Chapter 55: Choosing Words

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Keiko was sharpening her kunai with an expression of fierce concentration when Hazō found her, which did not at all make him feel apprehensive about starting a conversation which could come across as confrontational.

“Keiko,” he began nonetheless, “can I talk to you?”

“Proceed,” Keiko said, setting the kunai aside and turning the full force of her attention on him.

“So, Keiko. I have a question that I'm curious about your answer to. Suppose that we were expecting some Leaf-nin to be in opposition to a job we took and you needed to talk to Akane about the fact that we may need to fight and kill some of her former almost-comrades. How do you suppose she would take it?”

Keiko stared at him fixedly for a couple of seconds.

“Hazō,” she began, “are you asking this question based on the encounter we had with the Leaf ninja in the Fire Country, where we were forced to kill them and you thus had an opportunity to learn Ishihara’s response?”

“Um.” Hazō’s planning had not covered this contingency. This was the problem with trying to outmanoeuvre someone more intelligent than yourself. “Well. Yes?”

“Did you further prepare a comprehensive plan for this conversation which assumed I had forgotten the event in question? A plan which is now inapplicable, leaving you floundering?”

There was an awkward silence.

“It was a flowchart,” Hazō finally admitted.

“A flowchart,” Keiko repeated flatly.

“Yes,” Hazō cringed. He hadn’t gone as far as showing Inoue-sensei the actual document. He felt certain that if she ever discovered its existence, he would not live it down for as long as he lived. And now, on top of everything else, he had to find a way to persuade/blackmail Keiko never to mention it again.

Keiko shook her head. “Flowcharts are an inefficient way of planning important conversations. As soon as you limit yourself to the physical space of the paper, you are effectively defining a small number of possible responses, which narrows your predictive abilities. I recommend visualisation of a three-dimensional possibility space, coupled with rehearsal of verbal fragments created using existing data, which you can swap in as necessary.”

Hazō’s jaw nearly dropped. “You mean you plan important conversations in advance too?”

Keiko nodded seriously. “When I have sufficient data to make reliable predictions, at least, and can form a suitably detached frame of mind in advance. Unfortunately, my bloodline has significant blind spots when dealing with human relationships, forcing me to draw on my own social skills instead.”

“Keiko, that’s… that’s amazing.” Hazō looked at her with new awe in his eyes.

Keiko gave a shy smile. “Thank you. I have found it very useful in the past, although it is still a work in progress.”

She hesitated, giving Hazō a measuring look.

“It is my experience,” she went on warily, “that human beings are inherently unpredictable. They react in unexpected ways, and often, especially when they are angry or upset, they will terminate the conversation without explaining why your words triggered such a reaction, never mind how you can avoid doing so in the future.”

“I know, right?” Hazō exclaimed. “With the Kurosawa, you can use body language to signal your feelings at any given point in the conversation, and where you anticipate it going, and things like that. I mean, it’s not perfect, but at least you know what you’re doing most of the time. Whereas normal people are constantly giving off mixed signals, and lying about their feelings, and expecting you to read their minds! And would it kill them to just have a list of patterns of interaction you can use so conversations are structured and predictable, instead of constantly having to think on your feet based on guesswork about what the other person is thinking?”

Hazō and Keiko looked at each other.

“I have been thinking that my entire life,” Keiko said quietly, something about her relaxing in a way Hazō didn’t think he’d seen before.

“Then…” Hazō said slowly, choosing each word carefully, “I would like to persuade you that Akane is realistic rather than delusional when it counts. She surprised me when I asked her after the Leaf-nin encounter—she was offended that I felt the need to talk to her about it. She knows what we are, and she knows what they are, and she knows what we all signed up for. I assumed that because she's always focusing on positive outcomes and being upbeat that she couldn't handle the darker elements of our life. But that turned out not to be a very accurate description of her. She was neither shocked nor more upset than I imagine you or I would be at having to kill Mist hunter-nin.

“I am further hoping that changing your mind about her will reduce conflict between the two of you, and lay the groundwork for the kind of harmonious relationship with her that you already have with me and Noburi.”

Keiko seemed to think about this for a few seconds.

“I accept the evidence you have offered me, and will commit time to considering it in depth. I appreciate your helpful motivations, but remain puzzled as to how this outlook of Ishihara’s can exist side by side with her Spirit of Youth philosophy without severe cognitive dissonance. In addition, since I find said philosophy personally offensive, I would need her to avoid inflicting it on me if a positive relationship between us were to be established.”

Hazō smiled. “I’m relieved that you’re taking my words seriously. I don’t fully understand how Akane can be so positive while experiencing the same world we are, but we can see for ourselves that she is, and I value the shift in mood that her presence and actions regularly create. I hope that, in time, you will be able to accept enough of it to expand your own emotional palette.

“Should I go away now and give you time to process?”

“Yes, please,” Keiko said. “And thank you. I am grateful that we are able to communicate with this level of clarity, though also sympathetic to the fact that you are suffering similar difficulties to me in your everyday interactions. I tentatively hope that we will eventually be able to share our different coping mechanisms in order to achieve better optimisation.”

She went back to sharpening her kunai. There was, now Hazō looked more closely, something meditative about the repeated motions.

Perhaps he should do something similar to give himself more clarity while he analysed what had just happened. Weren’t there seal blanks that needed scribing?

o-o-o-o

“So what you’re proposing,” Inoue-sensei said in the special voice reserved for lunatics, small children and idealists, “is that we refuse to provide information to one of the most powerful men on the continent who also happens to be our nominal boss and who’s directly responsible for us having this contract in the first place. We will then follow through by casually mentioning that we murdered some of his fellow Leaf ninja, and present him with bodies he may recognise as personal friends or acquaintances.”

“Yes?” Hazō’s plan didn’t sound quite as insightful coming out of Inoue-sensei’s mouth as it had in his head.

“I’m with Hazō-sensei on this one,” the world’s best apprentice said firmly. “It would be horrifically unyouthful to betray such an important promise, even to Jiraiya. And handing over those people’s bodies so they can have a proper funeral is the least we could do after killing them. I’m sure they have friends and loved ones back home, wondering where they went, and whether they were killed, or captured and tortured for information, or still out there somewhere, alive but unable to get home on their own, and hoping against hope that their allies will come and save them before it’s too late…”

Inoue-sensei gave Akane an uncomfortable look. “Yes, well. Right. I guess… I guess we can risk burning some of the goodwill we’re about to get from Jiraiya on this, if the rest of you are on board.”

There was a series of nods, except from Kagome-sensei, who seemed to be holding back some kind of comment. Given the kind of thing Hazō’s sealcrafting mentor usually came out with when he didn’t hold back (i.e. pretty much all the time), Hazō probably didn’t want to know what was going through the man’s mind.

“But that’s not the real issue here,” Inoue-sensei resumed. “Isan's existence and location is valuable strategic information. If Jiraiya finds out that we hid it from him—and he eventually will, once the village makes first contact with the outside world—I guarantee that he will make an example of us by feeding us to the biggest, slimiest toad he can muster. There’s a time for being honourable and a time for not getting killed, and the only reason I’m alive today is because I’m good at knowing which is which. That goes for you too, Hidden Swamp kids. If I was the honourable sort, I’d have tried to help Shikigami against Captain Zabuza and we’d all be dead right now.”

“I disagree, Inoue-sensei,” Keiko spoke up unexpectedly. “Although I agree that honour in general is a sure path to death in this brutal world, there are nevertheless some things that must be kept sacred.”

“Oh?” Inoue-sensei sounded genuinely curious.

“I am speaking of the master-apprentice bond. Consider our group: Hazō is apprentice to Kagome, and Ishihara, for reasons I admit continue to escape me, is in turn apprentice to Hazō. And while our relationship with you may have… evolved… over time, you cannot deny that its foundations feature much of the same. Without such bonds, we would be what we once were—individuals thrown together purely by a need for survival, without deeper loyalty or… emotional connections.”

“Mori has a point,” Akane chipped in. “In Leaf, they tell so many stories about Jiraiya’s apprenticeship under the Third Hokage, and about how he then taught the Fourth. If we put the emphasis on Mori’s duty to Takahashi, I think he’d respect it. He is an incredibly youthful man.”

“And the rest of you?” Inoue-sensei turned away from Keiko and back towards Hazō and Noburi on her other side.

Keiko caught Hazō’s eye, and mimed plucking something out of the air and placing it in front of her mouth as she moved her lips.

“I’m with Keiko,” Noburi declared after a second. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for us, I mean for anyone, to go to Isan anytime soon. We should give them time to adjust to their new situation. And getting Takahashi angry with us isn’t going to get us very far from a diplomacy angle either, especially since it looks like he’s the head of the dominant faction in the council now.

“I don’t agree,” Kagome said suddenly. “I say we throw Jiraiya at the stinking stinkers and watch the fireworks. They want to get us trampled by a tapir stampede just ‘cause we’re strangers? Let’s see them try pulling that trick on one of the Leaf Three. Then we can point at the crater afterwards and say, ‘That’s what happens to people who try to stab us in the back.’ And no matter who wins, somebody who knows who we are and how we fight is going to be dead at the end. How’s that?”

“Right,” Inoue-sensei shifted to get everyone in her field of view. “We have four votes for Hazō’s proposal and two against. But your case isn’t that bad, and you guys seem to care about it more than I expected, so I’m not going to use the all-seeing all-knowing jōnin veto. Instead, just in case it isn’t possible to talk from inside a giant toad, I’m just going to say ‘I told you so’ in advance.”