Trigger warnings: Implicit references to prostitution and non con, explicit descriptions of poverty. Reader discretion is advised.

Chapter 9

The water sparkled and rippled, and when touched fled concentrically. It was a pellucid sheet, a gossamer sheath; rubble and industrial remnants percolated underneath, and so did shells and shoal and seaweed. The boat's prow bisected it, the oars in a display of rugged violence displaced it, and Naruto watched with some interest as the stream shrugged off the assault and reknit itself, a gash not just healing or sealing shut but refusing to acknowledge both its own existence and their presence.

That's the dream, he thought to himself glumly, closing his eyes. Be like still water. Refuse not just the sediment in you, but the violence enacted upon you. Refuse participation. Refuse action. Suffer. Suffer and be still, and pretend nothing's changed.

That was the dream, and it was a pipedream. He couldn't feign naivety. Not after yesterday. Fate until then had seemed like this far off thing: shifting images yet to concretize in a cracked crystal ball, hopes and dreams decaying but yet to die. It was the inevitable end that would someday be spun into reality from the spider web of authority— to be faced alone in an indeterminate future, to be surrendered to, but not without a fight.

But fate last night had come looking for him. It was one thing to vaguely know that there existed a world outside, where Jinchuiriki like him had it hard; it was quite another to have it confirmed that to be a Jinchuuriki was to live a life of instability, where one constantly kissed the precipice of madness. And when Satsuki had spoken about the Raikage's brother, it was not the man Naruto mourned for, but himself. The sporadic temptations of the fox were all one by one recollected, and he wondered if that would ever be him— if someday he would go similarly mad and give to the world that'd only ever taken from him the terror that it so justly deserved.

There it was again, that damned fear. There it was, that stab of resentment. Do nothing, suffer all, let the world around you unfold, as it must, as it must. Because to do otherwise would—

"... drifted off? We've reached."

Naruto opened his eyes.

Offered her a broad grin.

Stepped off the boat.

Looked around.

And found himself disappointed.

"Ya said it'd be pretty."

"...It is, I think. In a rustic way."

"Horseshit. Seen nicer public urinals."

"We're not here on holiday, Naruto."

"Nah, but you yapped on an' on about it. Called it a tourist utopia."

Uchiha Satsuki, who'd let her hair down and traded her hakama for the functionality of a jonin vest and typical jonin attire, coloured.

"It was prettier back in the day, when I came this way," she conceded.

Naruto shrugged.

"Looks like shit now."

And so it did. A line of scraggy shrubbery of a fungal hue stretched into the distance. The spent sun drooped that way. Closer to them was a wasteland decked in dying stubble, with soil the colour of rust, and stacks of rebar strewn about, and oil slicks, and a decrepit dockyard left incomplete. A knot of men ran to and fro and sprinkled the evening air with acrid profanities. And amidst the confusion there marched their way a heavy set man with a sword at his waist and a tattooed front. He wore an eyepatch, and looked every bit like a clichéd baddie, but when he spoke his voice was soft.

"Uchiha-san." He bowed when he reached them. "Been a long time."

"Waraji." Satsuki gave him a nod, then turned to Naruto. "This is our client's right hand man. Waraji, this is my student, Uzumaki Naruto."

Waraji furrowed his brow.

"We asked fer you," he grumbled. "Just you, nobody else. This ain't some picnic or field project. Boss won't pay fer a team, I know that much. He wants the best, not some…" he stared at Naruto, then looked at Satsuki and swallowed down whatever insult first came to mind. "...some wet behind the ears rookie." He grimaced and spat.

"Oi, oi, big guy." Naruto puffed out his chest and tapped it. "Lemme tell ya, I ain't the best Shinobi ya ever hired, but I got heart. Lotsa heart. Can't buy that shit. Hers is made of tin, but mine? Pfft. Pure gold, mister."

Satsuki shot him a frigid look that euthanized the rest of his attempt at whimsicality.

"The payment was already decided on," she said to Waraji, "so it should not be an issue. But if my student's presence here is such a hindrance, then he and I can take the next boat back to the land of Fire."

"Now, now, Uchiha-san." Waraji wiped his nose against his arm and looked around nervously. "Didn't mean ta hurt you or nothin'. We got a problem 'ere, is all. And you know 'ow the boss is."

"Take me to him."

"Ah." Waraji looked around again. "He ain't around. Somethin' urgent's come up and he lef' Zori an' me incharge. You...you're supposed to work fer us." He avoided her eyes, and looked for all the world as though he expected to be driven head first through rebar for the audacity of this pronouncement.

Satsuki raised an eyebrow.

"Then we can either proceed with my suggested arrangement," she said pleasantly, "or you can explain to your boss why I refused his task."

Waraji looked up and gave her a smile which revealed a rotting tooth or five.

"You mus' be hungry, the both o' you. Place's this way."

Their residence was on the outskirts of the land of wave. It had two floors. It was neither opulent nor spartan but communicated instead a sense of being nondescript— slate-shaded, stale odoured, speckled with evidence of decay, cracked, covered from top to bottom in a fine film of dust. Neither shabby nor spick and span, but bland, utterly bland. The place held twelve men. Cigarette smoke pooled from the windows, which were left open at all times. The front adjoined a small garden and the first floor branched out into a terrace the size of three cubicles glued together. It was nothing to write home about, but it was better than suffering the everyday atrocities of a tented existence in the middle of nowhere.

At night there wafted into the arid air the sound of sniffles and sobs, moans and groans, thuds and creaks and bumps. This went on for two or three nights, then the routine of these sounds was abruptly perforated by a shrill scream. The scream rose in pitch, went on and on. And it was at this that Uchiha Satsuki, her eyes puffy, her hair askew and undone, her lips drawn into a thin line, wrenched open her bedroom door and marched across to the room from where the screams were being emitted. A sharp rap and three or four muted statements later she stepped into the room and there fled from it a half naked woman, perhaps thirty, her hair matted, her fingernails dirty, teeth yellowed, robes frayed, frame pallid and shrunken. This done, Satsuki stepped out, turned to the man, who Naruto noted was Waraji himself, and after another softly uttered sentence or two she marched back into her room and shut the door.

He heard the sound of a lock clicking.

All this Naruto observed while himself in the throes of an inexplicable insomnia. He refused to entertain thoughts about what this event meant, or what the terror in the woman's eyes as she rushed by implied. Her eyes were sunken, so you could clearly see the grooves; her skin was lustreless and her countenance so emaciated that at a glance you could envision her skull. He was struck by the sensation of having seen a skeleton go by— a skeleton that wore its skin in a fleshly shroud. And he had a sudden conviction that it was death which brushed him by; death animated; death festering and fructifying in the maggot infested womb of some whore, cannibalizing her innards, awaiting the moment when it would burst through her body and claim the world for itself...

He was not able to sleep the rest of the night.

Morning, with its rubescent shafts, broke in a flurry of red like flecks of flesh scattered.

But come night again the sounds somehow ceased altogether.

"What did ya tell him?" Naruto asked when he next saw Satsuki.

"That this isn't a brothel."

A week went by. It was mid morning. They were seated in the dining room.

And Waraji was already drunk.

"Zori don't live with me no more," he was saying. "He got this place the other side o' this shithole, the mongrel, th' cur, th' bumfuck lover."

"Yeah. Yeah we know. You said this, like, a hundred times already. Shut up, man."

Waraji ignored him and wildly waved his sheathed sword about. Then he dropped it.

"Son o' a bitch has all the fun." It dribbled out in a hushed confession, tinted with envy and admiration. "He an' a few o' the boys keep things straight 'bout here. He's the discipline guy, he the man."

And that said he smacked his lips together and downed another gulp of the noxious liquid he had been swilling all morning. Belched. Broke wind.

"He's disgusting," Naruto said, staring at the ceiling. He shut the comic he'd been flipping through. "Hey, big guy. You're disgusting."

"UwU, senpai," Waraji said gravely, emotionally, his lower lip quivering, his eyes watering. "You so mean to me."

"..."

Uchiha Satsuki, who was reading a textbook on medical ninjutsu that even from its cover looked frighteningly technical and utterly dull and full of life sapping gibberish, looked up. She'd swapped out the stuffiness of her Jonin attire for the homeliness of a kimono. The bun was back in place, held together by a set of needles.

"Ignore him." There was a long suffering look in her eyes. "He's always like this when drunk."

Waraji's head landed on the table with a thwack. This was accompanied by snores.

"What a shit place, I swear," Naruto grumbled. "Sit here and do nothin', sit here and do nothin', and stay the fuck away from these dipshits who'll fight ya at the drop of a hat. Boring. Boring, boring, boring."

"Perseverance is a virtue."

"I ain't the virtuous sorta guy."

"Mm-hm." Her eyes gleamed. "Maybe that's why you need to learn it. Good things come to those who persevere."

"Did ya, like, swallow a book on clichés as a kid?"

"Clichés are well worn for a reason." She shrugged. "You'll find that most hold true."

"Not this one, though."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, wait long enough and ya get old. And the older you get the higher the chance your heart just goes poof!" He raised a fist, then opened it languidly and made an upward motion, a mushroom cloud. "We've waited, sister. O, we've waited and waited. You and I, we're old. It's been a long, long wait. A million, billion years of listenin' to this shitheel and his drunken rants."

"I have a low bar for you at the best of times. But that— that was beyond dreadful."

"You break my heart. Just stomp on it already and call me Uzumaki."

"Oh, shut up." There it was again, the eyeroll, accompanied by the smallest of grins. Blink, and you'd miss it. There was something in it that quickened his heartbeat just a smidgen, and…

Naruto cleared his throat.

"So," he asked, "why we waitin'?"

"Hm?"

"I mean, I thought it was a swoop in, shake the guy down, break a bone or ten, swoop back out kinda thing. What are we waiting for?"

She closed her textbook. Looked at him. Crossed her arms. Raised an eyebrow.

"You tell me."

"Wow, so you don't know either?"

"No, you idiot." For a moment he thought she'd wring her hands in despair. "It's a test. A thought experiment. Tell me why we haven't made a move yet."

"I dunno. You're lazy and love the company of thugs?"

"Naruto."

"Konoha's broke and starving so you gotta run up the bill? We do charge hourly, don't we?"

"Naruto." Her expression clearly said: cut the crap.

He sighed.

"Yeah, ok, ok. Fine." He rubbed his nose. Squinted at the ceiling and nibbled at the inside of his cheek.

"You said there's a bridge being built?" He asked after a minute.

She inclined her head in acknowledgement.

"Ya went and looked at it on the first day. You already seen the main cast of this drama. You know, the guys we gotta put the fear of the lord into."

"Yes, that's correct."

"So why aren't we...no, wait, don't tell me yet. Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm."

He closed his eyes. Tried concentrating. The underside of his eyelids involuntarily flamed with sheets of light, exploded into a frenzy of sparks; these were torches dispelling the quiescent dark; and once more there emerged from the white heat of his guilt the grainy memory of that woman gliding by. Over and over she drifted past, a video recorder broken, stuck on repeat, her face shadowed over, shifting. Then within the space of a grimace she began to transmute, the skin turning fleecy, flaking, cracking, peeling off; the mien elongating; the form distending, diminishing, becoming quadruped; and within his mind's eye he watched horrified as half a second's metamorphosis unmade and then remade her: she was no longer a woman, but a sheep being led to an abattoir. And the twine around her neck was in his hands— he her captor, his silence sealing her fate.

Do nothing, suffer all, let the world around you unfold, as it must, as it must.

Naruto opened his eyes hurriedly.

"You're playing for time." His voice sounded shrill, even to him. Unnatural. "Or at least the client is. Else this is straightforward business."

She looked at him with a half squint. She'd picked up on his discomfort, but made no mention of it. He appreciated that.

"And why would the client play for time?"

"He's...I dunno, he's hopin' for a peaceful solution or something? Nothin' else makes sense."

"Close enough." Satsuki offered him a smile. "We've been told not to act because he still hopes that he can find a solution which is satisfactory to all parties. He has a delegation hashing out details at the moment. He more or less owns this land. He controls both the industry here and the sea routes. He has a similar stranglehold over several areas across the world. So when rebellion began to brew, when they began building that bridge, he pulled some strings and tripled the tax rates, because it occurred to him that he would no longer have a monopoly if the bridge were completed. It is a portal to the outside world, and thus to competing interests. He is reluctantly willing to make an example out of this land in the hope that it prevents other insurrections."

"What a wonderful human being."

"But," she went on, ignoring his snide aside, "Gato harbours some hope of making them see their folly. He is willing to recant the tax rates, which were enforced a year ago; he is willing to let things go back to what they were. For this he needs the leaders of this land to see reason. Some have been persuaded, others purchased; but there is this one fisherman who has anointed himself the leader of the people. Kaiza, if I recall correctly. He retains massive public support. He refuses to bend or to be bought out, and it is he who is at the forefront of this bridge. If he can be persuaded, the rebellion will fall. If not, then he will have to be brought down. But the latter is a last resort. The client would rather retain his business in this province and tide things over than burn it all down. Beggaring them has affected him too, in a way. Or at least a fraction of his profits."

Naruto barked out a laugh.

"I ever tell ya that I love the kinda clients we serve?"

"A few times, yes." She did not bat an eyelash or miss a beat.

"So why me, huh?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Naruto pointed to himself.

"Why me?" He gestured to the passed out Waraji. "That guy said they asked for you. Just you. I don't need babysitting. I fail to see the point of me here. Ya coula' left me back home and come fixed this mess yourself. It'd be easier. This is just me, I dunno, sittin' around and swattin' flies."

"Why, I thought you'd never ask." She smirked at him, and it was in this moment that he knew he was screwed.

"I need you to explore Wave," she said. "Find this fisherman. Persuade him to drop this cause of his."

"I thought ya said there was a delegation doin' just that."

"Yes." She offered an upturned palm and made a graceful half shrug. "But they lack— what do they call it?— Ah, yes, a personal touch. You, on the other hand— you are a victim of our village. You see us for what we are, or so you tell me. So what I want you to do now is to go out there and convince him of how evil a people we are. Sell him on our ruthlessness, and make it clear to him that the price of resistance is death." There was something inscrutable in her look, something calculating. Every trace of the girl he had chatted with companionably just moments ago had disappeared, and was now replaced with a statuesque poise and frigidity.

She made a shooing gesture.

"Scram, little fox. Go enjoy the world outside. This man's destiny is in your hands."

Wave was a cyst ruptured. A town trapped in torpor. A stinking slag heap sprinkled with the debris of a populace. These were the thoughts which came to his mind when he wound his way through the town square, where citizens haggled over a withered harvest and tumbled about in graceless locomotions. Their breath emerged in rancid puffs; their skin was of a sickly pallor, a wheatish hue which had been whitened in places by anemia. Their bellies were bloated and bore a tumid rotundity. On their faces, above scurvied gums, there festered an acceptance of their destitution.

Theirs, he saw, was a destiny penned at the hands of a nouveau riche conqueror— and they accepted it with nary a sigh.

To thus suffer defilement, to suffer the whips and scorns of fate, to suffer through conditions so fundamentally deplorable that the horrors of existence acquired the lustreless mundanity of the quotidian— this, this was life, in this lay the essence of existence. Reality resided at the centre of this stasis: reality was a shrubless desert which on occasion was smoothed over by the mirage of mirth. It was an unlocked cage, from which sabre-toothed death sprang forth.

He saw in their fate his own mirrored, and felt for them a torrential sympathy, till, inflamed, he too was one amongst their throng: drowning in an unnavigable mire but suffering in silence and grace. Living— like them—for himself. In spite of the tyrannies inflicted on them they lived. Though broken, they lived. Though brought to their knees they got back up and went on living. They found in the vast night of sorrow a flicker of happiness to latch on to, which was a candle, a match lit momentarily. And when that went out they found another, then yet another, till the vast void of grief was crushed under the weight of an atom of joy.

And that was life— that was all there was to it. A mote of dust was heavier than a kingly crown. Pomp had its day, but not here, and not in his heart. And thus he would be free, forever free: his heart would swell with the strains of a defiant harmony. He would scale the jagged summit of human tyranny, not to bow before its crimson fane but to bleed upon its spires, each drop an accusation, a validation, a triumph.

Glory in thus suffering. Glory in giving the universe the middle finger. Satisfaction too.

Throw at me whatever the fuck you wish to. Go on, I dare you. Do your absolute worst. You can't break me. I'll take ten times the punishment, ten times the injustice, and still stay unmoved.

Naruto looked about and grinned bitterly.

Kindred spirits here. He'd found kindred spirits here.

He wandered about, but the images everywhere were the same. A land savaged. A land consumed. Plundered. Defiled. Eaten up by the locusts of greed. Its people deflated. Dying. The skin sticking to their bones. The afternoon sun leeching away at their life. Sweat in rivulets streaming down their foreheads, washing away the fight in them. And their eyes glazed over in acceptance, their shoulders slouched over in affirmation of a suffering that came to them unsought and would not leave till every man, every woman and every child had shriveled up and submitted to fate itself.

Beyond humiliation now. Beyond degradation. Beyond despair.

Beyond saving.

Sentiment twisted his heart. Tears stung his eyes. Naruto gnashed his teeth and scrubbed his sleeve over his face in a near apoplectic fury.

None of that now, he thought. None of that shit. Look. Look. See what we do to people. This is what you work for. This is what you are made to uphold.

And once more there was that familiar stab of resentment. He wanted nothing to do with this. He wished he could bring back Namikaze Minato and drive a kunai through the man's heart.

Distraction came in the form of a tug at his track top. He turned around, and was confronted by a little girl, seven years old perhaps, who had a bunch of wilted flowers in her hands. She wore rags, but there was something about her that was different from the land itself, and from the people that like reanimated corpses muddled through its sun-blazed trails. She was emaciated, yes, and her face had a hollowed out look; but her eyes were bright— life leapt and twirled behind those eyelids. She wore a sun struck smile that was blinding in its innocence.

"Spider-lilies, sir?" She held up her offering. "I got red spider lilies. And carnations too. Just a hundred ryo."

Naruto grinned.

"Nah, kid. Nah, I'm good."

Her smile flickered, then faded. Her arms dropped nervelessly to her sides. The light in her eyes, which just a second ago had been a second sun, began to seep away.

"...Sir, I…" she shifted about and looked away in shame. "Just one bowl of miso soup, nii-san," she blurted out. Then, seeing his face, she hastily amended, " Or one carrot. Anything." Her head dropped. "Haven't eaten since last night. My flowers are bad and no one buys em. But...but I promise, just one bite and I'll...I'll find something better for you by tomorrow. No payment. Just food. Please?"

A whirlwind of emotion.

A murderous rage.

A fraction of a fractious second passed, within which he raked up an image of Minato Namikaze and mutilated it six different ways. Tears again threatened the edges of his eyes.

Then Naruto looked at her and offered her his widest smile.

"Sure, kid," He took her flowers. "These are beautiful. Imma keep em. I know a girl who'll like em."

Hope shone in her eyes.

"Really, nii-san?"

"Yeah." He grinned. "Come along. You and me? We're gonna go eat a feast fit for Kami himself."

A/N: A few people were confused about my intentions for Naruto last time around, so I've decided to dip into my notes and leave you with a summary of his character so far. Feel free to skip this if you wish to, or if you don't skim the fic. If you do skim, then a lot of transitions and maturations will not make any sense to you. Either way, up to you.

A note on Naruto's character so far

To put it simply, at the heart of Naruto's character here is a question of choice, and of free will. He tries to negate being a slave of circumstance by being in total control of himself and every fibre of his being. So every action (or rather, should I say, his cultivated inaction) becomes a form of protest.

To put it in broader terms, since in the larger scheme of things he has no control over his own life (or so he believes), and since his fate, in his eyes, has been predetermined, the Naruto in this fiction defines himself in terms of what he cannot and will not do. Since the course of his life has been influenced by the activity of others (think Minato, think Sarutobi), he reacts to this by draping around himself a cloak of passivity.

In the first arc and a half he is passivity personified: his is a system of inaction; his protest is through a self imposed exile from activities that he actually enjoys (he admits in chapter 7 that he loves both training and the pain it brings). The stuffiness and the serious nature of order have intruded upon him, so he opposes it by creating for himself a persona steeped in a deliberate levity (pranks, wisecracks), plunges into a self embraced bathos; he dwells and revels in chaos, and insists on a personalized idea of reality that, while recognizing actuality, takes no account of it, since in his eyes he cannot fight it. So he takes pride in his suffering and his ability to be unruffled by said suffering. He sees a Shinobi controlled world, and understands its expectations from him to be a war sacrifice: he is not okay with this, but considers it inevitable, and so does not waste his time pondering over avoiding this outcome.

He does not desperately desire his freedom: he he has given up on it. As he says in one of the earlier chapters, it is an impossibility, because Konoha would never let him go; and even if he were to escape them then there'd be a world outside hunting him down for what he holds. Therefore freedom to him is an ideal, an abstraction, an impossibility — its beauty lies in its impracticality. To put it as the Joker would (Heath Ledger's): "I'm like a dog chasing after cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one." He wouldn't know what to do if he were truly free. It is pondered over wistfully, and is of such high value to him precisely because it is never a choice he can opt for, and is never even on the table.

In this sense, the Shinobi system to him is as death would be to a human being: inescapable, inevitable. You might have panic attacks over it for a while if you look at it too closely; then you grudgingly come to terms with it, because the human mind's ability to accept any privation and adapt to any set of circumstances is truly unparalleled.

So if looked at like this, then he is deliberately reactive, to the point that he lets the world happen to him instead of making any attempt whatsoever to govern it or influence it. It is his mode of protest, the only one available to him: it is the only modicum of control that he can retain over his own life. He is simultaneously a jailor and a prisoner, and loathes both conditions. He recognizes the price of exceptionalism; and while he is not opposed to the ideal itself, he is opposed to why he is being asked to attain it. He reduces shinobi versus civilian to a good versus evil dichotomy (a simplification), and hates the systemic and exploitative nature of one while envying the innocence and freedom of the other, though the latter also comes with powerlessness.

This binary approach to an else complex issue is by design: it is what I intended to write for the character, because Naruto, even in canon had a similar propensity for simplification and reduction (I will be Hokage, and that's all there is to it; I will make my own brand of peace through forgiveness, and that's all there is to it; I will drag back a massacre victim that my village has broken down, whether he wills it or no, and that's all there is to it, because he is my friend).

When Satsuki calls him idealistic she misreads him (she gets the lack of ambition part right, but cannot relate to the powerlessness that causes it). He, in fact, is not idealistic: his belief system at the moment is a step short of fatalism and nihilism. But he's not quite there yet (and never will be, though more on that later), because he still believes in creating meaning via the levity of the day to day, via an appreciation of the ordinary; whereas nihilism needs making peace with a fundamental lack of meaning in the cosmos (which nonetheless doesn't necessarily take away your ability to appreciate it). We will not go there.

He retains his canonic sense of kindness, and also his obstinacy. He has a desperate desire to find an ideal to truly embrace, truly believe in. But at the moment, he hasn't yet found that central point he can pivot about. This is deliberate, and the fic to an extent is about that discovery (and this might shock you, but no, it's not the pairing itself).

The pairing is secondary, while the question of character and its transition (for both characters) is primary.

Either way, this is the base character I set out with. I am possibly missing out on a few things here ( I'd have to go back and look at what else I integrated— resentment, for example, simmered underneath the surface; and there was the idea of wanting to be seen as who he is, and not what he holds), but those are the fundamental ideas behind the initial arcs of the character. That said, the work attempts to be a character centric drama. Neither of the two main characters is static, and my goal is to trace their maturation and evolution over arcs (and keep it as natural as I can). Naruto at the moment has had limited interactions with the world (one of the few things Satsuki gets right), and the fic is about how the two of them evolve when exposed to external stimuli and various events. So there will be transitions in attitudes, shifts, the entire lot, as happens irl. If the characters are exactly the same at the end as they were at the beginning, then I've failed as a writer, and the fic is a failure.

I'd write up a similar note on Satsuki and her base persona, but it gives away way too much, so I'll refrain from that for now. Everything I've written for Naruto, though, is implicitly or explicitly already in the fic (or will be, by the end of the next chapter- I broke this one up into two parts because it was getting too long), at least if you go through both the prose and the dialogue, and don't just skim it. It will be similar for Satsuki.

As a final note, if your expectations from the fic are romance, and just romance, then this isn't the fic to read. I'm clarifying this now because I anticipate complaints along those lines later. The fic at its heart is about a journey towards self realization for both characters. There will be conflict (and not of the token kind either). They will change over time. Their paths at times will intersect and at times run parallel (as in canon). There is eventual romance, but the fic will not live or die by it. That's not what I set out to write, and I'm not going to cripple either character's indvidual agency for it. The key is to try and get them to react naturally in situations, without breaking character. I did not set out to write caricatures. They have to pick each other, and it has to happen over time; it is not going to be shoved in via either character simply abandoning everything they stand for. I think this arc will make that abundantly clear.

Reviews, as always, are appreciated. Have a great week ahead.