Land of Snow managed to catch Team Fir unprepared. The irony of an entire country, rather everything it represented and was best known for, managing to sneak up on a team of ninja was not lost on Mana. The magician could not stop wearing a ludicrous grin the entire time. Once in a while she would just start smiling or chuckling to herself for no apparent reason and had Erumo not been oddly mad at the magician and Yushijin too tired to care, she'd have surely been drilled about her mental condition.
Obviously the whole country did not approach the trio from behind, blades to their throats and threats of drowning them in their own blood if they did not surrender a scroll or intelligence they were protecting or told the password that allowed ninja passage through protected survey points inside Fire Country or to enter certain remote facilities and archive buildings.
What snuck up on the trio were the frigid chills and snowflakes clamped together to make them about the size of a small apple. Snow could not have been snowing, it was falling from the sky as if dropped with a spoon from a bucket of the thing. At the edges of the Land of Snow, the air was still a chilly mixture of the two clashing sides – the damp heat of the close south from the equator and the masses of snow falling down by the fluffy snowballs and melting almost instantly – constant snowfall, no snow on the ground.
"You okay?" Kouta reminded of himself, irony once more showed herself off as the type of bitch it was by having the magician forget to include her own boyfriend in most social equations passing through her mind.
"Yeah… Just… Remembered a joke that's all." Mana dismissed it. She did not like lying, she was bad at it, but explaining why she was chuckling from time to time to Kouta would have been so frivolous and to such little use that she chose to rather leave him out of it.
It was not that difficult to understand why Mana had forgotten all about things Kouta cared about. After training and working alongside his father the youth became so entranced and excited with battles that he stopped caring about things he used to care about. He was constantly late, never asked or insisted about anything that did not include a battle he may have deemed satisfying. The only reason they got into the Valley of Hell mess in the first place was that he just felt like having a blast.
"Well… Could you tell it to me?" Kouta blinked rapidly a pair of times, staring with a blank expression that Mana would have used had she still been interrogating people in Shukuba. People she still had no reason to suspect yet wanted to dig stuff up about regardless just to see what comes up. His tone implied almost that Mana owed him that much.
"Do you want it to also come with a 2000-word essay of what I think a joke is?" Mana raised her eyebrow. She was probably mostly at fault for lying. This was such a no-quarrel and it was laughable in of itself how avoidable this entire fight was. It was because of how unimportant this disagreement was and how much Mana was at fault for it that she got this defensive and made a deal out of it.
"I mean… We've seen some pretty messed up stuff out there. People have been known to lose their minds let alone morale in better conditions than these." Kouta shrugged.
"You meant well. We could all probably use a joke…" Erumo grumbled on. Her passive-aggressive tone implied a similar amount of wrath boiling inside of her yet it was sort of broader in the scope that it wanted to cover.
"And check if I'm not insane…" Mana brought up the point of Kouta's that she chose to focus on rather than the more reasonable alternative.
"We're stopping. There." Yushijin interrupted the quarrel of the three. He pointed his extended arm at a small settlement in the distance. It was so measly and underdeveloped that the floor-high brick wall around it should have cost more than most of the houses consisting it.
"Now? If we picked up the pace, we can get to a stronger settlement than this one." Kouta looked baffled by the leader's call.
"This place might have a carriage and a coachman to rent. We could get closer to our mission objective that way and rest along the way." Ignoring the fact that Erumo's conclusions were more or less reasonable, nobody counted on the trapster disagreeing with Yushijin on anything.
"We need to stop and gather our strength. We can't spend the time on a carriage either. We need to keep up on light training." Yushijin shut his team down. While he did not claim it outright, his fear of making another bad decision as a leader was weighing down on him. Still, he could have dealt with that weight much worse than choosing the safest path in all things.
"Maybe we do need to stretch our legs, get on the same page." Mana sighed while looking around the snowstorm that offered no mercy and was sure to grow even more merciless the farther they went on ahead.
If the Land of Snow settlers truly were being terrorized by some group that lived near or inside mountains or caves, it was tough to imagine how a group such as that one could have survived in such inhospitable environment. Just staying healthy and in fighting shape would have required constant chakra input to augment one's body or else sickness or frostbite would have crept right under one's coat.
The quartet faded out of vision in a single bound and moved with haste toward the location that Yushijin pointed out. There was always a risk that the place did not even have an inn to hang their coats in but in a place like this an inn would have been just about a killer business idea and the only way to keep such a settlement afloat financially. It was not like money could have been made selling snow. Even if they were, this snow would not have been any good outside the polar range of the Land of Snow anyway.
Yushijin was adamant about finding the inn and getting the rooms. While the weariness and the sense of loss in his eyes was a massive red flag, nobody argued with him. It was something he needed. A simple chore to help him establish a hint of control back over the happenings around him and the team he led. After Valley of Hell, he needed something simple, not just a simple errand, a simple call that he could have made in his sleep and that may have counted as right even if he did get something wrong – who cared where the four would be sleeping? They were all big boys and girls. They could have handled it.
Regardless of how cool the trio was with giving Yushijin his macho space in handling the accommodations, it left them with plenty of time on their hands and only wandering a humdrum settlement of wood, hay, and stone. One found that when one could process the remarkable conditions of a hi-speed ninja battle, waiting around for even fifteen minutes was a life-shaver.
"Man, even the bricks of this place don't have any color!" Erumo groaned. The trapster then turned at Mana and Kouta, surprised that she did not receive a reply. Judging by the kunoichi's questioning glare, she would have been fine with either a dull agreement or a heated argument.
It took Erumo a handful of moments and visual ticks to realize that both Mana and Kouta were too ashamed to show off their heated argument spirits. The trapster grinned with a round-cheeks smile as if she had just stuffed her mouth full of ice cream and only had her expression to translate the feeling to the outside world.
"Fine, I'm off to get some materials and see if I can get some new tools. You guys have fun with your date." Erumo waved her hand almost like flipping the pair off. Or at least it felt that way since it didn't look like either Kouta or Mana were that much in the dating spirits.
"Look I'm…" Mana started the moment Erumo disappeared after the first corner.
"No, I totally get it. I came off too strong. Your reaction was justified." Kouta fumbled some of his own words out, both of their apologies and excuses made not for themselves but for the other party instead tripped and mingled into some sort of pitying cacophony. A cocktail of pity.
"Are you okay? You must have taken a pretty nasty beating in there, took on the worst guy of them all on and, as per your family tradition, took him fists-swinging." Mana expressed some of her own worries. She always felt somehow silly for worrying over the health of Kouta when he was usually the authority on medical matters of any squad he was in. The magician was not sure how it felt marrying a chef but she was certain that the feeling of inadequacy in what was traditionally accepted as a more feminine role felt alike.
"The only thing's broken is my pride…" Kouta smiled. "You sure you don't need another scan and some more patching up? There are always some edges to polish with medical ninjutsu, you know."
"Pride…" Mana beheaded Kouta's attempt at changing the topic. The magician walked up to the nearby stone fence and placed her back against it. The numbing frost of snow soaked through her magician's uniform that was not in the greatest of conditions, to begin with, the time to change into something more fitting for the weather could not have come soon enough but even that necessity would have had to wait. "It's not something you used to have enough of for some of it to be broken."
"Yeah, I guess a lot has changed. I don't think you're justified in criticizing me though. You just up and disappeared for years on me. On everyone. Your reasons were either too ethereal or poorly explained too. Yeah, I started spending more and more time with my father. Yeah, a thing or two of the way he handles things rubbed off on me. It's not like you don't have your own quirks. Working out at nights all by yourself, meditating on who knows what issues but they hurt you. I may be thick but not even I am that thick."
"I'm not criticizing you." Mana sighed. "I'm trying to learn. I know I've missed out on a lot, I made a bunch of friends and then I left all of them hanging multiple times. I can't even imagine what hurtful message it sends every time when I choose to disappear on everyone to train by myself as if it's you guys that hold me back."
"See? You and father have more in common than you thought. He has a way of rubbing off on people, he used to tell me all the time that you were a bad influence, although, I'd say it's because of his own subjective judgment of how mother affected his own training. Now he's come to see you as a valuable ally and a great training partner. He doesn't even mind our…" Kouta stopped talking. He was at a loss for words.
With good reason. How was it that they were supposed to call their relationship at its current, snapping point? It used to be so dreamy, like an endless, fluffy and pink cloud of cotton candy that the two soared through. They both knew that the candy cloud obstructed the pavement of rock-solid ground a billion miles beneath that they'd both eventually end up hitting but the sweets were just too damn savory.
"I've noticed you've changed after the Valley of Hell. You've held yourself back in the fight, resorted to just healing. The entire trip here you've been doing nothing but asking to scan and heal people. Check their emotional and physical health." Mana brought up. It was a personal and painful topic, enough so that it would have moved Kouta's thoughts away from the awkwardness of the topic while preventing Mana having to deal with its intricacies as well.
"Maybe I have… It's just… I thought I knew who I was, what kind of role I played on this team and… One swing of a sword and I got yanked out of it. I don't feel it anymore, no more anger, no more violence trying to crawl out." Kouta sighed. "I can't be who I was before that without those impulses which means I have to be something else. May as well be the version of me you like."
Mana shook her head. It was something that quickly made Kouta's smile fade away but then she smiled with softness in her eyes that brought that same smile back. Out of both cold and a soft spot in her heart for the constantly messing up idiot beside her, Mana wrapped her hands around Kouta's short but thick arm and pressed herself against him up to his shoulder. In times like this, he felt like a tree. Granted, a decorative and short tree but a girthy one at that. Most importantly – a warm one. One that soothed and felt welcoming every time one ventured to lay under its shade.
"I like you. Whatever version of you, I'll always support you. Even if you never abandoned that obsession with becoming an ANBU, I'd have somehow tried to make it work. The only thing I'd hate would be if you were living in a suit of someone else's skin." Mana said while looking on at the elegant snowfall and the completely unbothered passers-by. They all wore the same completely casual and used to it expressions even if some of them stopped to shake their fists up at the sky on a rare occasion. A sentiment to which a few select passers-by joined in on. Even the stoics of the Land of Snow knew some fun…
"That's a gross analogy." Kouta quivered. Befitting the machismo that Mana found adorkable, he tried to hide the fact that he was freezing bit by bit under the guise of disgust. While on a rational level the young man she loved trying to hide the fact he was cold felt stupid, on an emotional level it just felt noble.
"So you've always felt that? The Cursed Seal?" Mana raised her head up and looked Kouta straight in the eyes. She wondered if perhaps spending more time around his father and using it with increasing frequency made the Cursed Seal stronger, made it harder to resist.
"Always. Even way back. It's actually much better to know what it is exactly and how to deal with it. I don't know what would have happened if I never faced it and learned to tap into it. One day it may have broken out and…" Kouta sighed. "I don't know. Maybe it's still there. I… I haven't tried it yet, calling out for it."
"Because you're scared to call out for it?" Mana wondered.
"Because I'm afraid it won't answer. What if that sword was some sort of sealing sword. What if it sealed my Cursed Seal away forever? It was a wicked power, I know that but… It was a part of me regardless. You can't rip it out without reducing the sum of what I am." What Mana initially took for a pushing motion and got all confused for was revealed to only be a little shrug from Kouta's side. With boldness that the magician had not experienced before from the young man, he pressed her back to his side.
"Of all people, I know what you're going through…" Mana looked on ahead.
"Yeah… It's kind of stupid of me to whine about it in front of you. What you've gone through was so much worse…" Kouta said.
"It was not all too different, however. Knowing what I had to pay for my fears of confronting those losses, what I paid for my hesitation with… You have to call out to it." Mana advised. It was not easy for her to speak those words: it was not easy recalling the losses that followed her own identity issues nor was it light to advise her beloved to call out for a part of him that the magician still felt unsure about. While she did have to gulp down the usefulness of the Cursed Seal's power, being the black cat that she was to everyone around her, the hair on her back would never stop standing up whenever that surge of wickedness was spoken of or whenever it manifested.
Kouta breathed in deep, turned to Mana as if he was about to say something but then caved in. It did not take a genius nor did it require the reading of his mind to realize what tiny sparrow the Juugo managed to identify and swallow down before it flew off never to be taken back.
"Look, it's not like the exact abilities of the swords of the Seven Swordsmen are a mystery. There are rumors about them. Each successive roster and generation wields the same swords. I say we walk into the nearest library or an archive building and see what you've been cut by. Then, when you know that your worse side was not sealed off, you will have a safety net, right?" Mana pushed her back off of the stone fence and insisted while leaning on Kouta.
"You should find a place to hide your bare legs in. You'll freeze to death…" Kouta breathed out a long and somewhat reserved breath that he had been warming up somewhere deep in the chest. "A library is a good place as any for that sort of thing, I suppose."
Again Mana chuckled. This time both she and Kouta knew the reason for her cackling and that made it all much better. With vigor in her motion unlike anything she's experienced lately, the magician began lightly dragging the young man with her to the nearest building where their quest for a library could have begun.