It was like one of the ghost stories from his genin days, the three of them huddled under a tent in the middle of nowhere, listening with anxious child-ninja acuity for the sound of a hook-handed man scraping metal sounds against the thick canvas fabric.

Except that this had been terrifyingly real.

"You collided in the field with that fiasco?" His voice was low and taut, kept constrained within the circle of twisting lamp-cast shadows, in keeping with the mood. Ginta's eyes were bright and sparkling with restrained delight, reflecting silver moonlight; he seemed to have, for the first time that evening, forgotten about the wheelchair and why he was in it.

Hiro's sensei, when he'd seen her after the shock had settled, had used the Ando affair as an incredibly effective object lesson on how important it was to watch people, and how normal even very twisted people could seem: she, an experienced Intel specialist, had been friends with Ando and his girlfriend right up until the night before his rampage--and hadn't noticed a thing.

It had apparently been a dreadful confluence of failures even larger than Hiro knew, if Intel had managed to both screw up so badly with Ando, and, through bizarre seal design and miserable traffic routing, had actually enabled him to interfere with an unsuspecting team's unrelated mission.

Thinking that, Hiro had an uncomfortable suspicion. "They weren't asking you to delay your mission and track him down, were they?" All that careful planning and setup for an assassination... Even a day's delay could ruin everything.

Then another thought occurred to him. "That new scroll... it was in the updated cipher, wasn't it."

Ginta laughed delightedly. "Yes! It totally was. Roku and I were so totally screwed." He leaned back in the chair again, feeling lighter and happier than he had since that interrupted lunch with Hiro before his mission. Hiro was fun. Fun in a way not many people Ginta ran across were. He was sharp, kept up, asked the right questions. Asked the wrong questions.

And he was cute. Where had that thought come from? But it was true, Hiro was cute. He had the ethereal Hyuuga pallor and glossy black hair, but full lips and rounded cheeks, softer than the angular features of most of his kin. They were beautiful: Hiro was cute. Ginta's laugh took on an extra dimension--wry, self-mockery. What a thing to be thinking!

"So anyway. So anyway, yes. We totally ran into that fiasco, but we had no idea that was what was going on. And now we had another scroll, and it was in the new cipher and we couldn't read it. We tried, though. I mean, neither of us are code-breakers, but we tried. Spent half a day in that safe house, trying to figure it out. We also sent a message back with the hawk. In the old code, cause that's what we knew, but we figured even if the hawk got intercepted, it wasn't like any enemy was gonna learn anything useful from our message. We sent back the charcoaled scroll and a note saying we were at the new coordinates. Figured Intel could work it out that we didn't know what the hell they were saying."

Hiro nodded. His lips were pursed, his eyebrows just slightly furrowed. Obviously thinking. That was what made him so interesting. He was like the koi, Ginta reflected, bright and unpredictable, turning first this way then that. And surprisingly easy to talk to.

"Anyway, we finally had to give up. I mean, it was a good cipher. We figured out a date and time, we thought, and that was about it. And after another day and still no further word from Intel, we decided the only safe course of action was to abort our mission, so we did. We got all the way back to Konoha before we heard about Ando. Man, debriefing for that was fun, too. I mean, we got interviewed about that stupid cipher scroll, questioned about our decision to abort, and then after they finally decided we'd done the right thing with that, in came the people investigating Ando and Jun. Poor Jun. They found his body three days later, about five kilometers from that safehouse."

Hiro nodded, thoroughly in agreement. "I guess that kind of thing is why we're all so frantically looking for a better way to keep watch on our high-stress agents. There've been a few other incidents since then, haven't there, of agents going rogue?"

There had been the barest hint of something in what he'd seen of Ginta's file... but maybe he was just reading too much into it. He watched Ginta closely, investigative interest thoroughly concealed beneath genuine.

"Really, it does seem like improving the system should be a fairly high priority right now. Clearly all the measures we're currently taking just aren't good enough."

He hoped this line of discussion didn't touch off too many sensitivities; he knew Ginta had been edgy earlier. (Worth thinking about, the cataloguing part of his mind inserted with impersonal interest.) But he was truly curious about the ideas Ginta might have, and for more than just altruistic reasons: he suspected that if someone did, in the future, end up relieving themselves of their sanity in an explosive and Ando-like manner, some significant portion of the fallout that had initially gone to Kotoe-san might get passed along to him instead.

"I suppose it depends on what you define as going rogue," Ginta said slowly. There were a few, always a few. Usually the hard-case PTSD breakers just self-destructed. They killed themselves quietly, alone in their rooms. They took solo missions with no intention of surviving them. The less damaged broke down crying in the showers, or knelt at the Heroes' Stone until they lost feeling in their legs and had to be carried away. "Guys like Ando, they're still pretty rare."

Guys like Sadao, though... Ginta thought of Kakashi again. Of his own murderous rage, transmuted into coldly efficient and thoroughly brutal torture for the rapist. Of his own role in letting Sadao slip through Intel's cracks for so long. He looked away from Hiro's face. Away from blind-appearing eyes that could see far too much. Hiro didn't know about that. Couldn't know about that. Any of it.

"I think maybe they don't really want to do a better job than they are. There was an agent--he's dead now, but I crossed paths with him a couple of times--anyway, he was... He was a danger to his comrades, but he was an even bigger danger to Konoha's enemies. He was a useful tool. The higher ups were happy to turn a blind eye to the little warning signs. Big warning signs. As long as he was still useful. It took him attacking an agent they considered even more valuable before they acted, and when they did, they had a ready-made poison pill for him, in the form of another agent he'd... Injured in the past."

Ginta shivered, tugging his yukata closer. It was the cold night air, and not the conversation, he told himself. Even the koi were moving more sluggishly now.

"Are you cold?" Hiro asked, solicitous, and wary of the trust the hospital had placed in him. The evening air, brisk just after sundown, had turned decidedly chill--summer was still a long way off.

Ginta's story was chilling enough on its own. It made a frightening kind of sense, for an organization that was focused on producing the best of the best: searching for efficiency in its agents, rather than any touchy-feely notion of congeniality and playing nice with others.

A shiver chased down Hiro's spine at what Ginta seemed to be oh-so-cagily implying. That clearly uncharacteristic hesitation over the nature of the 'anonymous' agent's injuries... It had to have been personal experience. Of what, Hiro's mind shied away from thinking about--anything that could give Ginta pause wasn't something he wanted to encounter. At all.

He suddenly wondered how many Intel agents chose to take up the administration's offer of an apartment within headquarters. How many declined.

You couldn't run a tight-knit unit like this one on some kind of evolutionary principle, that only the strongest would survive. There were different kinds of strength, different measures of value. Putting together all the hints in his own mind--Ginta's blank recitation of impersonal events, not meeting Hiro's eyes; his vehemence when describing his plan to increase agent oversight; those tiny, uneraseable intimations of something left out of his file--Hiro had to wonder, uneasily, if the ANBU administration properly understood that.

"Yeah, a little cold," Ginta agreed. He pulled at the blanket, tucking it closer around himself, and was glad, now, that the nurse had insisted on it and socks. The metal halo around his leg, with its flesh- and bone-piercing struts, seemed to channel the chill right into his very core. "This sucks, actually" he added, waving a hand dismissively at his broken leg. "If they'd given me a real cast, and maybe some actual clothes, I'd be fine. I could use chakra to warm myself up, but I'd probably catch hell from the medics for it. Actually it's kind of hard not to, though, you know? I mean, you get so used to using chakra, it's like... like telling someone not to use their sense of balance or something."

Medics and chakra use were much safer topics than broken agents and broken processes, and other misfortunes best forgotten. Ginta wasn't sure why he'd said anything at all. Even leaving his and Kakashi's and Sadao's names entirely out of it, it would be far too easy for a trained Intel agent--especially one as smart as Hiro was--to deduce hidden truths. To see 'underneath the underneath', in the famous words of the first Hokage. Every schoolchild at the Academy had that maxim drilled into him. Looking for concealed meaning was as second nature to a well-trained ninja as using chakra. As balancing and breathing.

And Hiro was far too easy to talk to.

"Intel picked right when they recruited you for a debriefer," Ginta said with a wry twist of his lips.

Hiro shrugged enigmatically, and kept silent. Anything that Ginta told him would remain equally private, between himself and the koi: he wasn't a debriefer, right now. Just, he supposed, a friend.

"I guess we should go back inside," Hiro considered, suprised to discover his own reluctance. "Can't have you getting sick again, after all that fuss." Ginta's limb-encrusting shroud of metal--straight through to the bone, Hiro's visual memory provided unbidden--looked impossibly chilly, and the blanket spread across Ginta's lap wasn't particularly thick. Hiro was even cold himself, and he wasn't the one who'd been deathly ill just barely a week ago.

Besides, now he had a set of records to check: mission data, personnel documents, and any ANBU names freshly filed into the Stone. He would keep Ginta's almost-revelation as secret as any sworn agent reasonably could, but this halting, bits-and-pieces story felt like something he needed to understand--if only because, otherwise, the anxious wondering would drive him mad.

He was getting the feeling that, in these circles, knowledge wasn't only power--it was safety. No one wanted to be sent out with the Hunters' prize bulldog, only to have it turn on you.

If that was what had happened to Ginta, Hiro didn't want it happening to him, too.

"No," Ginta protested, drawing the word out into a disappointed whine. But he was shivering, and the cold moisture in the April air was starting to slick the hard surfaces of the wheelchair and settle into damp folds of the blanket and his yukata. He hunched his shoulders, which didn't help at all.

Hiro just waited him out, giving him the same skeptical look Ginta's teachers once had, while they waited for him to work out for himself what they'd just told him.

"Yeah, alright," he said at last. "I guess it would be really stupid to get myself sick again. But I'm so tired of being in that room. You should come visit again tomorrow. I have some cards. We could totally play cards."

Like he had played cards with Ryouma, waiting for Kakashi to wake up. Thinking of them, he really didn't want to go back inside and stare at that closed door again.

"You should definitely come again, and we could go for another walk. I'll ask someone to get me a sweatshirt from home, and then we could stay out longer and I wouldn't get cold. We could get coffee or something."

Then he yawned, and the skeptical look on Hiro's face intensified.

"I don't know how I can be tired." Ginta rubbed a hand through his hair, with a sheepish look on his face. "All I do is sleep. Although they said it would take a couple more days before I was really a lot better. But I can tell I'm already way better than I was, because you don't start getting bored until you're well enough to realize you're sick, you know? Anyway, if they do that chakra thing to my leg again tomorrow, I might be a little sleepy in the afternoon, because they sort of knock you out when they do that, and they didn't do it today so I'm due. But then I think they might let me have crutches soon, and you could visit again and we could go for a real walk."

While Ginta was talking, Hiro started to gently roll the wheelchair back toward the hospital entrance, patiently listening to Ginta's sleepy ramblings with half his attention while scouting warily for any bumps on the wide graveled path.

"I'll try to come back soon, if I can," Hiro answered carefully. "If I don't have a mission." The way things had been going lately, it was more likely that they'd load him up with missions until he required Psych's services himself. Still, unless they were going to make him miss his first Psych class, they probably wouldn't send him on a long away mission until Tuesday at the earliest. So he'd have at least some free time.

"Tomorrow evening, you said, right?" Hiro tried to decode the specific time information from Ginta's extended verbal perambulation, but ended up just venturing a guess. "I should still be in-village, then. I'll be there."

"Yeah, tomorrow. If they do the thing on my leg, then I'll probably be awake again around maybe five or five-thirty. And if my grandma and mom come to visit, they'll probably come in the morning, unless Grandma comes in the afternoon, but if she knows I'm going to be sleepy she might not. Although my mom would probably rather visit when I'm sleepy, because I think she likes me better when I'm quiet."

He shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head back against the wheelchair to offer Hiro a wry half-smile, then shook his head. It was far too easy to talk to Hiro, but it was also... Fun. The prospect of another visit was enough to make tomorrow something to look forward to. Ginta's grin broadened."Anyway, I'm glad you're gonna come again tomorrow."

Another yawn split his face and brought moisture to his eyes. He shut them for a moment, then blinked them wide, just in time to hear a slightly alarmed female voice. "There you are! We were starting to worry, Hyuuga-san." There was chiding there, under the alarm. And the quick, hushed sound of soft-soled shoes hurrying over tile as she emerged from the hall. She held a pair of IV bags in her hand, one big one of dextrose, and one small one full of a nearly opaque, yellowish solution.

"You're a half hour late for your next dose, Sakamoto-san," she scolded, stopping then and there in the middle of the hallway to hook the new medications into the IV line feeding into Ginta's arm. "And really, visiting hours are over. You look a little flushed, were you out in the cold, or is that fever?" Her fingers were pressed against Ginta's cheek before he could protest. He flinched away. She apologized.

"Cold. That's good. Did you have a nice outing? I'm sorry to have to shoo your friend out now, but..."

"It's okay," Ginta said resignedly. "He's coming back tomorrow, right?"

Hiro, who had stepped back against the wall, nodded, his expression somewhere between amused and concerned.

"Thanks for visiting," Ginta said, sketching a salute at Hiro. "Tomorrow I'm totally walking with crutches. You can bring taiyaki to bribe me."

"We'll see," the nurse said. She took the handles of the wheelchair and started pushing.

"Bye, Hiro," Ginta called, and waved.

Hiro waved back briefly, his hand hanging in the air as he watched Ginta's wheelchair disappear down the hallway. When it rounded the corner, he'd already turned to make his way back through the winding hospital corridors, his mind abuzz with details and documents.

And discussions.

It really had been a lot more fun than Hiro'd been expecting. He'd gone there to build a connection, capitalizing on the information that he'd weasled out of Kotoe-san, so he could satisfy some of his lingering curiosity from their last meeting and build his understanding of the complex web of ANBU interrelationships. And, for sure, he'd done all that. (Though now he'd ended up with a whole new battery of unanswered questions.)

Still, if that was the task, this had been a surprisingly enjoyable way of accomplishing it. Even when the discourse had turned antagonistic, Ginta's finely honed intellect had proven an engaging adversary--just like their previous meeting. And at least Ginta understood sense, which so many people didn't.

Visiting tomorrow, in the early evening after Ginta's treatment, was only about twenty hours away. Pleasant thoughts of conversational gambits and artful dodges were plenty to occupy Hiro's mind, all the way to the ANBU Records Room.

Flashing his ID and security clearance at the door, his lips curved into a minute, anticipatory grin. Let's get to the bottom of this.