.
Wise men are not pacifists; they are merely less likely to jump
up and retaliate against their antagonizers.
Genma wakes up to the sounds of footsteps outside the door, followed by the sharp rap of somebody knocking. He rolls his head on his pillow. The light green numerals displayed on the clock at their bedside read nine fifty-four in the morning, and while that's not a lot of sleep, it's enough that he knows he won't be falling asleep again.
The knocks come again.
He extricates himself from Hiwa, not bothering to be careful because, by this point, he knows he's not going to wake her up.
Opening the door a crack reveals an impatient looking messenger, a sealed envelope in his hands. "Murai Kokona?" he says.
"My wife," Genma answers. "I'll take it for her."
"Very well."
The messenger slips it through the opening and goes off on his way.
Genma kicks the door shut behind him with the heel of his foot, his hands occupied with opening up the envelope. Sure enough, it's from the Taki agent.
Curiosity has him skim the letter. Basic and unassuming, he reads a short reminder to get enough sleep, enjoy the free food while they can, and bring back a souvenir for him and the rest of the family.
Genma tosses the letter onto the vanity and wanders back over to the bed. He settles on the edge of it. In her sleep, Hiwa mumbles something, nonsense that he can barely hear, and Genma smiles to himself.
He reaches out and brushes her hair out of her face.
He doesn't want to do it, but he knows he has to wake her up.
The clock blinks as it changes from nine fifty-seven to nine fifty-eight, and Genma decides that while he does have to wake her up, he can at least give her a few more minutes to sleep while he goes and gets ready.
.
.
Hiwa doesn't know—or care—what time it is when she feels somebody shaking her shoulders because whatever time it is, it's too early. She groans and bats the hand away, rolling over.
"Come on. You gotta get up."
"Do I?" she mumbles back, the words slurred.
"Yep."
"Tired."
"I know, but I need you to get up."
Hiwa curls into the blankets and tries to pull it up over her head. But she can feel sleep starting to slip away from her. It's already bright out, and the light pierces through the cotton blankets, right into her eyes even as she shuts them against it.
"Why?" she whines.
"Taki letter came."
Shit.
Groaning again, louder this time, she pokes her head out of the blankets and peers at the clock on the bedside, eyes narrowed. Ten-thirty. Five and a half hours of sleep, if even that. And without much sleep the night before, Hiwa can feel the ache in her knees and the stiffness in her back from the continued exhaustion.
But Genma's right.
He grins at her. "And the bear peeks out of her cave."
Hiwa sits up and tries to get her hair out of her face, to little avail. The battle against the thick, knotted mess before she's had a chance to brush it is a losing one.
Blearily, she stares at him.
"I'm gonna go get Kakashi," he says. "You gonna fall asleep again in the five minutes that takes?"
She sighs. "I'll try not to."
"Good."
True to her word, once Genma leaves she forces herself to get up out of bed and get a few of the basics out of the way. She brushes her teeth, combs out her hair enough that she can throw it into a messy bun on her head, and splashes some cold water on her face.
She's closer to being awake when Genma and Kakashi enter the room again, though it's a stretch to say she's all the way there. There's a filter of sleep over her vision and her movements are sloppy at best.
"Morning," Kakashi says.
Hiwa tosses the letter at him by way of greeting and drops down into the plush of blankets gathered on the front half of the bed.
When he stares down at it, eyebrow raised, Hiwa rolls her eyes. "You can translate that," she says. "You know the Village Code."
"You can do it faster."
"Not half asleep, I can't."
Kakashi rolls his eye.
Hiwa curls up into a ball in the blankets and shuts her eyes. Tired as she is, she doesn't let herself fall asleep again.
It takes Kakashi somewhere in the range of ten minutes to work it out. There's a heavy silence around the room while he works his way through it, stood in the middle of the room while Genma settles himself on the vanity bench.
"They secured a new owner and have the entire situation laid out, and are going to send them off to the resort within two days. We have to have the cleanout finished by then. They're making their move on the owner tomorrow."
"Tomorrow night, then," Hiwa says.
"Tonight," Kakashi says. "We're not pushing this off. Especially because if they move on the owner and word gets back to the resort in time, they're going to go on high alert."
"I think I'm with Kakashi. We're not on their radar, at this point, but there's no reason to tempt fate. Better to just get it done now."
Both of them going against her is vaguely annoying, but Hiwa doesn't have the energy to voice a counter-argument. If she were more awake she might be able to see their side, anyways. "Sure. Whatever." She yawns.
"We'll hit in the late evening, but not in the middle of the night. Operations like these expect that anybody attacking is going to want to work in the cover of night—security's tighter. Seven tonight, we'll move in," Kakashi says. Hiwa feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and she cracks open an eye to stare at Kakashi. "And you're going to be on hand, Hiwa."
She stiffens.
"Is that going to be a problem?" Kakashi asks. His voice is hard and she knows he's expecting her to put up a fight.
That's also annoying. Not unfair, given what happened the last time she and Kakashi were on a mission that required her to kill and he witnessed the lengths Hiwa will go to avoid taking a life unnecessarily. Just annoying.
"If it needs to happen, it'll happen," she says, her voice no more forgiving. Genma's eyes widen a fraction. "I'll do what the village needs me to do."
Kakashi claps his hands and the tension dissipates as if dismissed. "Good. Then you kids have fun. Be safe. No making babies, hmm? Mission babies are always messy. Meanwhile, I'm going to go and enjoy the coed bathhouses and take a trip to the casino."
He slips out of the room without another word.
"He knows," Genma says.
"Are you surprised?" she asks.
She shoves her face into the blankets, her eyes falling shut again, but the hair on her neck doesn't go down.
Hiwa sighs. She waves a hand vaguely towards Genma. "Let me have another couple hours of sleep and I'll explain that."
"More sleep sounds like a good idea."
.
.
"I think I surprised him when I said 'no'; I don't think he's used to people outright refusing an order from him."
"In fairness to him, generally, when your commanding officer points at somebody and says 'kill them', the answer's a given."
A faint smile on her face, Hiwa mildly says, "I get why he was mad, and I don't blame him. Or why anybody would be mad." She shrugs one shoulder, as best she can strewn on top of Genma like a blanket. "But it's not my fault that Jiraiya didn't warn him that I have a history of this. And I was never coy about the fact that I didn't think killing an innocent woman just because her husband screwed Konoha over is the fair way to go about things."
With her head rested on his chest, Hiwa can hear the way Genma's hum rumbles through his torso. She glances up and his face is neutral.
"You don't agree with it," she says.
"I'm an assassin," he says dryly. "The perspective is kind of hard to relate to."
"I know."
"Even if you couldn't find definitive proof, there was enough circumstantial evidence to doubt her innocence. That's enough, for keeping the village safe."
"For you, and for the village."
"But not for you."
"Not always," she says. "Especially not if I'm going to leave a kid orphaned and a mother and father daughterless. That alone—guilty or innocent—always makes me hesitate." She taps her finger against his jaw and he looks at her. "You must've hesitated, before."
He frowns, and she knows she skimmed a nerve. "Of course, I have."
"I just choose to find a workaround."
"Not all of us have that luxury."
"I know," she says. "I don't always have it, either."
"But you've gone out of your way to have it."
"Never at the detriment of the village," she says, and the words come out clipped and sharp and she turns her face into his chest. "Sorry."
His fingers run through her hair and he shifts, sliding himself down on the bed, and drops a kiss on the top of her head.
"Everybody does stuff they don't want to do. And I've gotten a reputation for avoiding doing things I don't want to do, even if that means being a bit underhanded. People can feel how they want, about that. But I'd never… I'd never put the village in danger, over it. Because at the end of the day, I know what I signed up for."
Like a good little soldier, if the order is given and she doesn't see an alternative, she'll march.
She doesn't like to kill.
A little bit of trickery here, some manipulation there? Things that won't cause permanent harm to somebody who doesn't deserve it? That's no skin off her back.
But death is a permanent solution to what is often a temporary problem, and maybe it makes her a coward that she chooses to keep her conscience clean of handing out that judgement, even if the sentence is handed down at the beck of the village and not her whim.
That said, some calls you don't ignore. In the same breath that she refuses to take a life unnecessarily, she refuses to recklessly endanger another life for her conscience. She won't do it.
This is one of those calls. She would never ignore a call like this.
And she explained as much to Kakashi, all that time ago. He may not have agreed with her then and she knows he doesn't agree with her now, but he knows that she would never cross that line because she spelled as much out for him, and that's where her annoyance stems from.
"Like this mission. I know that if you guys run into trouble and need me as backup, I'll have to kill some people." With a bit of a bitter taste in her mouth that taints her words like poison, she says, "I know where I have to leave my conscience at the door and do my duty."
"Better for both of us if things go smoothly, then."
"Cause you and Kakashi less trouble," she says, "cause me less trouble."
He lets his head fall back against the pillow and stares up at the ceiling. "Keep you out of trouble."
"Seriously?"
"And I don't mean that in that I don't think you could handle yourself," he says. "I'm not doubting you. I'm recognizing that a dangerous situation is a dangerous situation, and frankly, I know I'll be able to focus better without you in it, too."
She thinks of how it felt being on the outside, while Kakashi and Genma were on the inside. And even knowing they were capable, she'd been worried. And he does genuinely seem to think she could do it, which is more than she thinks about herself, and she has to smile at that.
"Can't fault you there," she murmurs. "I'm probably going to be worried about you two, no matter how well I can logic around it."
"Kakashi, too?"
She scoffs. "Not him." And she shouldn't. But as much as she wants to kick him into a well and put a boulder over the entrance, she does care about him. In a weird, annoying way. "Well, maybe a little," she says. "But I'm pretty sure he could clean this place out on his own if he had to."
"Probably." Genma lifts his head to grin at her. "But. Worried about me?"
Hiwa lifts herself up. She sets one knee on either side of his chest and drops one of her elbows beside his head, so she's hovered over him like a tent. With her hair loose from her bun, it forms a veil around them as she looks down, her nose inches above his. She brushes her thumb against his jaw. The skin is still smooth from when he shaved this morning, and she can make out a tiny scar along his jaw, thin and old.
"Yeah," she says. "Worried about you."
She's lost enough people, already. She doesn't want the universe to take this from her, too, before she's got the chance to see it through. She can't do it, not again. Having love dangled in front of her like a carrot on a stick, always two steps ahead.
She wants to reach out and grab it, then snap the stick over her knee.
He settles his hand over his. His thumb skates over her knuckles, warm and soft. "Well, don't be. I'm not going anywhere."
.
.
Hiwa settles herself on the bench.
She's dressed in a rather bland kimono, unarmed. All she has on her is a book to keep her company while she listens to the earpiece stuck in her ear. The area is empty—most people are off in the dining area, having dinner.
It's just her, her book, and the gentle whisper of the pond as water filters in and out of the pines. And the jamming device stuck in her pocket.
In the corner of her eye, she can see Kakashi and Genma, knelt at the exit.
Kakashi raises his hand to his ear. "Moving in," he says, his voice filtering in through her earpiece.
Genma mimics the action, though he doesn't say anything—both of them will have their mics turned on continuously. Better to keep Hiwa updated while their hands are occupied.
Hiwa pushes on the button embedded into the chord of her earpiece. "On standby."
"Heading in three, two, one."
The line goes dead.
Kakashi pushes his hand through a couple of seals and a chunk of dirt the size of a table flips up like an opened hatch. The two of them duck into it, and not even a second later, Hiwa hears the sounds of metal clashing. Two solid thuds follow.
She grimaces. The grip she has on her book grows into a vice.
Deep breath.
She closes her eyes and breathes in.
Deep breath.
And she breathes out.
She flips open her book to where she has it marked and does her best to focus on the words instead of the sounds of fighting. It's an awful soundtrack to the book, and she's grateful that it's only one ear, and through the other, she can listen to the sounds of the garden.
It could have been minutes that passed by, or it could have been hours. Hiwa doesn't know. But in her peripheral, as she reads, she catches sight of Blondie walking towards her, her posture tight like a viper prepared to strike.
Blondie's gaze is locked on Hiwa.
Hiwa reaches into her pocket, slow and casual, and flicks on the disruptor. Blondie flinches and her eyes narrow on Hiwa.
And Hiwa wants to deal with this on her own. Genma and Kakashi need to focus on the task at hand. So, she sits, her gaze on her book, and waits as Blondie approaches.