"'Cause you're a fla-fla-fla-fla-mingo,

Such vivid color,

Fla-fla-fla-fla-mingo,

And as you dance and flutter down right into the ground,

Where's your smile now?

Only envy lingers around,"

-Flamingo, Will Stetson

I listened to the soft tap of sandals coming down the hallway, but I couldn't hear Matsu at all.

I didn't know the sandal-wearer, but she wasn't a sensor-nin. If she was, she would've stopped once she sensed me sitting on the floor, or Naga, standing in the middle of the room with his arms crossed.

I heard them talking, but I didn't try to make it out. Instead, I wondered what he told her.

Matsu turned into the room and kept walking, moving behind Naga, but she stopped in the doorway, breath hitching. Her wide eyes flicked from me to Naga and then to Matsu, who slouched against the wall.

"You lied," she said, and her voice cracked.

"Cho, right?" Naga asked.

"Urakawa," Matsu corrected.

"Right."

I crossed my legs as took a careful step back, shoulders hunched like a cornered, terrified animal.

Naga dropped his hands. "We won't hurt you."

She took another step back, fully in the hallway, not believing him.

But then I was the Wolf of the Rain, Naga was Storm God, and Mamoru-sensei only heard about spies that had already been killed.

No one said how to deal with them but only someone from somewhere that had prisoners would think they'd be taken alive. The last prisoner the village had was left to die.

She froze at the sound of slow, casual steps from the hallway she and Matsu came down.

"I wouldn't if I were you," Hidan said, stopping behind her on the ceiling. The shadows waving over his face made his eyes glow. "I can't believe you didn't notice. Aren't you supposed to be elite?"

Her eyes shot up and he grinned down at her. She stumbled away from him and pressed her back against the wall next to the doorway, nails scraping stone. "You said they weren't here, and you wanted to show me—"

"If we wanted to capture and kill you, there were easier ways to do it than this," Naga said, trying to sound nonthreatening.

It was because of Matsu that Naga agreed to talk to her at all. He trusted her, and it was enough for me to sit and listen while they talked.

She didn't hear him, but she was a foreign-nin, and none of the foreign-nin that came down here had ever left alive.

She slid down and dropped her head in her hands. Loose strands of hair fell out of her bun. "I tell the truth—I tell the truth for the first time in my life, and this happens."

Matsu looked tired, "They're not going to kill you. You should listen to him."

Hidan dropped down and cackled when she flinched.

Naga sighed. "Matsu told us about the seal," he said. "Think about it. An interrogation would only be a waste of time. Matsu doesn't want you to die, so he brought you here to talk about what you can tell us."

She looked at me, then quickly away. "Then why is she here?"

I leaned back on my hands. "I want to be. That's all."

She stared at the floor for a few seconds, then she hugged herself. "Of course he told you all of it. He's the best liar I've ever met. They'd love you back home."

"I never lied to you before today," Matsu shot back.

"You thought they'd act in a certain way, but you didn't know," she stressed, pinning him with a wide-eyed stare. "You didn't know, and you still told them. If they did say they'd kill me, would you wish you didn't bring me here?"

"You don't know them."

"Would you regret it?" she asked again, harsher.

Hidan looked bored. He held up his middle finger at me without looking.

Matsu didn't answer and her eyes went wider, looking at him like he was someone she didn't know.

She pulled her legs up but I could still hear her trying to catch her breath.

The way he looked at her—

It was the look he had when he told me I was being watched and when Enyo threw that knife at me, like he was an unsheathed blade.

"If I kept all my regrets with me I wouldn't be here," was all he said.

"Enough," Naga said, crossing his arms. "Matsu or not, you're still Root, and the only way anyone will look past that is if I tell them they should."

She looked up like it took all her energy, her voice barely above a whisper, "You're blackmailing me?"

"I'm giving you a chance," Naga said. "If you took what you know back to Konohagakure they'd only turn you back into a tool and send you somewhere else. Work with me and I'll give you a place here."

Not that she'd make it that far if it leaked that she was a spy.

She looked at Matsu, stare burning. "There's nothing I can say," she said. "He knows that."

"Not anyone you came here with?"

She looked at the floor. "I can't—"

"What if I asked for a direction, or a message in code?"

She shook her head again, "What is your word worth to me?"

"Nothing, but I'm choosing to talk with you when there are more than enough people here to stop Matsu from helping you."

Her eyes dulled. "You're saying this like I have a choice."

"Betraying your village isn't something I can force you to do."

She didn't respond right away, "There's nothing I can say," she whispered.

"That's not all you can do."

She was silent for longer than before, almost inanimate. "You want me to spy for you."

"I want to trust you, even if I don't have a reason to," Naga told her. "You could leave. You could tell Danzo or the Third about how to access this shelter, where it is, and how to take us by surprise, but Matsu told me about you to protect you, so I'm giving you a choice."

Her eyes looked duller. "I won't be able to tell you anything useful."

"We'll see."

Urakawa arraigned herself to fold her hands in her lap. "When do I leave?"

"When you want to."

Her eyes flicked up to him, at once reanimated.

"I told you. Choose Amegakure. I can't force you to do this."

I stood because I'd seen the look in her eyes before (surprise, always surprise, and a little disbelief), and felt her eyes on my back as I slipped past Hidan out into the hallway. "When's your birthday, Hidan?" I asked.

"What's it matter?"

I paused just before the turn into the leftmost hallway. "You should come with me."

Naga's voice spilled out into the hallway.

"Unless you like listening to them talk," I added.

Hidan clicked his tongue. "Shut up," he said, but stepped out of the room.

I started down the hallway. "I don't think Mamoru-sensei or Joji would care, but Yahiko and Naga and Maho would want to know."

"Dumbass," Hidan said behind me, then didn't speak for a few seconds, "When's yours?"

"You first."

He scratched his head. "Who taught you to be this annoying?"

I traced a hand over a burn on the wall. "You, mostly."

I heard him tch. "April second. You still gonna be annoying about it?"

"December."

"When in December?"

"I don't know."

He stopped. "How the fuck do you not know."

"It was always more important to other people than it was to me."

He scoffed, but I heard his footsteps again. "You could make the sun sad."

I hummed. "Didn't you kill all your friends?"

He laughed, but I heard the surprise buried in it. "I tell you about one heathen and you think any of those other blasphemous dumbasses were my friends?"

"Were they?" I asked, going up the steps.

"Fuck no."

I didn't believe him.

照美

"Mei Terumi," Yahiko said thoughtfully. He tossed a wooden brush up as I pulled a letter from Naga's hands.

Hidan plopped down against the wall as I watched it spin. The wood was cracked and bloated with water. If it was an inkbrush, it hadn't been taken care of.

Yahiko's fingers closed around it as I looked over the letter. The handwriting was all neat, curving lines, faded and almost unrecognizable beneath dried stains. Messages written on scrolls never felt crumpled and fragile like this did.

"Did Joji-sensei find out who delivered it?" Naga asked.

A name was written at the top. Mei Teru-mi. Under it was her village, Kirigakure, and a number, 704986.

"You tell me," Yahiko said airily, tossing the brush up again.

"I think," Naga began carefully, "That this is too important for you to keep pretending to be angry at me."

Yahiko threw up his hands. "Pretending? Pretending?"

"What does the number mean?" I asked, not looking up.

To the current leader of Amegakure—

"Joji-sensei said it's a registration number in Konohagakure's bingo book," Naga said.

—to be brief, this contact is not one made on behalf of anyone but myself—

"Oka, can you tell Nagato that Joji-sensei found the trail of whoever did, but decided against following it?"

I didn't and Naga sighed.

—though the situation is dire, I bear the belief that the intended recipient of this letter knows well what it means to want to save a village from itself.

I could almost see a faceless person behind the words on her hands and knees, hands upturned, begging to be trusted. She'd already told us too much.

—only a nation without an attached history would hear my proposal.

We hadn't known much about Suisai before we left. Mamoru-sensei sent us to Hyozan with only a find Sana.

Shinobi never said more than they had to when they wanted something done.

"You ever get sick of bickering?" Hidan asked. "I'd rather listen to the heathens that never shut up than this shit."

—Yagura Karatachi, fourth Mizukage, must be eliminated by any means necessary.

"You bicker with everyone all the time," I pointed out.

Hidan didn't turn his head when he said, "Is it your life's mission to contradict everything I say or what?"

"Wouldn't be," I answered, "If you were harder to contradict."

—he's become more brutal in recent months—

—allowed the Yuki clan to turn on each other—

—purging entire bloodlines he views as a threat, even children—

—encouraging crimes committed against kekkei genkai wielders—

Hidan's eyebrow twitched. "You make me want to kick your ass."

I hummed, "But you can't."

—if successful, I pledge the full support of Kirigakure to Amegakure's pursuits, whatever they may be—

"You don't understand how much iron I melted down to fix a certain water wheel at the request of someone in this room, only to be told later that, oh yeah, Mamoru-sensei's engineer isn't one and doesn't know what she's doing," Yahiko lamented to Hidan.

"I was vague," Naga admitted, "But it was Mamoru-sensei who told you that Etsudo's apprentice was an engineer."

Mei had marked the end of the letter with a dull, pink-purple smear.

Hidan eyed me, "You're annoying as shit."

I held the letter out to him.

He stared at it, then me.

I didn't lower my hand.

Yahiko was still insisting that Naga knew the entire time. Finally, Hidan yanked it from me.

"How did it get here?" I asked.

Yahiko spun the brush so the end faced me and I saw that it was hollow inside. "Technically, Enyo found it," he said, looking in the hole. "It was wedged between the rocks close to the water and he tripped over it and sprained his leg. Joji-sensei said it wasn't there last night."

The more I looked at it, the less it looked like a normal inkbrush. "A civilian?"

"Someone pretending to be an artist or a painter," he agreed. "What we know is that they came from Wind, Rivers, or Ishigakure, put it there sometime during the night, and was back across the sea before Joji-sensei and Enyo got there at sunrise."

I hummed, went over to Naga's neat pile of scrolls in the corner, and dug out an old ink bottle. I dropped the cap in the pile and dipped my finger in it as I stood. It was almost empty, but I used most of the rest to draw a map on the wall.

The symbol for Water country southeast, Lightning to the north, somewhere between that and Hot Water that I didn't remember, Fire, Grass—

"I don't think they left Rain, but if everyone who looked like they might be carrying paintbrushes was stopped and questioned, someone might report it to Lord Yodogiri," Naga thought aloud. "That's why Joji-sensei didn't follow them."

Rain, below Grass, and Rivers below that. Wind to the southwest—

"If I was talking to you, I'd make fun of you for taking so long to figure that out," Yahiko drawled.

Naga ignored him.

I drew a line from Rain down through Rivers to—

"What's past Rivers?" I asked.

Naga studied my map. "Nothing."

I paused, then traced a line from where a boat would be to Water country.

"Maybe if someone had sensed them—"

"They were on the other side of the village," Naga protested.

I drew another line from Rain through Fire to the northern ocean, and then from Rain up through Stone. They'd been traveling for a long time, probably slowly, someone who'd probably ate and slept and lived like a civilian so no one would pick up the wrong brush and feel its emptiness.

Naga glanced at Hidan, "Do you know anything about her?"

Hidan squinted at the letter. "Terumi..." he trailed off. "Yeah, I fucking know her clan. Never met her, but they made defending the coasts a pain in the ass. There was always a Terumi who poisoned the air so they could get away or melted the unlucky bastards who tried to take the war to them. I bet those tree-huggers had to deal with the same shit in the south."

Yahiko pointed the brush at him, "Tell me I didn't just hear you say that they melted people."

"Namekuji—"

"—is a slug," Yahiko interrupted Naga. He turned the brush on him. "Can you melt people?"

"Yes."

"You don't count," Yahiko dismissed.

"How do they do it?" Naga asked Hidan, ignoring him again.

Hidan leaned back. "Are you fucking stupid? How does cash cow do what he does?"

"We haven't met that many people with a kekkei genkai," Naga patiently explained. "I thought they might have summons too."

Hidan shot him an irritated look but didn't respond.

I looked over my map. It'd be easy to think they came up from River country, but River-nin would've stopped them on the water or followed them. It was too risky for someone with something to hide.

"How the fuck does she expect to be found?" Hidan asked.

Yahiko stood. He took the ink bottle from me, dipped his thumb in, and circled the longest route through Fire. "The lipstick," he answered, and drew Frost between Hot Water and Lightning.

"The smear was lipstick?" I asked.

He put Land of Crystals next to Ishigakure. "Any reason she thinks we can track her with that, Nagato?"

"Yugakure," Naga sighed. "She thinks we killed everyone at the inn like we were supposed to. If they were ninja like we thought they were we would've needed a way to track them down if they decided to run. It means she has connections to the underworld that we don't, and there are different rumors going around on what happened."

I hummed. Why wouldn't mercenaries take on a job like this?

"We still haven't heard back from the daimyo," I mentioned.

Why wouldn't we, if we killed anyone for a good deal?

"Yeah, about that, I don't think that guy he sent was a messenger," Yahiko said, adding Whirlpool in the water between Hot Water and Fire. "If he really did know Hanzo for as long as he said he did he would've known he wouldn't have agreed to the tithe again. If it was me I would've come here with the expectation that he'd be dead when I left."

Bloodline purges, Mei had said, like that meant anything.

"He didn't expect Matsu, and didn't have orders to kill him," he continued.

"We were lucky," Naga murmured.

"Joji-sensei was lucky," Yahiko corrected. "Like I said, if it were me, and I thought I wasn't strong enough to beat Hanzo in combat and I had the resources, I would've brought two letters. One laced with poison. Something metallic and absorbed into the skin. They're the hardest to break down."

"Or bring someone else to take advantage of an opening," Naga said.

"Or that."

Hidan left the letter on the floor and opened the Book of Jashin in his lap.

"Are we going to do it?" I asked.

"You know, killing a Kage is generally seen as an act of war. If you aren't already from that village that is," Yahiko said.

"I thought we wanted allies."

He laughed.

"We don't know enough to take that risk," Naga said.

"We're in a position now where we don't have to look after this place with promises anymore. We can afford to turn down missions that'll burn us if we're not careful," Yahiko added, drawing wobbly boats along the water routes.

"Okay," I said easily. "But I remember learning from someone that if we were burned, to burn them back."

"I wonder who," Yahiko said airily.

"Someone should ask Mamoru-sensei about the fourth Mizukage and the Terumi clan," Naga mentioned. He looked meaningfully at me, and I looked at Yahiko.

"Have I told you how approachable you are, Nagato?" Yahiko asked.

Naga sighed.

"I think he blames me for not stopping Yahiko in Wind," I said.

"You—" Yahiko stopped at my look. "That's right, my fault."

"Fine," Naga muttered. He got up, went to the map, and took the bottle from Yahiko. "Will you ever tell anyone what happened in Wind?"

"No, this is better," I answered.

Yahiko ignored me by watching Naga draw something on the wall that was either a bird or a slug. Or both.

"Remember when we drew those cards for Jiraiya-sensei?" Naga asked.

Yahiko squinted and rubbed his chin. "No judgement here, of course, but I think you've gotten worse."

I caught Hidan watching them. He locked eyes with me, daring me to comment on it, but I chose to sit against the wall next to him instead.

He looked at me, "You're weird as shit, you know that?"

I crossed my legs. "Says the Jashinist."

Hidan only eyed me as Yahiko tried to guess the animal and Naga refused to answer.

Eventually, he tilted his head back and asked, "You're really okay with just going along with this shit?"

"What shit?"

"Don't they call you a Wolf or something?" he asked. "You suggest doing this shit, they say no, and that's it?"

I hummed as I met his gaze, "You really are a lot like Maho."

"What?" he asked, like it was the most offensive thing I could've said to him.

"I don't really care," I answered, leaning back. "Not about Kirigakure, or Mei, or Water country. I think she could convince Yahiko to do it because of how much she loves Kirigakure and he loves Amgakure if they met. The message was meant for him. Naga wouldn't take as long, because if she's as good as she wants us to think she is, all she'd have to do is make him an offer he couldn't refuse. But me?"

"What do you think she could say or do that'd convince me that Kirigakure is worth it?" I asked. "Worth more than what Yahiko and Naga think?"

Hidan stared.

"Maybe if we went I'd care," I told him. "But I don't, so I have nothing to say, and they know that."

Yahiko had given up guessing and had settled on watching in perturbed silence. It made Naga laugh so much that he couldn't keep his hand straight as he drew.

"If you say I'm like that cash cow again I'll cut off your tongue," Hidan said.

"And sacrifice it?"

Hidan's pupils shrunk. He didn't blink. "You don't know how much I want to kick the shit out of you."

"You lost our spar."

Hidan didn't respond, but I could recognize a line as I was about to cross it. It was in the way his eyes turned flinty when I teased him about making a sacrifice.

"You didn't say how you felt either," I told him.

He blinked once. "Fuck are you on about—"

"Kirigakure. Are you okay with going along with it if we did go?"

Hidan looked bewildered. He ran a hand through his hair and looked away, "Don't joke about Jashinism," was all he said. "I'm giving you that one, because you've always been an ignorant fucking heathen."

He didn't answer my question, but I only hummed and glanced at the Book of Jashin.

"What does it say?"

He smiled crookedly, "What? Don't try to tell me you're interested in the Way of Jashin after that?"

"I'm not."

He blinked. "Is this supposed to be some sort of shitty apology?"

"If you want to take it that way."

"You're so fucking annoying."

"It's not written in hiragana or kanji," I said.

"So?"

"They're used the most in mission requests, and I recognize the characters enough to know what order they're supposed to be in," I explained. "Is that katakana?"

Hidan slumped down the wall and scrubbed a hand down his face. "Fuck. I keep forgetting you barely know how to fucking read."

"I'm not fast at it, but I know how," I said defensively. "Mostly."

"Fucking Katakana," he said, dragging out the word.

"It's not?"

"Man'yōgana," he said, like it pained him deeply to have to say even that much.

"Man-yo-gana?"

He slumped down more with a groan.

I pointed at a passage. "What does it say?"

He swatted my hand when I touched a ripped page. "It says that I fucking hate you."

"Who's annoying again?"

Fully on the floor now, he dropped his arm over his eyes like the conversation exhausted him, but didn't let the book fall off his leg. "Where."

I counted paragraphs. "Third paragraph," I said. "First line."

His mouth moved silently for a few seconds. "Lord Jashin wills that a sacrifice be treated with the respect of converts and be given the chance to repent for their sins."

I hummed and pointed below it, "And this one?"

He twitched but didn't have enough hands to stop me. "I'm not moving my hand to look."

There was a diagram of his sacrifice circle on the next page. "Fourth paragraph—"

"I'm not reading the fucking instructions to you," he cut me off.

"And how was I supposed to know they were instructions?"

Hidan responded by shutting the book and shoving it down the front of his pants.

"You're the worst," I told him.

"Go get it if you want me to read it so bad."

"The worst."

照美 - Shining beauty.

Man'yōgana - ancient Japanese.

Lord Yodogiri is the rain daimyo. Nagato's just more respectful than the other two.

Remember back when Yahiko wondered what Obito was doing? Well, if you know Kirigakure's history...