The Green Pig wasn’t generally considered one of Konoha’s best bars. It probably wasn’t even one of the mediocre ones. It was a shinobi bar: the shinobi bar, as far as Ryouma knew. He was fairly sure Senju Hashirama’s name was carved up on the smoke-blackened ceiling beams, along with eighty years of new names and grime. The pool tables probably dated from Shodai’s time too, assuming they’d had pool back then; Ryouma was certain the felt hadn’t been replaced in his lifetime, at least. The booths were sticky and torn, the furniture mismatched, the bathrooms truly terrible.

Shinobi folklore said if you drank at the Pig before you left for a mission, you’d come back unharmed. Ryouma had plenty of scars to prove that wasn’t true, but the beer was cheap and the company was good, and nobody ever went to his death grateful he’d gotten a solid nine hours of sleep the night before.

So far the evening looked promising. There were a couple of long-legged chuunin up at the bar, a devil-eyed special jounin very carefully picking out the intricate steps of a Wind Country pattern-dance on the open floor by the jukebox. A few daring civilians, sizing up the shinobi like dishes on the menu and whispering to each other. Ryouma was waiting for one of them to gather up the courage to buy him a drink. In the meantime, he was shooting pool.

“Seven, top corner pocket,” his opponent said, sliding down the table to set up her shot. Ryouma moved obligingly out of the way. He wouldn’t have gone for the seven—the nine had a better angle, if you spun it right—but he’d tried offering advice earlier and gotten a cue stick to the instep for his trouble.

“I’ve been playing pool longer than you’ve been alive,” Minami Izumi had informed him tartly. Ryouma suspected that wasn’t strictly true, but you didn’t pick fights with Academy teachers, on-duty or off.

He leaned on his cue stick instead, and scanned the crowd again. The special jounin had finished his dance and was accepting beer and kisses from his audience. All young women, Ryouma noticed. Ah well. There were always more kunai in the holster.

There was one stepping through the door now, in fact. Tallish, reddish-haired, broad-shouldered and square-jawed. Shinobi, even if you hadn’t seen the split lip and the black eye. His eyes flicked to check sight-lines and exits, automatic as breathing. After a heartbeat the hard line of his shoulders eased a little. He nodded to someone across the room, and headed for an open spot at the bar.

Ryouma slapped twenty ryou down on the tattered felt of the pool table. “Sorry, Minami-sensei,” he said. “I forfeit.” He handed his cue to a bystander and took the three steps down from the pool-loft to the main floor of the bar. A dark-haired civilian girl smiled at him; he smiled back, distractedly, and fetched up against the bar at the shinobi’s elbow.

“Buy you a drink?”