.
The state is based on this contradiction.
It is based on the contradiction between public and private
life, between universal and particular interests.
For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.
"So, here we are."
"Indeed."
Akari stares at the Third, leaned back in his chair for what will probably be the last time.
"There've been some good times, daddy."
"Good times," he says wryly. "Is that how you view them?"
"Come on, don't be like that!"
"Of the thirty years I spent as the Raikage, you have been the biggest thorn in my ass, you little shit."
"You flatter me."
The Third scoffs. He pushes himself to his feet and walks around the office, running his hand over the surface of his desk, the window, the war table. A solemn air follows him around the room.
"You plan on putting Ay through the wringer, don't you?"
"Why ask a question you already know the answer to?"
"Hmph."
"Gonna ask me to be gentle on him?" she says. "Tell me to be nice and slow? A good, gracious lover?"
"No," he says. "My son is strong, and he fights his own battles."
The Third stops in front of the map. Pieces from the now finished war—a war they lost—lay scattered over the surface of it, a series of toppled targets and pushed back boundaries. He picks up one of the wooden flags and runs his thumb over it. With a shake of his head, he sets the piece down.
His hand comes to rest over Kumo, his palm so big that it swallows up the entire village. "What I ask is that you be kind to Kumogakure. Be gentle on this village."
The Third gazes at her with eyes as hard as the mountains surrounding them and Akari gazes right back, her head tilted to the side.
She swallows whatever nonsense she was about to spout.
"You love this village," he says. "As much as I do, and as much as Ay does."
Akari meanders over to the table. She drags her finger over Kirigakure, nothing but a speck on the map compared to Konoha or Kumo or Iwa. A layer of dust coats her fingertip and Akari blows it off.
She meets his eye. "And?"
"I'm glad for what you've done for the village."
And when she snipes back at him, "Are you?" it's not nearly as snarky as she intends for it to be.
"You've tested my patience. And fuck knows you've pushed Ay to levels of frustration far beyond anything he's ever imagined, which I'm sure you'll continue to do. You'll make him hit his limit, and then take another step past." The Third chuckles, a deep, almost bitter sound. "I'm surprised the boy still has hair. But all you've done has been in the pursuit of making this village better. You're Kumo, through and through, under all of that defiance and fire."
She sighs.
She wonders if he remembers that when she came to Kumogakure, one of the first homes she stayed in was his. Even as their Raikage, this big, towering hunk of meat and muscle, he welcomed the children of the village—be they born here, brought here, or immigrated here—into his home and treated them like his own.
She remembers him tossing her up on his knee and offering her a chunk of bread. Telling all of the assembled punks a story about some mission he went on when he was a genin, and what he learned about himself and his teammates. He made sure every child left his home with a full stomach and a smile, because even in his leisure when his time was meant to be his own, he turned around and gave it back to his villagers.
To his people.
And whether or not Akari ever acknowledged it, she's never doubted that she was one of his people.
"Of course I am."
"Then I ask you to be gentle on this village. Thrash Ay however you want. It's his job to hold his own against you, no matter how fierce you prove to be. But this village, regardless of whether or not it meets your ideals and your standards, has done nothing but open its arms to you. Don't repay that with a knife in the gut, you hear me?"
"Yeah," she says. "I hear you."
"Good."
Akari waits in the lobby of the Raikage's building, the place where the preliminary peace talks are set to take place. One of the upper rooms has been booked. Already, Ay is in there with B at his side and a handful of other delegates. They're just waiting on the Iwa and Konoha representatives at this point.
She's there out of passive interest.
Which of the tree fuckers are they going to send?
Will she get lucky, and will Iwa send Han? Her correspondence with him about the jinchuuriki union has been fruitful, but nothing beats good ole face to face discourse.
So, she remains there in the lobby, cross-legged on top of a table. And she waits. Even as the other Kumo nin glare at her, as if that's going to actually do anything at this point.
She only unglues her attention from the door for a split second to grab a magazine, but when she looks back up, who else is waiting for her but Minato Namikaze.
Akari hops to her feet and shouts, "You!"
Both Minato and the dude with him—some freaky ass old man who reminds her of an albino porcupine—spin around to face her.
Minato's face as the recognition dawns on him is downright delighted. "You!"
Albino Porcupine frowns, his brows knit together, but she can see as he puts the pieces together. He grabs Minato by the back of his vest. Minato ducks out of it and flies over to where Akari is standing.
"I read that Gramsci paper," he says.
"And?"
"It was incredible. Definitely not realistic, but—"
"What do you mean not realistic? What's unrealistic about thinking that children shouldn't be turned into weapons?"
"I mean, it completely ignores the innate danger of the world. Not training from a young age is bound to both limit future development and leave young people defenceless."
"But no ninja actually stands a chance of adequately defending themselves until they hit chunin, and the average age for that is fourteen."
"Starting training later is just counterproductive, though! They'll just be defenceless longer."
"Not if you expedite the training process. Start basic conditioning at age eight—if the child shows an interest—and then once they hit twelve, only then are they allowed to start learning jutsu and weapons training. And no real combat situations before sixteen."
"How are they supposed to build up enough dexterity and muscle memory? You can't just start somebody that late and expect them to pick it up as easily."
"There are other ways to train dexterity than actual weapon practice—"
"Which all villages include in the early years of their Academy."
"—and besides, efficiency-wise, your ability to practice a skill is exponential. The older you are, the more equipped your body is to learn, so the better you're able to grasp the skill. What you gain from the ages of five to eight is inconsequential, and could probably be made up in a year of intense training."
"What you learn at age five is foundational! It preps you to learn moving forward."
"Which, as I said, can be replaced by non-combative alternatives."
"It doesn't work that way! That's like expecting somebody to learn how to write, but only letting them stretch out their fingers and trace the letters, but not pick up a pencil until ten years old. And there's a point where being older actually makes the skills more difficult to pick up because your body isn't as receptive to building new muscle memory. By waiting too long, all you're doing is prolonging the process—"
"You can't compare handwriting to thrown weapons—"
"Yes, I can? A lot of the skills are the same! Both are dexterity focused activities that require hand-eye coordination—"
"One is an essential skill, the other isn't—"
"That's way too biased of an assertion to make—" Minato gasps. "Wait… this is. Basically word for word, what Gramsci had to say. And writing being an essential skill, that was something he wrote about in his essays on lowered rates of literacy among civilian populations in ninja villages."
Akari smirks at him. "Is it?"
"Well, yeah, but—oh, wait." His brow furrows. "Yeah, I remember you mentioned him a year and a bit—" Minato cuts off, and a second later, his jaw drops. His eyes go wide as saucers. It's so much blue, like the sky on a cloudless day. "You were talking about Gramsci a year and a half ago."
She shrugs. Minato takes a step forward, practically vibrating.
"You were talking about Gramsci a year and a half ago! Gramsci didn't start getting published until a year ago. And… your writing style, in those pamphlets you hand out. It's so similar. And you have a personal 'in' with Gramsci, enough to get early copies of his essays."
Minato's so close, at this point, that their noses are almost touching. "You're Gramsci," he breathes. "You are, aren't you?"
Akari pokes him in the chest. "I thought you were supposed to be a genius? Huh? What took you so long to figure it out?"
"Whoa," Minato says, voice small. "But… why write under a different name?"
"Originally? To circumvent the shitty bougies who wanted to silence me. But at this point, I just keep doing it because sexism is a thing and the big dick politician men here can't pull their heads out of their asses long enough to realize that a woman has as many valid ideas as a man. Bunch of pussy bitches."
"Wait, does that mean that Gramsci is starting to work its way into the Land of Lightning's civilian politics—"
"What the actual fuck are you two doing?"
Minato jumps back a step at the booming voice.
Porcupine Man is standing a few feet away from them, eyes narrowed. Everybody else in the lobby has turned to stare at them, but the cowards they are, nobody dared approach. Except for Porcupine Man.
"Are you trying to ruin this?" Porcupine Man hisses at Minato. "You're causing a scene at the peace talks! Arguing is the opposite of what we're trying to do!"
"But—no, wait, but she—"
"Can it."
"How do you brush your hair?" Akari asks.
"I'm not dealing with you," he says. "I know who you are. I know your brand of bullshit. This little idiot might be willing to indulge you, but I'm not."
Minato whines. "But, Jiraiya—"
"Nu-uh. We're leaving. We've got places to be, actually important things to do."
Porcupine Man stoops down and tosses Minato over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and he marches off through the lobby.
Minato reaches out his hand towards Akari and shouts, "I'll find a way to contact you!"
"No, he won't!"
Minato deflates like a popped balloon, and the two of them disappear into the upper floors of the building. Akari would follow, if not for the fact that there are ten ANBU agents dedicated to keeping her from interrupting the talks.
Which is a complete violation of her right to knowledge and the free spread of information, but whatever. Go off, assholes. She'll just siphon the details from B later.
.
.
Ay pinches the bridge of his nose. "Of course, she did."
The Third laughs. "Come on, don't act like you didn't expect this."
"If I had known that Namikaze was going to be tagging along, I would have done something to keep her as far away from this building as possible."
"Live and learn, Ay. This is why she always had missions out of the village when I was planning to host political meetings."
Ay curses himself for not having thought to do that.
It helps nothing that, as Lord Third knew would happen, interest and support for Akari within Kumo has grown since the war ended. Lord Third didn't win them the war. And the blowback from that hasn't been anything extreme, but Ay thinks that's more symptomatic of this being a ninja village than any reliable indicator for dissatisfaction with the current regime.
Ninja whisper behind raised hands and the civilians gather in their homes and their bars to complain about the failure of a fight they can never hope to understand the complexities of.
Ay needs room to win them back over without her throwing her 'rise of the worker' bullshit in their faces.
And then he remembers the scroll he'd thrown aside earlier, into his 'deal with this later' pile following the preliminary talks amongst the villages.
The actual peace talks that the other kages will be attending is in another couple of weeks. It's not too late to get her out of his hair for that and buy himself some time to appease the masses in one fell swoop.
Ay rummages through the mess of papers and comes out with the unfinished first draft he'd written up earlier for a three-month-long diplomatic mission to Suna. Right now, it's scratch notes, based on what the Suna representative requested during their talks. He still needs to add a few details and send it off to the administrative wing to be cleaned up and turned into a formal mission scroll.
The Third watches, and when he sees what Ay's holding, he bellows out a laugh. "That's a bold choice. Ready to give up on the sandy bastards already, eh?"
Ay scoffs. "What can they offer us? It's not like they produce strong enough ninja—not even their daimyo has faith in them. At best, they're parasites that we can use as fodder when the fighting breaks out," he says. "Let them entertain her for a few months while I settle the talks and get settled as Raikage."
"Very well," the Third says. It's said neutrally, and Ay knows better than to expect anything more from Lord Third.
This is Ay's reign; the Fourth Raikage is in office now.
Not the Third.
And while he might offer bits and pieces of advice surrounding the inner workings of the village, Ay knows his father better than to expect any kind of political advice. As the Third said before—the Raikage mantle is Ay's burden to bear, now. His choices have to be his own.
Ay scrawls Akari's name in the corner and gets to work on finishing up the draft.
Suna, despite having claimed to be an ally, left Kumo to rot within a year of the Third War starting. And now they see fit to open their hand and expect Kumo to fill it.
Ay is nothing if not fair. He'll repay them in kind for what they've given Kumo.