"Sumire-san," Arakaki said. An acknowledgment of her presence and nothing more. "Sit please." He continued to look over the document in his hands a moment longer, reached for a large silver fountain pen and signed it, then set it aside and picked up a deep green folder that Sumire would surely recognize at a glance. Her own personnel folder. He read that silently for several moments, turning pages, seeming utterly absorbed in it. It almost seemed he'd forgotten the woman he'd summoned, the very subject of that dossier, was right there in the room.

At last he looked up. "Will you have some tea?" he asked, and took off the reading glasses he'd been wearing, setting them on his desk with a sharp click that sounded loud in his silent office. "I'd like some tea." He pressed a bell to summon Himuro back, requested two teas, and waited silently for them to appear. When Himuro had gone again, leaving behind to gently steaming ceramic cups on lacquer saucers, Arakaki looked at Sumire at last.

"You are an excellent Intelligence operative, Agent Murakami. Perhaps you'd like to tell me why you are here."

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Well, hell. This didn't look like it was going to be the anticipated 'good' meeting at all! Sumire glanced down at her tinted nails, then back up at him. Usually, this was where she said something sarcastic, but she couldn't be sarcastic to her commanding officer, now could she? "No Sir, I wouldn't assume anything aside from the fact I've not done anything grievous, or else I'd be having this conversation with Shida-san and not you." A pause. "Sir."

Okay, perhaps she let it leak out a touch, a droplet, really.

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Arakaki just raised a pair of well-groomed eyebrows, taking a delicate breath through his nose. It conveyed a level of distaste with her answer that words could never have captured. "Shida-san is not concerned with this particular matter," he said mildly. He watched the young woman, poised, lovely, with a bitter edge to her like a poisoned confection, and smiled grimly. "You have been working in Codes and Cyphers for seventeen months. I take it you enjoy your work there? You like that sort of cerebral puzzle?"

He sat just as still. Just as deadly.

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Sumire inclined her head, "Yes, Sir. I find it a great exercise." It wasn't nearly the compliment she should have given it. Sumire loved her work, it kept her enemies guessing and her village safe. It made her feel, in a way, needed. Integral even, moreso then her forays out into the field to offer up her skin ever did.

She had a feeling that something she didn't like was about to happen. A good kunoichi listened to her instincts. "More than anything I've encountered thus far." Sumire waited, her thumb upsetting the edge of a bracelet, mentally preparing her next move in their sudden, unspoken chess game.

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Arakaki noticed that little twitch and jangle as her bracelet moved. He smiled a little more warmly. "I'm not trying to intimidate you, Sumire. I simply feel it's important that you understand the importance of what I am about to tell you." He waited a moment, noticing her pupils dilate and constrict in her strange, light eyes; noticing the nervous tremor of the fall of plum blossoms from her kanzashi, so elegantly out of place with her uniform.

"You are a good coder," he went on. "You are skilled with cyphers, and your work is satisfactory." There was another pause while he drank his tea, watching her. She wasn't going to like what he had to say. Giving the ninja who sweated blood for their Hokage under his orders bad news was a day-to-day occurrence for him, but it never made it a pleasant task.

In a perfect world, Murakami Sumire would never have to run another mission. She could spend the rest of her career happily in the bowels of Intel, translating and deciphering and encoding and encrypting. But this was not a perfect world. And a trained field operative, especially a kunoichi, could not be lightly put on the shelf.

"It is time you allow your interest in cryptography resume its rightful place in your life, as a secondary pursuit. I am reassigning you from Internal Affairs to Field Operations, effective immediately."

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It was a little like being shot in the heart; she didn't immediately feel the sudden blow, the compliments to her coding cushioning the following statement. But then, her idol's words sunk in, and she managed to control her facial features with the needed modicum of grace to keep from screaming (ha, as though she could actually do that) in utter terror. After a long moment of silence, she managed to make her thin, soft voice form the words needed, "May I ask why you chose such a decision?"

She had to hear the reasoning, it just didn't make any sense any other--- realization dawned over her features. The sudden influx in field missions, running the same types she'd done before the cataclysm in Kaze no Kuni in the last five months was a dead giveaway to what her superiors had been planning. She'd simply chosen not to think of it that way, telling herself that they'd been short-staffed for women since she got there. "Oh."

What an interesting state to be in, helpless.

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"Yes," Arakaki said. He could see the moment when understanding hit her. It was not unlike the look that crossed a man's face when he understood the masked assassin in his bedroom was there for him. The look when the target understood what that odd salty-bitterness in his morning tea portended. That moment when a captured ninja came face to face with Shida Akumaru's warped, grinning, molten-plastic face and realized that no, his buddies weren't coming for him, his village would never know what happened to him, and in a few hours, Konoha would know every secret he had ever pledged to guard with his life.

"Yes," he said again. "You are a kunoichi. You are trained. You are skilled. You are a resource Konoha and your Hokage have need of." He sighed and picked up his tea again, sorry to see the raw distress in his subordinate, even so well disguised behind a facade as Sumire had. "You will continue to work in Codes and Cyphers on a part-time basis. Between missions."

It wasn't what she wanted, but perhaps it would soften the blow.

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A litany of things shuffled, settled, upset, and shuffled again as she thought. A little, cowardly voice inside her said that she could escape. Leave the village in the dead of night, change her looks, cut her hair, hide and disguise her scent. They would never find her, ever. No matter if her name ended up in Bingo Books the world over, she could hide forever. Anything, everything, was worth never taking up the mantle of kunoichi ever again in that position. She could quit right now!

After five seconds, Sumire shut the voice up and away, never to be heard from again (or at least until she fell into heavy sleep). "I understand," she replied quietly, cowed. Her village needed her, she reminded herself. He'd left her with the Crypt.

That would be enough, wouldn't it?

"When should I expect my first assignment, Arakaki-sama?"

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"You have already received it," Arakaki answered. He drained the last of his tea and put the cup down with a click, picking up a mission assignment scroll and handing it to Sumire. "If you have questions, you know the appropriate channels in which to raise them." He put her folder aside, picked up another one. Returned his reading glasses to his face.

It was a dismissal. Clear, unambiguous. One that knew there would be no argument.

He waited until the rustle of cloth told him she'd stood, was offering him a deep, respectful, stiff-backed bow.

"Sumire."

She looked up.

"Go and come back, Konoha shinobi, ANBU agent of your Hokage." It was the same formal send off which all missions were launched with. Arakaki stood himself, and returned the bow.

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