulder after every other step. He was heading toward a brown house near the center of the village. When he got there he fumbled with the door for a bit before squeezing through and pulling it shut behind him.

I stared.

Did he just sneak back? We'd already evacuated this area. The civilians were supposed to be gone. So either the clones missed one, or this kid watched his family get moved out and then turned around and came back on his own. To what? Grab a toy? Sleep in his own bed one more time? Whatever the reason, a child alone in a village my clones were about to finish gutting was a problem.

What was the clone assigned to monitoring the evacuation doing? Don't tell me they were slacking off.

I was about to walk over and check on the kid when I noticed movement in the branches of a tree about thirty meters out. Sure enough, one of my clones was already up in the tree, keeping an eye on the house. He saw me and looked over.

The clone gave me a look. I knew that look. I made that look. It was the look I gave people when they caught me doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing and still somehow made me feel like I wasn't. And the worst part was, it was working on me. I could feel myself shrinking under my own disapproval.

I put my hands up.

“All right. Sorry. My bad.” I shouldn't have doubted my own work ethic. I was a responsible, attentive, thoroughly professional shinobi who would never cut corners on civilian safety just because it was boring. Obviously. Of course. What was I thinking.

I accepted my own apology. Noble as hell. Truly.

The clone on the branch seemed satisfied with that and hopped down, walked into the house, and came out carrying the kid by the back of his shirt, dangling him by the collar like a cat carrying a kitten who'd wandered too far.

"Put me down! This is kidnapping! You're kidnapping me!"

The clone didn't even look at him. Just started walking east, toward where the other civilians had been moved. The kid thrashed and swung and accomplished absolutely nothing.

"I'm telling my mom! I'm telling her right now!"

Sure, kid. We're literally taking you there. A few minutes later his mother happened. Loudly. The kid went very quiet very fast. Problem solved.

…

-Orochimaru-

I watched Shinji's back as he walked out and slid the door shut behind him. The sound of his footsteps faded down the hall and kept fading until I couldn't hear them anymore.

Only then did I reach for my brush. Anything written in front of Shinji was written in front of Moryo, and Moryo didn't need to know about this. The recipient was a broker I'd used twice before the war. He wasn't a Konoha asset, or anyone's asset, really. The man operated out of a trading post near the northern coast and sold access to people who killed for money. He was expensive, discreet, and had the good sense to never remember the faces of his clients. The ideal business partner, in other words.

Personally, I saw no issue with letting Moryo's spirit become whole again. A reunified spirit still trapped inside a seal was just a louder prisoner. The danger was never the spirit. It was the body. As long as her physical form stayed buried and sealed, she could be as whole as she liked and it wouldn't change a thing. She'd still be stuck inside Shinji with nowhere to go.

Tsunade, of course, disagreed. "We don't know what a complete Moryo does to him," she told me. "We don't know what that kind of power does to the integrity of the seal."

Fair concerns. I simply didn't share them. It was a shame. The research potential of observing a spirit reunification in real time would have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance. But Tsunade would beat my spine into pudding until I agreed, and I preferred my vertebrae where they were.

Which brought me back to the letter. The instructions were simple. Two of Shinji's clones would be heading north. Their destination was the Land of Snow, where one of Moryo's sealed locations sat waiting to be cracked open. Somewhere between the border and the temple, those clones needed to stop existing. The bounty hunters assigned to the job were to disguise themselves as Land of Snow shinobi. Border patrol, ideally. The clones would be entering foreign territory without authorization, which made them, on paper, intruders. And intruders got killed. It was tragic. It was also completely believable.

The important part was that nobody could trace it back to Konoha. As far as anyone would ever know, Moryo's clones had wandered into hostile territory and paid the price for it. It was a tragedy, really. We’d say all the right things, act appropriately bummed out, and then we’d move on with the peace of mind that the ancient demon’s comeback tour had died at the border.

I finished the last line, set the brush down, and reread the letter. And then reread it again. Adequate.

"Two S-rank bounty hunters?" Tsunade asked, her eyebrows shooting up.

"That should be plenty," I told her.

"You’re talking about two clones being puppeted around by an ancient demon. That thing could level an entire village and you want to throw just two bounty hunters at it?"

"They’re clones, Tsunade. There’s a limit to what they can actually do."

"That limit changed the second Moryo got involved and you know it." She pulled out a chair and sat down across from me. "Two isn’t going to cut it. I want four S-ranks. And I want every A-rank that broker can get his hands on before those clones even get close to the border."

I paused. That was a significant escalation. The cost alone would be enough to fund a small campaign. Four S-rank hunters, plus however many A-rank the broker could scrape together on short notice. The bill for this would make Konoha's treasury department physically ill.

"You realize what this is going to cost, right?" I asked.

She looked at me like I’d just told her water was wet. "Do you have any idea who I am?"

"I don't really see what your family history has to do with our current money problem."

"The Senju have funded this village for three generations," she countered. "A few bounty hunters aren't going to break the bank."

Saying they'd funded it for three generations was generous. So was the word "funded." But it wasn't exactly the right time to get into a debate over clan financial history. I raised an eyebrow. "So, are you volunteering to pay for this out of your own pocket, then?"

"Don't be stupid," she snorted. "Konoha is paying for this. This is a sanctioned military operation against an active threat to the village. That's exactly what the ops budget is for. You don't use your personal cash for military expenses, Orochimaru. That's called a coup. You've got to learn to keep your personal life and your work life separate."

My mouth twitched. She was ragebaiting me. With Jiraiya gone, she'd apparently decided I was next in line for the role of 'person Tsunade provokes for entertainment.' I had at least four things I wanted to say, three of which were reasonable and one of which would have gotten me hit. I said none of those things.

Her expression was practically daring me to argue, but I wasn't Jiraiya. Jiraiya would’ve taken the bait. He would’ve said something incredibly stupid, earned himself a fist-shaped dent in his head, and then said something even stupider because that was just who he was as a person. I didn't happen to share that particular character flaw.

I turned back to the letter, added the revised numbers, and folded it twice. The messenger bird was on the branch outside the window, where I'd left it earlier. I slipped the letter into the tube on its leg, secured the clasp, and gave it a push.

The bird dropped from the branch and disappeared into the dark almost immediately, heading north.

I watched it until I couldn't see it anymore.

Behind me, Tsunade had already gone back to the map.

…

-Ame elite jonin-

We were two hours from home when the bird found us.

It swooped down through the trees and almost overshot. My partner was quicker, arm already out. The bird landed on his wrist and sat there while he pulled the message tube off its leg.

[Foreign shinobi, heading west toward Kusa's border. Intercept and eliminate. Priority.]

He read it twice, then burned it.

"Guess we're not going home yet."

"Guess not."

And that was that. We found our spot, killed our chakra, and waited. Same as always. We'd done this dozens of times. Ambush was what we did. Between the two of us, we'd stacked up more confirmed kills behind enemy lines than most full squads managed in a career. Easy money.

Hanzo-sama's chakra hit us before the target did. Massive, furious, blazing through the rain like a bonfire rolling downhill. Whatever this guy had stolen, it was enough to make Hanzo-sama chase him personally. That scared me more than the target did.

Then the target appeared, and I stopped feeling comfortable about any of this.

We hit him with everything. Perfect ambush, perfect timing, two-sided suiton in the rain. He hadn't seen us coming. His eyes went wide.

Should have been the end of it.

It wasn't. He moved through our jutsu like it wasn't there, and after that the whole thing went sideways so fast I couldn't even tell you what happened in what order. There was lightning. There was steam. I swung my blade. And then Taku was dead. Just like that. One moment Taku was in the branches behind me. The next he was falling with his throat open and his eyes already going blank, and the target was gone, flickering north through the trees with Hanzo-sama's chakra screaming after him.

For three years we'd worked together. Before that, we trained together. Before that, we grew up two streets apart in a ward that doesn't exist anymore. Taku still owed me for drinks last week. I was going to let him pay me back tonight. I crouched beside him to close his eyes, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Rain was already pooling in the hollows of his face. I stayed there longer than I should have, long enough that I almost missed it.

Crk.

“!!!”

Something behind me!

I spun and found nothing. But the ground had been torn open from underneath, wet soil pushed aside around a hole that was still filling with rainwater.

Every hair on my body stood up. Something had crawled out of the ground here.

My heart started hammering. I could feel it in my throat, in my teeth, this heavy wet thumping that made it hard to think straight. The rain was loud but not loud enough to cover whatever had made that sound, and the hole was fresh, the edges still crumbling, which meant whatever crawled out of it was close. Very close. My eyes swept the trees, the branches, the mud. Nothing. Nobody. But the hole was right next to Taku's body, which meant it had been underneath us the entire time!

I was still looking at the hole when something hit my back and kept going until it punched through the other side.

I looked down. A hand was sticking out of my chest, coated in flickering blue-white light.

Hanzo-sama was chasing him. I'd seen the lightning flicker north. I'd heard the chain screaming after it. Both of them were gone. So how was he here?

I didn't feel myself fall, but I must have, because the next thing I knew I was on my knees in the mud right next to Taku.

The rain was all I could hear now, and Taku's face was all I could see. Right there, looking up at the sky with those open eyes. At least I won't have to go home without him, I thought. At least there's that. I reached out to close his eyes one more time. I didn't make it.

…

-Shin-

Two dead jonin at my feet. The rain was still coming down, and the blood on my arm was still warm.

I shook it off. Most of it, anyway. The rain handled the rest, rinsing the red down my sleeve and off my fingertips in thin, pink streaks that vanished into the mud before they could leave a permanent stain.

I crouched down next to the first one and closed his eyes. Then I walked over to his partner and did the same. They were still warm. Bodies stayed warm for a while after, actually. Longer than most people expected. Something about residual cellular activity and heat dissipation rates, I'd read about it once in one of Tsunade's medical textbooks when I was supposed to be studying chakra pathway diagrams. The human body held onto its warmth for roughly two hours after death, give or take, depending on weather and body mass. In Ame's rain, probably closer to one. Not that it mattered. Warm or cold, dead was dead, and it wasn't going to help either of them where they were going.

My hands came together against my chest, fingers laced in what I hoped passed for a prayer. I didn't actually know any. But the gesture felt right, and sometimes that was enough.

"I hope you two get reincarnated somewhere nicer," I muttered. "Somewhere without a draft, maybe. A world where wars are just something you read about in a history book and the biggest problem you have to deal with is what's for dinner."

The rain answered for them, which was about as much conversation as I was going to get. I stood up, wiped my hands on my pants, and turned north.

Somewhere out there, my decoy was still running. Just a clone I'd squeezed out at the last second, scraping the bottom of a tank that was already running on fumes.

He didn't need to win. He just needed to keep Hanzo looking the wrong way long enough for me to disappear, and I'd gotten that chance because the Raiton hitting the Suijinheki was the luckiest thing that happened to me all day, and I say that as someone whose entire day had been a masterclass in bad luck. When lightning meets a wall of spinning water, the whole thing boils off instantly, and for about two seconds the entire area turns into a wall of white steam so thick you can't see your own hands. Two seconds isn't a lot of time for most people, but I'd been making clones under worse conditions than this. Clone went out running west, and I dropped straight down into the mud with a Mole jutsu before the first wisp of steam started to thin. It was about as simple as it gets. But it worked, and it worked because of one beautiful, glorious fact.

None of them were sensors.

Not the two elite jonin I'd just put in the ground. Not the squads that had been trailing me since the border. And most importantly, not Hanzo. Hanzo was strong enough to make me question every life choice that led me to this country. Paranoid enough to chase a thief across his own country with his personal guard in tow. But a sensor? No. That, he wasn't. And right now, that one missing line on his otherwise terrifying resume was the only reason I was still breathing instead of floating back to the boss as a puff of smoke and a pile of regrets.

My decoy was out there somewhere, heading west, burning through the last dregs of chakra I'd shoved into him. Three minutes, maybe less. After that he'd pop, and Hanzo would be left standing over a cloud of smoke thinking he'd just killed the thief and everything he'd stolen with him. By then I needed to be very, very far away. So run, buddy. Run like your life depends on it, because mine does.

But enough about him. Let's talk about the good news, because there was good news, and it was strapped to my chest, and it was incredible!

I reached into my jacket and pulled out the jar.

The pair of purple eyes floated in preservation fluid, concentric rings still visible even through the glass. The Rinnegan. Just looking at them made my heart do a little dance in my chest. These eyes were older than most countries. Stronger than most armies. The Sage of Six Paths himself had these, and that guy was basically God with a staff and a bad haircut. And right now, they were sitting in a jar in my hands, in the rain, in the middle of enemy territory, and I was grinning at them like an idiot.

Hanzo had chased me across his entire country for these. Nearly killed me for these. Made me burn through chakra I didn't have and run harder than I'd ever run in my very short life. And the whole time, the whole miserable, terrifying time, all I kept thinking was, if I could just get these back to the boss, Hanzo wouldn't be a problem anymore. None of them would. The guy who'd spent all day making me feel like a mouse running from a hawk? The boss could punt him across the continent with these. That's what the Rinnegan was. Power so far above everything else that calling it power felt like calling the ocean a puddle.

I held the jar up and smiled at it. The eyes stared back at me, and for a second we just looked at each other, me and the two most valuable eyeballs on the planet, having a moment in the rain. Then I tucked them back against my ribs, swallowed the grin that was trying to take over my entire face, and ran.

All I had to do was not die for a few more hours. Easy. I'd been not dying all day. What's a little more?

…

-Shinji-

We could only pull off a thousand clones now. That was barely a tenth of what I used to run. It sounded bad, and honestly, it was bad, at least if you still thought the way I used to. Back then, my logic was simple, more clones equals more problems solved. You throw enough bodies at something and eventually it stops being a problem. That was how I’d been fighting this war, and it worked right up until the moment it didn't.

But the thing about losing ninety percent of your army is that it forces you to get smarter with what's left. And I didn't have to get smarter alone. Tsunade. Orochimaru. Minoru. A Nara strategist. These were people who'd been fighting wars with limited resources their entire careers. Give them a thousand unkillable soldiers and a clear objective, and they'd do more damage than I ever did with ten thousand. The moment we reached the new outpost, we found out if that theory held up.

It did.

Orochimaru found the cracks. Tsunade plugged the gaps. Minoru kept the logistics from collapsing. And the Nara clan head built a playbook that made a thousand clones feel like five thousand, rotating them through targets so fast that enemy scouts kept reporting different numbers every time they looked.

I watched this man look at a map for thirty seconds and see things I'd miss in an hour. We hit Iwa supply lines at night and vanished before dawn. We feinted east and struck west. We let entire positions fall on purpose just to lure critical pursuit into an ambush. A thousand wasn't ten thousand, but a thousand in the hands of people who actually knew what they were doing turned out to be something the enemy hadn't trained for. You couldn't solve it by just having more soldiers, because every time you thought you'd figured out where we were, we'd already be three steps ahead.

And that was with a thousand. A thousand! If this guy had been running my clone army from the beginning, back when I had ten thousand, I was pretty sure we wouldn't just be winning the war. We'd be done with it. Snatching up their clients, their resources, maybe their lunch money too. Ten thousand unkillable soldiers under a mind like that? Forget defending Konoha. We could've walked into all three nations before breakfast and been home by dinner.

So naturally, I had to ask why he hadn't been on the western front this whole time. He just said "clan business." I waited for more. More didn't come. I knew a closed door when I saw one, so I didn't push. Whatever had pulled the Nara clan head away from an active war front, it was big enough that he'd chosen it over the entire western campaign.

I didn't know the details, but my clones in Konoha had been reporting tension. The whole village had been on edge for a while, and nobody was saying why. My clones weren't exactly plugged into clan inner circles, so all they got was the mood, not the cause. Interestingly enough, whatever it was seemed to resolve itself right after we put Danzo in the ground, but I'm sure that's completely unrelated.

Anyway, point was, he left. And the western front had been running without its sharpest mind for weeks, and by the time he came back, the damage was already done. Konoha had replaced him with another Nara, because that's what you do when you lose your best strategist. You grab the next one and hope the family resemblance extends to brainpower. It didn't. A random Nara was still smarter than most people, sure, but "most people" and "Nara clan head" weren't even in the same conversation.

But a Nara clan head with a thousand immortal clones? That was a different story. The clones hit the field on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, Suna and Iwa's advance had stalled. By Thursday, we'd shoved them back across two river crossings they'd spent days taking.

For the first time in a while, the war felt winnable. Which is probably why the universe decided to send one of my clones barging into dinner to say, “Boss, you got a second? It's important.” I did not, in fact, have a second.

Bad timing, because I was busy. And by busy, I mean Tsunade was sitting across from me making these little "mm" sounds every time she bit into a new piece, and I would rather die than interrupt that.

Today's creation was Kurobuta Katsu with Kabayaki Glaze and Kombu-Cured Daikon. Three K's. A dish built for demolishing willpower. The pork was crispy enough to sing when you cut into it, the glaze had that sweet-savory depth that made your brain forget you were in a war zone, and the daikon added just enough crunch to make you reach for the next piece before you'd finished chewing the last one.

Tsunade was on her fourth serving. Her cheeks were puffed out like a hamster hoarding for winter, and every few bites her chewing would slow to this dreamy mugu-mugu, cheeks still full, eyes half-lidded, the legendary princess reduced to a moaning girl savoring her food. And I was watching every single time, because that moment, when Tsunade stopped being Tsunade and became just a girl making lewd sounds she'd punch me for hearing, that was my payment. Forget the war, forget the clones, forget everything. Just give me that one second on repeat and I'd cook for this woman until my hands fell off.

So that's what I did. Kept cooking, kept the plates coming, kept watching a beautiful woman go mugu-mugu on food I made with my own hands on a Thursday evening.

I was halfway through plating her fifth serving when I caught it. Little bit of glaze on the corner of her mouth, just sitting there like a gift from the heavens. Don't mind if I do.

"Sensei," I said, leaning in. "You’ve got a little something right there."

I reached across the table and wiped the corner of her mouth with my thumb. Tsunade went completely still. Her chopsticks were halfway to her face, her cheeks were still full, and she was looking at me like I’d just switched languages mid-sentence and she was still trying to translate.

I looked at the bit of glaze on my thumb. Well, I couldn't let that go to waste.

I licked it off.

"Mm. I used the same recipe as last time, but this tastes better somehow." My eyes drifted back to Tsunade. "I wonder what’s different."

She started to lift a hand, probably to smack me. 

"Oh, wait, I switched out the mirin," I added quickly. "You always scrunch your nose at the first bite whenever I use too much."

Her fist froze mid-swing. She’d been all set to smack me for flirting, but now I’d gone and made it about the cooking. About the mirin. You can't exactly punch a guy for adjusting his mirin ratio. That's just cooking. The fact that I'd been paying that much attention to her face every time she ate my food, though, well, she couldn't quite figure out what to do with that part. And she couldn't exactly tell the guy cooking for her to scram.

I'd seen Tsunade angry. I'd seen her tired, annoyed, drunk, and once, briefly, sad. But I'd never seen her blush before, and I have to say, it was totally worth the wait. The legendary Senju princess, with her fist still hanging in the air and her ears turning bright red, looked like she wanted to hit me for the flirting she couldn't prove, thank me for the food she was still chewing, and pretend I didn't exist so she wouldn't have to deal with any of it. It was beautiful.

"Boss," the clone said, his eyes bouncing between me and Tsunade with some obvious jealousy. "We really need to talk."

I opened my mouth to tell him it was fine, that Tsunade wasn't exactly a stranger. At this point she was practically the lady of the house. Whatever he needed to say, he could say it here. But then I caught something else in his face. Behind the jealousy, his eyes were screaming ‘boss, this one is strictly private.’

I shut my mouth.

"Sensei," I said, pushing back from the table. "I need to take this one for a walk. He gets antsy if he doesn't stretch his legs. Last time I left him sitting too long he started doing squats in the corner and it freaked out the supply corps."

"I don't care if he starts doing backflips. Just go already. Take your clone and get out of my face."

"Backflips, huh? Don't give him ideas." I paused at the door. "Oh, sensei, if you get bored, there's a card game in tent four. I'd tell you to go easy on them, but honestly, with your luck, they'll be fine."

She tried to glare at me, but you can't really pull off a glare when your own track record is working against you. What was she going to say? "Actually, I'm great at cards"? The entire shinobi economy had benefited from her being wrong about that.

"...shut up. I was on a losing streak," she said, barely audible behind the plate.

A losing streak implies there was a winning streak at some point. There was not. But I wasn't going to be the one to say it, and judging by the way she pulled the plate up to her face like a shield, chewing aggressively at nobody in particular, she knew I didn't have to. Her ears were poking out above the rim, though, and they were burning. Absolutely on fire. You could've lit a candle off them.

"...'m coming to your room t'night," she said, cheeks round as a tanuki's and twice as aggressive. "Bwring money. 'm gonna take ev'rything you have."

God, she was cute. I wanted to marry this woman. Right here, right now, in this rundown outpost, with katsu glaze on her face and her ears on fire. I’d take the vows in my sandals. I didn't even need a ring, the chopstick she was holding would’ve worked just fine.

But I must have been staring too long, because the next thing that came my way was a chopstick. Then another. I dodged both and left before she started throwing plates.

We walked far enough from the outpost that even an Inuzuka would have trouble eavesdropping, and then a little further because I was paranoid, and then a little further after that because I was me.

"Alright," I said. "You've been making that face since dinner. What's going on."

The clone took a breath. Then he grinned. Not a normal grin either. His whole face cracked open like a kid who just found out school was cancelled forever.

"Boss," he said, and his voice was buzzing so hard with excitement I half expected him to vibrate out of existence. "We actually pulled it off, boss. We secured the Rinnegan. The mission in Ame was a total success!"

My heart jumped. Actually jumped. Like it physically moved inside my chest, packed its bags and relocated two inches to the left. The Rinnegan. The actual, honest-to-god, Sage of Six Paths Rinnegan was in our hands. We had them, and I had to repeat that to myself three times before my brain agreed to process it.

"Where are they?" I asked, already grinning back so hard my face hurt. "Where are the eyes right now?"

The grin died.

It didn't just disappear. It melted off his face in stages, like a candle losing its shape on a hot day. First the corners of his mouth drooped. Then his eyes slid sideways, not to look at anything, just to stop looking at me. Then he started scratching the back of his neck, and I knew exactly what that meant, because I only did that when I was about to deliver bad news.

"So," he said. "About that."

"About what."

"The eyes are... well, they’re temporarily not in our possession."

I stared at him. The grin finally let go of the cliff and fell.

"Okay, okay, before you make that face— "

"What face."

"That face. The one you're making right now. The one that says you're about to demote me to latrine duty for the rest of my natural lifespan." He put both hands up like I was pointing a weapon at him. Which I wasn't. Yet. "The clone carrying them ran out of chakra on the way back. Moryo's supply cut out mid-transit, completely out of nowhere, and he couldn't sustain himself. But — and this is the important part, boss, this is the part where you don't kill me — he managed to stash them before he dispelled. They are hidden in a safe spot, sealed and everything. We just need to go pick them up."

I stared at him some more. Long enough that he started shifting his weight from foot to foot.

"So they are safe," he added, his voice climbing an octave. "They are definitely safe. They are almost certainly safe. Like, ninety-five percent safe."

I smacked him across the back of the head.

"Ow!"

"You come to me," I said, "grinning like you just hit the biggest lottery jackpot in history, tell me we’ve got the most powerful eyes on the planet, let me enjoy that for three whole seconds, and then hit me with 'actually we lost them somewhere in the woods but don't worry they're probably still there'?"

"I didn't say they were in the woods, I said—"

"Go pick them up," I interrupted.

"That's the plan," he stammered. "I just thought you should know the situation—"

"Why? Why exactly should I know? What does telling me this do except make me worry about something that I can't do anything about from here?" I smacked him across the head again. "Go. Pick. Them. Up. And next time, don't report good news until it's actually good news. Come back with those eyes in your hands and then we'll celebrate. Until then, you've got nothing to tell me and I've got a sensei to feed. Go."

He didn't wait for a second invitation, he just went.

Tch. What a nasty troll. As if I didn't know what he was pulling. He didn't come here just to share the good news. He came here because he'd been carrying the good news and the bad news and the gut-wrenching anxiety of possibly losing the most important eyes in history, and he wanted someone else to suffer with him. That someone being me. Because who else would it be.

And congratulations to him, because it worked beautifully. I spent the entire rest of the day being completely useless. Fidgeting during briefings, tapping my fingers on every flat surface, poking my head outside every twenty minutes like the clone was going to materialize out of thin air if I wanted it hard enough.

By nighttime, I was a total wreck. I couldn't sleep. I just lay there in the dark, running through every single way this could go sideways, and trust me, there were a lot of ways. What if Hanzo found the stash? What if some animal dug it up? What if the seals failed, the preservation fluid leaked, and the most powerful eyes in history rotted in a hole because my clone picked a bad hiding spot? I stared at the ceiling for so long that it probably started staring back at me. By the time the sun came up, I’d already been awake for hours, sitting outside the outpost and pretending I was enjoying the morning air when I was really just burning a hole in the woods with my eyeballs.

He finally showed up just after dawn. Same clone, same grin, and a jar tucked under his arm with two purple eyes bobbing gently in the fluid.

“LET'S GOOOO!” The shout left my body before my brain could stop it.

A window on the second floor slammed open with a bang. "It's five in the morning, you psycho!"

I blew them a kiss. And just like that, the worst night of my life turned into the best morning ever.