While Pain goes on a rousing tangent that explains all he will do for us to seek justice on our enemies and make them suffer as we have, blah, blah, blah, we haul ass off the stage and chase as fast as we can after Sai's suddenly retreating figure. All through Itachi's introduction he was as silent as the rest of the ravers (whom I suppose must actually be secret KS members), and still as a statue. Now he's slipping through them like grease.

"Naruto! Naruto!" Out of nowhere Hinata's hand grabs my shirt, eyes wide.

"Hinata? Where's Kiba?"

She ignores that. "Naruto—did you know what this was? Did you know this was Pain's KS premiere?!" She looks frantic, and considering the state of the Hyuuga banner behind her, I can understand why.

"No, I didn't know." Her eyes relax a bit and she lets go, melting back into the crowd.


The next week, when Lee doesn't emerge from P.E., we find him behind a tree at the edge of a field where he likes to practice, half dead. His arm looks broken, his ankles are both swollen beyond normal, and the fingers are almost all dislocated, among other injuries.

"Holly shit!" Kiba spits.

"Looks like Neji found him," I say.

"We've got to get him to the nurse!" says Chouji. This sucks for him—it's his first day back with us since Temari introduced Shika to crack.

"Oh, like she could do anything for him! Besides, who would she call? He lives at a foster home for boys," says Kiba.

"Well, can't we take him to the hospital?"

"And tell them what? That he's been repeatedly beaten and abused by another kid fifty pounds lighter and four inches shorter than him because he won't hit back? Great idea—really."

"Let's take him to my house," I say, and my brain is too shocked at myself to stop my wagging tongue. "It's not far from here—we can get him in and you guys can get back to campus before the end of fourth."

They all look at me like I've grown a second head; I've never in all my years let any of them into my home. Not even into the building. But Lee is still bleeding freely and when I grab him under his unbroken arm they help me without comment.


"Nmf…"

"I have to reset your fingers," I tell the stirring Lee an hour later. "Try not to scream too loud."

Snap, crackle, pop. Crack, pop, snap. Pop, pop, snap, crackle, grind. "AHHH!"

I could make music out of this.

"Lee? Can you still hear me?"

His eyes are blurred and unfocused in his pain and I can tell he's not going to be able to stay awake through the next hand. But I know something that might be enough of a shock to his system to keep him awake—that concussion was too nasty for me to risk his sleeping again.

"We're not done yet, so put this towel in your mouth and bite down."

No arguments, no questions, just a quick grab with shaking fingers (newly well-set fingers, if I do say so myself) and eyes that plead for this to be over with now.

Using an experiment I thought up when I was seven, I line up his hand just so and spread the fingers wide. Picking up a very large, thick, Oxford Dictionary, I give him a grimly sympathetic look. "Brace yourself."

He shuts his eyes and I slam the book down on his hand.

With five resounding CRACK!s, his hand is reset, and when I draw the towel out of his still screaming mouth, there is blood on it.

"Oh, god! Oh, god! Oh, GOD!"

"Hurts like a bitch the first time, but imagine if I'd popped them in one at a time again."

His eyes are wide open now, pupils dilated to pinpricks in the black. I don't think he's feeling the appropriate gratitude. I sigh and get up to call Tsunade. I can't set broken limbs.

"Don't fall asleep!"


"He's very lucky. His ribs are broken from top to bottom on his left side."

WHACK! goes her hand over my head. "HEY! What was that for? I'm the hero, damnit!"

"And you would have been the killer if those ribs had punctured an organ! What were you thinking by moving him?! You could have killed the boy just by holding him wrong!"

"Well, sorry! But we didn't exactly have many options on our hands at the time! It was our help or the hospitals and his ruined pride!"

"Pride? Pride?! Where is the pride in being left to die by someone who can't respect human life?!"

"Better he dies with his dignity intact than become as much a monster as the one who did it!"

"There's nothing dignified about death!"

"Of course there is! If you die with your head up and your eyes open, no one can deny you—even in death!"

"And it's better to die proudly than admit to anything less?! Better to be strewn in the streets with strange bodies for the sake of your stubbornness?!"

"OF COURSE IT IS! PRIDE IS ALWAYS WORTH DYING FOR!"

She stops mid-rant, both of us flushed from the yelling, eyes locked and hers shocked. There's something in there that looks like horror at my omission, and I realize it's because she's seeing her brother in me. Again.

Nawaki died in the riots of the Week of Armageddon, throwing rocks at members of ROOT and the police and flashing his Hickey proudly.

The moment is tense but then she deflates and looks away. Despite her cosmetics, she looks old and tired, yet I feel no pity.

I will not be sorry for telling the truth.Tsunade sets his bones quickly and efficiently, splinting them and ignoring me in favor of fixing the mistakes my dictionary-stunt made ("Dumbass brat! Didn't I teach you anything?") and wrapping his ribs. She tells me he can't move for a while or risk ruining the job. She hands me some antibiotics, painkillers, and his maintenance routine on a card and leaves without looking back.


"How are you feeling?"

"Why are you being so kind to me? You've never shown any of us any affection. Not in six years."

"Seven for Shino and Kiba." I dig around my back pocket for the last of a blunt we were passing around before we got worried about Lee. Light it up. He frowns, but accepts a hit off it. "Guess you just seemed pathetic enough for me to give a damn. Besides--I have bigger problems these days--yours didn't seem so unmanageable that I couldn't pitch in."

I think I might be telling the truth.

Kyuubi's laughing like a maniac in the back of my head. No, scratch that--he's laughing like Heath Ledger's Joker at the end of the movie.

You've lost our mind, brat, he gasps through imaginary tears of hilarity. Kiss your respectability good-bye!

Oh shut it, furry. If I go down you do too.

He shoots me the equivalent of a mental raspberry and I come back to reality.

"So why do you let him hurt you like this?" I ask. "I mean, come on--you either have to be a complete wuss, a pacifist, or an S&M fan to be OK with someone turning your face into tenderized steak."

His eyes get big and weapy. Sweet God, but if he cries I will hit him myself.

The waterworks are held at bay--for the most part, and he says very quietly, "Winning a battle is not the same as winning a war. I learned I could defeat him long ago. And in that way I knew I would always have the upper-hand."

"So you've been holding back all this time?" I don't try to hide the surprise in my voice. "Why? Why let him hummiliate you on top of beating your ass every day?!" I preached to Tsunade about dying for the sake of one's pride, and I still believe in that. But now I'm not so sure Lee is.

"It is above me to take joy in another's pain. But that does not stop me from feeling shame or horror when I let him win. But because he win's those battles, I win the war, and I will have so many scars at the end of this, that I don't think I will be able to be seen as the same person." He meets my eyes with a hard look--the same one I wake to in the mirror each day. "I would like to see that person. Don't you agree?"

"Yeah. I guess I can see that."

Damn, the green bean's deeper than I thought.


Because Pain is like a magnet, I am drawn to all of his meetings. I stand on the sidelines, listening, with a woman named Konan who folds perfect origami sculptures with a casual hand as though board, and a man named Nagato who wears Ozzy Osbourn glasses and smiles too much. He needs a haircut.

The meetings where Pain preaches instead of promises are held in broad daylight in cafes where the menus are framed in chains of KSKSKSKSKSKSKSKS, with ANBU representatives and the intercom voices of exiled KS members from overseas. They are joined by misfits--doctors, mechanics, teachers, gun shop owners, soccer moms, and even a few construction workers. It's strange, because most are the parents of kids from my school, who have spent their whole lives tormenting me--feeding Kyuubi's evil. These people's eyes are full of passion, knowledge and focus, as though they have been thinking the way Pain talks for their whole lives. I see them and wonder how the light in them could have escaped from their children.

Jiraiya and Tsunade attend the night gatherings--rave-like rallies that borderline riots where the young and stupid are sucked like bits of something nasty into the vortex of Pain's toilet of a mouth. And make no mistake--what he says to them is nothing short of profanity and nothing less than sacrilege to the state. The kids down what he gives them like starved dogs will swallow whatever they can rip from a carcass when they are too hungry to care that it is rotten. They flash freshly tattooed Hickies like new IDs and some--in a bizarre declaration of thier love--will mark over each other's KS with thier lips, to make it a true Hickey. Drugs and sex run ramped through it all, and I feel almost ashamed to lead my "friends" to these places.

The old crowd sits on the highest point they can find to watch and laugh at it all, their feet dangling while they drink like fish. They are the celebrity confetti that clings to everyone's mind, glittery and great in their ancient glory.

Kankuro's band plays at every gig, and I hear rumor that the Sunas have lent out Club Kabuki for Pain's more intimate meetings.

Sai, Gaara, and Itachi are in the shadows of everything, like ghosts who refuse to be exercised into the light.

Amidst the adrenalin rush, I can feel something building inside everyone, making us clutch at each others' hands a little tighter, because not even Kyuubi can tell me what we're waiting for.


I'm at Kiba's house to return tupperwear when I hear it.

"Kiba, please--send him away!"

Hinata, behind the door, with the idiot.

"But why, Hina? I thought you liked him. You guys are always talking about poetry and politics and stuff."

"I can...handle certain parts of him. But Kiba--you didn't see his face at that rally! And all these meetings are making him go crazy--I can see it in his eyes! Please, pleaseKiba--send him away before--"

But I move away from them before I can hear what she's expecting, and sit down very slowly, trying to get my bearings. So--this is what it comes to, huh? Looks like Kiba's facing a choice--his beauty or my beast.

Good. It's time I let him in on my plans for him. But onlyif he is wise enough to understand all I'm offering him--freedom, marriage, family, fame, power--and what it will require of the both of them.

He and Hinata seem to have it out for a while and I've moved to the swing of his back porch, overlooking the cheep dog shelter his sister keeps among their family's junkyard. Corpses of twenty-year-old hybrids and smart-cars and solar-speeders are everywhere between the hubcaps and Back to the Future-esq-engine designs. Most are only half finished--results of failed experiments and some of the last evidence of the greatest innovations man could have, should have made.

Everyone knows and nobody tells that the Inuzukas make the best cars in the country--totally gas-free; zero to sixty in five minutes or ten seconds, depending on the make; luxury interiors; supped Eco-friendly engines; 100% illegal, thank you very much, Mr. President.

Eventually, Kiba emerges haggard and pissed off. His face is proof that the argument ended without a winner; eyes scrunched, teeth gritted, and expression pained. Confused.

"She wants me gone." It's the truth.

"I'm sorry, Naru," He begins. "I don't know what her problem is. She was fine with you and the guys and even Shukaku's shit until just a few days ago."

Makes sense--Hyuuga's stock has taken a turn for the worse, and the pressure for her to get engaged to another company's CEO (cough, cough, Uchiha) would be extreme now. She's going to have to make a stand with them or us, and soon. Pain is already discussing ways to make a new roster of KS members--an untraceable, safe roster that ROOT will never be able to get their hands on. Not like the last time, he promises.

"What did you tell her?" He looks a bit confused. "I mean, either she gave you an ultimatum, or she's going to. Trust me--I know how people react to me. So what's it going to be?"

He sighs and sits at the edge of the porch, legs splayed in the sun as he rubs his throat, unsure of what to say.

"I get this feeling you want something from me. From all of us--Shika and Chouji and Lee--but me especially. And I won't lie--I don't know if I'm OK with being used like that by a...a friend."

That word--friend--spoken like a dirty word, is still honest. His face--open and vulnerable like a hopeful child--makes it so.

Huh. I admit myself surprised for the second time in so many weeks.

"You've never called me friend before," I say, trying not to sound excited. But it's hard--this was all I was denied as a child, and old dreams die hard. "Not like you've called Shino a friend."

"Aw, come on Naru!" he sounds uncomfortable and exasperated. "Shino's my buddy and my best friend but...you're just...It's like being a soldier with you--a brother in arms, you know? You've got so much charisma (once you get past the creepy-evil-look you like to show off); it would be impossible not to want to be friends. I mean—you eat my food man! So...yeah. We're friends. Okay? And if we're friends you have to promise to keep clean with me about whatever your evil scheming is, at leastwhen it comes to me. And Hinata. Got it?"

Surprise, surprise, Kiba's asking for the one thing I will never give up--the truth. Too bad, dog breath. You shot and missed.

I make a big show of sighing and looking awkward, mentally refining what I was planning to tell him already, until my lie is flawless.

"Fine. If you really need to know, I was going to ask you..."

I spin him a tale until dusk settles over the porch.


AN: And Kiba's trap is set! Seriously though guys--what do you think of this thing? I need hard-core feedback or what's the point in keeping it up? Hell--I'll take a flaming if it's an honest, critical review. I'm trying to improve so you guys don't have to read crapy stuff. Especially since I'm working without a beta, again. By the way, next chapter (whenever it comes out) should have some kind of action stuff in it.