'The far villages of the Land of Earth don't care for the gossips of their neighborhood shinobi. They see able-bodied workers in every passing traveler, and drought has made rice planting especially bothersome in their inland plateaus. The locals are friendly, and hardworking. Since my arrival, I have learned how to affix thatched roofs for better rain coverage, how to till and layer the soil for easy water percolation, and how to facilitate the day-to-day quantities of water necessary for a bountiful harvest.
The life of a farmer seems far from unfulfilling, and I find myself intrigued by it. Perhaps I will stay here until after the harvesting season.'
The new era of peace-- a record five-years-and-still-running --has granted the villagers of Konoha a safe haven to slowly puddle into as the world around them acclimates to its new, repetitively mundane everyday. One of those puddles, chin on his palm and fingers curled over scrappy parchment, sighs into the air as his assistant-slash-advisor-slash-babysitter dumps a mountain of paperwork onto his desk with aplomb.
"Due tomorrow morning, Sensei."
Hatake Kakashi, aged 36, is already thoroughly regretting most of his choices in life. Warming the hot-seat until a younger, much better-equipped someone-special is less young, and experienced enough to competently take over seems a nice, simple plan on paper but--
"And if I fell intensely sick very suddenly?" Kakashi is, to put it bluntly, at his wit's end.
Shikamaru shrugs, already headed for the door. Waving a hand over his shoulder (with zero concern for the rapidly approaching dusk), he capitulates with a: "Tomorrow evening, then."
It says much about Kakashi's character that his first thought is of how he'd really much rather die being swallowed by an oversized whale-- actually, the idea becomes more appealing the longer he turns it over his fingers. In this new world of conjectures and advancement, where every minute decision has a lasting impact; where pressure amounts, stiff as stone wrought metal…
"Shikamaru?" The man pauses before the office threshold, one hand on the doorknob, one foot already in the hallway. Kakashi sighs again. "Never mind. Enjoy your dinner."
Shikamaru turns to face him. Perhaps it was his voice that did him away, maybe even an expression he hadn't meant to show-- Shikamaru purses his lips, caught in a web, and haltingly, he asks: "You sure about that, Sensei?"
That will not do.
Kakashi allows his forehead to mash against the lined redwood of his desk. The theatrics are a balm, dispersing Shikamaru's sudden seriousness to the tune of Kakashi's simpering: "Your wife's temper is even fouler than Sakura's-- do not tell either of them I said that."
Shikamaru mimes zipping his lips with a roll of his eyes.
"Well," he says. "I'll be off, then. Don't stay up too late and eat something before you go home."
Kakashi twinkles his fingers as Shikamaru disappears in a swirl of leaves.
(…The parchment is rough under his nose; yellowing at the edges, several weeks old, and water-stained. The handwriting is neat and familiar in ways that still twinge through his chest in mockery-- his next action is instinctual: fingers flying over the rungs of his desk drawer, mapping out the chakra-sealed lock to slowly work it open. The letter is one of several from over the years, with the same, drably curious quality as all the others. Impersonal, but not truly detached, either. A status report that reads like lukewarm coffee in the morning, and absent laughter.
(Uchiha Sasuke who is at once incredibly changed, and the exact same person Kakashi has always known him to be.)
Kakashi closes his eyes. After weeks of endless, sticky summer heat, Konoha welcomes its first rainstorm.
Sasuke hates the cold. He never says as much, but Kakashi has made a career out of his observational skills and he'd known Sasuke, if only for a brief period of his life…
Sasuke hates the cold. Despises it with a teeth-grinding fervor: palms curled into his arms, head bowed resolutely. Kakashi never asks why-- he supposes he was never meant to realize --and Sasuke hoards what little remains of his secrets, carried over the years.
"Yo!" Kakashi brings a blanket-- he always does, though he knows the guards will see fit to remove it by day's end. Sasuke never thanks him-- never says much of anything to him, really --but he allows his shackled hands to slip through the bars bordering his cell, and he never questions the gift for what it is. From Sasuke, those small inklings of trust are everything.
"Kakashi," They should give him more water for his troubles. Sasuke isn't the talking type by nature, and every word scrapes across his tongue, thinly and raw. Kakashi looks through those cell bars, the blanketing darkness of within, and watches the way Sasuke settles into his cot, blanket in his arms, hugged against his chest. Whatever Kakashi had meant to say after, be it his casual greeting pleasantries or the usual inquiries, are lost to the abyss.
Sasuke looks lonely in that cell. A singularity left to drift in the palm of the world. Kakashi allows himself to sit on the floor across from him… Sasuke tenses up at the gesture, nervous perhaps, and so he turns, letting his back lean against the bars separating them.
"It's warming up outside. Sakura thinks summer is around the corner, but I'm not sure. A little early for summer, don't you think?" Quiet. The occasional shallow breath: a puff of air, a stutter, nothing. "I know, I know, you're wondering why I'm bringing it up at all. You hated summer. You sweat too easily, and you hated the rain, too. I just thought you should know, you always liked being prepared for-- what did you call it? All eventualities? --I doubt that's changed."
Sasuke's bare feet drag across the floor before that sound is swallowed by the prison, too. Kakashi thinks of how they don't allow slippers in the cell, either. Standard protocol for someone deadly enough to kill a man with just a look, never mind that Sasuke's chakra is sealed. Never mind that Kakashi is the incumbent Hokage, creator of said seal, and disapproving of all of this. Simply never mind.
The silence reigns.
"Are you eating well, Sasuke?" What he means, always: are they treating you well, and if not well, fairly?
"Don't ask stupid questions, Kakashi."
Sometimes he wonders just how much of what the war has left him is his to keep. For Naruto and Sakura, it's easy. He has always been their Sensei, even as they'd both gone on to make names of their own under masters that were not he, himself.
Sasuke is a different story. Sometimes, even when he's right in front of Kakashi, Sasuke seems as lost to him as he did the day he left.
And Kakashi… blames himself for that, too.
"I'll take that as a yes!" He mimes clicking a pen and unfurling his palms in mimicry of a slowly opening booklet. "The next question on our agenda…"
Somewhere far from here, a faucet leaks water against slabbed rock floors, one-two, one-two, like a metronome. And Sasuke has never been the talking type, he hoards his words like blocks of gold, and smothers those things that needn't be said. For a long while after, the sound of that faucet is the only response Kakashi is allowed to receive as his directionless questions pepper into inanities, into jokes that fall flat the moment they leave his lips.
And still, he stays until his hour is up, until the guards come rushing through the prisons' bolted doors to escort him back to the village.
"I'll see you next week, Sasuke," he says, a reminder rather than a goodbye. Because Kakashi hoards things, too-- trinkets and memories, and people most of all.
Sasuke doesn't do anything more than grunt as he leaves.
Progress, small but still there. At least he's acknowledged he'd left at all.
Progress.
The rain doesn't let up by the next day-- designated especially for bi-monthly team outings, a "get-together" of a sort --and so lunch is spent beneath the rain-drenched tarp covering the high-stools of Ichiraku, Naruto halfway through his bowl-number-five of ramen as he regales Kakashi and Sakura about his most recent vacation in nearby Suna with Gaara and Hinata.
"Okay, okay, get this--" Naruto pauses dramatically, roving his eyes throughout the booth in an attempt to reel them both into his storytelling-- Sakura rolls her eyes for his effort, but Ayame, at least, seems to be invested as she serves up Naruto's sixth bowl of ramen --before flapping out his hand with a chuffing, "Gaara has never gone to a public bathhouse before."
"No. Way." Sakura's cheek melts into the meat of her palm, though she makes an effort to narrow her eyes in feigned interest. Despite her obvious boredom (this was, after all, the fourth time Naruto's brought up his vacation in the two days since he'd arrived back in the village), Naruto takes her words as an incentive to plow through his admittedly hilarious anecdote about Gaara burying himself in sand at the sight of Naruto in nothing but a towel.
Kakashi claps slowly, and with much levity, to show his appreciation.
Naruto scoffs, which really isn't fair because Kakashi is sure Sakura has fallen to sleep.
Comparative niceness, or however that saying went.
"You know," Naruto says, arms folded, and pouting with the same kicked-puppy-face he's been using since he was twelve. "If teme was here, he'd at least tell me to my face if he's bored."
Kakashi deliberately calls out for a second bowl of ramen, hand on his chin as Sakura starts up a rant about the prudence of respecting Sasuke's privacy and wishes, yadda yadda, 'don't bring him up just because I'm sick of hearing your dumb story!'
"You're just jealous I got hitched to two people when you can't even snag one!"
Kakashi shrugs at Teuchi's raised brows as Sakura flings herself-- and subsequently, Naruto --out of their seats, Ichiraku, and straight into the pouring rain.
"Was Ayame ever this difficult as a child?" Sakura turned 23 two months ago, and headlights as one of Konoha's head medical experts besides Tsunade-hime herself. Naruto will follow after her in October.
Teuchi turns to look at Ayame, who sweetly laughs at a joke one of the other restaurant patrons makes as he receives his order.
"I'll take that as a no," Kakashi sighs, shaking his head as Sakura tears up half of the city block in an attempt to catch Naruto's face with her bare fists. "How much do you think roads cost?"
Teuchi grins.
"More than I make in a month if we're being modest, Hokage-sama."
Kakashi sighs again.
"I thought you'd say that."
Kakashi doesn't know if Naruto and Sakura have a similar correspondence with Sasuke. He's a sore spot for them, still, even if he no longer pits himself as their enemy. Kakashi's thought of bringing it up once or twice, mostly to keep the conversation running, sometimes to break up fights… he never does.
Summer comes early, as Sakura predicted. The last of springs frost disappears into the green earth, and the mornings usher in a harsher sun-- warm and angry and blindingly bright.
It doesn't seem like that in the prisons. They're just as cold and dreary as they've always been: the distant faucet still leaks, and the deep dark of the underground etches itself into the shadows beneath the scones of light manning the hallways.
Kakashi still brings his blanket, and Sasuke still accepts it wordlessly.
Progress.
"Do you hear the rain from all the way here?" Kakashi asks, letting the back of his head curve along the edges of the bars. His ear brushes cold metal as he eyes his former student from his periphery-- Sasuke, who shuffles to make himself comfortable on his cot: legs together, arms folded atop his thighs, the blanket draped over his shoulders for once.
The silence weighs the air around them, a sound in itself. The faucet leaks, one droplet, two…
"No." Sasuke murmurs, clear and calm. Kakashi waits to respond, and his patience is rewarded some while after with Sasuke's tentative, "But you can smell it, later on. When the sun comes back… it smells like the sewers."
"That sounds horrible." Something giddy bubbles in his throat. Something that tastes like laughter, crackling and warm. "Should I bring anything for it? An air freshener, perhaps?"
The front of Sasuke's cell is annoyingly blank-- a dark gray wall stained red where hands would normally go, and black where feet would drag. Kakashi wonders if Sasuke's counted all the tiles available for his purview, if he catalog's the newer stains with each new prisoner, each new attempted jailbreak, each new failure.
Kakashi does. Sasuke still doesn't like to speak to him face-to-face, and an hour is a long time to while away.
"I could drink the air freshener." No, he means. It is, as with so many other things, prohibited.
"Flowers, then? Those that don't die easily, too. I'm sure Ino would be glad to help me pick them out."
Sasuke's silence slithers across the floors, a shadow grasping for light. Kakashi lets his words sit there, marinating, as Sasuke doubtlessly thinks through all the reasons Kakashi would bring up such an old acquaintance.
Sasuke, like Kakashi before him, doesn't know how to qualify the thoughtless, natural kindness of others.
And Ino had hated him when they'd first brought him in.
"How would one kill me with flowers?"
Kakashi laughs.
"I would never."
"It should be gratifying to see you actually complete your paperwork on time." Shikamaru groans, settling on his haunches in front of Kakashi's desk as he works through a tax reform proposal-- soon to be rejected, however regrettably, because they are still rebuilding parts of Konoha and the Land of Fire devastated by the war --and the older man has only enough energy to spare his poor assistant a raised brow.
"It's nearing midnight, did you eat?" Kakashi grunts-- the last several hours are a blur of paperwork, ink, and mission debriefings. If he'd eaten at all, he can hardly recall.
Shikamaru doesn't like his answer-- doesn't like much of anything pertaining to his job, really, other than the fact that it makes him money and gets him off the field.
"Kami," Shikamaru groans again, dusting off his slacks when Kakashi buries his nose further into his paperwork. "I can't leave you alone like this, you'll kill yourself, and my wife will kill me for killing you by technicality. You have met my wife, Sensei? -- Whatever, fine, don't answer that."
The clock ticks. Another hour passes him by, and outside, the never-ending rain continues to pelt its way through the village.
"Yah, Kakashi-brat." A different voice resounds throughout the room. Seems Shikamaru had gone and come back without his noticing-- nervy shinobi-genius --and with him, he's brought the only woman with any authority to forcibly pull him out of his chair by the ear.
"Tsunade-hime,"
Tsunade grins at him, one hand on her hip, the other holding up a bottle of sake like some sort of grand prize.
Kakashi should perhaps give Shikamaru a raise.
"We're taking the night off together, doctors' orders."
Tsunade and Sasuke don't hate each others' guts-- it is as surprising a statement as it is, unfortunately for everyone involved, a true one.
"Brats," Tsunade greets, waltzing into the room with several stacks of report files in her grasp. She's alone, for once, and Sasuke visibly relaxes into his cot when she shoulder-checks Kakashi out of the way from his cell door. "And don't even think about asking to come in, the council is already in a tizzy about your favoritism."
"Kakashi doesn't do favoritism. Not enough people he likes who like him back." Sasuke mouths off, tilting his head upwards when Tsunade gestures to check the seal on his eyes. Tsunade cackles, which is really just rude.
"You referring to me, Uchiha?"
Sasuke smirks.
Cheeky.
"Couldn't say, there's also myself to consider."
"Oi!" Try as he might (and hurt as he is, really), Kakashi can't muster up the frustration needed to counter Tsunade and Sasuke's combined, gleefully targeted harassment towards him. One can say, even, that these visits are the only times Sasuke seems to completely loosen up around Kakashi, like a rope fully unwinding.
Easier to be in the presence of someone you've hurt, and has hurt you, when there is a buffer who gives only enough fucks to make sure you don't accidentally kill each other.
"Well, you haven't messed up your seal since the last time I inspected it. Keep up the good work."
Sasuke makes a show of rolling his eyes-- and he calls Kakashi dramatic --but allows Tsunade to ruffle his hair after she finishes doing his check-up.
"Now, we're going to move on to the second reason for my being here-- no, you can't read the papers unless Sasuke allows you to, Kakashi." Sasuke purses his lips but allows Tsunade to hand over one of the folders when Kakashi asks.
"Medical records?" Thorough ones, too. The first several sheets date as far back as three months before Sasuke was even born, and they don't skimp over his stint in Otogakure, either. "Who looked over you when you were in Sound?"
Sasuke stares at him-- a breath is held, and dispersed --before he answers, fingers alighting across his bared arm, "Yakushi Kabuto."
Tsunade ts-ks, rifling through the rest of the files she'd brought along with her.
"Snake asshole junior. Why he's alive, I'll never know."
Sasuke's face… twitches. A peculiar, strangely slow movement. He blinks once and turns, eyes facing the half of the cell wall his cot is bolted into.
"He wasn't terrible."
Kakashi frowns, but as with so many things pertaining to Sasuke, he doesn't ask.
This is the catch of their renewed acquaintanceship-- friendship --whatever it is Sasuke considers them to be: for many months already, and for many more to come, they will straddle the line of invisible truths guiding their way to one another. Their hurts, their fears, their unnameable, oddly interwoven past-- all on this untrodden pathway, with an end still too far to see.
"What did you say your reason was?"
Tsunade sighs, finally having found her file-- a folder, really --with a red-trimmed back, uncommonly thin.
"I didn't," she says, before she takes a seat beside Sasuke on that cot, hands bunching into the fabric of Sasuke's blanket, expression… somber.
Kakashi wants to be in there, with them.
Kakashi wants to be anywhere but here, intruding on something he shouldn't ever have to see, hear, or know at all.
"They never had anyone talk to you after, did they, kid?" Sasuke doesn't need to ask what event Tsunade is referring to-- Kakashi doesn't need to, either --and isn't that sad?
"I didn't know it was an option." Sasuke says. "I didn't think it would matter in the long run. I was busy with other things."
The cell door gives way to the pulse of Kakashi's chakra-- incumbent Hokage Kakashi, chakra already keyed to everything it needs to be keyed to; who was barred from this place for the sake of propriety; who has only ever superficially cared about those particularities --and Kakashi allows himself to cross the short space between the bars and the cot opposite them, until he's settled on Sasuke's other side, another available shoulder to lean on.
Tsunade doesn't berate him for it. She doesn't do anything other than look at him, nod, and turn away again.
"Well," she says softly. "It's open to you now, kid, and I think you'll really benefit from it."
Sasuke shudders, hunching into himself. Kakashi tentatively places his hand on Sasuke's shoulder-- it isn't shrugged off, not immediately, and not after a long while of it just being there --and this counts as progress, too.
"Tell me when you're ready." Tsunade whispers. "Take as much time as you need, and even if it's just to reject this… tell me."
Sasuke nods his head once.
Progress.
Tsunade plies him with a bottle of sake, two, and then caps it off the moment he starts to get pleasantly buzzed.
"When's the last time you got properly hammered?" She ts-ks, screwing on the lid of a half-empty bottle before chucking it somewhere behind his desk. "Think about it this way, brat, I'm saving you from a whole lot of suffering in the morning."
Kakashi whines to show his frustration. Tsunade, the terrible woman, cackles in his face for it.
"Kami, look at you, barely out of your thirties and you're already sagging in the arms. When's the last time you did anything interesting?"
"When's the last time you were in this office, hime?"
Tsunade grins, perhaps a little drunker herself than she'd let on.
Kakashi pretends he hasn't missed this.
"You should get out more-- explore the village, go on a diplomatic trip, something entertaining, at the very least."
"I don't know how else to tell you this, Tsunade-hime, but we just got out of a war."
Tsunade snorts, clacking her nail against his desk. She looks amused, still, which is unlike her-- usually, she gave serious topics their proper weight.
"I don't know how else to tell you this, Kakashi, but the war ended five years ago."
Kakashi narrows his eyes.
"I was there when it happened, if you'll recall."
"Yes, yes," she flaps her hands out, red nail polish glinting beneath the fluorescent lights. "You didn't seem to remember, so I thought to remind you."
"Tsunade-hime…"
Tsunade's face softens the longer she stares at the pictures on the walls: her grandfather and granduncle-- the Shodaime, and Nidaime, followed by Sarutobi-sama, Minato-Sensei, and herself.
"I've always thought the Hokage's legacy was one of war. Even those few, 'peaceful' years while Sensei was in leadership served as a front for a cold war, and then there was my own tenure…" she snorts quietly to herself, setting her amber eyes are on him again. "Rokudaime Hokage and the first of all of us to rule over an extended period of actual, real-life peace. It's quite the accomplishment, Kakashi."
"I didn't do much of anything," he mutters, looking at those pictures himself. In a few years, his own image will be mounted there as well-- another Hokage, come and gone --and he will have fulfilled what no other Hokage has fulfilled before him: maintain the peace until a new leader ascends to take his place.
That dream is barely out of reach; an eventuality that only solidifies with the passing of the years.
"I still feel as though another shoe is about to drop. I was born into war, and I've fought in two out of four of them. I'm a soldier, Tsunade-hime, waiting for the inevitable. It's all I know how to do."
"Yet times have changed." Tsunade nods in acceptance of an argument he does not hear for himself. She looks young like this, unburdened by the trials of the hat, and the sirens of war. It's easy to forget that she isn't -- that she hasn't been young for a very long time.
"You deserve a vacation," she tells him resolutely. "I had a nice, long one before getting myself involved with Konoha's crap, but you never did. It's really about time."
"Naruto is far from ready to take the hat."
Tsunade laughs, gesturing to herself.
"Who said anything about Naruto, Kakashi-brat?"
Ironic as it is, it's been a very long time since Kakashi has felt so clearheaded. All he can do in the face of it is laugh alongside her.
"Are you sure?" he asks later on, when the moon wanes and they prepare to head their separate ways. The rain has finally started to peter off.
"I wouldn't have offered if I wasn't, Kakashi."
Kakashi smiles.
"Thank you, Tsunade-hime."
Yamanaka Isao is a distant cousin of Inoichi's, and the man assigned to help Sasuke for the remainder of his prison sentence. He has a stiff upper lip, and while far from confrontational, a strong backbone as well as a reputation for taking on a lot of Konoha's worst cases of shell-shock.
Tsunade trusts him. So does Morino Ibiki. So does Yamanaka Ino, and in turn, Sakura and Naruto.
It takes Yamanaka Isao three months of sessions with Sasuke to pin down his issues, and that is only because he needed to "test for longevity".
"He's a pitiful boy, that Uchiha-san. Vulnerable."
Kakashi ruffles his fingers over his lopsided hair, watching through the one-way mirror as Sasuke melds into his seat in boredom, waiting for the guards to escort him back to his cell.
"Sasuke is single-handedly one of the most powerful shinobi to have ever existed." It is a weak response, he knows. People were strong in a variety of ways, and while the Uchiha, in particular, were incredibly powerful, emotionally speaking…
"Uchiha-san is 19, Hokage-sama, and although he lived most of his life as an orphan, he has always been a pawn in the machinations of other, more powerful men."
"Speak plainly." Kakashi has grown tired already, so Sasuke must feel doubtlessly more so. While he can never claim to have lived completely independently from his own duties, at least his choices were purely his own. Always.
"We live in an era of peace, Hokage-sama, and regardless of his crimes, Uchiha-san is also a war hero. Once he has served his time, I implore you to consider… letting him be, just for a little while."
Sasuke bows his head when the prison guards finally step into the room to fetch him. They are rougher with him than they need to be-- Kakashi will have to speak to them about that tendency; if it has ever spilled over to other, unfortunate prison occupants, or if it was targeted and thus necessitated their transfer elsewhere--
Sasuke's leg seemingly gives out from under him. When he raises his head, he meets Kakashi by the eyes.
Kakashi smiles.
"As long as it will help him, I support your plan wholeheartedly, Yamanaka-san."
Sasuke, chained arms held up by the guards, quickly disappears from view.
Yamanaka Isao huffs softly under his breath-- it sounds like amusement.
Perhaps it is.
"Very well."
"I'm capping you off at three months, Kakashi. Any more than that, and I'll set an Anbu retinue and Naruto on both your asses."
Kakashi flaps his hands at Tsunade-- temporarily retaking her position as village leader as Kakashi walloped around the continent for diplomacy's sake, or however his PR-team had spun it for the masses --and watches the way she struggles to mask her wry amusement.
"Well Shikamaru, Shizune… Godaime-sama," Kakashi tips his head with a two-finger salute, skin buzzing with electric excitement. "Later!"
The wind whirls past his ears as he shunshins from building to building, the sloping tiles of the civilian apartments giving way under his feet as the world blurs around him--
"Fearsome rival!" By the towering entrance gates of Konohagakure-no-sato, Maito Gai, Haruno Sakura, and Uzumaki Naruto prepare to send Kakashi off with their most fervent goodbyes, and well-wishes. "May your soul be eternally youthful, and your most joyous journey, prosperous!"
Sakura sniffles, handing Kakashi a bento box ("from the store near the hospital, Sensei, no need for thank you's!") before kicking at Naruto's shin to get him to cough up what turns out to be a knapsack of trinkets and snacks to keep him occupied throughout his journey north.
"And you gotta tell that teme that Sakura-chan and I are still waiting on him for lunch, you hear me, Sensei?"
"Maa, maa with you screaming in my ears, it's hard to forget."
Gai, sensing his incoming (tearful) departure, immediately amps up the waterworks, much to Sakura's visible chagrin.
Kakashi is going to miss them all.
"Well, Sensei, don't do anything stupid, okay? And keep Sasuke-kun from doing anything stupid, either!"
"Hell yeah, dattebayo!"
The kids get a head-pat each for their efforts, and Gai gets a thumbs-up for coming all this way on his wheelchair, relatively alone.
"Well, I'll see you all soon. Don't destroy Konoha while I'm away, I'm still technically its leader."
Naruto predictably squawks in protest, which earns him Sakura's negating fist and a mouthful of dirt.
Kakashi shunshins away to get out of the crossfire.
"One hour, forty-three minutes, and fifty-seven seconds." On the tree at the far end of the main road, one arm braced against a high branch and the other placed on the hilt of his sword, cocksure, is Uchiha Sasuke himself. "You're late."
"What happened to living life as a farmer?" Kakashi queries, an unnamable emotion bubbling in his chest as Sasuke bounces on the balls of his feet, seemingly prepared for the long journey ahead of them.
It's been three years since Kakashi has seen him.
"Tsunade can be surprisingly persuasive when she wants to be, and you sounded like you needed a guide."
Kakashi grins.
"Well then, lead the way."
