Notes: This chapter is completely different than I wanted it to be. Completely. Which isn't to say that I don't like how it came out, but still. I guess I'll have to make up for it in the next chapter. Lotus-Eater, if I put any more apostrophes in inappropriate places, feel free to beat me with possessive pronominals until I am dead because I definitely ought to know better. And Ancient Chinese Proverb, I really appreciate the fic-rec. Everybody, go check out her new site: www. Thereadershavechosen . eternflame . com. Awesome-sauce. Final note: feel free to ask me about the title of this chapter, but be prepared for a long (and long-winded) explanation. Because I am such a nerd.

Goals: Some people have noticed that I tend to leave a little…pause in Shino's thoughts a lot, as if he were hunting for the correct word. I don't do this because I think he's stupid or anything. I do it because 1) I'm trying to give him a different mental voice from Tenten, and 2) I think Shino's the kind of guy who wants to use the exact correct word for situations and events, and so spends the extra time sorting through his vocabulary to come up with it. So the goal here is trying to give Shino a distinctive voice/thought process. Is it working?

Warnings: Violence, blood, some politics, general unpleasantness.

Chapter 12

False Dichotomy

It was a gloomy, wet morning. Tenten was only an hour or so from Konoha's walls, and thus, a hot bath and a dry bed. The payoff from her mission weighed her sack down heavily, and not for the first time did she wish Lee had been along on this one. He could have hauled this mess back without blinking an eye, she thought tiredly, shuddering slightly as a drizzle of cold rainwater found its way into her collar and down her neck. As it was, the load of beautifully crafted but very heavy golden armor had lengthened her trip home by almost six hours. And the treasurers will only melt the stuff down for coins or something anyway, she grumped to herself. I don't know why the client couldn't do that himself.

Oh, stop whining, she told herself firmly. You got the job done, you got paid, and you're almost home. There's nothing else to worry about.

Except maybe the sudden panicked screaming coming from the west.

Tenten froze on her tree branch. There! Again, another faint scream, coming from further in the forest. A girl or a very young boy was screaming something, though the words were difficult to pick out over the rain and wind. She was still far enough from Konoha that it could be anyone…

Amid the garbled cries, she heard a faint, "Sensei!"

Shit, she thought, flicking the clasp of her heavy sack open. It clanked heavily to the ground far below her, but she was already several yards away and picking up speed as she leapt from one damp branch to another.

She followed the sound of the screaming, swearing aloud when it stopped abruptly. She vaulted to the muddy ground; it was too wet to carry sound accurately, but she might be able to pick up on some vibrations. The moment her feet touched the dirt, however, she felt a shiver of chakra running through the water puddles in the direction she had been headed. She examined it cautiously, but it was unfamiliar. She scanned her memory, but there were only a couple people she knew in Konoha who used water chakra. And this one felt very hostile indeed.

Water chakra, she thought with a groan. Those are never easy opponents.

The rain was picking up now, gone from a mild glum drizzle to a moderate shower. At this rate, it would be an all-out downpour in a matter of minutes. Not ideal conditions for fighting an opponent who could use water as a weapon.

Someone screamed again, just through the trees ahead of her. Someone young, and very, very scared.

Tenten drew four chakra-charged shuriken, focused her senses, and threw.

The shuriken shot directly into the head of the water-clone, and the chakra she had infused into the metal blades dispersed it with a loud splash. Tenten followed close behind, her katana taking off the head of a second water-clone as she landed in a crouch in front of two Konoha genin. As she skidded to a halt in the slick mud, she made an instant assessment of the area. Two genin, children shivering with fear and inexperience, were standing back to back with kunai outstretched in clammy hands. Three water-clones, big water-clones, twisted and grotesque mockeries of a human body, had been clustered around them. With a backwards slash of both blade and chakra, Tenten dispersed the third.

Not clones, Tenten corrected herself as she saw the way some menacing foreign chakra was twisting around inside the polluted-looking water. Water monsters. She heard one of the genin, the girl, gasp as the murky, ice-cold water from the third monster splashed over her head. A few feet away, a third genin was huddled on the ground, holding his arm tightly to his chest with a pained, pale expression. Tenten just had time to register six – no, shit, seven – of the hideous water monsters around the boy when two of them suddenly exploded. Tenten threw up an arm to shield her face from the icy blast of their dispersal, and when she lowered it again she saw two enormous hands retracting…no, shrinking.

"There's three of them," Akimichi Chouji told her gruffly, swinging a suddenly giant arm to the left and connecting solidly with a lunging water-monster. "I got a good hit on one of them, broke off his arm, but they moved back outta range." He swung again, blocking the vicious downward slash of one monster and hurtling the thing backwards until it connected with a second. Both exploded in a spray of murky water, but Tenten could already see why this battle had kept Chouji from following through to the source. Almost as soon as the water-monsters were destroyed, they re-pooled in the muddy ground and sprang up again, looking even more solid each time as the water got muddier and muddier. She glanced around – the boy and girl genin still standing were bravely trying to hurl kunai at one of the water monsters, but they obviously had not yet learned to infuse blades with chakra, and so the water monsters were merely absorbing the blades without flinching. The third genin was struggling back to his feet, slipping and sliding in the mud as he fought to overcome the pain of a broken arm. Chouji was like a thundering bull smashing through the water clones in two and threes. But he couldn't leave to seek the shinobi controlling the clones without leaving his students exposed.

"Where are they?" She shouted above the noise, summoning a hefty morning star and swinging it in a wide radius. Another of the water monsters (mud monsters, by now) burst around her, but she neatly dodged the wave of noxious water.

"North," he bellowed back, sweeping out a huge arm and picking up his wounded genin. With the boy tucked securely under one arm, he took a flying leap and landed heavily in the mud in front of his two remaining genin. The impact caused a wave of sludgy water that smashed into a few of the monsters, knocking them back a few steps. But then, to her horror, they seemed to absorb the wave and grow even larger. And some of them were even starting to melt together, forming tangled messes of limbs and claws that roared in an ugly, bubbling way. It reminded Tenten of a dying man choking on blood.

Putting that cheerful image firmly from her mind, Tenten turned and somersaulted over the monsters' heads, landing next to Chouji. "They have to be close enough to see," she yelled, spiking a muddy claw that came too close to the genin.

"Up there!" the genin girl cried in a thin, shaky voice, but her hand was steady as she pointed up to a sheered-off hillside looming up out of the trees. Chouji reached out and snatched her arm back before a monster could clamp down on it. Tenten caught his eye, and nodded.

Chouji extended one strong arm outward, and Tenten jumped lightly up onto his forearm, gathered her muscles, and leaped with all her might just as Chouji spun, throwing his arm up and launching her at the hilltop.

She flew through the air, wind and water battering at her face. She narrowed her eyes against the rain and just before she reached the peak of her flight path, she saw them.

Two shinobi in heavy-weather clothes were standing in a cutout on the rocky hillside, arms outstretched towards the battle raging below. The third was perched on a rock nearby, rocking back and forth as he clutched his shoulder, which was soaked in blood.

Suddenly, Chouji's words registered fully in her brain – broke off his arm, she thought.

But now her gravity had changed; she was hurtling downward towards the enemy, and one of them had spotted her. He turned, lifting his palms upward. A stream of water shot out towards her face, dividing neatly around her katana blade and reforming as it aimed for her face. It was a nice try, but she'd seen that move before.

Tenten smirked, and twisted.

Her katana slammed into the top of the water shinobi's right shoulder, the force of her fall driving the sharp blade all the way down through his collarbone and into his ribcage. She had only a brief moment to see the look of total shock and agony wash over the man's face before he fell backwards, wrenching the katana out of her hand. She let it go, already spinning to block his howling partner with her morning star. She smashed the first incoming wave of chakra-charged water to the side, but when she moved to counter the second, her feel slipped in the mud. It was too late to stop the fall, so instead she rolled into it, and came up on her feet some distance away from the attacking shinobi. But he was a distance fighter, too, so the gap only gave him room to summon more water monsters. Tenten saw the first disgusting head start to bubble up from the mud, and bashed her morning star down on it. If he started summoning a pack of those things, she'd be stuck fighting them again while the shinobi moved to somewhere he could watch without fear of attack.

She crushed one more half-formed water monster with her morning star, then let the heavy weapon drop, immediately filling her hands with a dozen kunai. She threw them all as rapidly as she could, one after another, forcing the shinobi to focus on blocking and avoiding rather than calling up more of the monstrosities. As the last kunai left her hand, she gathered her chakra and summoned two great handfuls of poisoned senbon needles. The water shinobi caught her final kunai and with a shout, threw her own weapons back at her, all twelve kunai swept along inside a wave of murky water.

Tenten dropped and spun, lashing out with a chakra-charged leg and sweeping an opening through the base of the wave. The bulk of the water crashed over her head, her kunai impacting the ground behind her. But Tenten was already rolling through the opening in the water, throwing all of the senbon needles even as she rolled up to her knees.
The shinobi raised his arms and tried to surround his body with a cocoon of water, but the small, slim needles went right through it, straight as arrows into his chest and neck. The water shield wavered and dropped as the fast-acting poison took hold. Whew, Tenten thought, swiping at her face to clean some of the muck off. Now I really need that bath.

"Look out!" A voice boomed from behind her. Tenten threw herself to the side just as something big and sharp whistled through the air where her neck had been an instant ago. She reached for her scrolls but it was too late, the water monster was already bearing down on her, claws and teeth gleaming red. She had time to think the third shinobi! and god, it's made of blood!

Then a huge mop of brown hair burst through its chest, shattering the creature into a shower of bloody rain. Chouji didn't even lift his head, just kept charging through the monster and past Tenten until he rammed into the man standing a few feet behind her. The armless shinobi sailed through the air with a final wail, then landed in a pathetic heap against the base of a tree and lay still.

Chouji shook the red-tinged water from his shaggy head and stood up straight. Tenten was already on her feet, a nine-ringed broadsword in hand. "Thanks," he said, turning to face her.

Tenten also straightened, and put away her sword. "Yeah, no problem," she said. "How's your team?"

He nodded to the left, and she saw the two uninjured genin helping the third up the rocky hillside into view. The girl was bracing the hurt genin as the other boy put his palms carefully against the broken arm. A faint green glow surrounded his hands for a moment, and then the boy sighed in frustration. "Sorry," he said. "All I can do is get the swelling down a little."

"A medic-nin?" Tenten asked.

"Not yet, but he's got a knack," Chouji said proudly. "Ino's been working with him a little. He might be her apprentice later on, when he's learned the basics."

"You need some help getting home?" she asked, plucking her kunai out of the dirt and wiping them clean as best she could.

"Nah, we'll be okay."

She started to say more but was cut off by a strained voice. "Chouji-sensei?" the injured boy asked, as the genin came to a stop a few yards away. At first Tenten thought he was staring at her, but then she saw he was looking past her, at the body she had almost sliced in half.

First fight, she thought, not without sympathy. First deaths, too, from the look of them.

"Yes," Chouji replied. "Daiki, Miku, Yuuto," he said in a gentler tone. "Do you see these men?"

The girl stared, and the smaller boy swallowed hard. The injured one, however, nodded.

"They tried to kill us today," Chouji went on. "Really kill us. But not because they hated us, or our village. Because they were paid to do it."

"So you ki-killed them," the injured boy stammered. His face said that he was trying to look tough and wise, like this lesson was nothing new. But the hitch in his voice and the tight paleness of his face gave him away. Tenten picked up her morning star and flicked the mud off of it, remembering her own first fighting mission when the Grass nin had attacked her genin team. Gai had fought the man like it was all a game, calling out teaching points to his watching genin until the enemy ninja had attempted to rip Lee in half with a strange vine-creeping technique.

Chouji sighed, and knelt in the mud to look each genin in the eye. "We killed them," he said gravely. "To protect our friends, and our teammates. Yuuto," he looked at the smaller boy. "When Daiki was hurt, you ran to help him up, right?" The smaller boy nodded. "Even though that meant putting yourself in the way of those monsters?"

The kid swallowed hard again, then said, "Yes, sensei."

"And Miku," the big shinobi turned to the girl, who was staring at the smear of a shinobi her sensei had left at the base of the tree. "When your teammates were in trouble, I saw you jump on top of that creature and stab it. You would never allow anyone to hurt them, would you?"

The girl ripped her eyes from the body and faced her sensei. Her features were fixed in a grimace of half-terror, half-anger. "No, sensei," she replied, and her young voice did not waver. "Never."

Tenten jerked her katana free of the dead man's body and nodded to herself. The worst part of that day with the Grass nin, she remembered all too clearly, had been the moment she had thought Lee was going to die. The sick, wet cracking sound of the Grass nin's head as Gai shattered his skull had been secondary to that horror.

Tenten looked back over her shoulder. The boys were looking at their sensei, perhaps as a way to avoid looking at the carnage. The girl, however, was looking right at Tenten, at the splattered blood and mud on the older kunoichi's clothes and body, but mostly at the long, wicked katana she had just wrenched from the corpse. She looked up and met Tenten's eyes, and the woman nodded to the girl. Yes. Sometimes it's like this, too.

The girl's arm tightened around her teammate's waist, and Tenten saw the beginning of real understanding in the child's eyes. This was a lesson all shinobi learned, sooner or later. It wasn't about bravery in battle, or how one had to be willing to kill another human being. The lesson was in the necessity of bravery, and the reason for the killing.

Not for glory, Tenten thought, not for power, not even for pride or honor. For love, and friendship; for the people who guarded your back always, even as you guarded theirs. For the people who couldn't fight back, and the people who believed in love enough to fight and bleed and die in its name. Always for them.

Miku glanced at her two teammates, looked into her sensei's broad, kind face. Then she met Tenten's eyes again, and the girl nodded to the woman. Yes. For them.

"Chouji-sensei?" the injured boy spoke, sounding less frightened but more solemn than before. "What do we do now?"

"Now," Chouji rose and brushed the mud from his knees. "We bury the bodies, and finish our mission."

It was a clear, warm night. Shino was only a few miles inside the border, among the sandy hills between the Fire Country's forests and the Wind country's vast, harsh desert. The wind was blowing from the west, carrying the hot, dry smell of sand into the town square where he was currently waiting. Shino leaned back against the wall of one of the large, wealthy houses in the square, blending in with the flickering shadows. In the center of the square, bright lights illuminated the throng of people crowded around a speaker on a small elevated platform, who was yelling excitedly and occasionally jabbing a fist into the air. The crowd was shouting in random angry or jubilant voices, and would respond to his wilder gestures with increasingly louder roars of approval. Shino watched from the shadows, noting how what had begun as a crowd of muttering individuals with nothing better to do was slowly becoming a mob of angry rioters spoiling for a brawl. All they needed to turn this into a massacre was someone to do something stupid.

The heavy gates across the square groaned open suddenly, and a dozen well armed men came trooping through them.

Exactly, Shino thought.

The crowd turned to face the newcomers as they lined up neatly on either side of the gate. Uniforms, Shino noted, but all brand new and not fitted. A wide assortment of weaponry, too. Hired fighters, then, not a regular militant force. Which meant the client was both wealthier than the Hokage had been led to believe, and was not yet willing to expose the provinces' regular troops to this…situation.

"Citizens," one of the hired fighters announced. "You will all disperse and return to your homes, or we will be forced to view you as hostile and will take action to preserve the peace."

This was, naturally, met with the kind of enthusiastic scorn and anger than only nice, normal, peaceful people can summon when they are deep in the throes of the mindless mob mentality. "On whose authority?" One man's voice managed to make itself heard above the general shouting.

"The Lord Masaru commands you to disperse," the hired man shouted again, hand going to his sword hilt. The other uniformed men also began to shift position, hands on various hilts, handles, and scabbards. Shino pushed off the wall and began to walk around the perimeter of the square.

"He isn't the true Lord!" a woman called from within the depths of the crowd, and the man on the platform waved his arms in emphatic agreement. "He is an impostor!" He shouted, too, leaping down into the throng and becoming a part of the angry, shouting faces. The noise in the square shifted, the people buzzing angrily like bees warning predators from their hive.

Several months of drought had made their lives difficult enough, Shino knew, and the strict policies of the current 'Lord' of the province, while strategically sound in the long run, merely looked cruel and stupid to the ordinary people who did not know enough to see the eventual outcome of food rationing and water taxes. Times were tough, and the self-proclaimed Lord was already unpopular.

There had to be someone to blame. And it was always easier to point a finger when a hundred other fingers pointed with you.

Cries of "The Lady's son is the real Lord!" and "Masaru is Consort, not Lord!" grew louder and louder, and Shino could no longer really tell if the voices were male or female, old or young. It didn't matter. It was the mob, now, full fledged and only seconds away from exploding.

Shino reached the far side of the square, grabbed a protruding window ledge, and started to climb. Below him, someone threw a rock at the armed men.

It took him three minutes to cross the top of the wall around the Lord's mansion and make his way through the expansive grounds. By the time he made it to the mansion doors, the town square was already on fire.

Two armed guards were stationed by the doors, crossbows loaded and faces grim. Shino swarmed them as he went past, blocking their screams with the kikkai. He left them alive, calling his bugs back to himself as soon as the men collapsed from chakra depletion. He wasn't here to kill random hired hands.

He was here to stop a civil war.

Inside, various servants and a few more hired fighters scrambled around, crying, shouting, fleeing. Shino kept to the walls, using a low-level disguise technique to prevent anyone noticing him, and the kikkai to physically stop anyone who started to run too close. He could hear the rumble of the gates outside as they attempted to swing closed, and the crash as they were forced back open.

"Enough!" A new voice suddenly bellowed over the din, loud and commanding. "Stop this idiotic milling about!"

Instantly, the servants stopped running and screaming. A nervous sort of silence descended over the entry hall of the mansion. Outside, more yells, crashes, and the crackle of fire rang, but inside all eyes were on the man who strode into view at the top of the grand stairway. He folded his arms and stood with his feet braced apart, face and voice calm but firm. "Isami," he snapped to a thin old man at the foot of the stairs. "Get the servants into kitchens and have the cook bar the doors. I want Lieutenant Arata to station guards around the kitchens and the Lady's quarters. Never mind the Entrance Hall or the South Wing, there's nothing there of any value."

"But what about the mob?" someone cried.

"Summon the garrison leader," Lord Masaru replied. "Tell him to resolve the situation with as little bloodshed as he can. Now!" Galvanized by his tone, the people began to run and shout again, but this time with less panic and more purpose.

Shino stepped into the light.

The Lord Masaru turned to face him. He eyed Shino with a cool eye, then nodded. "Shinobi," he said, though it was difficult to tell if the word was a greeting or merely an assessment.

Shino inclined his head slightly. "I am here," he said at last, "with regards to a contract."

"Yes," Lord Masaru agreed, and Shino saw a flash of…regret across his stern features. "It's a stupid thing to have a war about," he said. "The baby is the legitimate heir, but he can't rule yet, and the woman is so…" he hesitated, and then shook his head. "She is a good woman, and a good mother, but she cannot rule these people. If it were a good time, no droughts or discontent, maybe, but now…" he trailed off. "Her first husband was a good man, too, but he made some bad choices. He was weak."

"And you are not," Shino said quietly.

Masaru stared at Shino, perhaps trying to see through the dark glasses to the man beneath. He gave up finally, frowning. "I will do what must be done. Even if it means…Even if it is something that I do not want to do."

Shino said nothing. Outside, the roar of the mob changed from anger and violence to fear. New voices, in the clipped, professional tone of soldiers, and the throbbing beat of hundreds of boots marching in time broke through the bellow of the mob. The garrison, Shino realized.

"It must be done," Masaru said again, softer. "For the people. We can't have a stupid war over something like this. I won't let my people die for the sake of a technicality. It must be done."

He snapped his head up, gave Shino a hard look, and said, "Do your job, shinobi." Then he turned and strode down the stairs, out the doors, and into the burning, screaming night.

Shino walked forward, raising a hand. A swarm of kikkai buzzed and boiled out of his arm. Shino closed his eyes and concentrated. The deadly kikkai swarm drew itself into a tight, glittering sphere, then shot forward like a cannonball. It smashed through the wall before him, then through the wall behind that. Shino followed behind until he stood in a large room, empty of almost everything save a few tapestries and a lone woman.

She sat in the middle of the room, facing the wreck of the wall through which Shino had come.

"There is a door," she said quietly as he came to a halt before her.

"At the end of many corridors," he replied.

"And surrounded by many guards," the woman nodded. "I thank you, then, for sparing them."

Shino knelt before her, bowing his head. "You know why I am here."

The woman, a pretty woman in her mid thirties, smiled at him. It would have been a lovely smile were it not for the pain of betrayal mixed with defeat and sorrow that he saw in it. "Masaru sent you," she said.

"Yes."

"He cannot be Lord, not with full authority," she told Shino, fingering a beautifully crafted emerald ring around her delicate finger. "The other lords won't support him, not while I am officially regent in the name of my son. And he needs their support."

"Yes," Shino said again, still kneeling.

"He is a good ruler," the woman told him. "He doesn't want a war, because his people will die. He will make the province safe and healthy again, if they would only just listen to him."
To this, Shino said nothing.

"I love him, you know," the woman murmured, her eyes going a little unfocused. She twirled the ring on her finger again, holding it up into the light and letting the candlelight fracture and dance inside the jewel. "And I think he loved me. Loves me."

Shino raised his head. "But you know why I am here."

"Yes," she agreed. "But you see, it could have been my son. Then I wouldn't be regent, and he could rule legally. But Masaru knows how much I love my son," her voice took on a slightly desperate tone, and her fingers clenched around the emerald ring. "He knows how much it would hurt me, to kill my baby. So if it has to be done…if it must be done…"

She stopped, and opened her eyes. "Will it hurt?" She asked, sounding many years younger than before. Then she slowly toppled forward. Shino caught her before she hit the floor, and laid her out on her back, hands folded across her stomach. The kikkai rose like a wispy black cloud from her body, sated on her life-energy.

"No," Shino said, and left the body behind.

**

"Shino? Are you alright?"

"Yes, Hinata."

"Oh. Good. Um…I saw Tenten on the practice grounds a few minutes ago."

"Hm."

"Shino? I think it would be nice if you stopped by and said hello. For me, at least."

"...Very well, Hinata."

**

False dichotomy: a logical fallacy consisting of a supposed dichotomy which fails one or both of the conditions: it is not jointly exhaustive or not mutually exclusive. In its most common form, two choices are presented as if they are exhaustive, when in fact other alternatives are possible. In some cases, they may be presented as if they are mutually exclusive although there is a broad middle ground.